How Power Works: what connects the Ceuta 'crisis', Nolan's Odyssey and Morocco?

An illegal occupation that the world ignores, that's what

Last week, tens of thousands of migrants entered the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the north African coast causing a widespread outbreak of anti-migrant hysteria and closing of borders across Europe. Meanwhile, Chrisopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey, sweeps the box office and is mentioned as ‘Oscar material’.

There is an unreported connection between these two seemingly disparate events.

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Background

Both the film and the ‘invasion’ of Ceuta have garnered a lot of press attention. Ceuta because Europe, increasingly dominated by the far right, is obsessed with illegal immigration. The Odyssey because it’s a big, ambitious film that a lot of critics seem to like.

The Connection

In Ceuta, it’s very clear, from the evidence and from past history, that Morocco caused the crisis by allowing the crowds of migrants to get past its border guards; indeed some of the Moroccan soldiers seem to have directly encouraged the young men seeking to cross. It did the same in 2021. I would bet my last dollar that Moroccan intelligence planted the social media posts that triggered the rush to the border in the first place.

Why does Morocco do this? To show that it can. Morocco likes other countries to know that it can turn the tap of unwanted migrants on and off whenever it likes. It denies responsibility, but there can be no question that Morocco deliberately triggered this crisis. Doubtless the Moroccan government will be very pleased with the cross-Europe hysteria that has resulted.

The Ceuta drama serves to show Morocco’s power to cause Europe immense difficulty. In that way, it’s a bit like Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. It’s been speculated, plausibly, that one motive could be that Morocco wanted to ‘punish’ Spain for its Prime Minister’s recent visit to Algeria, whom Morocco regards as its enemy and rival (the two countries have closed their borders to one another for over thirty years; there have been no diplomatic relations for five years). This hostility is down to one event: Morocco’s illegal occupation in 1975 of the Western Sahara, an occupation that continues to this day. So Morocco would have seen Sanchez’s visit as a kind of endorsement of Algeria’s position which is to support the indigenous people of the territory in ending the illegal occupation of their country.

In 2021, when Morocco caused a similar ‘invasion’ of Ceuta, the reason was that Spain had given medical treatment to the leader of the Frente POLISARIO, the resistance movement that represents the original inhabitants of the Western Sahara in seeking liberation and self-determination. The camps containing the 150,000 refugees driven from the Western Sahara, run by the Polisario, are in southern Algeria (I have been there). Morocco is trying to pressure Algeria to disown and expel the Polisario. Hence the connection with the Spanish PM’s visit.

And here is the connection to The Odyssey. Nolan chose to film part of his epic in the Western Sahara. This is a bit like filming in the occupied West Bank. It is reported that Morocco encouraged Nolan to film there. He was probably offered subsidies of some kind - perhaps free hotels? Free transport? Doubtless, free security - as Morocco very much wants to ‘normalize’ its occupation and having epic films shot there helps.

Nolan would surely have known that the Western Sahara is occupied territory. But he chose to ignore this, instead trampling on the rights of the indigenous inhabitants, the Saharawi. No doubt he calculated that audiences for his film would not know about the Western Sahara or, if they did, would not care.

And here we come to the geopolitics of this tragic issue.

Since the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario in 1991, there have been many UN Security Council resolutions that require Morocco to hold a referendum on self-determination for the territory. I negotiated some of them, back in the early 2000’s, when I was at the UK Mission to the UN¹. That referendum has never happened because Morocco has effectively blocked it.

And the Security Council has done nothing to force Morocco to fulfil its legal obligations, much as the Council has done nothing to force Israel to comply with international law and leave the occupied Palestinian territories either. In the latter case, Israel has been protected from consequences by the US; in the Western Sahara, it is France, another permanent member of the Council (and thus wielding a veto), which blocks any meaningful pressure.

If he bothered, Nolan may well have considered this. He or his sub-producers will, I suspect, have consulted the British embassy in Rabat who, I also suspect (but of course cannot prove), would have given him a pro-forma account of Britain’s ‘legal’ position - that the UK supports self-determination - while nodding and winking with abandon that, in reality, the UK would not care (I have attended similar such meetings, including about the Western Sahara). The Foreign Office in London may have given him a similar message. Whatever, Nolan concluded that there would be no political fuss if he went ahead. And he was right.

Morocco is like Israel in that it sees the cultural space as one to exploit in normalising its illegal occupation of someone else’s land. (There are some who see Israel’s hand behind the Ceuta crisis, as ‘punishment’ for Spain’s criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza: there is as yet no evidence of this). Morocco, which has heavily invested in encouraging cultural appropriation of the Western Sahara, is happy to advertise Nolan’s complicity in its occupation (Nolan, not so much). Similarly, a few years ago, Richard Branson tried to build a wind-surfing centre in the Western Sahara, careless of the legal niceties of illegal occupation. He too was encouraged by Morocco, indeed by its king, who busily courts the rich and powerful, portraying himself as a kind of moderate reformer (not a portrayal most Moroccans would share). For historical reasons, the legitimacy of the monarchy is very much tied to the occupation of the Western Sahara: Moroccan diplomats have been wont to threaten that if anyone did anything to disrupt its occupation (such as mention it), the monarchy would ‘fall’ and - who knows? - bring about another crazy Islamist state on Europe’s southern border.

You may remember a very enjoyable zombie film called World War Z. In this film, a zombie virus rapidly spreads across the globe. Only Israel has so far successfully protected itself from the plague of flesh-eating mutants. The protagonist, played by Brad Pitt, visits Israel where a wise intelligence chief gives him a homily about how Israel has learned never to be complacent when assessing likely threats. And indeed, as he speaks, we see the zombies swarming disgustingly in huge numbers on the other side of a defensive wall which is clearly situated just to the east of the Western Wall, which is where, by coincidence, Arab East Jerusalem (what’s left of it) begins. The film all but calls the zombies, Arabs. The dehumanisation of Arabs, now crude and overt under Israel’s extremist government, has its subtleties, or did have.

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Conclusion

The Odyssey is reported in the film pages; Ceuta in the main news sections. Morocco’s hand behind both is barely discussed (though the Spanish press is much more savvy than the British or American). Neither is the connection between the two events: illegally occupied territory.

The Western Sahara is not only ignored geopolitically. It is also ignored in the popular discourse. There would be a boycott of The Odyssey if it were filmed in the West Bank. Please remember this when you see Nolan waving his Oscar.

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1. It’s well-known that I and the non-profit advisory group I founded, Independent Diplomat, have worked with the Frente POLISARIO for over twenty years. Morocco of course hates me and regularly publicly denigrates me, including once by building a website devoted to my activities as an ‘Algerian spy’. I should note that neither I nor Independent Diplomat have ever been paid a fee from the Polisario for this work. And I won’t be going on holiday in Morocco any time soon.