The French intifada

The Casablanca massacre left many dead: the New York Times put the death toll as high as 400. The French believed that they had crushed Istiqlal and, having banned the Communist Party, proceeded with their plans to depose the sultan, Mohammed V, and to impose direct rule. The plot was crude and simplistic, aimed at satisfying the aspirations of the French settlers in much the same way as they had in Algeria. The strategy also created anger in Paris. At a meeting of the Académie Française, during which the Moroccan resident-general Alphonse Juin lavished praise on pro-French Moroccans, the distinguished Catholic novelist François Mauriac complained loudly that the protectorate and its officers were a ‘masquerade’ for colonial violence.

Most Moroccans of all classes, sickened by the Casablanca massacre, had become Nationalists in one form or another. These feelings intensified when the French launched their coup against the sultan and persuaded various mystical brotherhoods that, as a Nationalist, the sultan was effectively apostate. He was exiled to Corsica and then to Madagascar, while the French put their designated ally, Ben Arafa, on the throne.

The sultan’s exile provoked fresh cycles of violence. Two new groups, born out of Istiqlal, led the way. In the countryside there was the Liberation Army and in the cities the Secret Organization. The first major act of resistance came from Abdel ben Abdellah, an unknown house painter from Casablanca, who launched a frenzied attack with a knife on the so-called ‘French sultan’ as he rode on horseback with the Royal Guard. Ben Arafa was unharmed and Abdellah shot dead.

The violence was matched by the Présence Française, a shadowy French terrorist group rumoured to be linked to the group called La Main Rouge, which was already operative in Algeria and Tunisia. No one knew for certain whether these groups really existed or whether they were a fiction invented by the French secret services (at the time of writing this is still unknown, as the archives have yet to be fully opened). Nevertheless, there was a spate of murders in Morocco which could not be properly attributed to any group but which mysteriously served French interests.

The response of the Moroccan resistance to these provocations was to escalate the violence. On Christmas Eve 1953 a bomb exploded in the Central Market of Casablanca killing twenty-six people. A former Istiqlal militant named Mohamed Zerktouni, a carpenter and a leader of the Secret Organization, was arrested. He killed himself with poison shortly after his arrest. This was the moment when the most peaceful Nationalist attitudes hardened into armed rebellion. Within weeks, Morocco became effectively ungovernable as riots, strikes and mutinies broke out spontaneously across the territory. French army squads patrolled the countryside. The parts of cities deemed ‘troublesome’ were sealed off. In Paris the French government wondered anxiously if the violence that was spreading through Algeria had infected Morocco.

On 11 June 1953 the businessman Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil was shot dead on the steps of his Casablanca apartment building. Lemaigre-Dubreuil was a financier and the owner of the newspaper Maroc-Presse. For the past five years he had been acting in Morocco as an intermediary between Paris and Rabat.

Initially he had been in favour of preserving and even strengthening the protectorate, and agreed that the deposition of Mohammed V was the way to achieve this. More recently, he had come over to the view that a middle ground could be found between Moroccan independence and French interests. These views were promoted in Maroc-Presse, much to the anger of extremist settlers. Lemaigre-Dubreuil had been intelligent enough to see, however, that the struggle in Morocco also had a geopolitical dimension: it was about France finding its place in the new world order after the Second World War. All of this was enough to condemn him to death in the eyes of the settlers.

The killing of Lemaigre-Dubreuil was a major blow to Paris. Firstly, the French government had lost a passionate and informed advocate in Morocco. Secondly, it looked likely that the fraught situation might become just as volatile and deadly as the war that was beginning in Algeria. The French Prime Minister, Edgar Faure, sent over a new resident-general, General Gilbert Grandval, a personal friend of Charles de Gaulle, to take a firm grip on the situation.

Grandval began by sacking senior police officers sympathetic to the pro-French terrorists, excluding from Moroccan territory the leader of Présence Française, and arresting the alleged murderers of Lemaigre-Dubreuil. He also released Moroccan political prisoners and began a dialogue with Nationalists.

