Fighting Over Parsley

On July 11, 2002, six Moroccan gendarmes occupied Isla de Perejil [1], or Parsley Island, an uninhabited, Spanish-administered rock of about 37 acres, just 220 yards off the Moroccan coast. If the standoff had lasted longer than a few days, and if blood had actually been spilled, we might now know it as the Parsley War. But on July 18, they were overwhelmed and forcibly ejected by Equipo 31, a crack team of Spanish special forces soldiers. No shots were fired.

And that was that. Morocco and Spain agreed to return to the status quo ante [2]: Spain’s claim to the island would remain disputed, but not actively challenged, by Morocco. The island itself would remain unoccupied by either side. Isla de Perejil’s non-occupation is now closely monitored by both the Moroccans and the Spanish (though it’s unclear whether the Moroccan goatherd who occasionally used to graze his flock on the island now has to show his passport).

Apart from that, the case seems closed. But in this part of the world, few things are merely what they seem [3]. Known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules, the strategically important gateway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is laced with mirroring versions of history — a commodity in no short supply here. Those versions of history have even left mirroring border phenomena on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Perejil is one of seven Spanish territories on and off the Moroccan coast, once known collectively as “plazas de soberanía.” The two main ones are Ceuta and Melilla, two cities on the African mainland. Formerly called the “Major Plazas,” they are now each enjoying a separate, autonomous status within Spain. The remaining “Minor Plazas,” apart from Perejil, are all garrisoned with Spanish soldiers: the Islas Chafarinas, a three-island archipelago near the Algerian border; Alboran, a flat and empty fleck of land flanked by tiny Isla de las Nubes; and finally Peñón [4] de Alhucemas (which includes the two minuscule islets called Isla de Tierra and Isla de Mar) and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, both on Morocco’s central Mediterranean coast, not far from the city of El Hoceima. Morocco claims both autonomous cities and all of the plazas, except Alboran, 30 miles out to sea, the only bit of Spanish North Africa not hugging the Moroccan coastline.

Opposite Ceuta, across the STROG [5], is Gibraltar (“Gib” in British parlance), captured by the British in 1704 and granted to them “in perpetuity” by the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713. The Spanish have never accepted the loss of Gibraltar, besieging it on three occasions and most recently blockading it from 1969 to 1985.

It seems illogical, not to mention a bit petty, of the Spanish to demand the return of Gibraltar while they cling to their toeholds on the Moroccan side. But Spain’s position is cherry-picked from two opposing principles: Either occupying strategic bits of another country’s coast is an affront to its territorial integrity, in which case Spain can rightly claim Gibraltar but has to renounce its plazas and autonomous cities in North Africa, or Spain’s historic rights to those places can be maintained forever, in which case the same applies for British sovereignty over Gibraltar.

Naturally, Spain has an internally consistent way out of this conundrum: Ceuta and Melilla were Spanish cities long before present-day Morocco existed [6], so it can’t claim them. But Gibraltar was ripped from the bosom of the Spanish state and has been a British colony ever since — in fact, the last colony on European soil [7]. And what should happen to colonies? Right, they should be decolonized.

Another solution, examined first by the British in 1917 and then proposed independently by Spain’s King Alfonso in 1926, was an exchange between Spain and Britain, with Gibraltar reverting to Spain and Ceuta (and possibly also Melilla) becoming British. The swap would have been an interesting new chapter in the long association of Ceuta and Gibraltar. Both exclaves, barely 14 miles apart, poke into the strait, guarding this chokepoint of naval traffic between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Seen from above, they look like the hinges of a door that can be opened and shut by whomever controls them. Seen from the sea, Gibraltar’s Rock and Ceuta’s Monte Hacho [8] could be mistaken for the northern and southern pillars of a gigantic gate.

In fact, both rocks are the actual Pillars of Hercules known to the ancients, named after the legendary hero because they marked the westernmost extent of his 12 Labors. To the Greeks and Romans, the Pillars of Hercules were the proverbial end of the world. Tradition has it that the inscription on them warned “Nec Plus Ultra,” or “Beyond this, there’s nothing.”

That changed when Columbus brought back news of lands beyond the ocean, and riches beyond compare. The personal badge of Emperor Charles V, who ruled Spain soon after the discovery of the Americas, showed both pillars interwoven with the slogan: “Plus Ultra” — “There is more out there,” the perfect motto for a nascent transatlantic empire. Charles’s badge is at the origin of Spain’s coat of arms (which still shows both pillars), and possibly also of the dollar sign [9] — the two vertical bars being abstract renderings of Gibraltar and Ceuta, and the curling motto reduced to the S-shape that connects them.

