Let us say it plainly: Ceuta is not a migration crisis, it is an instrument of state. And a free Rif is the only structural guarantee that it will not happen again.
To understand why, however, we must first dismantle the three myths on which Spanish and European policy towards Rabat has rested for decades. Three myths that every crisis refutes and that every Spanish government nonetheless goes on endorsing.
First myth: Moroccan stability
The central argument for appeasement is always the same: Morocco is an island of stability in a turbulent region, and that stability must be preserved at any price. It is the founding myth of the entire relationship.
The reality is otherwise. A stable regime does not need to turn its own youth into a diplomatic projectile. A stable country does not see seven out of ten of its young people declare, survey after survey, that their only life plan is to leave. The images from Ceuta in 2021 as in 2026 do not show a state controlling its borders: they show a people seizing the first available breach to flee. When the regime "opens the floodgates", it does not manufacture the flow; it simply stops holding it back. The flow is permanent, fed by the despair of an entire population and that is the true diagnosis of Moroccan "stability".
What the West calls stability is, in truth, silence. The silence of prisons filled after the Rif Hirak of 2016-2017, when the state's only answer to peaceful social demands a cancer hospital, a university, jobs was hundreds of arrests and sentences of up to twenty years. The silence of a domesticated press and imprisoned journalists. The silence of an entire region, the Rif, under a de facto state of military exception since 1958.
Mistaking silence for stability is an analytical error. Staking Spanish national security on that error is recklessness. Systems that suppress every outlet for expression are not stable: they are waves that have not yet broken. And when this one breaks for history teaches that it always does Spain will discover that it had mortgaged its entire Maghreb policy to a regime whose only succession plan is repression, with fourteen kilometres of sea as its sole firebreak.
Second myth: the loyal partner
The second myth presents Morocco as a reliable partner of Spain and of Europe. The facts paint the exact opposite portrait: that of a state which has made interference in European domestic affairs a systematic policy.
The centrepiece of that apparatus is religious. Through its Ministry of Habous and a network of front foundations, Rabat funds, controls and supervises a substantial share of the mosques of Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and France: it appoints or vets imams, shapes Friday sermons, and turns places of worship into terminals of influence for a foreign state. Dutch and Belgian intelligence services have for years documented this "long arm" of Rabat over its diaspora: surveillance of opponents, pressure on families back home, communal supervision. European citizens of Moroccan or Rifian origin are treated by Rabat as perpetual subjects, and institutions that should serve their spiritual life operate as instruments of political control including the capacity to steer the electoral behaviour of entire communities in municipalities where their demographic weight is decisive. That a foreign state should command such leverage inside the electorate of European democracies ought to be a standing scandal. Instead, it is a taboo.
To this must be added the episodes now known across Europe: the mass surveillance conducted through the Pegasus programme, which reached according to press revelations never convincingly denied the telephone of the Spanish Prime Minister himself; and the European Parliament corruption scandal exposed in 2022, in which Morocco stands named among the states purchasing loyalties at the heart of European democracy.
What other power that spies on a sitting Prime Minister, buys members of the European Parliament and instrumentalises mosques on Spanish soil would still be called a "strategic partner"? The question answers itself. Interference is not an anomaly in the Spanish-Moroccan relationship: it is its nature.
Third myth: the guardian of the southern border
The third myth is the most profitable of all for Rabat: Morocco as the indispensable gendarme of Europe's southern border, a dyke against irregular migration and terrorism, and therefore deserving of European funds, political concessions and silence over its crimes.
Ceuta 2021 and Ceuta 2026 have exposed the truth of that contract: *the guardian is the threat*. Europe pays Morocco for protection against a weapon whose trigger is in Moroccan hands. It is the business model of extortion: the same actor manufactures the danger, administers the danger, and charges a fee for averting it. Each European payment buys no security; it buys the next show of force, because it teaches Rabat that blackmail pays. The Spanish reversal of 2022 on Western Sahara, presented as the definitive price of stability, bought precisely four years of truce.
A dyke that opens at the will of the one who administers it is not a dyke: it is a floodgate. And a border whose security depends on the mood of an authoritarian regime is not protected: it is mortgaged.
The security balance sheet: the test of the facts
There remains the supposedly decisive argument: counter-terrorism cooperation. It is here that the contrast between rhetoric and results is most painful, and here that precision matters most, because the victims deserve truth rather than slogans.
