NORTH AFRICA: Bound for Obliteration

Of all North Africa's native leaders, none has been a stauncher friend to France than Morocco's King Mohammed V. Though it is now two years since Morocco became independent, 270,000

Frenchmen still live there, 29,000 still serve in the Moroccan bureaucracy. King Mohammed has let France keep 20 bases and 35,000 troops in Morocco. This devotion to the French dream of "interdependence" between Morocco and France has exposed the King to incessant and increasing protests from Morocco's vociferous ultranationalists, who abhor all dealings with their country's former imperial masters. In reply, King Mohammed has counseled patience, negotiations and trust.

But last week Mohammed turned on France. He flatly demanded the withdrawal of all French forces in Morocco. To show that he meant business, his army halted three French military trains, thereby interrupting the convenient arrangement under which 50,000 troops and great quantities of materiel have been shipped into Algeria from France's Moroccan garrisons in the past two years. A week earlier, when news seeped out of the desert that French and Spanish forces were conducting a joint campaign to clear their Saharan possessions of Moroccan irregulars, Mohammed V launched on a tour of Morocco's southern border. Heretofore, Mohammed has kept himself carefully aloof from Moroccan extremists' attempts to snatch the potentially oil-rich Sahara away from France and Spain. At the oasis of M'mahid before a cheering throng of desert riders, he laid formal claim to the western Sahara—a claim based on the fact that 900 years ago his ancestors of the Almoravide Dynasty ruled all northwest Africa.

Lost Confidence. Truth was that lingering Arab confidence in France was ebbing so rapidly in the wake of Sakiet that no leader could soothe his angry subjects with assurances of French good faith and be convincing. Last week Mohammed was acting like a man whose own patience had run out, whose own confidence in French good will was gone.

Mohammed's sudden claim to Mauritania and his anger over the Sakiet bombing had no logical link except that of history. But Mohammed made clear their linkage in his own mind by juxtaposing the two subjects in an interview this week with French newsmen. Morocco, he told them, "cannot maintain its present policy of restraint if the Algerian problem does not receive a solution which gives satisfaction to the national aspirations of the Algerian people and recognizes their liberty and sovereignty." In a defiant gesture of solidarity with Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba in his quarrel with France, the King endorsed Bourguiba's long-standing dream of a North African federation composed of Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.