Morocco’s secret services pride themselves on being the eye that does not sleep, maintaining surveillance 24/7 across the kingdom. Yet that same apparatus has watched, documented, and ultmately permitted successive waves of Moroccan citizens to flood into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, The authorities are fully aware of the routes, the organizers and the true scale of the departures.
They choose not to stop them. This is not incompetence. It is policy by omission.
While ordinary Moroccans risk their lives climbing fences or swimming across the Strait, the state apparatus remains deliberately passive.
Europe, for its part, has poured millions of euros into Morocco under the explicit understanding that Rabat would stem irregular migration toward Ceuta, Melilla, and other nearby EU territories. The money arrives, the flows continue.
The latest surge is the clearest evidence yet that the cash disappears into the opaque networks that actually govern the country, the interlocking business and patronage interests of the royal family, headed by the self-proclaimed King Mohammed VI.
This is not merely corruption in the ordinary sense. By the highest orders, the monarchy and the wholse system in Morocco are implicated in converting European security payments into private income for the regime’s inner circle. The same monarchy that presents itself as a reliable partner against migration simultaneously tolerates, and at times facilitates, the very pressure it is paid to contain.
The result is a double harverst: European subsidies and political leverage.
That leverage is now being used openly, because Madrid continues to withhold full recognition of the so called soverignty over Western Sahara. The Moroccan state has turned irregular migration into a diplimatic weapon.
Each new wave of arrivals at Ceuta is a clear message: cooperation on migration is conditional on Spain’s acceptance of Rabat’s territorial calims. The human cost is borne by desperate Moroccan citizens.
A large portion of the political profit accrues to the Palace.
Migration has been deliberately turned into a tool of oppression against Spain, Madrid and other European countries a calculated instrument of pressure that exploits human desperation to clearly punish the non-recognition of Western Sahara and to force diplomatic concessions.