Morocco

THE year 1961 is likely to be remembered in Morocco for two unforeseen developments. The first was Mohammed V’s sudden death last February in the midst of a routine operation. The second was the surprisingly tranquil transition of power which has taken place since then under the aegis of the country’s new sovereign, the thirtytwo-year-old King Hassan II.

So unexpected was King Mohammed’s death that his adversaries could not even begin to mobilize their forces before they were swamped by a tidal wave of national mourning. The extraordinary spectacle of thousands of grief-stricken subjects trekking toward the capital to pay their last respects was a forceful reminder of the immense gulf still separating the minority of Frencheducated urbanites, who are hostile to the monarchy, from the illiterate masses of the medinas and the hinterland, who remain fanatically loyal to the Sherifian throne.

Moulay Hassan had been generally regarded as a spoiled and rather dissolute prince. But almost from the moment that Hassan, as the newly anointed Imam of the Faithful, donned the ritual jellaba to lead the Friday noonday prayer, the image of the playboy princeling seemed to have been effaced by a new image of a pious young monarch, leading his faithful flock in the hallowed footsteps of his forefathers. Those who were tempted to doubt the depth and genuineness of this metamorphosis received their first surprise when the newly crowned King rode the traditional white horse of the sultans through the narrow streets of Fez, Morocco’s intellectual and religious capital, while the crowds cheered wildly. And they got an even bigger surprise shortly thereafter, when Hassan rode triumphantly into Casablanca, the stronghold of his left-wing enemies, who had privately sworn that he would never set foot in it alive.

Divide and rule

During the five years which followed his triumphant return from exile in Madagascar in the spring of 1956, Mohammed V sought to prepare Morocco for constitutional monarchy. A diplomat by nature, he moved warily, striving to give his opponents just enough rope to hang themselves but not enough rope to hang him or his sons. This he did by making formal concessions to appease the opposition’s demands for immediate, universal democracy while retaining the real levers of power — the Army, the gendarmery, and the police — in his own hands. The result was a strange behind-the-scenes tug of war which reached its climax under the premiership of Abdullah Ibrahim in December of 1959, when two prominent leaders of the left-wing Union of Popular Moroccan Forces, which was supposedly in power, were arrested on the grounds that they had been arming and financing a private gangster organization to blackmail the administration and terrorize their opponents.

The price of this divide-and-rule policy was, inevitably, governmental paralysis; and it was to put an end to it that Mohammed finally decided in May, 1960, to take up the reins of government himself, appointing his son, Moulay Hassan, to the post of Deputy Premier. The crown prince quickly revealed himself as the moving spirit of the new government.

Unlike Mohammed V, who was brought up in the closed, intrigue-ridden atmosphere of an Islamic court, Hassan has benefited from a fully up-to-date Western education. He speaks fluent English as well as French and Arabic, and has a French law degree. His approach to problems has always been more forthright than that of his father, and he possesses a great deal of physical courage. He has made it clear that he intends to be a man of authority, even if it means putting parliamentary democracy into temporary cold storage.

For the time being, Morocco has no truly representative institution. The 76-man National Consultative Assembly was allowed to die a quiet death in May of 1959, when certain of its members — and particularly its ambitious and dynamic President, Mehdi Ben Barka — refused to be satisfied with their purely consultative role. The Constitutional Council, which was appointed to fill the vacuum, consists of some 55 hand-picked notables (22 others having resigned in protest against the majority’s frankly conservative leanings), who, theoretically, are supposed to hammer out a constitution by the end of 1962; but it is a good guess that the new constitution will be tailor-made to royal orders.

The new King acts

One of the new King’s first acts was to reinstate General Kettani, the highest-ranking officer in the Moroccan Army, who had fallen out of favor with Mohammed V for daring to criticize the Moroccan government’s decision to withdraw its support from the UN operation in the Congo and to follow Moscow and Guinea in supporting Lumumba. Kettani was so incensed that he stopped off in Paris on his return from central Africa and asked to be reinstated in the French Army, where he got his training. The French would have been only too happy to do so, had Hassan not wisely chosen to avert the grave military crisis which would have ensued from the defection of the senior of the Moroccan Army’s only two generals.

The new King demonstrated a similar energy in dealing with another potential source of trouble within the Army, which came to a head at the beginning of this year. This took the form of three petitions, the last signed by some 400 lieutenants, expressing discontent with the fact that the senior officers in the Moroccan Army (some 70 colonels, majors, and captains) are graduates of French and Spanish military academies and veterans of colonial campaigns rather than “real Moroccan patriots,” of the kind that distinguished themselves in the struggle against the protectorate. Hassan finally agreed to receive a delegation of the grumblers, who demanded immediate promotions and pay raises; but to their amazement he tore up the petition in their faces. He thereby made it clear that he would brook no sign of revolt in the 35,000-man Army, which he knows is one of his key instruments of power.

On the strictly political front, Hassan began by trying to form a government of national union, including all of Morocco’s major political parties. The endeavor proved abortive, his left-wing adversaries refusing to join any government they did not absolutely control, and in June he appointed a government made up of notables and former political enemies.

The new government was such a hodgepodge that more than one observer was led to conclude that the new King had deliberately set out to prove that government by politicians is impossible in Morocco and must be replaced by government by technicians. Some support for this view is adduced from his retention in the new government of the Finance Minister, Mohammed Douiri. As the first Moroccan to have graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris, Douiri is the prototype of the trained young Moroccan technician, and the country is still appallingly short of technicians. He also happens to be the chief bête noire of the left-wing opposition, because he tried to set up a rival labor movement challenging the Union Morocaine du Travail’s monopolistic control over more than 600,000 unionized workers.

