To Create Martyrs

NORTH AFRICA To Create Martyrs

It was Sunday in Manhattan, and the diplomats of the United Nations had postponed for a day their discussion of France's troubles with her rebellious North African protectorates, Morocco and Tunisia. But fanaticism knows no holidays, and in North Africa itself, Arab nationalists, urged on by the Communists, were busy seeking ways to exploit the latest incident.

Few of the 500,000 Arabs and 120,000 Frenchmen in Morocco's teeming, gaudy boomtown Casablanca, some 1,000 miles from the scene of the murder, had even heard of the victim, Tunisian Labor Leader Farhat Hached (TIME, Dec. 15). Yet Casablanca's Nationalist daily El Alam that day urged all Moroccan workers to mourn his death in a general strike. At a strike meeting in the headquarters of the General Union of Moroccan Syndicates, Abdesslem Jibli, knife-faced, hot-eyed Arab leader, fanned the flame of hatred for France before a crowd of some 1,700 turbaned Arabs and serge-suited French Communists. His listeners answered with frenzied screams and gesticulations. In the midst of the hubbub, a French undercover agent slipped away to report the temper of the meeting to French Administrator Philippe Boniface. Boniface hurried to his Moroccan counterpart, bearded Mohammed El Mokri, Pasha of Casablanca.

Can Town. Soon afterward, the pasha's runners, some 400 men in high red conical hats, whose duty is to cry their master's will to the people, were racing through the streets crying: "Workmen, you must go to work tomorrow. Shopkeepers, your shops must remain open!" Frenchmen who heard and understood nodded in satisfaction; maybe there would be no trouble after all. But in the vast jungle of tin-roofed hovels known locally as Bidonville (Can Town), an angry mob was forming. There the criers were beaten up before they could deliver their message. Glib agitators harangued little knots of Arabs while others began hiding stones under their burnooses. From shack after shack came the ominous scrape of crude knives being honed.

At 10 that night, a shower of stones fell on the roof of an isolated police station just across the dung-strewn road from Can Town, and within seconds the police were inundated by Arab rioters. "They appeared as if by magic," said one of the eight policemen on duty, "out of the ground, from holes in the wall. It was unbelievable. One minute the street was deserted. The next minute it was filled with a horde of madmen screaming for blood." The police fired at short range killing some 20 Arabs.

A Quick Look. Next morning the peaceful clop-clop of fiacres on the Boulevard du Quatrieme Zouaves was interrupted by the rumble of trucks filled with Berber troops and the quick march of the blue-black Senegalese riflemen. They were met by a mob of some 10,000 screaming Arabs armed with sticks, stones and anything else that could pierce or bludgeon. Hard-bitten French Commandant Louis Durand three times commanded the mob to halt. As the Arabs continued to surge forward, Durand gave the order; the crack of rifle fire split the air and an estimated 40 Arabs dropped. The rest dispersed to carry on the fight from rooftops and doorways. French observation planes circled overhead to keep track of other mobs snaking angrily through the city.

In a quiet apartment on the Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, 70-year-old Louis Ribes, a former French colonial administrator, turned to a friend. "I'd like to know more of what's happening," he said. "I think I'll drive out and have a look." "My friend, please don't," begged the other. But Ribes was determined. Two hours later, a body was found with head crushed, eyes gouged out, throat and trunk slashed and torn beyond recognition. From the tailor's label in the shreds of the suit, the body was identified as that of Louis Ribes. Two young cyclists who-had followed Ribes's car for safety suffered the same fate. The bodies of three more Frenchmen were found later, two so badly mutilated that at first police thought they were women.

Shoehorns & Scimitars. At the end of the two days of rioting, some 3,000 Arabs were rounded up in the same union hall where the trouble began. As the police forced them into a sullen huddle, the hall was filled with the clatter of weapons--clasp knives, ice picks, scimitars, poniards, shoehorns, hatchets, fire tongs and brass knuckles--falling to the floor. Net score after two troubled days: 1,000 arrests; 100 or more Arab dead, 60 known wounded and probably many more cared for by their people; five European civilians dead and 13 wounded; three soldiers dead and 43 wounded. "Those who bear the responsibility for these frightful days," said France's Resident General Augustin Guillaume at a funeral for the European dead, "are the sowers of hatred . . . whose cause cried for blood. It is their appeals to fanaticism and disorder, encouraged so imprudently from outside by our enemies, and alas, by our friends, which are at the bottom of the drama Casablanca has just lived through." The predominantly French crowd cheered, clapped, chanted and booed as if it were at a political rally. What was the point of the slaughter? One arrested Arab nationalist explained: "It was the best way to create incidents so that we could offer martyrs to the United Nations."

At week's end in Manhattan, France's friend, the U.S., which had alternately blown hot & cold on Arab nationalist aspirations, joined the majority at U.N. in deciding (by a vote of 27 to 24 in the case of Tunisia) to let the French settle their problems in North Africa without interference.

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