Word: melilla
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...months earlier, Letizia's sister had committed suicide. This fall, groups of Catalan nationalists publicly burned photos of the king and queen, and last week, Morocco's monarch temporarily recalled his ambassador from Madrid to protest the Spanish monarch's visit to the contested cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Through it all, Juan Carlos and his wife Sofia have maintained their habitual calm, confident, no doubt, of both of their high approval ratings and their own exquisite manners...
...Garzón's decision last Tuesday to investigate several Moroccans, including a few high-ranking officials, for alleged atrocities against the North African Sahawari people between 1976 and 1987 after Spain withdrew from its former colony of Western Sahara. The fact that the Spanish monarch's visit to Melilla on Tuesday coincides with the anniversary of the Green March - the day in 1975 when 350,000 Moroccans poured into Western Sahara to claim the region - only adds to the friction...
...world at Spain's Royal Elcano Institute. "Spanish-Moroccan relations are always presented as privileged. But these declarations have been extremely vehement." On Saturday, the Moroccan parliament called for protests outside the Spanish embassy in Rabat, and on Monday, hundreds of angry citizens demonstrated on the Moroccan border with Melilla and in the city of Tetuan...
...countries that claim to be the closest of allies, Spain and Morocco sure do fight a lot. The latest chapter in their ongoing love-hate fest came this week, as Spain's King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia made a trip - their first as monarchs - to Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish cities that Morocco claims as its own. They were on official state business and it was the first time a Spanish monarch had visited since 1927. Last Friday, Morocco's King Mohammed VI protested the royal visit by withdrawing his country's ambassador to Spain and on Monday, as thousands...
...Located on the coast of western North Africa, Ceuta and Melilla have been part of Spain for more than four hundred years. But Morocco views the two cities as occupied territories - a last, insulting bastion of Spanish colonialism. Much as any gesture of British sovereignty in Gibraltar raises Spanish hackles, so do assertions of Spanish identity in North Africa irritate the Moroccans. Five years ago, for example, the two countries came to the brink of war when a band of Moroccan soldiers raised their national flag on a tiny, uninhabited island called Perejil that Spain considers its territory...