Frontiers in North Africa

(b) Spanish imposed borders

The borders of Southern Morocco and the Western Sahara result entirely from colonial decisions by France and Spain. They are the consequence of France's desire to satisfy Spanish ambitions for some colonial presence in Morocco. As far as the Western Sahara was concerned, Spain made it clear at the beginning of 1885 that it would exercise a protectorate over the Rio de Oro and this was confirmed and delimited by France, as far as the AOF was concerned, in a convention in June 1900 (Brownlie 1969; 438-440). The northern section of the Western Sahara, the Saquiat al-Hamra, was subject to a further treaty between France and Spain in 1904 which laid down specific territorial limits - in the wake of the Entente Cordiale by which Britain renounced its own earlier interests in Morocco in favour of Morocco and, more specifically, in the Sahara region. The 1904 treaty acknowledged only that the Saquiat al-Hamra lay within a Spanish sphere of influence and it was only under a further treaty made in November 1912 that Spain acquired actual title (Brownlie 1969; 149-153).

Spain had also acquired title to protectorates inside Morocco itself by the 1904 and 1912 treaties. These included the famous northern zone of Morocco, the site of the Rif war from 1921 to 1926, the Tarfaya province in the south which formed the northern border of the Western Sahara and the enclave of Sidi Ifni just to the north of Tarfaya. Spain also claims title to the city enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla along Morocco's northern Mediterranean coastline, as a result of conquests in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when, it claims, the modern Moroccan state, created by the Alawite dynasty, did not exist. Most of these territories were abandoned in the wake of Morocco's accession to independence in 1956 - the Northern Zone in 1956, Tarfaya in 1958 and Sidi Ifni in 1969 (Knapp 1977; 334).

Ceuta and Melilla still remain under Spanish control, but Morocco has made it clear that, eventually, they will have to be returned although Spain refuses to consider this for the reason given above, namely that the modern Moroccan state never enjoyed title to them. Morocco, however, considers that its statehood long predates these conquests, since it stretches back to the beginnings of the Idrisid dynasty in the ninth and tenth centuries. One consequence of this has been an absurd Spanish claim to Perijil island, a mountainous outcrop 200 metres off the Moroccan shoreline, which Morocco occupied in July 2002 with twelve gendarmes, ostensibly to control smuggling - and from which it was unceremoniously expelled by an amphibious Spanish invasion forces some days later. The result has been to reactivate Moroccan claims to Ceuta and Melilla, as well as to three other Spanish enclaves along its coast - the Penon de Alhucemas, the Penon de Valez and the Chaffarinas Islands.