Morocco

MORE than three years have passed since Mohammed V, King of Morocco, lineal descendant of the Prophet, and twelfth reigning member of the Alaouite dynasty, made his triumphant return from exile in distant Madagascar. These three tempestuous years have seen the throne of Iraq upset, the Dey of Tunis banished, and the King of Saudi Arabia replaced in effective power by his brother. But in Morocco the prestige of the throne remains unshaken, though its power is by no means absolute.

The secret of this stability is to be found partly in the general conditions of present-day Morocco and partly in the personality of its King. Though Morocco boasts a number of large communities (Casablanca, Fez. Rabat-Sale. Marrakesh) and a surprisingly well-organized industrial proletariat, three quarters of the nine million inhabitants are illiterate shepherds, tillers of the soil, or tribal hillsmen who are often scornful of the better educated, softer city dwellers.

The relations between the two base not always been amicable. In the last years of the protectorate, the French tried to capitalize on this perennial antagonism by deliberately building up the power of the feudal tribesmen of the hinterland to offset the more advanced populations of the cities, represented above all by the Istiqlal (Independence) movement. This policy failed, but the problem of harmonizing the relations between the two remains.

Crown versus parties

Upon his return to Rabat in the spring of 1956. die Sultan was forced to appease the democratic forces which had helped bring him back to the throne, by setting up a national consultative assembly. But this was not a strictly representative parliament. Its seventy-six members, the majority of whom are from the Istiqlal are appointed by the King for a two-year term which need not necessarily be renewed. They are entitled to debate government proposals, particularly the budget, when the assembly is in session (about three months in the year), but they cannot veto government initiatives, which become law by royal edict. The same limitations extend to the council of ministers, which cannot convene except under the chairmanship of the King,

Behind this ceremonial facade, the realities of power are somewhat different; but the latent conflict between the crown and representative parties, which has been a feature of every constitutional monarchy, has in Morocco momentarily resulted in strengthening rather than in weakening the throne. The prime reason for this is that in the political chess game it is the Istiqlal party, not the King, that has made most of the mistakes.

The Istiqlal, as the only truly nationwide party — the party of the firebrand nationalist, Allal al-Fassi, and of the sophisticated diplomat, Ahmed Balafrej —emerged from the independence struggle against the French with the conviction that it was the only authentic spokesman for the Moroccan masses. The Sultan made a move to dispute this pretension by entrusting the premiership of the first government to an independent, Si Bekkai. a former lieutenant colonel in the French colonial forces. But three months after this government was formed, the Istiqlal took advantage of a local disturbance to demand and obtain the key ministry of the interior. It has held it, with one slight interruption, ever since.

The Istiqlal promptly launched a wholesale purge of the caids and pashas who had collaborated with the French, replacing them with party henchmen. These administrative appointments provoked a series of revolts, culminating hast October in that of the Rilf mountaineers, which the new and untried Moroccan army had to be called out to quell. Not content with this, the Istiqlal launched a campaign to harass other parties by suppressing critical newspapers and by assassinating or kidnaping importunate opposition leaders. In the autumn of 1957 it even felt strong enough to veto an attempt made by two leaders of the resistance army. Abdelkrim Khatib and Mahjoubi Aherdane, to set up a new party aimed at representing the country’s rural masses.

To strengthen his links with the army, which is only 30,000 men strong and still dependent on about 200 French military advisers, the Sultan made his son and heir, Crown Prince Moulay Hassan, chief of staff. He has also successfully used his abundant reservoir of personal charm to make an ally of Mohammed Laghzaoui, an enterprising bus company owner and former financier of the Istiqlal movement who has built up a remarkably welldisciplinecl 11,000-man police force in three years.

Last November at the height of the Rid rebellion against the Istiqlal — the King forced the Balafrej government to accept the promulgation of three edicts establishing a charter of public liberties (covering political association, public meetings, and the press) which the Istiqlal had previously tried to block. He followed this up in December by offering the premiership, after the fall of the Balafrej government, to the man who had been its most vehement critic: Abdallah Ibrahim, a former minister of labor and ex-editor of the Istiqlal organ Al Alam (The Standard). He thus helped consummate the rift within the party, which last January erupted into open warfare.

Since then, the Istiqlal’s prestige and popularity have steadily declined. Each of the two contending factions has taken to publicizing the faults of the other. Both camps have employed armed gangs to break up meetings and to intimidate local opposition leaders. The Istiqlal has also encouraged the harassed opposition parties to renew campaigning and to reissue party newspapers and weeklies. All this activity is in preparation for Morocco’s first municipal and communal elections, which are scheduled to be held this autumn.

