What if Brahim Ghali were not in the San Pedro hospital in Logroño?
No one has seen him come in. There are no photos of the Sahrawi patient admitted. No photos of him getting off the plane that took him to Zaragoza. There is no official confirmation that the leader of the Polisario Front is in the San Pedro hospital in Logroño.
From the outset, the news published by the weekly Jeune Afrique about the arrival of the Polisario leader on board an Algerian medical plane to Zaragoza, where an ambulance from the Riojan Health Service was waiting to take him to the San Pedro hospital in Logroño, was taken as valid.
The contradictions, confusions and misinformation generated by the news, won over all the media. The governments in Algiers and Madrid, however, remained silent. The Polisario, for its part, navigated in ambiguity, initially denying the information, claiming that it was being treated for COVID-19 in an Algerian hospital in Tindouf, then saying that it had been transferred out of Algeria, making a stopover in Spain, and finally admitting that it was hospitalised in Spain. Mere manipulation of the news for ulterior motives, or else the leadership of the independence movement had simply been sidelined by the Algerian host.
When the news ceased to be speculation and became certainty came the Spanish government's statement by Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya, confessing that Ghali had been accepted in Spain for strictly humanitarian reasons to receive hospital treatment.
However, nobody, nobody, neither the Spanish government, nor the Algerian government, nor the Polisario, nor the autonomous government of La Rioja, which not by chance is led by a PSOE president, nor the management of the San Pedro hospital in Logroño, nor even the Health Service of La Rioja, have issued any communiqués on the alleged hospitalisation of Brahim Ghali in the San Pedro hospital.
It is common for governments to conceal the illnesses of their leaders, and, when these are made public, to hide the place where they receive medical care. This is said to be for security reasons, and also to avoid media harassment.
In any case, in the case of the Spanish government's acceptance of medical treatment for the Sahrawi leader, given the nature of the imbroglio, the pending accounts with the courts and Ghali's past, it is worth asking whether the Spanish government is not obliged to tell the truth behind it. Faced with the possibility of a serious crisis with the Kingdom of Morocco, Pedro Sánchez can no longer hide behind reasons of state.