Rabat also insists it will not attend the BRICS Summit this week ‘at any level whatsoever’.
The Moroccan government has firmly and furiously denied the South African government’s announcement that Morocco had applied for membership of the BRICS bloc, which will discuss expanding its membership at its summit in Sandton this week.
The Moroccan government says it has neither applied for membership nor will it accept the invitation it received to attend the BRICS-Africa outreach meeting at the summit.
“Morocco will not take part in the BRICS-Africa outreach meeting at any level whatsoever,” an official of Morocco’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Daily Maverick.
He said the invitation to the summit was not a BRICS or African Union initiative, but an invitation from South Africa in its national capacity. And so Morocco had rejected the invitation on the basis of its “strained relations” with South Africa, said the official, who asked to remain anonymous.
He explained, “South Africa has always shown a primary hostility towards the Kingdom [of Morocco] and has systematically taken negative and dogmatic positions on the question of the Moroccan Sahara.”
What Rabat calls the “Moroccan Sahara,” is more generally referred to as the Western Sahara, the territory south of Morocco which Morocco claims, but which many of its own people insist is…