The departure of the French

This continuing climate of political uncertainty has had inevitable repercussions in the economic field. Morocco’s greatest economic headache is its shortage of capital, combined with a concurrent lack of qualified technicians. Since the end of the protectorate, French investments, which in 1952 hit a peak level of almost 1400 million a year, have virtually ceased. Casablanca is no longer the boom town of North Africa, its place being taken by Algiers, to which French capital has been attracted in bulk. In the last three years only two foreign companies have been tempted to invest in new Moroccan enterprises the French Berliet company, which is building a truck assembly plant in Casablanca, and the American General Tire and Rubber Company, whose factory has yet to be built.

Ninety-eight per cent of Morocco’s industrial concerns are still directed by Frenchmen, simply because there are no qualified Moroccans to replace them; but the departure of about half of the 350,000 French civilians and more than 100,000 French soldiers has caused a drastic shrinkage in consumption and a rise in unemployment. Official government figures now admit that one out of every two persons in the country’s rural population is underemployed and that one out of every five able-bodied persons in the towns and cities is chronically without work. But in the absence of new investment, industry and commerce simply idle along, while the population increases at the dangerous rate of some 150,000 a year.

The situation in rural areas is hardly better. Though only 150 out of about 5900 French colon farmers have left Morocco, many of the rest would be only too glad to sell their lands and pull out, but they can find no buyers except at cut-rate prices. They therefore hang on in apprehension of the future, overworking their lands in a desperate effort to achieve maximum profits, which they no longer invest in Morocco but export abroad. This has naturally provided plenty of fresh fuel to those Moroccan patriots who have been led to believe that the expulsion of French settlers would automatically enrich the country they have been living off for years.

The Moroccan government thus finds itself caught on the horns of a dilemma, in the first place, it is harassed by demagogic exhortations calling for the expropriation of colon lands, the total evacuation of foreign troops and of the American air bases, and the nationalization of key industries. In the second place, it lacks both the capital and the technicians needed to fill the gap.

Just how the present or any future government can break out of this vicious circle is unknown. One alternative to the Western capital which many of the country’s politicians berate so vociferously is capital and technicians from Soviet Russia and Red China, both of which recently opened embassies in Rabat. So far Morocco’s leaders have hesitated to follow Egypt’s example, but some observers believe that they will eventually be driven to doing so by their anticolonialist logic.

The war in Algeria

The other major stumbling block to economic recovery is the war in Algeria. So long as it continues, there can be no hope of reasonably stabilizing Morocco’s relations with France. Today there are some 80,000 Algerian refugees on Moroccan soil, and quite a number of them have worked their way into the administration at Rabat. Aside from the constant pressure they exert, the sympathies of virtually every Moroccan are with the Algerian rebels. The overwhelming majority of the country’s politicians talk passionately of an Arab Maghreb, and even of a Moroccan Sahara.

Most troublesome of all are the secret gunrunning and arms traffic which the Algerian war perpetuates. This is a source both of clandestine profit for slick Moroccan operators and their political backers and oi conflict with France. The French seizure last April of the Czech ship, Lidice, which was carrying a shipment of arms destined for the Algerian rebels via Casablanca, is the most recent in a series of such incidents.

Mohammed V has made it clear that he is ready to do everything in his power to hasten the conclusion of the Algerian war and that this is the fundamental — if not the official — motive of his trip to Paris. His relations with President de Gaulle, while distant, have remained excellent. De Gaulle appreciated the Sultan’s cooperative role during the difficult clays of World War II and awarded him the Grand Cross oi the Liberation — the only foreign ruler to be thus honored. The General has not forgotten that a good portion of the Free French forces which helped liberate France was made up of Moroccan soldiery.

The problem of mediating a settlement of the Algerian struggle nevertheless remains a formidable one, if only because de Gaulle has consistently asserted that the Algerian problem is an essentially French affair. Whether Mohammed V can succeed where other emissaries and intermediaries of good will have failed, no one can say.

The American bases

The Algerian war has also had the indirect effect of embroiling Moroccan-American relations. As its leading NATO ally, the United States cannot officially denounce France’s North African policies. This and the fact that we maintain four air bases and one emergency strip on Moroccan soil are taken by Moroccans as proof that America is really a colonialist power, and hardly a day goes by without some polemical editorial denouncing the continued operation oi these bases.

In fact, the relations between American air force personnel and the local inhabitants have generally been good. The bases keep 5000 Moroccans permanently employed and give indirect work to 5000 more. Through all sorts of expenses, private and public, they pump some ,847 million a year into the Moroccan economy - more than the 840 million which the country has been receiving in annual economic aid loans to help finance its investment budget. But Morocco’s superpatriots insist that Morocco must be left free to pursue a policy of neutralist nondependence.

When asked what his country would do with the huge bases if the United States were to hand them over, one prominent Moroccan politician is said to have replied: “We would maintain them for the arrival of the Russians.” The story is probably apocryphal, but it accurately transcribes the Oriental cynicism with which local demagogues, inside the Istiqlal and out of it, have used this issue to browbeat the government.