The Sail scandal

To make matters worse, Douiri, in early May, had come under direct attack for his alleged involvement in the “Safi scandal.”As the world’s second largest exporter of raw phosphates, Morocco has long offered an ideal terrain for the construction of a major chemical complex devoted to the production of enriched fertilizers and subsidiary products. After years of deliberation, the Moroccan government finally decided in September, 1960, that the logical site for such a complex was the port of Safi, midway down Morocco’s five-hundred-mile Atlantic coastline, because of its proximity to the ocean, to the phosphate mines of Louis Gentil, and to a newly discovered deposit of natural gas.

A dozen international companies accordingly made bids for the $60 million contract, and last April at the Casablanca Trade Fair the Finance Minister announced that the Moroccan government had decided to split the contract three ways — the recipients being an American, a German, and a French firm, which were respectively to build a phosphoric-acid, a sulphuric-acid, and a triple-superphosphate plant.

Hardly had the announcement been made when the opposition press came out with banner headlines accusing the Finance Minister and certain of his assistants of having granted the contracts not on the basis of competitive merit, but because they had been offered and had accepted multi-million-dollar bribes. To all the charges and imprecations, the King has simply turned a deaf ear. This bland imperturbability in the face of almost hysterical abuse has been a source of immense frustration to the opposition, which has begun to realize that it faces a far more redoubtable adversary than it had anticipated.

Stealing the opposition’s thunder

This irritation has been further aggravated by the growing suspicion that King Hassan is preparing to adopt the main points of the leftwing economic program. Like all underdeveloped countries, Morocco is the victim of a galloping birth rate. Early this year, official statistics revealed that the country’s population had passed the 11.5 million mark and was increasing at the rate of 300,000 a year.

Morocco has neither the capital nor the industry needed to create a mass of new jobs. Neither the Safi complex nor the $50 million which the Italians are investing in oil prospecting, the construction of an oil refinery and a Fiat-Simca assembly plant, and the establishment of a network of service stations can do much to alleviate this situation in the immediate future; for, welcome as these investments are, they for the most part require skilled workers, of whom Morocco has all too few.

The left-wing opposition has long maintained that the only way of tackling this problem is to break up the large estates, redistribute the land to hungry peasants, and introduce a public works program of agricultural improvement along collectivist lines. Though King Hassan may not be willing to go quite so far, there seems little doubt that he recognizes that the situation is too serious to be dealt with by business-asusual methods. To cope with it, he gave his closest adviser, a forty-twoyear-old lawyer and former War Minister, Ahmed Guedira, the twin portfolios of the Interior and Agriculture ministries when he revamped the government last June.

This was followed later by the announcement that the government was going to introduce a term of obligatory military and civil service for all Moroccan males between eighteen and thirty. A compulsory draft would help to absorb idle manpower by putting young men to work building roads, irrigation canals, drainage ditches, barrages, and bridges, reforesting treeless areas, and helping out with the harvest. It would also enable Morocco to build up its Army.

Competition for the Sahara

That competition for the Sahara is now well under way was obvious before last July, when Habib Bourguiba mounted his noisy assault on Bizerte to cover up his claim on the Edjele oilfield, on Tunisia’s southwestern border. Like the Tunisians, the Moroccans have so far failed to strike any oil on their own soil, and this has encouraged them to cast a covetous eye on the vast petroleum and gas resources lying beneath the Sahara.

The most vociferous champion of a Moroccan claim to the Sahara is the veteran Istiqlal leader Allal elFassi, who is today Minister of State for Islamic Affairs. Since 1955 Allal el-Fassi has been a tireless promoter of a “Great Morocco" — a vast area, ten times the country’s present size.

Last year, during a four-day visit to Berlin, he quietly slipped over into the East zone, where, with the connivance of the Ulbricht regime, he was allowed to delve into the Wilhelmstrasse records, going back to the days when Kaiser Wilhelm II was sending gunboats down to Agadir to support the Moroccan sultans in their tiffs with the French. On his return to Rabat, his findings were published in an official white book, complete with maps, in which Great Morocco was shown to include not only all of Mauretania and the Spanish Sahara, but a generous chunk of the Mali and almost a third of the French Sahara.

King Hassan must recognize the large dose of Arabic hyperbole inherent in these inflated claims. But he cannot publicly deflate them as long as their chief champion is a member of his government. At the same time, any continuing claim to a Great Morocco can only serve to embroil Rabat in further quarrels with other African countries. By adamantly insisting, during last autumn’s session of the United Nations, that Mauretania is an integral part of Morocco, the Moroccans managed to line up all but two of the black African states against them.

The low-water mark in recent Moroccan statesmanship was probably reached in January of this year, when Mohammed V tried to recoup his country’s sagging diplomatic fortunes on the Dark Continent by presiding over a Pan-African Conference at Casablanca. The conference was boycotted by all but three of the central African states, as well as by Tunisia and Ethiopia.

After four days of deliberation, a communiqué was issued with the official blessing of Egypt’s Nasser, Morocco’s Mohammed, Ghana’s Nkrumah, and Guinea’s Sekou Touré, proclaiming the forthcoming formation of a Pan-African High Command and the promulgation of an African Charter. But when the self-styled “Casablanca powers" made a reckless attempt to meet a second time, in Cairo at the end of August, Nkrumah and Sekou Touré stayed away.

Whether this will suffice to make Hassan reconsider the benefits of a continuing close association with the brasher of the uncommitted African countries remains to be seen. At the Belgrade Conference in September, he lined up with the more aggressive delegations whose “positive neutralism" betrays a somewhat martial, and sometimes even pinkish, stamp. But. though inclined to be impetuous and impatient, he is too shrewd not to realize the limits to which a King can go in pushing an unholy alliance with openly atheistic and cryptoCommunistic regimes.