North Africa

IN THE area stretching from Morocco through Algeria into Tunisia, covering more than a million square miles of barren desert, fertile oases, and snow-capped mountains, almost 2 million Frenchmen are immersed in a population of 20 million Arabs. The Arabs of French North Africa are not alone. Behind them, from Libya across the Middle East to Pakistan, is a rising Islam of 300 million people.

The result, in this corner of Africa, is an acute struggle between religious nationalism demanding its freedom, and European economic and political interests demanding the right to develop their human and financial investment.

Nowhere in the whole vast territory is the problem more serious and dramatic than in Morocco. During the past twenty months, since the French sent pro-nationalist Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef into exile in Madagascar and replaced him with Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa, the Protectorate has lived in a reign of terror. More than a thousand people, Moroccans and Europeans alike, have been killed or wounded.

No clear-cut policy

To a large extent, the current dilemma results from the lack of a clear-cut policy. Between 1912, when the French established their Protectorate, and 1932, when the region was finally brought under control, standard operating procedure was laid down by Marshal Lyautey, who conquered and first governed the territory. He had deprived the Moroccans of their liberty, but his plan from the beginning was to allow native leadership to conduct its own direct administration.

But changes followed Lyautey’s departure. The straightforward, soldierly, man-to-man relations that had endeared the Marshal to Moroccans were replaced by bureaucracy. The tasks of government became big and complicated. Political appointees from Paris, professional civil servants, and handpicked representatives of French colonial interests in the region came to Morocco. Some, like the native affairs officers who went off to live with hill tribes, were selfless individuals with a real sense of what the French call la mission civilisatrice. But many had no comprehension of Arab methods, and for the sake of efficiency began handling business themselves. This deprived the natives of their opportunity to learn by experience, and without experience they were not ready for self-government.

Nor were they given any great chance for education. School attendance is now breaking records, but of a population of 8 million, only some 200,000 Moroccan children attend classes, most of them in Koranic institutions where not even arithmetic is taught. Consequently, in public jobs, only one in four hundred Moroccans can find work, and then he is relegated to a menial position. Among the 300,000 French in Morocco, one in twenty is employed in government administration.

Economically, the French colonists have done wonders to develop the country. They have intro duced scientific farming, built dams in the Atlas Mountains, torn down the abominable shanty towns, and developed lucrative mines. A city like Casablanca, with its gleaming skyscrapers and broad boulevards, is as modern as anything in Southern California, right down to the Cadillac showrooms. Since the French assumed control of the area the native population has quadrupled because of the great progress made against disease and because there are no longer continual wars between Moorish tribesmen.

But in Morocco, as in colonies elsewhere around the world, the indigenous intelligentsia have a way of graciously accepting their physical well-being and then asking where it is all leading to. Over the years it became uncertain to Moroccans, and equally uncertain to the French, where France’s hitor-miss administration was taking Morocco.

The issue became somewhat clearer after World War II. One evening in Casablanca in 1943, Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef had dined tête-à-tête with a visitor named Franklin D. Roosevelt, and although no factual account of their conversation was ever published, the common assumption was that the United States had offered independence to Morocco. Suddenly the Sultan emerged as the pole of attraction for a growing nationalist movement led by the Istiqlal, or independence party. Its program was immediate autonomy, with dual French and Moroccan citizenship for European settlers, some of them badly needed for their technical abilities.

The Resident-General in Morocco then was Marshal Alphonse Juin, a tough soldier, born in North Africa, who had very definite feelings about France’s strength and presence on the continent. For years Juin (and later his successor, General Augustin Guillaume) tussled periodically with the Sultan in comic opera fashion. There were threats and counterthreats, displays of armed force and sulky stubbornness.

Finally, in the spring of 1953, the Pasha of Marrakesh, El Glaoui, a long-time enemy of the Sultan and an even older friend of the French, organized a crusade against ben Youssef. Driving around Morocco in his black Cadillac, he rallied more than three hundred rural chieftains to his cause. Many came out of conviction, many through simple bribery, many on orders from their French advisers. By August, Paris was being warned that a civil war was in the offing, and the government agreed to exile ben Youssef.

Morocco’s holy war

Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef, in that Moslem identity of spiritual and temporal law, was also the Imam or religious chief of the country. To the native population, especially to the more devout million and a half living in cities and towns, it appeared unholy that their Koranic leader be dismissed by infidels. It seemed even more bizarre that his replacement, Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa, would accept the throne after having sworn two years before (along with others of the royal family) that he would never replace the deposed Sultan. Ben Youssef had never really abdicated, so there were technically two Sultans and two Imams.

The shooting started, and it has not yet stopped. There is something of a holy war about Moroccan terrorism which makes it impossible to end with mere police measures. In a recent trial of terrorists, one Moor calmly and sincerely explained that his acts of murder were religious duties, performed in the name of God. He had belonged to no organization, nor had he taken any orders. His activities were individual, personal, and incomprehensible to the court.

