Moroccan Regime Faces a Diplomatic Blow

The repercussions of the events that took place at the Ninth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD 9), and the Moroccan regime’s involvement in the scandal of the assault on the representative of Western Sahara, are still making headlines at the level of international public opinion. Observers have unanimously agreed that what the Alawite regime was subjected to in Japan was a multi-dimensional diplomatic slap.

The incident was described as a “blow to Moroccan diplomacy,” as stated by the Spanish newspaper “El Independiente,” which stopped at the details of what happened, and the subsequent alignment by the African countries “TICAD”, including the traditional allies of the Moroccan regime in the African continent, with the Sahrawi Republic in participating in the African-Japanese summits, as a founding member of the African Union, a decision that was taken unanimously, if the Moroccan position of rejection is excluded, which is a rare case since the return of the Alawite regime to the institutions of the African Union in 2017.

The Spanish newspaper commented on what happened in the Japanese capital: “After an attempt to assault a Sahrawi diplomat by a member of the Moroccan delegation, the final statement of the ministerial meeting of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), which brings together Japan and the African Union, confirmed the right of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to participate in the meeting as a full member of the African Union.”

“El Independiente” added in its article, quoting the final statement of the Tokyo meeting on Sunday, that “the only rejection of the term member state of the African Union came from the Moroccan delegation alone,” indicating that the Moroccan regime, due to its blatant bullying, was abandoned even by its traditional allies, who did not intervene to defend it.

The newspaper was keen to point out the nature of the delegations that participated in the Tokyo meeting and said that they were ministers and delegations from Japan and member states of the African Union, in addition to representatives of international organizations. It also stopped at the first paragraph, which indicated that “one of the member states expressed a different point of view” on the issue of the right of all members of the African Union to participate equally in the meeting, and the opposing state was Morocco”, El Independiente explained.

The Spanish media platform wrote about what it described as “Moroccan isolation” at the end of the meeting, when the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yoko Kamikawa, addressed the representatives of the member states of the African Union, in the presence of the envoy of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, together at the table with the representative of Zimbabwe, with a picture published by the Japanese Foreign Ministry showing the Sahrawi representative at the closing session, with his country’s signboard, like the rest of the member states, confirming that “the Moroccan diplomacy failed in its attempt to exclude the representatives of the former Spanish colony, a non-autonomous territory occupied by Morocco and pending the decolonisation process, the last on the African continent”.

According to the Spanish newspaper, the Moroccan delegate’s behaviour sparked a wave of criticism due to this behaviour that contradicts diplomatic norms, quoting Omar Mansour, the current Polisario Front delegate in Brussels, as describing what the Moroccan diplomat did as “shameful trolling moves, and yet he was unable to tear up the Sahrawi Republic’s signboard at the TICAD ministerial conference in Tokyo.”

The Sahrawi Interior Minister asserted, the newspaper added, that the Moroccan representative’s failure did not stop at the inability to steal the identity of the Sahrawi delegation, but rather extended to “his arrest by the conference security, its crushing by the security men, and its expulsion from the meeting due to the scandal and disapproval of this ridiculous diplomacy, which wants results to be achieved with aggression and assault.”