Eduardo González
The Ministry of Culture has committed to the Polisario Front not to mention the capital of Western Sahara, Laayoune, as part of the territory of Morocco, after the Department itself mentioned it as a Moroccan city both in an internal document and in the Official State Gazette.
On August 29, the Ministry of Culture – when Miquel Iceta (PSC-PSOE) was still minister – made public in the Official State Gazette the awarding of works for the remodeling and rehabilitation of the La Paz Spanish School, in Laayoune. In that announcement, the Sahrawi capital appeared as a Moroccan city on two occasions – “in Laayoune (Morocco)” – and as such it continued to appear in the information offered regarding this procedure on the Ministry’s website.
As a consequence of this, the MP Néstor Rego Candamil, of the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) and attached to the Mixed Parliamentary Group, warned in a written parliamentary question to the Government (dated on January 26) that “this absolutely improper reference that places Laayoune as a Moroccan city both in internal documents of the Ministry of Culture and in the publication on the matter made in the BOE, it represents a change in the traditional position of the Spanish State regarding the legal status of the territory, as well as the contravention of the Law International and the Resolutions approved by the UN”.
In the same sense, the representative of the Polisaraio Front in Spain, Abdulah Arabi, sent a letter to the Minister of Culture and Sports (who at that time was already Ernest Urtasun, from Sumar), in which he conveyed “the resounding rejection of the improper reference to Laayoune as a Moroccan city”, which represented a “contravention of International Law (…) given the separation and distinction between the territory of Western Sahara and that of Morocco.”
“The above has been maintained by the Court of Justice of the European Union on repeated occasions in rulings from 2016, 2018 and 2021, in which, among other issues, it recognizes the right to free self-determination of the Sahrawi people in accordance with the law. International”, added Arabi, who urged the minister to “guarantee respect for International Law in the actions of the Ministry as well as to take the pertinent measures so that the Spanish Administration does not contribute to hindering the legitimate right of the Sahrawi people to self-determination. and independence.”
In response to the parliamentary question from the BNG, the Ministry of Culture assured on April 3 that the minister had expressed “personally to the representative of the Polisario Front” that “there is a firm commitment that this situation will not be repeated.”