(Nec) Plus Ultra: the pillars as endpoint or gateway. Again, two competing versions of history. And Ceuta and Gibraltar are connected by yet another history with two wildly differing versions. Early in the Eighth Century, Julian [10], a count tasked with “holding Ceuta for Christendom,” switched sides, exhorting and aiding the Muslim invaders of North Africa to cross the strait to Spain. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula began when their general Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Mons Calpe in 711, henceforth renamed Jebel Tariq — i.e. Gibraltar.

Legend has it that Julian wanted revenge for the honor of his daughter Florinda, ravished by Roderic, the last Visigoth king of Spain. Muslim sources later described her as innocence incarnate, while Christian scribes depicted her as a loose woman — respectively maximizing and minimizing Julian’s casus belli. In Spanish history, Julian is the ultimate traitor, opening up the country to seven centuries of Moorish rule. But in his 1970 novel “Count Julian,” the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo takes the alleged traitor’s side, relishing in the destruction of Spain.

Examples of this mutability of allegiance persist across the strait. Spain’s claims to Gibraltar are supported by … Morocco — for surely, a return of Gib to Spain must mean a return of Ceuta to Morocco. Spain’s claims to Perejil are supported by Algeria, Morocco’s unfriendly neighbor, but not by Spain’s fellow European Union member France, Morocco’s former colonial overlord.

Perhaps Gibraltar is the northernmost part of Africa, for its Barbary Macaques are the only monkeys living in the wild in Europe [11]. And maybe Melilla is the southernmost city of Europe, because its Capilla de Santiago (St James’s Chapel) is the only gothic church in Africa.

All the while, the peculiar borders of these exclaves persist, and harden and soften according to circumstance. Spain and Britain’s co-membership of the European Union was instrumental in ending the blockade of Gibraltar, normalizing the border at La Linea — no longer a three-quarter mile strip of no man’s land garnished with barbed wire.

But the persistent disagreement between Spain and Morocco over the plazas, coupled with an increase in undocumented migration from Africa into Europe, has put Spain on the spot. For many thousands of poor Africans seeking a better life in Europe, Ceuta and Melilla are the entry points into the First World. The barbed-wire fence around both territories is hardly an impediment for those daring and hardy enough to trek across the Sahara.

Some in Spain suspect the periodic surges of migrants into its two African cities are co-orchestrated by Morocco, to underscore their untenability as Spanish, and EU, exclaves in Africa. But ironically, the surges more likely result from the improved Spanish surveillance of the strait, which many migrants try to cross. Like the flow of a river, the phenomenon of mass migration simply seeks the most convenient channel for its course. Hence the poor, huddled masses of boat people reaching Italy’s southernmost island Lampedusa, and likewise the Canary Islands, Spain’s archipelago off Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

For them too, the Strait of Gibraltar no longer is the Nec Plus Ultra of their dreams.

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.

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[1] The official Moroccan nomenclature is “Tura,” which in Berber means “uninhabited,” but also used is “Leila,” which probably is a loan from the Spanish “la isla” (“the island”).

[2] In full: status quo ante bellum, “the state of things before the war.” This principle of international law holds that territorial conquest in battle should be nullified after the end of hostilities. The opposite principle, used to justify territorial gains, is uti possidetis — in full, uti possidetis, ita possideatis, “as you possessed [it], you shall possess [it] from now on.”

[3] For starters, how about the intriguing similarities between the Parsley Incident and the Falklands War, fought two decades earlier? Both involve failed attempts by former European colonies to reclaim islands off their coast held by former European superpowers. Kennedy-Lincoln assassination similarity buffs, start your engines!

[4] Literally a crag (a steep rocky outcrop), the Spanish word peñón has also come to mean a Spanish military outpost at such a location. Apart from the two mentioned here, other examples include the Peñón de Argel (i.e. Algiers), occupied by Spain from 1510 to 1529.

[5] Naval speak for the Strait of Gibraltar.

[6] 1640 and 1497, respectively. Morocco became independent from France in early 1956. Spanish Morocco — a protectorate since 1912 , not to be confused with the plazas — was allowed to join French Morocco in independence a few months later.

[7] Gibraltar had the status of Crown Colony from 1830 to 1981; in 2002, it was re-classified as a British Overseas Territory. Gibraltar has its own elected government, and thus claims no longer to be a colony, but Spain resists attempts to remove it from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization’s list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (16 at present, of which 10 are under British jurisdiction).

[8] Elevations 1,400 and 670 feet respectively; another candidate for the southern pillar is the Jebel Musa (2,800 feet), just beyond Ceuta’s border with Morocco.

[9] The pillars were pictured on the reverse of the Spanish dollar, legal tender in the United States until 1857.

[10] He might also have been called Urbano, or Ulban. He may have been a Berber, a Visigoth or a Byzantine. Perhaps he was the local ruler of Ceuta, or merely its governor. [11] According to tradition, the extinction of the Gibraltar macaques would signal the end of British rule over the Rock. A similar legend requires the Tower of London to house six raven, lest the monarchy should fail.