Morocco: Hope

High in the Rif mountains this week 4,000 young Moroccans hacked away with pick, shovel and sledge hammer, gouging a road out of the wilderness. Even for the peasants who made up three-quarters of the group, the work was exhausting, as temperatures simmered up over 100DEG. City boys desperately tried to toughen their torn hands with tannin from the bark of cork trees. The work was hard, and nobody got paid--but the whole business was somehow satisfying. The young nation of Morocco was building something for itself.

Unity Road is a sensible vision conceived by Mehdi ben Barka. bright-eyed young (37) president of Morocco's Consultative Assembly. Brought to the U.S. by the State Department last March to see whatever he wanted, Ben Barka did not succumb to the common delusion that the U.S. is a chrome-spun nation so rich that its experience can have no relevance to the problems of other peoples. He took a look at Manhattan and Washington. D.C., but was more particularly interested in Arizona's irrigated cotton fields and in Puerto Rico's "Operation Bootstrap," the imaginative economic self-development program designed to pull Puerto Rico out of centuries of poverty.

Back home again, Ben Barka began casting about for suitable self-help projects, soon thought of the rugged Rif mountains, which form a natural barrier between North and South Morocco and until last year marked the boundary between the French and Spanish zones of occupation. Following the classic policy of divide and rule, the two occupying powers had left the central Rif roadless and virtually impassable. One thing Morocco could do, decided Ben Barka, was to build a road through the Rif.

Tents & Tasks. In late spring, with the enthusiastic approval of Morocco's new King Mohammed V, Ben Barka made a dramatic appeal to young men: give your country one month's labor on the Unity Road. Of the 36,000 youths who answered his call, 12,000 were finally selected on the basis of geographical distribution--Negroes, fair-skinned Berbers, and Arabs from the coastal cities. France (in whose detention camps ex-Revolutionary Ben Barka spent nearly four years) contributed tents for the volunteers and the U.S. provided $100,000 worth of blankets, mess kits and army uniforms.

By July the first of three batches of 4,000 volunteers were at work in the Rif. Rising at 5 a.m., they walked to their work sites and worked through till noon, with only a half-hour break. Lunch over, the volunteers moved on to a different kind of task: classes in the ABCs of civic responsibility. And out of each group, the brightest 80 were sent off to a special camp where the nation's top politicians lectured them on such matters as "the rights of a citizen" and "the democratization of Morocco."

Muzzle-Loaders & Missionaries. Fortnight ago, as Berber tribesmen from Rif peaks shot off ancient muzzle-loaders and sent up wild, ululating cries of jubilation, Morocco's King Mohammed toured the Unity Road, found it navigable, though rough, for its entire length of 35 miles.

Expected to cost roughly $500,000--less than half what it would have cost to build it with conventional labor--the Unity Road will serve as an invaluable commercial and political link between Morocco's interior and its Mediterranean ports. More important in Ben Barka's eyes is the fact that it has already created 12,000 missionaries for a new Morocco, men who will serve as leaders in future self-help projects. "We are building the road," reads the motto of Ben Barka's volunteers, "and the road is building us."

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