Inevitably, these actions dismayed the colons. Whenever he appeared in public, Grandval was met with jeers and anti-Semitic insults. On 14 July 1953 a bomb exploded at Mers Sultan Square in Casablanca, killing seven Europeans. This was the provocation needed for retaliation by pro-French murder squads – gangs of young men who prowled the streets of Casablanca on motorbikes and in black Citroën cars, gunning down Moroccans at random, dozens of whom were reported injured or killed. This level of violence exceeded anything yet seen in Algeria.

There were more riots and strikes. At Khourigba, a phosphate mine in the Middle Atlas, three hundred Europeans, including women and children, were massacred. The French army and air force counter-attacked, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of Moroccans in the countryside. Morocco was now in deep crisis. The response of Moroccan Nationalists was to press on and attack the French; briefly Moroccan and Algerian Nationalists were under a joint command. The insurrection threatened to become a war.

The threat of a war on two fronts, in Algeria and Morocco, forced the hand of the French: the protectorate was dissolved and Morocco finally gained its independence in April 1956. The French fled, leaving behind structures that were unworkable; the protectorate had effectively been the purest form of colony, in that it overlay the realities of Moroccan life with an administration that served only the settlers. Everything in Morocco had to be rebuilt, and this was not something which could take place overnight. Mohammed V, who had returned from exile in Madagascar to become king, was a shrewd man with a group of intelligent and sophisticated advisers. He promised to pull Morocco together as one nation, but his first priority was to establish order.

In the first months and years of independence, colonial law was universally disregarded, and the country he inherited faced massive economic and social problems. Ten million Moroccans lived in poverty, often on the edge of famine, while a French and Spanish minority owned the best land and held the best jobs. Anarchy was only a short step away. By May 1956 the Istiqlal party was divided, and Mohammed V himself conflicted over the way forward. For advice he relied on Mehdi Ben Barka, a former mathematics teacher who had evolved into a left-wing Nationalist. Ben Barka provided a counterpoint to the piety of Allal Al-Fassi, but the truth was that Free Morocco was a fragmented and unmanageable nation.

Mohammed V died in 1961 and was succeeded by his son Hassan II. At this stage the monarchy was still fragile and it was not expected to last; international observers, including the United States, anticipated a popular revolution mirroring the waves of Arab nationalism that had swept through Egypt and other Arab states. Hassan’s first priority was therefore to ensure that he stayed in power. He did this by imitating the French strategies during the protectorate: controlling the army in the cities and buying off the caïds in the countryside. He asserted himself as the religious leader of the country and made a point of leading Friday prayers in Rabat, publicly slaughtering a ram to mark the beginning of the Aid El-Kebir festival.

He also declared himself ‘amir al mouminine’ (Commander of the Faithful) which made his very existence a sacred and inviolable fact; the Moroccan ulemas may have had a part to play in the organization of government, but it was the king who was the ultimate religious authority in the country. During the early 1960s, Hassan kept a tight rein on religious movements in Morocco by exercising this authority. Meanwhile, the Marxist Left was slowly dying, strangled by Hassan’s repressive régime, which monitored and imprisoned all those who were a threat to the throne.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Morocco remained a tense and unstable place. To the outside world, the country was known and celebrated as a counter-cultural paradise. The novels of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs and the activities of the Beats had given Morocco the reputation of a free-living society where drugs and gay sex were the norm. In an American guidebook published in 1971, clearly aimed at a hippie audience, the author compares the Moroccan Muslims, with their ‘soul’, to Afro-Americans: ‘The Arabs are a trip,’ he writes. ‘They are soul people who practise brotherhood every day rather than just bullshit about it on Sundays’.1

The reality of Morocco from the inside was quite different: this was a society controlled by fear of the government and the police. There were frequent riots, killings and arrests, and two failed coup attempts by the military. During student riots in Casablanca in 1965, more than a thousand students were killed by the authorities. This was followed by more uprisings, strikes and insurgent actions – leading eventually to the declaration of a state of emergency. The period between 1965 and 1975 is usually referred to as ‘les années de plomb’ (the years of lead). The truth about Morocco during that time could not have been further removed from the visions of the hippie dreamers who went there in pursuit of the exotic.

The most notorious act of repression was the murder of Mehdi Ben Barka, the former adviser to Mohammed V, who became a leading figure in the Socialist Party. In 1963, having survived several assassination attempts, Ben Barka left Morocco for Europe. He was sentenced to death in absentia for allegedly plotting to kill the king.

