MOROCCO: The Nightcomers

A DC-4 warmed up on the tarmac of Casablanca’s airport. A fleet of black Citroëns prowled determinedly through the French quarters of Casablanca, Rabat, Meknés and Fez picking up passengers for the flight. All through the small hours one morning last week agents of Morocco’s new secret police force knocked at door after door and curtly informed sleepy French colons to get dressed; they were to be expelled from Morocco immediately.

Before the roundup was over, a phone jangled furiously in the Rabat bedroom of André Dubois, France’s tall, elegant Ambassador to Morocco. When Dubois picked up the receiver a Frenchman serving with the Moroccan police excitedly reported that the newly independent Moroccan government was rounding up more than 50 members and alleged sympathizers of Présence Française, the organization of diehard colons who cannot reconcile themselves to Moroccan independence. A week earlier Moroccan police had discovered that Présence Française was circulating leaflets which urged Morocco’s Berber minority to rebel against “Arab domination” and “the Arab Sultan.” No one seriously believed that a handful of leaflets would succeed in inflaming the Berbers, who are fiercely loyal to Sultan Mohammed V. Nonetheless, the Moroccan government had decided to use “the Berber tract affair” as an excuse for mass deportation of French extremist leaders.

Within minutes after he got the news. Ambassador Dubois was on the phone to Moroccan Premier Si Bekkai, delivering an angry protest. Dubois was not overly disturbed by the decision to deport the troublemaking colons. (One of the deportees, a former Présence Française president named Georges Causse, had been expelled from Morocco once before, by the French themselves, allowed to return by clemency of the Sultan.) The ambassador was, however, incensed at Si Bekkai’s failure to live up to an agreement that the French embassy would be consulted on all matters involving French citizens. What seemed to outrage him most was the fact that the arrests were made in the dead of night. “Even in their worst moment,” he exploded, “European police wait until the hour of the milkman.”

Under Dubois’ assault, the Moroccan government made a slight concession: instead of being whisked off to France in the early morning as originally planned, the deportees were allowed to remain in Morocco till midafternoon to settle their affairs, then sped by air to Paris. Next day, with pointed timing, the Moroccan Foreign Office notified Ambassador Dubois that it planned to revoke a long-standing arrangement which allows French citizens to enter Morocco without a visa.