Referring to the High Level Meeting (RAN) that started yesterday in Rabat, IU, which is part of the coalition of the Spanish government UN Podemos, pointed out that it is the first meeting after the breaking of the cease-fire agreement and ‘the return to war in the territories occupied by the Moroccan regime’.

The IU party, very critical of the change of position of the head of the Executive, the socialist Pedro Sanchez, went further in its analysis.

‘All this is a product of the lack of vision on the part of the PSOE (socialists) on the relations with the Maghreb, which generates complicity with the occupation of Western Sahara and with the authoritarian Moroccan regime (…)’, it emphasized.

Meanwhile, it ignores other regional players with whom, by adopting this stance, it renounces to have mutually beneficial relations, he added in an indirect reference to ties with Algeria, which have been damaged by this issue.

‘With this meeting, in which only PSOE ministers participate, Pedro Sanchez again demonstrates that he is willing to give in to Morocco’s blackmail’, IU assured.

Likewise, Izquierda Unida regretted that ‘Morocco has become the guardian of the Spanish and European borders, and that it uses this position to obtain huge economic resources, without caring about the systematic violation of the rights of those who try to reach Europe’.

In this regard, he recalled that the ‘Canary route’, which departs from occupied Western Sahara and southern Morocco, ‘has become the deadliest in the European Union, with 1,784 deaths in 2022 alone’.

On the other hand, he reproached those attending the RAN for ‘ignoring such serious questions as the unilateral approval by the Moroccan Parliament of a delimitation of waters which not only takes as its own the Saharawi waters, but claims others belonging to Spain given its proximity to the Canary coasts, which include areas rich in raw materials’.

The change of position on Western Sahara by Spain was deplored at the recently concluded XVIth Congress of the Polisario Front, held in the refugee camp of Dakhla.

The RAN is made possible by Sanchez’s announcement that Spain considers Morocco’s autonomy plan for the Sahara as ‘the most solid, credible and realistic basis’ for a solution, a very similar statement made in the past by Donald Trump.

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