Morocco has not made a formal request to join the BRICS grouping, said a well-informed source at the Moroccan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
BRICS is a grouping of the world economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Morocco maintains substantial and promising bilateral relations with four members of the Group, except South Africa, with which it has strained ties. It is even linked to three of them by Strategic Partnership Agreements, added the source.
In response to recent media reports about a possible bid by the Kingdom to join the BRICS group, as well as its possible participation in the next BRICS/Africa meeting, scheduled for August 24 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the source stressed that this was not a BRICS or African Union initiative, but an invitation from South Africa, in its national capacity.
“It’s a meeting organized on the basis of a unilateral initiative by the South African government,” said the source.
The source went on to say that South Africa has always shown hostility towards the Kingdom and has systematically taken negative and dogmatic positions on the question of the Moroccan Sahara.
“Pretoria has thus multiplied, both nationally and within the African Union, its notoriously malicious actions against Morocco’s higher interests.”
South African diplomacy is known for its light, improvised, and unpredictable management when it comes to organizing this kind of event, said the diplomatic source.
As proof, the source added the deliberate and provocative breaches of protocol that marked Morocco’s invitation to this meeting. Worse still, many countries and entities appear to have been invited arbitrarily by the host country, without any real basis or prior consultation with the other member countries of the BRICS Group, it noted in reference to the Polisario being invited.
“It had thus become clear that South Africa was going to hijack this event from its nature and purpose, to serve a hidden agenda,” said the same source, noting that Morocco consequently ruled out, from the outset, any favorable reaction to the South African invitation.
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