PARIS, July 21 (UPI) -- Despite the flavor of comic opera that surrounds the sudden fuss between Spain and Morocco over the uninhabited island of Perejil in the Straits of Gibraltar, American Secretary of State Colin Powell is right to get so closely involved in mediating the dispute.
Three phone calls to Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, and four to Morocco's King Mohammed, all in the space of 24 hours, counts as intensive diplomacy.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher says the reason for Powell's intervention is that the United States "doesn't like to see its friends fighting." Spain is a NATO ally and the military agreements and air basing rights between the United States and Morocco date back over 40 years. But there is more to it than that.
Powell and his State Department advisers know all too well that disputed islands, even uninhabited ones, can be dangerous places. Seven years ago, another intensive burst of U.S. diplomacy was required to stop Greece and Turkey going to war over another uninhabited island that was home only to goats until national pride and military saber-rattling turned useless real estate into prickly symbols of national sovereignty.
At any given time, there is a low-level crisis under way in the Spratley islands, where China and the Philippines both claim ownership of possibly oil-rich waters. A similar dispute divides China and Vietnam over the Paracels islands, and it just 20 years ago that British sent a massive naval task force to reconquer the Falklands Islands from an Argentine invasion.
Governments and their diplomats, who usually have more sense than to make mountains out of molehills, can find themselves with little room to maneuver against a tide of patriotic public opinion. Such proud nationalist instincts have defied almost 30 years of American, European and United Nations diplomacy in the dispute between Greece and Turkey over the island of Cyprus. And the latest opinion poll in the Spanish daily El Pais shows 92 percent of respondents want military intervention to keep the Spanish flag flying over Parsley Island (as Perejil translates), even if only goats pause to admire it. Governments have few options against that kind of sentiment.
We may be about to see a similar outbreak of nationalist feeling over a spot just a few miles from Parsley Island -- the Rock of Gibraltar, the fortress that guards the Straits between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. British by right of conquest almost three centuries ago and held against repeated Spanish siege attacks thereafter, the Rock's 23,000 inhabitants overwhelmingly want to remain British citizens. Tony Blair's government, seeing friendship with Spain in the broader context of its European relations, is looking for a settlement based on joint sovereignty. The inhabitants would remain British, and the naval base would become a NATO facility.
It is a reasonable proposal, but Blair's Conservative opponents are pledged to fight it, and so is the Rock's own elected government and most of the inhabitants. And we know from the Falklands War that militant British nationalism, once aroused, is not easily cooled. And the Perejil row with Morocco has subtly changed the stakes in the arguments over Gibraltar.
The Moroccans launched this latest crisis over what they call not Perejil but Leila, which lies just 200 yards off its coast, because the island and the two Spanish-ruled enclaves on the Moroccan mainland of Ceuta and Melilla are to Morocco what Gibraltar is to Spain -- a standing affront to national pride. It is just as galling for Moroccans to look at the Spanish enclaves on their soil as it is for Spaniards to gaze on the British flag waving defiantly atop the fortress Rock. In American terms, it is if Alcatraz or Long Island were alien rule.
And unlike Spain's bid to recover Gibraltar, Morocco's claims over Perejil and the enclaves -- which Spain adamantly refuses even to discuss -- can expect a sympathetic hearing at the United Nations, where European rule over Arab land excites anti-colonial instincts.
But behind national pride, there is also usually a strong dash of commercial self-interest at stake in these disputes. And the underlying issue over the island of Perejil is about some other islands altogether -- the Spanish-ruled Canary Islands. Just off the coast of what used to be the Spanish Sahara (and now occupied by Morocco, despite the yearnings for independence of the locals), the Canaries are at the heart of the Spanish-Moroccan dispute.
It is to the Canaries, rather than the enclaves in Morocco, that Spain has sent troop and naval reinforcements, and where unoccupied islands have been garrisoned as a precaution. The reason is that in January, when Spain began offering licenses to drill for oil off the Canaries, Morocco condemned this as "an unfriendly act." Morocco is hoping for some kind of deal to share oil rights, along the lines reached between Britain and Argentina in Falklands waters.
National pride and islands are an inflammable mix. Add the prospect of oil wealth, and the inflammable can easily catch fire. Colin Powell is right to intervene to stop the Perejil fuss becoming a real crisis.
