North Africa: A More Than Five-Minute Truce?

As truce talks got under way at the presidential palace in Bamako, Mali, to settle the border war between Morocco and Algeria, a flock of vultures hovered overhead. As if to counteract such ominous signs, Malian witch doctors with grotesque ritual masks came from miles through the bush. There was plenty of work for them.

Until the eve of negotiations, fighting continued. The affair threatened to build up into an East-West confrontation, as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser rushed aid to Algeria’s Socialist Strongman Ahmed ben Bella. Unloaded at night from a pair of Cuban freighters in the Algerian harbor of Oran were at least four crated MIG jet fighters, 800 tons of ammunition, three field radio stations and more than enough Soviet-made weapons—including tanks, field guns, antiaircraft guns—to arm an armored regiment. Cuban soldiers accompanied the hardware. Neighborly Nasser also sent a pair of ships loaded with military equipment, and reportedly airlifted paratroopers direct from Cairo to the main Algerian staging area near the disputed border.

Equally Wary. When the negotiations finally started, Mali’s President Modibo Keita and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, host and mediator, tried to keep the Algerian and Moroccan delegations apart. The emissaries even ate in separate dining rooms, with Keita and Selassie shuttling back and forth. Finally, after one face-to-face meeting between Morocco’s King Hassan II and Ben Bella, a compromise cease-fire agreement was reached—but it was full of loopholes and did not last long.

The agreement called for a neutral, demilitarized zone along the disputed border, without specifying the lines to which Moroccan and Algerian troops should withdraw. The foreign ministers of the 32-nation Organization of African Unity, set up last spring at Addis Ababa, were to arbitrate the entire border issue, but their recommendations would not be binding. The Algerians later claimed that the agreement called for the Moroccans to evacuate the two small desert oases where the fighting began; the Moroccans hotly denied it.

Equally Ugly. No sooner had the two rulers left the balmy atmosphere of Bamako than their feud broke out all over again. In Rabat, where Hassan was greeted like a conquering hero by 1,000 warriors on horseback, the Moroccan government broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba and recalled its ambassadors to Egypt and Syria because of their “extremely hostile attitude.” Some 350 Egyptian teachers in Morocco were told to pack up and return home. In Algiers the mood was equally ugly. Although both sides had agreed to end their exchange of virulent propaganda, Ben Bella warned Hassan in a two-hour harangue that the struggle would continue between his type of socialism, which he evidently hopes to extend to the whole North African area, and Morocco’s monarchy.

The cease-fire deadline was midnight. Five minutes later gunfire was heard again. At dawn the shaky truce was broken. Algerian artillery opened up a massive barrage against Figuig, an oasis town in the southeast corner of Morocco where the border has been unquestioned for years. The royal army replied by bombarding an Algerian village four miles away. Amidst the shooting, Hassan sent off appeals to the United Nations, the International Red Cross, Keita, Haile Selassie, and the Organization of African Unity. At week’s end, the Algerians announced the end of the fighting, 24 hours after the deadline.