Along the Barbary Coast

In 1787, with a bribe of $10,000 and the combined diplomatic talents of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, the U.S. persuaded the Barbary pirates to lay off U.S. merchant shipping and signed the Sultan of Morocco to a treaty of friendship. When the treaty ran out in 1836, President Andy Jackson got it renewed indefinitely. Since then, Americans visiting or living in Morocco have had extraterritorial rights, freedom from import controls and certain taxes (although all other countries had given up these rights).

In 1948 Morocco, prompted by France, set up some import controls. This was a blow to the small but prospering U.S. business colony in Morocco, made up mostly of ex-G.I.s who had come in on LCIs during World War II and stayed on to make comfortable, Cadillac-powered livings for themselves. The Americans protested to Washington, and Washington protested to Paris.

In July, representatives of the U.S. and France faced each other in the big, ornate Peace Palace at The Hague before the 15 black-robed, white-bibbed judges of the International Court of Justice. In a crimson robe decked with ermine, Professor Andre Gros argued for France that the treaty was an archaic document under which the U.S. was trying to build a "quasi-protectorate" of its own in Morocco. The American businessmen in Morocco, Lawyer Gros said, were engaged in privileged import and money-exchange activities "based on fraud," and could not be checked by local laws.

In a business suit which made him seem a dull duck in a nest of full-plumaged drakes, a State Department lawyer named Adrian Fisher told the judges that the French were trying to weld Morocco into their own economy, insisted that the old treaty stands. The French, added Fisher, cannot very well complain that the evils of a money black market in Morocco are hurting France's domestic economy, while tolerating their own black market at home.

Last week Presiding Judge Sir Arnold McNair (a Briton) delivered the majority opinion: 1) the 1948 import restrictions are illegal and Americans have the right to import goods to French Morocco on the same terms as Frenchmen; 2) U.S. citizens in certain civil and criminal cases may claim the right to be heard in U.S. consular courts, but in other cases are subject to Moroccan laws; 3) U.S. citizens in Morocco must pay Moroccan taxes.

The judgment was a compromise but leaves the U.S. enough of a foothold on the Barbary Coast to make it something of a victory for Ben Franklin and his friends.

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