The Press: Casablanca Crusade

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In Casablanca's narrow Rue Dumont d'Urville one morning last week, a U.S. newsman walked through a police cordon to the offices of the daily Maroc-Presse (circ. 55,000), took a long look at its Broken windows and barricaded doors and said: "You've got to be a hero to work lere." For Maroc-Presse's 20 reporters and editors, courage is another requirement of the job; theirs is the most utterly hated newspaper in the world. Reporters are regularly beaten up, death threats come into the city desk almost daily. Editor Antoine Mazzella had his apartment bombed, Publisher Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil was machine-gunned to death on the street (TIME, June 27). Three weeks ago, a mob of Europeans swarmed into the paper's plant, smashed arinting equipment.

Colonialism Is Dead. The cause of the rouble is the crusade by Maroc-Presse or Moroccan autonomy. For two troubled years it has been telling fellow Frenchmen that colonialism is dead, that they must begin native self-government. To diehard French colonialists such an appeal amounts to treason, the betrayal of France to Moroccan nationalists.

Even the French police make no bones about their hatred of the paper. Two of them recently beat a British photographer because they thought he worked for Maroc-Presse; a top police official warned the U.S. Air Force public-information officer in the area not to associate with the paper's editors. Why do Editor Mazzella and his staff refuse to give in to the terrorists? Says Editor Mazzella: "I'm fulfilling a human obligation I just can't run away from. I'm attached to Maroc-Presse. It's the only newspaper that's ever given me the means to defend an ideal."

Maroc-Presse, started in 1949 by Mine-Owner Jacques Walter, was not founded as a crusading newspaper, but to cash in on Morocco's postwar boom. In its early days Maroc-Presse, like its competitors, rarely criticized the ironhanded suppres sion of nationalism by Resident General Alphonse Tuin. But in 1953, Maroc-Presse's Editorial Director Henri Sartout decided that France could no longer rule Morocco by force, should instead give the natives a voice in government, and thus win their support. The attack on the paper began at once. French business men pulled out their advertising, and Maroc-Presse's circulation fell sharply.

Bomb on the Balcony. As Sartout got more and more involved in politics, the job of running the paper fell to Mazzella, who was born in Oran, was a war cor respondent with the French army in Italy and the U.S. 9th Armored Division. On Mazzella, the French vigilantes centered their attacks. Shortly after he published an editorial trying to explain the political reasons for Moorish terrorism, a bomb was exploded on the balcony of his second-floor apartment. Next day his mail brought a warning from the French vigilantes: "That was just the beginning." Two months later, a friend on the police force burst into Mazzella's office, warned that he was to be killed that evening. Mazzella and his family managed to escape on a plane to Paris, one jump ahead of the killers.