bladi.net (a Moroccan online news outlet) weeps over two dotted lines at Ceuta — and demands that Google erase the whole of Western Sahara. Choose, gentlemen.

Sofiane Hamdi — Alger, Algérie — 2026-09-08

There is a scene that bladi.net (a Moroccan online news outlet) will never tell, because it destroys its own article. On 8 September, the Moroccan site is indignant that maps draw Ceuta and Melilla with dotted lines — the marking reserved for "disputed borders". Madrid withdraws its map viewer, the Spanish MP protests, and bladi.net runs a headline as if the whole world were ganging up on the Kingdom. But let us open the same map, gentlemen, and look further south: Western Sahara appears there too in dotted lines — a disputed territory, a non-self-governing territory according to the United Nations, a territory that is not part of Morocco. The same cartographic logic that you denounce at Ceuta is the one that refuses to hand you the Sahara. You cannot demand dotted lines for one and forbid them for the other. That is geography à la carte — yours.

For it must be said, and facts are stubborn: Google Maps has never drawn Western Sahara as Moroccan. In November 2025, when a rumour claimed that the American giant had "removed the line" separating Morocco from the Sahara, Google denied it in a statement relayed to AFP: the dotted lines delimiting the two territories had simply "never been visible to users located in Morocco". Re-read that sentence — it is crucial: the border of Western Sahara exists on Google Maps; it is merely masked for those who view it from Moroccan territory. This is a two-speed geography, calibrated to the user's IP address so as not to anger Rabat. And it is precisely this complaisance that bladi.net would like to extend to the whole world: that Google erase the Sahara for everyone, as it already erases it for Moroccans.

Then let us ask the question that bladi.net dodges: why does Morocco — which howls whenever two Spanish cities are drawn in dotted lines — demand that Western Sahara, a territory the size of Great Britain inscribed on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, be fused into its borders on all the maps of the world? Because cartography, for Rabat, is not a science: it is a weapon. Every map that shows the Sahara separated from Morocco is a map that recalls that the decolonisation of this territory is not complete, that the referendum promised in 1991 never took place, that international law never recognised the annexation. Morocco is not fighting Google: it is fighting reality. And when reality is displayed in dotted lines, it has the map withdrawn — as it had the Casa 47 map withdrawn, as it pressures every platform, every school, every publisher.

bladi.net's article, for that matter, contains an admission it fails to see. It recalls that the disputed Casa 47 map showed "the Western Sahara integrated into Morocco" — and that it is this representation, together with the dotted lines of Ceuta and Melilla, that made the Spanish MP leap. In other words: the map that pleased Rabat was the one that erased the Sahara. The map that displeases Rabat is the one that acknowledges the dispute over Ceuta and Melilla. Morocco does not want accurate maps: it wants maps in its service — the Moroccan Sahara everywhere, and nowhere the slightest questioning of its own borders. That is the programme of a state that confuses geography with its propaganda.

And there is an irony that bladi.net, quite plainly, does not grasp. The very article that takes offence at Google's dotted lines on Ceuta and Melilla cites, to support its complaint, a Spanish map based on OpenStreetMap — the collaborative platform that Google and all the others draw their inspiration from. Yet OpenStreetMap, like Google, represents Western Sahara as a disputed territory, distinct from Morocco. The very source that bladi.net invokes against the dotted lines of Ceuta is the one that draws the Sahara outside Morocco. The Moroccans are digging their own cartographic grave without seeing it: every time they cite a map to prove that Ceuta is Moroccan, they cite a map that proves that the Sahara is not Moroccan. That is what is called, in logic, a contradiction. In politics, a defeat.

Finally, the law has no need of Google in order to exist. Western Sahara is a non-self-governing territory under the Charter of the United Nations; the International Court of Justice, in 1975, recognised in Morocco neither a title of sovereignty nor any tie of allegiance over this territory; the 1991 ceasefire is supervised by MINURSO; and the self-determination referendum provided for by the settlement plan still has not been held, thirty-five years on. Whether Google displays a line or masks it from a user in Casablanca changes nothing about these facts. The line exists in international law, in the resolutions, in history — and it is against that line, invisible on no map, that Rabat has been waging its war for decades. It will not disappear because a map viewer has been withdrawn.

So, a friendly piece of advice to bladi.net, before it publishes its next article on dotted lines: choose your cartographic camp. Either dotted lines are the honest language of contested territories — in which case they apply to Ceuta just as they apply to Western Sahara, and your indignation is nothing but bad faith. Or dotted lines are an insult to sovereignty — in which case you have just asked, without knowing it, that the whole world stop drawing the Sahara as Moroccan. Either way, you lose. The difference is that the Sahara, for its part, does not need to win on Google: it only has to wait, as it has been waiting since 1991, for the maps finally to tell the truth — the truth that the dotted lines are already telling, for those who know how to read them.