Word: morocco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...national court fined the magazine's publishers 3,000 euros for "insulting the monarchy.") The couple were already having a tough year: A few 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...
...Still, this latest response seems to have taken many in Spain - including Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, who was in Morocco at the time the ambassador was recalled - by surprise. "It's not the reaction itself, but rather the speed with which relations between the two countries have deteriorated that is so surprising," says Haizam Amirah-Fernández, senior analyst for the Arab 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...
...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...
...tension with its neighbor across the Mediterranean. In September parliamentary elections, only 37% of eligible voters went to the polls. The low turnout - the worst in the country's history - was widely interpreted as a sign that voters felt irrelevant to the political process. "It's not unusual for Morocco to whip up nationalist sentiment when it wants to create a distraction from the country's real problems," says analyst Amirah-Fernández. "But it's not a good sign...