MOROCCO: The King’s Rain

Like many another newborn nation, the Kingdom of Morocco has sadly discovered that independence provides a brief, heady celebration but cures no chronic ailments. Two years after Morocco gained its freedom, its economic and political problems have piled so high that King Mohammed V was prompted only last month to remind his people: “It is not going to rain gold and silver. The seeds of independence will not yield their fruit in a day. Our sons and grandsons will pick them.” Less poetically, the King confided to a friend: “The French never gave me half as much trouble as my own people.”

Many of the eager young politicians of the ruling Istiqlal (Independence) Party view the King (and onetime Sultan) as an old-fashioned survival. Fighting tribesmen in the Rif mountains, in turn, view the Istiqlal with suspicion as “Frenchified city slickers.” Inside the Istiqlal itself, a vocal left-of-center minority demands a neutralist foreign policy and denounces “palace politics.”

Fortnight ago, in a crisis brought on by the leftists, conservative Premier Ahmed Balafrej and his government resigned. Harassed King Mohammed promptly turned to the one man who seemed to have the authority to halt the bickering inside the Istiqlal; he asked Allal el Fassi, 48, the party’s political leader, to become Premier. El Fassi is both a religious mystic and a rabble-rousing extreme nationalist who has led the agitation for a “Greater Morocco,” to include large hunks of the French Sahara. He proposed too many leftist Cabinet ministers to suit the King. Last week the King saw little choice but to run the country himself, with a group of “technicians” as ministers. Under pressure from the politicians, the King has joined in demands for the total and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. and French forces from Morocco. But he is disturbed that “my policies are now being made by extremists,” and hesitates to take over as Morocco’s strongman to restore peace in his troubled land. If Mohammed V does—former Vice Premier Abderrahim Bouabid warned darkly—”he will not be above criticism.”