Tags : Morocco, United Arab Emirates, UAE, Abu Dhabi, vacation, holidays, Gabon, France, Emmanuel Macron, Senegal,
The Alawite monarch does not want to return, for now, to Gabon, where his friend Ali Bongo was overthrown by the military, nor to France, with whose president, Macron, tensions persist.
Ignacio Cembrero
A day of work and then the start of a long vacation. On Monday, the 4th, King Mohammed VI of Morocco made a working visit to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It was his first official trip abroad in five years.
There, he was received with great pomp, his royal entourage escorted by a squadron of riders, while a salute of 21 gunshots resounded. Mohammed VI and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the UAE, signed a memorandum of understanding and engaged in one-on-one discussions about « the historic fraternal relations between both countries (…) as well as regional and international matters of common interest, » according to the official version.
After a few hours, the official visit concluded, but another began. « Mohammed VI has decided to stay a few more days in that friendly and allied country for a private stay whose duration has not been determined, » as announced by the Moroccan digital newspaper ‘Maghreb-Intelligence’ on Tuesday. The « private stays, » as described by the Moroccan official press, actually refer to vacations. It is likely that Abu Dhabi is only the first stage of a vacation trip that will later take the monarch to India, where he has been in 2001 and 2015 for both work and leisure visits.
The Alaouite sovereign had not set foot abroad for almost three months, since September 9th, when he was forced to interrupt his vacation in Paris to return to Morocco, devastated by an earthquake officially causing 2,946 deaths and 6,125 injuries. It took him 19 hours to return.
Abu Dhabi is an atypical destination for royal vacations. His two traditional leisure and relaxation spots outside Morocco were until now France, where he owns a castle in Betz and a mansion near the Eiffel Tower, and Gabon, where he has a seaside residence in Pointe Denis, on the estuary of Komo.
He has decided not to return to Gabon after the overthrow of his friend, President Ali Bongo, on August 30th by a group of coupist military. To France, his favorite destination, he also does not want to return for now because although the relationship is less tense in recent weeks, it does not have the cordiality of the past.
The peak of the Franco-Moroccan clash was reached in early September. The Moroccan Ministry of the Interior rejected the aid offered by France after the earthquake while accepting, for example, the aid from Spain and the United Kingdom, the latter with much fewer ties to Morocco than the former colonial power.
The Moroccan power-affiliated press also insulted and spread unfounded rumors about President Emmanuel Macron. « Not only does Macron seem like a shameful homosexual, but he also apparently maintains an extramarital relationship, despite being married to Brigitte, 24 years older than him, and she has doubts about her husband’s sexual orientation, » wrote the newspaper ‘Le 360,’ owned by Mounir Majidi, the king’s private secretary, according to Moroccan journalists in exile.
Mohammed VI’s meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed is exceptional because the monarch does not usually meet with foreign personalities. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez would have liked to travel to Morocco shortly after his inauguration on November 16. However, he wanted assurances that this time he would be received by the sovereign, unlike what happened in February of this year when the Spanish-Moroccan summit was held in Rabat. The royal palace did not give them, and for now, there is no visit.
The monarch, who was on vacation in Gabon in February, did not return to his kingdom to grant an audience to Sánchez. To compensate for this, the Alaouite sovereign announced that he would later extend a personal invitation to Sánchez to come and see him, as announced on February 1 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares. More than 10 months later, that invitation has not reached La Moncloa.
In the same month of February, Mohammed VI canceled a working visit to Senegal, where he had been invited by President Macky Sall. The king was still in Gabon at that time, but on the afternoon of February 22, just hours before his trip, a statement from the Royal Palace announced that he was suffering from the flu and would not travel to Dakar.
To skip the summit of heads of state of the Islamic world, held in Riyadh on February 11, Mohammed VI gave no pretext. The meeting was dedicated to discussing the war between Israel and the Palestinians, and the presence of the king would have been more than appropriate because he presides over the Al-Quds Committee, responsible for safeguarding the holy sites of Islam in Jerusalem.
Aziz Akhnnouch, the head of the Moroccan government, represented the king at that meeting and delivered a speech on his behalf. In it, he denounced « the blatant aggression against unarmed civilians » perpetrated by Israel, a country with which Morocco has established a close relationship since December 2020. He then made a « call for the awakening of human consciousness to end the killing of human lives (…) ».
It had been 34 days since the war broke out in the Middle East, and it was the first time the monarch addressed the issue. In early October and November, he delivered speeches in Rabat before Parliament and on television, and in neither did he mention the war.
El Confidencial, 11/12/2023
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