Rabat – In its media coverage of the Sahara issue, the Spanish newspaper El País, like the vast majority of Spanish media outlets, persists in addressing the conflict with the same habitual bias that has characterized its treatment of the dispute for more than five decades. Despite recent developments, including the Spanish government’s de jure recognition of sovereignty over its southern provinces, El Pais still presents the North African country as an occupier in its own Sahara. But perhaps more tellingly, while UN Security resolutions adopted over the past two decades have fundamentally consecrated the Moroccan Autonomy Plan as the only viable way to realistically ending the Sahara dispute, El Pais’s myopic coverage of the Sahara question still continues to describe Morocco’s presence in the Sahara as a violation of international law while misleadingly presenting the separatist Polisario Front as the legitimate representative of a genuine and authentic “Sahrawi” people.
The territorial dispute over the Western Sahara region in southern Morocco has undergone a series of legal developments in recent years, with the latest cementing the inexorable increase in international support for Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara and the irreversibility of what I have repeatedly described over the past decade as the Moroccan momentum. And yet, El País remains determined to analyze the conflict through the same obsolete prism that prevailed from the 1970s through the early years of this century. In other words, it continues to tell its Spanish and international audience that the nature of the dispute has not fundamentally changed over the past five decades. That is, the Spanish outlet misleads its readers by maintaining that the self-determination referendum framework, which the UN has since discarded as impractical and unrealizable, remains the main menu on the table of solution options at the UN Security Council. While the United Nations has essentially shifted to requesting that the Sahara be integrated within Morocco with a considerable caveat of local autonomy, El Pais tells its readers that the Sahrawis could still choose between association with Morocco or outright independence.
A brief history of the irreversibility of the Moroccan momentum
Since October 2018, there has been a string of political developments that have irreversibly changed the dynamics of the dispute in favor of Morocco’s autonomy plan, effectively burying the separatist ambitions of Algeria and the Polisario.
The first development was the UN Security Council’s adoption of Resolution 2440 in October 2018. With this decision, the UN’s highest body recognized Algeria as an integral party to the Sahara dispute, urging it to participate in roundtable discussions aimed at reaching a mutually acceptable political solution. Moreover, this resolution unequivocally underscored the need to “achieve a realistic, practicable and enduring political solution to the question of Western Sahara based on compromise.” This emphasis implied that the self-determination referendum was no longer considered a viable option in the Security Council’s quest for a realistic political settlement.
On December 10, 2020, the Sahara dispute reached a major historic milestone when the United States decided to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara. Like Resolution 2440, this development emphasized the centrality of Morocco’s autonomy plan in any settlement negotiations, describing the Moroccan proposal as constituting the only possible path toward a lasting political solution. Since then, several European countries, recognizing the irreversibility of the diplomatic momentum in favor of the Moroccan Autonomy Plan, decided to follow the United States’ lead. First came the Spanish government. After a very acute diplomatic crisis with Morocco that lasted a year, Spain took a historic step in March 2022 through a letter from the Spanish Prime Minister to King Mohammed VI. In that letter, the head of Spain’s government recognized the Moroccan autonomy plan “as the most serious, credible, and realistic basis for resolving this dispute.”
Two years later, more precisely on July 31, 2024 –and also following an unprecedented diplomatic crisis with France –French President Emmanuel Macron went a step further than Spain by recognizing Morocco’s full sovereignty over the Sahara. To crown it all, the United Kingdom also stepped out of its comfort zone in June of last year, expressing its clear support for the autonomy plan. With the joint backing of the United States and the three colonial powers that influenced the fate of Morocco’s Sahara in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no longer any doubt that the international community was finally disposed to acknowledging the historical legitimacy of Morocco’s claim to its Sahara. Still more importantly on the geostrategic front, these developments underscored a critical paradigm shift in the diplomatic consensus over the Sahara.
Indeed, after decades of oscillation between verbal support for Rabat and subtle encouragement of the low-intensity conflict over the Sahara to undermine Morocco’s quest for reunification with its southern provinces, most key international players in the Western Sahara saga now realize that the emergence of a potentially failed state in this particular region would be a sure recipe for strategic disaster and further instability in a Saheho-Saharan corridor at the devastating heart of an ISIS resurgence in Africa.
The icing on this cake of open embrace of Morocco’s Autonomy Plan as the only viable political horizon for Sahara came with the adoption of Resolution 2797 in October 2025. Going miles further than other recent developments in recognition of the irreversibility of the Moroccan momentum, this resolution formalized the inexorably growing international support for Morocco’s autonomy plan. Indeed, Resolution 2797 presents the Moroccan plan as the best path to a politically feasible and lasting settlement of the Sahara dispute. As I emphasized in my 2024 book, The Self-Determination Delusion, this UN resolution was both the inevitable result of a political process that began in the Security Council with the adoption of Resolution 2440 in October 2018 and the logical culmination of the cumulative political gains Morocco has made at the bilateral level over the past two decades.
