Perejil. The War That Never Was

On July 11, 2002, a group of Moroccan gendarmes landed and raised their country’s flag on Perejil, a previously unknown and uninhabited islet, barely larger than a football field, whose sovereignty was shared by Spain and Morocco. A few days later, the Prime Minister of Spain, José María Aznar, sent the country’s three military branches to expel the soldiers occupying the island. In popular imagination, the Perejil crisis has remained a comical anecdote—an overreaction by the Spanish military to the occupation of a barren rock. But that anecdote was in fact just the tip of the iceberg: beneath Perejil Island lay an international crisis of the highest order, involving the European Union, the UN, the Arab League, France, NATO, and the United States.