Word: moroccos
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...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...
...lifa may not be unique, but Tunisia itself comes close to it. Fifty-one years after gaining independence from France, this spit of land with just 10.2 million people has largely triumphed over the grinding problems of poverty and illiteracy that have beset Arab neighbors like Morocco and Algeria, and left parts of Africa close to economic collapse. In the process, Tunisia offers other developing nations a tantalizing example of how to overhaul their economies by pushing education, business-friendly policies and trade with the West. Much as Singapore has done in Southeast Asia, Tunisia has succeeded by galvanizing...
...officials make no apologies for their tough stance on political dissent, which they say has helped to protect Tunisia from the kind of terrorist attacks suffered in Algeria and Morocco. "We have eradicated terrorism as a phenomenon," says Refaï. Scores of members of the Tunisian Islamic organization Ennahdha have been jailed or exiled to Europe. This crackdown has intensified since Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat last year renamed itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and vowed to recruit terrorists across North Africa. In January, at least 14 people were killed in gun battles between security...