In exile, Ben Barka proved to be a painful thorn in Hassan’s side. He moved around constantly and relatively freely, arguing against Hassan’s despotism and campaigning against the ‘Gestapo-like’ tortures which, he alleged, were taking place in Morocco. In 1964 Ben Barka was named as executive secretary of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, with the brief of organizing the first Tri-Continental Conference, to be held in Cuba in 1966. He based himself in Geneva and, with growing support from Egypt and China, he looked set not only to rival Hassan as the public face of Morocco, but to overtake him as a leading statesman in Third World politics.

Ben Barka was constantly under surveillance by the Moroccan intelligence services but Hassan’s policy was apparently to lure him back to Morocco, even promising him a hand in government. It is probable that Ben Barka was considering this when he mysteriously disappeared in France in October 1965. The details of what happened to him are still unclear. What is known is that he was invited to Paris by a publicist, Philippe Bernier, to discuss making a documentary film about decolonization. Ben Barka was told that Marguerite Duras had agreed to write the script and Georges Franju had agreed to direct the film; these were serious figures on the Parisian literary scene, with impeccable left-wing, anti-colonial views, and Ben Barka saw no reason not to take the proposal seriously.

Ben Barka arrived early for the meeting at Brasserie Lipp in St Germain-des-Prés, and was observed lingering around the bookshop opposite, La Hune, with a Moroccan student friend called Thami el Azemmouri. What neither of them knew was that a French intelligence agent, Antoine Lopez, had been alerted to Ben Barka’s arrival at Orly earlier in the day by a Moroccan intelligence operative known only by the false name ‘Chtouki’. Lopez was given orders to make sure that Ben Barka was delivered to ‘a senior Moroccan personality’ – most probably General Mohammed Oufkir, the Moroccan Interior Minister, who would later earn a fearsome reputation for his ruthless methods, including torture and murder.

Ben Barka and his friend were intercepted outside the bookshop by two men who identified themselves as French plain-clothes policemen. Reassured by their official IDs, Ben Barka got into their car with no resistance. He was then driven to a luxurious villa in the suburb of Fontenay, the property of Georges Boucheseiche, a well-known French gangster, who placed Ben Barka under the guard of his hired thugs. Still Ben Barka saw no cause for alarm, as he believed himself to be under the protection of the French police. In the meantime, there was a flurry of calls from Orly to the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior. The next day Major Dlimi, chief of security in Morocco, flew to Paris, followed a few hours later by General Oufkir.

On his arrival, Dlimi told the gangsters that Ben Barka was to be ‘liquidated’. This caused panic – they had signed up for kidnap but not for murder. None the less, Ben Barka was battered into unconsciousness and, according to a number of accounts, killed not long after. Oufkir caused further confusion when he told the gangsters and rogue intelligence agents that he had left Rabat too quickly to bring with him the agreed fee for ‘taking care of Ben Barka’ (allegedly a hundred million francs). No one really knows what happened next. A senior figure claimed to have seen Ben Barka’s body dissolved in a vat of acid in Rabat shortly after his disappearance. Other sources claim that he was killed by the French or Moroccan secret services, or both, and buried on the banks of the Seine. In 1967 Oufkir, ‘Chtouki’ and the French gangsters were sentenced to life by a French court.

The Ben Barka affair became an international incident. Charles de Gaulle was furious that Oufkir should dare to act in such a criminal manner on French soil, and that his own intelligence officers had colluded with him. He sacked his head of counter-espionage and cancelled a state visit by Hassan. The Moroccan king in turn declared that de Gaulle was ‘intolerable’. The affair still lingers darkly in the imagination of Moroccans, who have an obscure sense that this was their JFK moment – when their best and brightest hope for the future was extinguished in a French conspiracy.

