French Culture Minister Rachida Dati began a visit on Monday to disputed Western Sahara where she will meet officials and open a French cultural center in a show of support for Moroccan sovereignty over the desert territory.
Rachida Dati © Mena Today
French Culture Minister Rachida Dati began a visit on Monday to disputed Western Sahara where she will meet officials and open a French cultural center in a show of support for Moroccan sovereignty over the desert territory.
The long-frozen conflict, dating back to 1975, pits Morocco, which considers the region its own, against the Algerian-backed Polisario Front independence movement.
"This is a strong symbolic and political moment," Dati told Moroccan reporters. Her nation in July became the second permanent U.N. Security Council member after the U.S. to back Morocco's position.
French President Emmanuel Macron visited Rabat in October telling parliament that Western Sahara was Moroccan, while his foreign minister promised to expand France’s consular presence to the territory.
Economic deals worth over $10 billion were signed during the presidential visit, following which Morocco mediated the release of four French spies held in Burkina Faso.
French support for Rabat over Western Sahara irks Algiers.
Morocco has also won backing from Western Sahara's former colonial power Spain, as well as Israel and more than two dozen African and Arab nations.
The Polisario in 2020 withdrew from a U.N.-brokered truce but the conflict remains of low intensity.
By Ahmed Eljechtimi
Migrants who swam or jumped over fences to rush into Spain's African enclave of Ceuta this week were returning home on Saturday, with many saying hunger, exhaustion and hostility from locals had crushed their hopes of a new life in Europe.
Spain said on Friday it had reversed a huge rush of migrants into a Spanish enclave in North Africa, with most of the more than 50,000 people who had crossed the border by land and sea already heading back voluntarily.
As 16-year-old Moroccan Ayoub El Abyad scrolled through Instagram videos showing migrants crossing into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, he and his cousin, then still a 12-hour drive from the border, decided to try their luck.
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