In November, Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson traveled to the port city of Dakhla, on the West African coast, to launch his budget airline’s latest destination. On the runway, he posed for photos with Morocco’s tourist minister Fatima-Zahra Ammor and announced that Ryanair would run four weekly flights between the city and Spain. “Dakhla will become the thirteenth airport in Ryanair’s Moroccan network,” the company reported, insisting it was “looking forward to further developing Morocco’s infrastructure, connectivity, and tourism in the near future.”
Yet the fact that the CEO of Europe’s largest airline traveled three thousand miles to unveil just a handful of new flights — and that he was met by a government minister — suggests that this wasn’t a routine expansion of an existing market. Dakhla is not part of Morocco but is located in Western Sahara, a resource-rich country subject to a brutal Moroccan occupation. Denied independence in 1975 after former colonial power Spain carved up the territory between Morocco and Mauritania, Western Sahara is known as Africa’s last colony — that is, what the United Nations designates as a “non-self-governing territory.”
Morocco is becoming a lucrative market for multinationals and a key ally in the European Union’s crackdown on irregular migration.
“These flights are a propaganda coup for the Moroccan government,” Sahrawi journalist Ahmed Ettanji tells Jacobin:
Ryanair is whitewashing the occupation of my country. It is playing into the narrative that Dakhla is a normal Moroccan holiday destination and obscuring the reality of a highly militarized city where Sahrawis protesting for their basic rights are being met by violent repression.
Yet with Morocco becoming a lucrative…
Auteur: Eoghan Gilmartin
