'Status quo' referred to by Spain is not mentioned anywhere, Says Journalist Zakia Daoud
Morocco-Spain, Politics, 7/19/2002

The very geographical location of the Leila islet doesn't let room to any fallacy. The islet status is Moroccan. And given its very position in the sea, even a division of the territorial waters can not be raised, said Zakia Daoud, journalist and author of many books on the Maghreb.

"The 'status quo' referred to by the Spanish is not mentioned anywhere, in any treaty, and no one has ever talked about it," said Zakia Daoud in an interview with French daily "Liberation."

Author of "Gibraltar, Crossroad of Worlds" and "Gibraltar, Improbable Boundary" (Seguier 2002), Daoud underlined that the problem "is to know who would be the real custodian of the Gibraltar strait. A power (Spain) claims the right to control both sides of the strait which are in two continents." This is strategically speaking of paramount importance as so many ships cross the strait, she said.

"But, Gibraltar is not just that: many worlds are facing each other there, orient-occident, Islam-Christianity, North-South," she noted, adding that "today, it is Europe's southern border that Spain wants to control."

On the continent there is Sebta that the "Spanish occupied in Moroccan territory through successive incursions," Daoud said.

She said that 12,000 out of the 80,000 inhabitants of Sebta are Moroccan, not to mention the Spaniards of Moroccan origin. She also stressed the economic importance of Sebta for Spain which finds there an interesting outlet to its products.

The journalist-writer surveyed Moroccan-Spanish longstanding relations and how these relations were consolidated when the two countries signed, during an official visit by Spain's king Juan Carlos to Morocco in 1991, the treaty of friendship and all along the period when the Spanish socialist party of Filipe Gonzalez was in office, and underlined that these relations began to deteriorate when Morocco refused to renew the Morocco-European Union fisheries agreement and the rightist popular party of Jose Maria Aznar came to power.

For Zakia Daoud, it is "the strait (of Gibraltar), the Spanish power, the anti-Moroccan ill-tempered mood of Aznar that are really in the core of the crisis. Spain made a demonstration of force just to say 'we are the masters'."

Previous Stories:
  History confirms Leila islet is Moroccan territory, testimonies   (7/18/2002)
  Spain's Llamazares: invasion of Leila islet smacks of colonialism   (7/18/2002)
  The Guardian: impossible not to side with the Moroccans over Leila islet   (7/18/2002)

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