In light of such profound changes, one would expect the Spanish press — and by extension the international press — to adapt its discourse and narrative to the new political and legal reality prevailing in UN discussions around the Sahara dispute. Because, to the utter dismay of Polisario ideologues and their Algerian backers and Spanish allies, who will understandably take a relatively long time to abandon their lost, futureless cause, Resolution 2797 has definitively settled the legal debate over the Sahara. In other words, as the only body with legal authority to steer the dispute toward a final resolution, the UN Security Council has clearly and explicitly acknowledged Morocco’s autonomy plan as the only basis for achieving a political solution to the dispute.
But El País and many other Spanish media outlets continue to ignore this reality. Instead of updating its analysis and understanding of the conflict, El País keeps disseminating half-truths and blatant falsehoods. For example, it persists in claiming that the Polisario controls 20 percent of the Sahara while Morocco controls 80 percent of the region. Yet this is an enormous absurdity and an outright falsehood. El País also continues to use expressions such as “the UN still considers the Sahara a non-self-governing territory pending decolonization.” This is an even bigger absurdity and an indefensible as if Security Council resolutions carried no legal weight or as if the General Assembly were the UN body responsible for the dispute.
When El País Acknowledged Moroccan Sovereignty in the Sahara
As I have suggested throughout this article, the Spanish newspaper’s insistence on using a worn-out narrative stands in contrast to the historical truth contained in the archives of a namesake newspaper that existed from the late nineteenth century until 1921. Like other Spanish press outlets and much of Spain’s political and media elite, what El País has refused to acknowledge for political and ideological reasons is that there was a historical episode, lasting from May 1896 to 1897, that completely dismantles the century-long Spanish narrative that the Sahara was not historically part of Moroccan territory.
In May 1896, an Austrian trader named Nehling, who was posing as a physician at the Moroccan royal court under the fictitious name of Abdelkrim Bey, claimed to possess a concession granting him a monopoly over trade in the Sahara, which was then referred to in Western terminology as “El Sous.” Nehling proceeded to sell the purported concession to a British company called The Globe Venture Syndicate in London (GVSL). This company then went on to claim exclusive authority over imports, exploitation rights in Oued Nun, as well as mining the authority to acquire real estate. Moreover, the GVSL maintained that it had been granted this concession by a council of chiefs independent of the Sultan of Morocco.
But the British government did not give credence to these claims, as it was fully aware that the Moroccan government at the time prohibited foreigners from trading with the inhabitants of the Sahara. Since the British company’s initiative was contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the Agreement of March 13, 1895 — which was signed between Morocco and the United Kingdom and recognized Moroccan sovereignty over that territory — the British government disapproved of the company’s operation and urged its promoters to not venture into the territory or undertake any activity without prior authorization from the Moroccan government.
Ignoring the warnings of both the British and Moroccan governments not to approach the territory or engage in commercial activities there, Arthur Gibbon Spilsbury, a member of the GVSL, decided to initiate his commercial operations with the inhabitants of the area. His first action, which he undertook in August 1897, was to send a shipment of ammunition aboard a steamship called The Tourmaline. However, his attempt could not have ended worse. As soon as the vessel arrived, a Moroccan steamer was waiting to arrest the crew and transport them to Essaouira. The adventure ended with Spilsbury’s hasty return to his country, where he was dismissed from the army and arrested two years later at the request of the Moroccan government. He was subsequently tried by a court in Gibraltar.
The most relevant aspect of this historical episode, which once again corroborates Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara prior to its nominal occupation by Spain in 1884, is the attitude of the Spanish press of the time. To be sure, the attitude of the Spanish press merely reflected Madrid’s fears regarding the consequences of Spilsbury’s expedition. Indeed, in the midst of the heated debate across Europe following the controversy sparked by Spilsbury’s illegal expedition in the Sahara, the Spanish press expressed concern that his actions might affect Spain’s territorial claims south of Morocco, derived from the Treaty of Tétouan of 1860.
Under that treaty, which the Spanish government had forced Morocco to negotiate and sign, the Moroccan government committed to ceding to Spain what it called Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña, a fishing outpost that Spain claimed to have established south of Morocco around the year 1476, before it was dismantled due to resistance from local tribes. Spain had been attempting to achieve this objective since the Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed with Morocco in May 1767. But all its efforts had fallen on deaf ears due to Morocco’s rejection and evasions. Given the importance of the fishing banks in all the waters of the Sahara for feeding the population of the Canary Islands, as well as ensuring their security, Spain sought to use its presence in Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña, later identified as Sidi Ifni and effectively occupied in 1934, as a springboard to occupy the entire Sahara region, or what has come to be known in Western terminology as Western Sahara.
