"Great is the Sultan!"

With sherifian majesty, Sidi Mohamed Ben Moulay Youssef Ben Moulay El-Hassan--Scion of the Prophet, Commander of the Faithful, Sultan of Morocco--singed the mustache of the Dictator of Spain. From the international court in Tangier he dismissed Judge Fernando Malmussi, a Fascist loyd to Benito Mussolini. With equal majesty, he appointed an anti-Fascist Italian to sit with a Briton, a Frenchman and a Spaniard--thereby giving the court an anti-Fascist majority. The new judge was Giovanni Apostoli, recommended by the Bonomi Government with the approval of London and Paris.

The Sultan is the nominal autocrat of three countries, in each of which somebody else is the real boss: French Morocco, the northwest shoulder of Africa; Spanish Morocco, its epaulet; and Tangier (overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar), the chip on the shoulder.

Since 1928 Tangier has been internationalized and demilitarized under the joint tutelage of Britain, France, Spain and Italy, but since the fall of France in 1940 the say of the British and French has been as nominal as that of the Sultan. The Spanish ousted Tangier's French Administrator and the Sultan's Mendonb (representative), installed their own military governor, seized customs and communications, encouraged anti-Allied demonstrations, and winked at Axis espionage.

To the Francophile Sultan, living in his green and white palace at Rabat in French Morocco, this state of affairs was as unpleasant as it was to the British and the French. Sidi Mohamed had his palace, his four wives, his growing brood of sons, his 100 concubines, his French chef, his crimson carriage, his salaaming subjects, who greet him with the cry "How great is the Sultan"--an exclamation, not a question. But he was not consoled.

He perked up when the Allies landed in North Africa and gave him a seven-passenger U.S. limousine. He gladdened with the liberation of Paris. Last week, by exercising his nominal authority, he told the Spaniards in effect that their supposed authority was even more nominal than his. And his voice was also the voice of renascent France.

In Madrid the Falangist press railed at the western democracies for "intolerable meddling" in Moroccan affairs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.