The gravest attacks suffered by Western Europe this century bear, with striking recurrence, the imprint of networks originating in the space Rabat controls: Madrid 2004, with close to two hundred dead, the work of a cell largely of Moroccan origin; the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks, built around Belgian-Moroccan networks in Molenbeek; Barcelona and Cambrils 2017, carried out by a cell directed by a Moroccan imam, Abdelbaki es Satty, whose prior contacts with intelligence services were subsequently revealed by the Spanish press without the questions raised by that revelation ever receiving a complete public answer.
Let us be categorical about what this does *not* mean: it is not a judgement on Moroccans, who are the first victims of the regime that governs them and, thereafter, of the stigma these crimes cast upon them in Europe. Reducing the problem to the origin of the perpetrators would be as unjust as it is analytically sterile.
What it does mean is something else, and it is devastating for the myth of the partner. If the Moroccan regime genuinely controlled the religious sphere as it claims and it does control it: no imam officiates in its mosque network without its approval and if its intelligence cooperation were what it proclaims, that record would be inexplicable. Only two readings are possible, and both condemn the partnership: either the Moroccan apparatus is incapable of preventing the radicalisation that germinates in the spaces it administers in which case the "indispensable counter-terrorism partner" is a myth or it tolerates and capitalises on that threat as one more diplomatic asset, exactly as it capitalises on migration in which case it is something worse than a myth. In either case, European security rests on a contractor who charges for a service whose results refute the contract.
The partnership balance sheet: objectives against results
Let us judge the Euro-Moroccan "strategic partnership" as every policy should be judged: by its results measured against its declared objectives.
Objective: contain irregular migration. Result: two mass deployments of the migration weapon against Ceuta in five years, with billions in European funds disbursed in the interval. Objective: guarantee security. Result: the record described above, plus the surveillance of the Spanish government itself. Objective: anchor regional stability. Result: a neighbourhood more tense than ever, an arms race with Algeria, and a region the Rif turned into a powder keg by repression. Objective: promote reform and human rights. Result: hundreds of Hirak political prisoners, imprisoned journalists, and a diaspora under surveillance on European soil.
There is not a single metric of this partnership that shows a positive balance for Europe. Every one of them shows a positive balance for the regime. A contract in which one party systematically fails to meet all its obligations while punctually collecting all its considerations is not a partnership: it is a tribute.
The Rifian alternative
Set against this balance sheet, the Rifian question ceases to be a sentimental or historical matter and becomes what it is: the only genuine strategic alternative that geography offers Spain.
A Rif in command of its own destiny would invert the equation term by term. Where the Moroccan regime manufactures emigration through deliberate marginalisation, a Rifian state would have as its vital interest the settling of its population through development for no young state survives the haemorrhage of its youth. Where Rabat instrumentalises European mosques, a democratic Rif, heir to a popular Islam foreign to the machinery of the Habous, would have neither the will nor the apparatus for such interference. Where the "guardian" blackmails, a neighbour whose nascent international credibility would depend entirely on its reliability would cooperate loyally in border management. And where Morocco maintains its claim to Ceuta and Melilla as permanent state policy, let it be said without ambiguity: the Rifian cause carries no claim whatsoever over the two Spanish cities. An independent Rif would be the first state on the southern shore with no territorial dispute with Spain.
International law, moreover, draws a precise distinction: the Rif is not just any secessionist region, but a territory with its own history of statehood the Republic of the Rif proclaimed in 1921 incorporated into a post-colonial framework that never had the consent of its population, and whose situation is today analysed by jurists of international standing under the gravest categories of the law of nations. Spain, the former protecting power in northern Morocco, is no bystander to this question: it is part of its history and therefore part of its solution.
Choosing the right problem
Realists will object that supporting Rifian self-determination would strain relations with Rabat. That is true, and it should not be concealed. But foreign policy does not consist in avoiding problems; it consists in choosing them. For four decades Spain has chosen the problem of a neighbour that spies on it, blackmails it, claims its territory, penetrates its religious institutions and uses human beings as ammunition. The result of that choice was counted in bodies off Ceuta on 30 July.
The alternative demands no adventures: it demands consistency. Support for dialogue on the future of the Rif, effective insistence on human rights, freedom for the Hirak prisoners, recognition of the Rifian question as an unresolved international question of decolonisation. Step by step, with the prudence of serious states but, for the first time, in the right direction.
The dead of Ceuta deserve more than another cycle of outrage and forgetting. They deserve that Europe name the cause of their deaths: a regime that manufactures the desperate and uses them as projectiles. And they deserve that Spain, the European nation that knows the Rif best, should understand at last that its own security and Rifian freedom are not separate causes.
They are one and the same.
Ridouane Oussama is President of the Rifian National Party (PNR), a civil society organisation headquartered in Paris with sections in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and France.*