In 1963 Morocco had been devastated by floods – a frequent occurrence in the central and northern parts of the country – which left thousands homeless in the countryside and with no hope of rebuilding even their meagre lives. This was the cue for Hassan to promote the mass emigration of Moroccans to France. The rationale for this, it was understood, was that Morocco was a poor country with a broken infrastructure, which simply could not provide work or food for a significant part of the population. The French government was also keen to work with the Moroccans, partly because, after years of expansion since the Second World War, the country was suffering from a labour shortage. There was also a deeper strategy at work. From the earliest days of his reign, Hassan wanted to present Morocco as a stable, pro-Western power – the direct opposite of Algeria, in fact. Hassan himself spoke beautiful French, was openly pro-American, and friendly to Jewish interests and the state of Israel. He courted the French political establishment and flattered French businessmen into taking an interest, promising them that nothing like the Algerian disaster could happen in Morocco.

With the agreement of the French, the policy of mass emigration from Morocco to France got under way. The Moroccans immigrants during the 1960s were all men – usually from a rural background, from the Rif or the Sousse, and semi-literate at best. They arrived in their hundreds and then in their thousands. By the end of the 1960s an estimated 200,000 Moroccans lived and worked in France. The population grew even larger in the 1970s, when women and whole families arrived.

Part of the deal Hassan cut with the French was to actively discourage this population from seeking French nationality. When the migrants returned home every summer, a great fuss was made in Morocco about welcoming home ‘les marocains de l’étranger’ (the Moroccans from abroad) – banners of welcome and special road-stops for weary travellers were all part of the propaganda. The Moroccan economy surged, boosted by the pay-checks of emigrant workers, but, discouraged or prevented from having dual French-Moroccan citizenship, they were also permanently disenfranchised.

For most of these workers, especially in the early days when car ownership was an impossibility, the journey north, in the cheapest trains or buses, was an annual misery. As they travelled through Europe, these young Moroccans would observe the affluence they saw all around them, only to arrive at their destination and find that life in the hostel or hotel felt much like life in prison. Most of them found work through agencies or touts, who set them up with lodgings where they were absorbed into the North African diaspora, which was spreading throughout all French towns and cities. It was a closed world of cheap hotels, cafés and brothels. The novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun drew up a list of prohibitions which defined the life of the new immigrant to France – it was meant as a parody but was not far from reality:

• It is forbidden to eat in your room (there is a kitchen at the end of the corridor)

• It is forbidden to have women in your room (there is a brothel called Chez Maribelle nearby)

• It is forbidden to listen to the radio after nine o’clock

• It is forbidden to sing in the evenings, especially in Arabic or Kabyle

• It is forbidden to slit the throat of a sheep (you must wait to return home for this)

• It is forbidden to masturbate in your room (go to the toilet for this)2

These men worked on building sites, sweeping the streets or in other lowly public services. There was also an alternative economy built around racketeering and prostitution. Newcomers to Paris, especially those from a rural background, were all too often ripped off by their compatriots. They were also wary of other nationalities, particularly Algerians, who were feared as unpredictable and violent revolutionaries. Many Moroccans knew that it was a good idea to distinguish themselves from Algerians in the eyes of the French, and so often avoided living in areas that were known to be predominantly Algerian, such as Barbès and, through the 1960s, the lower part of the boulevard Saint-Michel, which was nicknamed by racists ‘Bougnoule Saint-Michel’ (‘Saint-Michel the Nigger’). For this reason many Moroccans made for Clichy and Gennevilliers; northern Moroccans tended to clustered around Gennevilliers, which they had heard about in Tangier or Tetouan.

In the south, Languedoc-Roussillon attracted many Moroccan workers, while others headed north, to work in the mines around Lille or Roubaix, or to eastern France. Lyons was to be avoided as an ‘Algerian’ city, as was Marseilles, which was also packed with pieds noirs and known as an uneasy place for Muslims.

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Life was not easy for those who stayed behind in Morocco. Those who could not get to France made for Casablanca and the other big cities, dreaming of riches on an American scale. Inevitably, massive shanty towns grew up in the shadow of these cities. Morocco was now changing from a mainly rural country into another impoverished Third World mess. Hassan quashed resistance to this process by force, and exported to France the tens of thousands who were no longer needed in their home country.

During the 1970s Hassan only held on to power by courting Western support and crushing all opposition with his security services. There were rumours of secret prisons and torture. Left-wing and trade-union activists disappeared swiftly and mysteriously. Migrants returning from France often found that they did not recognize or understand their own country any more – in Europe they were displaced and had low status, but Morocco felt like a prison camp where no one dared speak the truth for fear of being ‘disappeared’ for ever.

