Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, assured yesterday in Fez, after holding an informal meeting with his Moroccan counterpart Nasser Bourita, that the date of the next High Level Meeting (RAN, for its acronym in Spanish) between Spain and Morocco depends on the “especially full” agendas of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and King Mohammed VI.
“It is going to be held, since it is an agreement between both parties,” Albares told the press after participating in the ninth Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, in Fez (Morocco). “It is a meeting that has not been held for seven years and it is very complex because of the number of ministers and the agendas of each one, both of the President of the Government and the King of Morocco, which are especially burdened by the international reality,” he added. “Dates are being crossed so that we can all coincide,” he added.
For the time being, according to Albares, the Working Groups established in the roadmap of the new bilateral relations “are working and are bearing concrete fruits”. “Therefore, it is a matter of time to find a date for the High Level Meeting to be held,” he assured. Albares held an informal meeting yesterday with Bourita, host of the Global Forum, and will meet again tomorrow in Barcelona on the occasion of the double ministerial meeting of the Regional Forum of the Union for the Mediterranean and the EU with the Southern Neighborhood. Both already met last November 11 at the Spanish Embassy in Paris to “move forward” on the roadmap for the new bilateral relations and prepare the High Level Meeting, which has not been held since 2015 and had initially been scheduled for November but will finally be held in early 2023.
The new bilateral meeting is part of the current process of improving diplomatic relations, which suffered a very serious deterioration in 2021 because of the reception in Spain of the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, for humanitarian reasons, and were relaunched earlier this year after the decision of the Government of Pedro Sanchez to accept the Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara.
The last RAN between Spain and Morocco was held in 2015 and the next one had been scheduled, in principle, in December 2020, but has suffered several postponements because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deep bilateral crisis. Finally, the letter sent by Sanchez to Mohamed VI in which he affirmed that the autonomy plan for Western Sahara constitutes “the most serious and realistic basis” laid the foundations for the recovery of diplomatic relations and paved the way for the holding of the High Level Meeting, mentioned in the Joint Declaration of April 7.
Albares participated yesterday in the ninth Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, “an initiative that Spain has co-sponsored together with Turkey since its inception and which continues to have very concrete actions of interreligious and intercultural dialogue in a complex and convulsive world, where war has returned to Europe and where there is a multidisciplinary, energy, food and humanitarian crisis,” as he told the press.
The minister also held a meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, whom he thanked for “Turkey’s efforts to restart the grain export agreement, vital to alleviate hunger in the world” and with whom he discussed “progress in the NATO enlargement process,” as he explained through his official Twitter account. “We have been able to exchange the dialogue that they are sponsoring in Turkey and with the United Nations between Russia and Ukraine and that has allowed the facilitation agreement and we have exchanged different points of view, on the possibilities that a dialogue can be established that will allow a ceasefire,” he added to the press. Albares also met with the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, with whom he spoke about the search for peace in Ukraine, the situation in the Sahel and “the dialogue between Venezuelans, to which we have of course already given our backing so that it can begin in Mexico”, he told the journalists.
Alliance of Civilizations
The ninth Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, which will conclude today and is co-chaired by Nasser Bourita and the United Nations High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, Miguel Angel Moratinos, was inaugurated with the reading of a message from King Mohammed VI in which he paid “tribute to all those who, particularly in Spain and Turkey, have contributed to the sustainability of this organization and its institutionalization as a reference of understanding, trust and dialogue between cultures, religions and civilizations”.
Bourita then stated that the Alliance must contribute to dialogue and peace in the world and advocated the possibility of developing a global Alliance Action Plan for the coming years with “concrete and tangible projects to promote dialogue, understanding and peace”. In the same vein, Moratinos declared that the Alliance of Civilizations can serve as a platform to facilitate understanding and respect because “the world is not witnessing a clash of civilizations, but a clash of interests and ignorance, as well as confrontations and struggles for hegemony and zones of influence, which must be combated through dialogue and a meeting of civilizations”. For his part, Albares stressed that “since Spain and Turkey launched this initiative in 2005, more than 120 UN member states have joined their group of friends.”
Guterres affirmed that holding this international event in Africa has a “profound significance” because it is the continent most severely affected by the combined effect of COVID-19, the lack of justice in vaccine distribution, the inequality in resources available for recovery after Covid and the negative impacts of climate change. Former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (founder of the initiative) warned that the world cannot “consent to a new Cold War” and called on the major powers to address “with humility” the fate of the least favored continents, such as Africa, which “do not aspire to world leadership or to be hyperpowers”, but “so that their peoples can live with dignity”.
