MOROCCO: Death at Caf

New Resident General Gilbert Grandval, sent from Paris to bring peace and a fair deal to restive Moroccans, acted like a man with no time to lose. The minute his plane stopped at Casablanca’s airstrip, he jumped down from the plane, too impatient to wait until the ramp was shoved into place. In his first week, he fired nine of the protectorate’s top French officials, “for essentially psychological reasons”; they were competent, he explained, but identified with the old, unpopular order. To Moroccan cheers, he declared a general amnesty for Bastille Day, freeing 77 political prisoners and closing the internment camp where Moroccan nationalists had been held. This, he said, was only a beginning. “Spirits must be calmed in order to institute a constructive policy,” he explained, and urged Moroccans to join the French in celebrating Bastille Day.

Curl of Smoke. Moroccans did, after their fashion. On Bastille Day, Moroccan flags flew alongside the French Tricolor, the streets were thronged with French and Moroccan strollers, and the cafe terraces were packed.

The day was just turning cool in the Rond-Point Mers Sultan when a three-wheeled delivery motorcart pulled up be fore the Café Gonin, crowded with Europeans sipping apéritifs while they waited for the street dancing to begin. Two Moroccan teen-age youths climbed off the motorcycle and walked away. Minutes later, somebody noticed a curl of smoke coming from the motorcycle. Two European youths lifted up the canvas cover and peered in. There was a deafening explosion. Café Gonin’s terrace became a mass of writhing, bloody bodies. Six Europeans were dead, 35 wounded.

In Casablanca, violence begets violence. Crowds of young Europeans stormed through the streets, smashing native shops, besieging the offices of the liberal French-owned newspaper Maroc-Presse, tearing down Moroccan flags. At midnight, a mob smashed into the apartment of Lawyer Jean-Charles Legrand, a French lawyer who has defended Moroccan terrorists in court. Legrand was waiting for them, revolver in hand. For an hour he held them off, killing one young attacker and wounding two others.

Leaflets & Buses. Next day, as the rioting rolled on, anonymous leaflets flooded the city urging Frenchmen to take up arms in protest against the Café Gonin bombing and Grandval’s “soft” policy. In groups of two and three hundred, European vigilantes stormed through the city, pillaging and burning native shops, overturning buses. Most vengeful were the Pied Noir (Black Foot), half-breeds of mixed Italian, Spanish and Moroccan blood and Morocco’s equivalent of the South’s “poor white,” who hate the native Moroccans with a fury based on economic insecurity. In the heart of the city, rioters lynched one Moroccan, shot down two others with submachine guns, and clubbed the bodies with gun butts. Yelling “Death to Grandval,” one mob, thousands strong, tried to storm the city’s office buildings, was driven back only by fire hoses and tear gas. The French police made little attempt to discipline the mob. “They’re only kids. They don’t mean any harm,” said one police official.

Retaliating Moroccans erupted from the native quarters, set fire to a hospital and lumber yard, burned one European alive in his car, and with cement blocks smashed in the head of a 76-year-old Frenchman, manager of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

At week’s end, defying warnings from demonstrators, the new resident general attended the funeral for the Bastille Day victims in Casablanca’s big cathedral. The seething crowd made a rush at Grandval, yelling “Dirty Jew” and “To the gallows,” ripped off an epaulet and his cap before police could hustle him into his car.

After three days of the bloodiest rioting Casablanca had seen since 1952, ten Europeans and at least 20 Moroccans were dead, more than 100 wounded. Casablanca was under martial law; tanks and armored cars patrolled the streets and surrounded the native quarters. Grandval announced grimly that he would continue the policy of moderation he had begun. Unhappily, for a man with no time to lose, too much time had already been lost.