There were sporadic outbreaks of violence throughout the 1970s, always brutally put down by the police and army, but the first signs of real trouble came in 1981 after the government decided to increase the price of oil, flour and butter by almost 77 per cent. The immediate effect was that thousands of people simply could not afford to feed themselves. In June 1981 the Hassan government looked for the first time to be shaken by the scale and the shape of the violence that took place in the cities of Oujda, Berkane, Nador and especially Casablanca.

The trade unions called for a general strike, which in Casablanca quickly became a riot when the police fired bullets above the crowd. The city erupted – the poorest quarters were the first to explode into fury as the news came through that people had been killed for demanding food. Tens of thousands took to the streets, marauding through the wealthier quarters, smashing windows, wrecking and burning cars. There was little or no looting: the rioters wanted food and justice, not consumer goods.

Aware of how precarious his position was, Hassan ordered tanks into the streets and helicopters buzzed over the crowds. This only further angered the rioters, as they saw how much the government invested in military hardware to control them. A state of siege was declared on 21 June, which gave the authorities to power to use snatch squads to pick off rioters. Officially, there were only sixty-six deaths, but everyone knew that this was a lie. Over the next weeks and months, residents of Casablanca reported that the ground had been dug up and bodies buried in wasteland across the city; one football team reported that they had been warned off their favourite pitch by the security services, who had buried an unknown number of corpses there. Cynically, Hassan invoked the spectre of the Iranian Revolution as a justification for his heavy-handed tactics. But these were not yet Islamists: simply a hungry and humiliated population.

The Islamic Call

The Islamist movement had been slow to catch fire in Morocco, largely because political Islam was at odds with the Moroccan home-grown version, which allowed for superstition, sorcery and saints. However, as in the rest of the Arab world, radical Islamism did eventually start to infiltrate mainstream religion.

The first Islamist group of any note in Morocco, Chabiba Islamiya (Islamic Youth), was founded in 1969 by Abdelkarim Mouti, a former inspector of primary schools who was born in the tiny town of Ben Ahmed and who hated the Left and the king in equal measure. Mouti would eventually flee to Libya in 1975 when he was accused of the murder of the prominent trade unionist Omar Benjelloun. Initially, the Chabiba concentrated on spreading propaganda through the universities. It was divided into two sections: one for preaching and the other for armed combat. In future years members of both wings would join legitimate Islamist parties in Morocco, or head towards the GIA in Algeria and ultimately to al-Qaeda.

The Chabiba were firebrands but they lacked convincing arguments. The Islamist movement really only began to take hold in Morocco with the group Al-Adl wal-Ihsan (Justice and Charity), led by the charismatic and cerebral figure of Abd al-Salam Yassine. Taking his cue from the Iran, Yassine began to attack Hassan in the 1970s as an arrogant despot unworthy of the throne of Morocco, arguing that Hassan was not even a Muslim. In 1974 he wrote an open letter to Hassan called ‘Islam or Deluge’, in which he said: ‘God has warned you twice.’ This was reference to the two failed coup attempts (the one led by Hassan’s protégé General Oufkir had nearly cost the king his life). Yassine went on: ‘This letter is a third warning.’ For this Yassine was sent to a mental hospital for three years. Meanwhile his home in Salé became a place of pilgrimage for his growing number of followers. He emerged in 1979 at the height of the Iranian Revolution and immediately resumed his campaign against Hassan.3

In the wake of the riots and massacres of 1981, Yassine’s prestige grew as Moroccans began to pit their experiences of poverty and injustice against the machinery of the state. There were more riots in 1984 – this time in the north of the country in Nador, provoked by a hike in the tariff which students had to pay to pass their exams. The response from the police and army was again merciless: officially there were twenty-nine deaths, but students also told of death squads and disappearances. This was when many of this generation began to turn away from Western ideas towards political Islam, a drift accelerated by the fact that many young people now sought their inspiration, in film, music and television, from the East rather than the West. One of the reasons for this was the sheer boredom and lies which made up the cultural output of the Hassan régime. The new influx of mainly French, affluent tourists also depressed ordinary Moroccans, who never saw any of this wealth other than what could be earned as a waiter or a hustler in the Medina.