Charge: In 2026, a European democracy that calls itself progressive still holds African land it took by conquest, still hasn’t answered for a war crime it committed against the people who lived there, and still falls back on the oldest colonial habit there is — walls, patrols, and silence — the moment that land is questioned.
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Exhibit A: The Land Itself
Let’s not dress this up as a “territorial dispute”. Spain occupies Ceuta and Melilla — two Moroccan cities, on the African mainland, taken in the age of conquistadors and never handed back when the rest of the continent threw off its European rulers. Every other flag came down. France left Algeria. Britain left Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan. Portugal left Angola and Mozambique. Spain’s flag is still flying over two cities it governs from behind razor wire and a river of Guardia Civil patrols — and somehow this passes for normal in 2026. Nobody in Brussels calls it what it is.
Exhibit B: The Silence Over the Rif
Between 1921 and 1927, Spanish planes dropped mustard gas on villages in the Rif to put down a rebellion against colonial rule. That’s a war crime by the standards Europe itself wrote just a few years later at Geneva. A hundred years on, the Rif still has the highest cancer rates in Morocco — researchers and members of the European Parliament have drawn the line from one to the other. Moroccan groups have written to the Spanish crown for over a decade asking for something as small as acknowledgment. Nothing. No investigation. No apology. Not one word.
Exhibit C: The Confession, Given Only When It’s Cheap
Now put that next to what happened this past March. King Felipe VI, standing beside Mexico’s ambassador at a museum in Madrid, said the Spanish conquest of the Americas involved “a great deal of abuse” that “cannot make us feel proud” by today’s standards. First time a Spanish monarch has ever said anything close to that. Mexico’s president called it a gesture of reconciliation.
It took years of pressure and a boycotted inauguration to get even that much out of the palace. Morocco has been asking for the same basic courtesy about the Rif for longer, and gotten nothing. Ask yourself why. It isn’t because chemical warfare on civilians is somehow the lesser crime — it plainly isn’t. It’s because Mexico was never going to walk away with Spanish territory. Morocco could. An apology to Mexico City costs Madrid nothing. An apology to Nador and Al Hoceima opens a door Spain has spent a century keeping shut, because on the other side of it sits the question of who actually owns Ceuta and Melilla. So the free apology gets given, and the costly one doesn’t. That’s not an accident of history. That’s arithmetic.
Exhibit D: The Reflex, Not the Incident
Watch what happens when migrants — plenty of them descendants of the same Rif families who survived the gas — show up at those fences. Madrid and Brussels don’t examine the sovereignty question. They defend it, instantly, as if anyone raising it had committed an insult. Spanish ministers have said outright that the matter simply isn’t up for discussion. Brussels’s answer was more fencing and tighter surveillance at “sensitive points” — straight from the European Commission. Strip away the modern language and it’s the same old colonial reflex: the colonized are a border-security problem to be managed, never a people whose grievance might actually be legitimate. A continent that spent the last century dismantling every other empire it built in Africa still can’t bring itself to ask whether its last colony belongs to someone else.
Verdict
You don’t need a fresh incident to reach a verdict here — Spain has already written the record itself. A government that brands itself feminist, progressive, a defender of human rights on the world stage, found the words to soften a five-hundred-year-old wound in Mexico. It cannot find them for a wound it opened barely a hundred years ago, on Africa’s own coast, on people whose grandchildren are still dying of the cancer it caused. And it won’t even discuss giving back the two cities it still holds there — it simply declares the matter closed. That refusal isn’t strength. It’s the tell. A country sure of its claim makes the case for it. A country that shuts the conversation down before it starts is guarding something it knows it can’t defend on the merits.
This isn’t forgetfulness. It’s a pattern, and patterns are choices: acknowledge whatever costs you nothing, and bury whatever might cost you the land. Spain never really stopped being a colonial power when the rest of Europe’s empires fell — it just stopped using the word. The fences stayed up. The flag stayed put. The silence stayed exactly where the conquistadors left it. That’s the colonizer’s mind in its most modern form. It doesn’t reach for the sword anymore. It just shrugs and says, “this isn’t up for discussion” — and the people saying it are the grandchildren of the men who gassed the ones still asking the question.