Thus, news that British companies had begun serious attempts to occupy the territory struck Spain’s political and media elite. Among the voices that most clearly captured this sense of alarm was that of a newspaper called El País, which insightfully articulated the prevailing view of developments that then prevailed south of Morocco. In February 1897, the Spanish newspaper published an article that left little to no room for ambiguity about Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara, which was then already coveted by both Spain and Britain. It wrote: “If this Syndicate succeeds in carrying out its projects, it will do so by ignoring the sovereignty of the Sultan in the territory of the Sus, establishing the autonomy of chiefs and tribes in opposition to the hegemony of a State recognized by all the Powers; altering the status quo of Morocco; modifying the limits of its territory, and arrogantly disregarding our rights under the Treaty of Tétouan.”
The emptiness of the Spanish narrative on the Sahara
This passage certainly lays bare the hypocrisy and lack of rigor on the part of an institution such as the newspaper El País, revealing that its stance on the Sahara dispute is driven by an ideological and political agenda. But it also — and perhaps more importantly — exposes the emptiness of the entire narrative upon which successive Spanish governments have based their argument that, prior to its occupation in 1884, the Sahara had never fallen under Moroccan sovereignty. In fact, since Spain launched its colonial offensive against the Moroccan Sahara in 1884, it relied on the same arguments as Spilsbury: that the Sahara was terra nullius (land belonging to no one) and that the legitimacy of its occupation derived from agreements signed with local tribal chiefs. This was also one of the main arguments Spain used when Morocco began, starting in 1957, to urge the Spanish government to enter into negotiations in order to reach a political agreement that would allow the Sahara to return under Moroccan sovereignty.
That El País lamented in 1897 — thirteen years after the alleged treaties signed with Saharan tribal chiefs — that Spilsbury’s expedition might undermine Morocco’s sovereignty over the Sahara and alter the limits of its territory constitutes compelling evidence of the falsity of the Spanish narrative. By extension, this undermines the broader Western claim that the supposed absence of Moroccan sovereignty when Spain took the first step toward occupation beginning in October 1884.
As I have demonstrated in my new book, The Unholy Alliance: The Hidden Conspiracy Behind the Spanish-Algerian Plot Over Morocco’s Sahara (1965-1979), published last week, the greatest obstacle that prevented Morocco from settling this dispute in the 1960s and 1970s was not legal in nature but narrative. That is, the obstacle stemmed from the way the Spanish media and academic machinery partially disseminated a narrative that delegitimized the Moroccan position and advocated for the establishment of an independent state south of Morocco. Even after Morocco convinced the Spanish government to sign the Madrid Agreement, concluded under the auspices of Security Council Resolutions 377, 379, and 380, the Spanish media and academic establishment continued to play a decisive role in spreading a narrative that questioned the legitimacy of that agreement, thereby paving the way for the Algerian regime to revive the dispute and prolong it to this day.
As if that were not enough, for five decades the Moroccan media and academic elite operated under a profound naivety. They believed that the historical and legal arguments underpinning Morocco’s position would speak for themselves, rendering unnecessary the need for relentless, sustained engagement engaging on the front lines of narrative construction. This unfortunate miscalculation created a vacuum that was eagerly filled by a Spanish press hostile to Morocco and aligned with Algeria.
However, over the past few years, it appears that Morocco’s political, academic, and media elite has awakened to the paramount importance of occupying the narrative space and adopting a proactive strategy aimed at countering and neutralizing the continuous avalanche of falsehoods propagated by Morocco’s adversaries. Of course, this essential shift is not welcome news for the cohort of Morocco’s detractors, whether in Spain or elsewhere. They must now reckon with the fact that this critical terrain no longer belongs to them exclusively, as it did for decades. They know that, as Morocco increasingly emerges from its prolonged media lethargy, they will be faced with the unenviable burden of proving the historical base and political legitimacy of their carefully distilled falsehoods in the prevailing Western Sahara story. And so, as Morocco-bashers retreat to the narrative front lines to make up for their incontrovertible losses on the historical and diplomatic terrains, they would do well to take note: Moroccans are watching closely and will respond promptly — factually yet unapologetically – to any attempt to promote narratives that seek to undermine Morocco’s interests or tarnish its reputation.
Samir Bennis is the co-founder and publisher of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.
The post Western Sahara: The Historical Truth That El País and the Spanish Press Overlook appeared first on Morocco World News.
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