Probably the surest way to disarm Moroccan terrorists would be the enunciation of a policy for Morocco. The most immediate problem is the politico-religious one centering on the throne. Most Moroccan nationalists, who until now have demanded the return of ben Youssef, are beginning to realize the impossibility of a request that would embarrass the French into refusal, and a current project under study in Paris is a threeor five-member regency, to rule until a new ruler is found.

Autonomy for Tunisia?

The color and excitement in the Moroccan drama are in direct contrast to the political drabness in the Tunisian situation. The difference is significant. Morocco is primitive and volatile. Tunisia is modern and more thoughtful. It is a smaller, poorer region whose population (currently estimated at 3.25 million and increasing by some 80,000 per year) has made incredible strides.

Since France established her Protectorate in 1881, Tunisia has been given its share of medical, industrial, and agricultural benefits. But the Tunisians have gone far ahead of other North African peoples in the educational field. About half the children reaching school age are actually attending classes, and within fifteen years, it is estimated, universal education will have become a reality. This rapid educational development lies at the root of France’s trouble in Tunisia. When the French occupied the region, its European population was mainly Italian, and it took fifty years to outnumber them. Today there are some 150,000 Frenchmen to 85,000 Italians in the territory.

The process of overcoming Italian influence led to the creation of a small, strong, and pampered French population, and nowhere in North Africa is the colonist more convinced of European superiority than in Tunisia. He has established himself in business and government, and he refuses to budge for the sake of Tunisian autonomy.

In Morocco, where natives still live in primitive misery, Frenchmen can act with simple brutality or benevolent paternalism. In Tunisia, the European comes face to face with a native who may be better educated, more intelligent, and often wealthier than he himself. During recent negotiations in Paris, a French Foreign Ministry official was astounded by the ability of the new Tunisian diplomats. “They not only have generations of Oriental rug merchants behind them,”he said, “but they’ve assimilated everything Western civilization has to offer.”

In a characteristically calm and mundane manner, Tunisian nationalists have been agitating for selfgovernment for decades. Their leader, an ascetic white-haired man named Habib Bourguiba, has pleaded their cause around the world and has lived a good part of his life in exile near Paris. Last July, Pierre MendèsFrance flew to Tunis with an offer of internal autonomy for the Protectorate. It was designed to give an allTunisian cabinet jurisdiction over Tunisia’s domestic affairs, and it would safeguard the rights of French inhabitants in the region. It wasn’t everything Tunisian nationalists wanted, but it was a basis for discussion.

The discussion has been going on ever since. There is the delicate question of citizenship status for Europeans, and there is some litigation over areas the French deem to be of strategic importance. There is the matter of police power, and there is the vast issue of Tunisia’s future relations with France and with other members of the French Union. There are also certain allied items, like the need for economic aid to resettle and refurbish the barren southern and central lands.

The European settlers, fearing they could be outnumbered by natives in any election, have been grumbling about a betrayal by their own government in Paris. At the same time, Southern Tunisia has been infested with fellaghas, outlaw bands calling themselves an “army of liberation” and demanding complete independence. Significantly, however, terrorism of the Moroccan variety has ceased to exist since the talks began.

Algeria, proudly French

“When it is very hot in Tunisia or Morocco, it is very warm in Algeria,” runs an old Moslem proverb; so Algeria is feeling a bit of the heat generated by her neighbors. But its problems are relatively minor.

Algeria, which has a million Europeans and more than 7 million Arabs, Berbers, Moors, and other non-Europeans, is in large part divided into three French departements, enjoying the same rights and responsibilities as any place in Normandy or Alsace. Trouble here is mainly started in sympathy with related movements in the Protectorates, and except for one extremist independence party, there is little agitation among Algerian Arabs for freedom from France. On the contrary, thousands of Algerians take advantage of their French citizenship to fly to France, descending upon Paris without money, employment, or skills.

France’s policy of integrating Algeria and “protecting” Morocco and Tunisia has produced quite different reactions. Algerians are consciously and proudly French, and if they have any complaint, it is that they don’t always enjoy the same economic and social standards of living as their compatriots. They constitute, as French publisher Georges Altman once put it, “France’s Negro problem.” But most of them have no more desire to separate from France than do the inhabitants of Harlem to secede from the City of New York.

Moroccans and Tunisians, on the other hand, are just as consciously and proudly not French. Many of them are steeped in French culture and many have fought France’s wars in Italy and Indochina. A man like Si Bekkai, the former Pasha of Sefrou, is a colonel in the French Army, an officer in the Legion of Honor, and a hero of World War II. But the suggestion that he is anything but Moroccan would bring a howl of protest.

Several French politicians are beginning to advance the idea of a federation of autonomous states modeled on the British Commonwealth. France could, they argue, maintain some fashion of imperial preference and economic privilege in exchange for defending and aiding her former colonies. It will certainly be years before any such blueprint could reach reality. As a member of the MendèsFrance cabinet put it not long ago, “Before we can be interdependent we must all be independent.”