The Door to the Sahara

The drive to claim North Africa tor the North Africans leaped suddenly southward along the Atlantic last week. This time the beleaguered colonists were the Spanish, not the French.

Back in 1860 Morocco's Sultan Sidi Mohammed ceded the Spanish a barren little coastal enclave called Ifni (see map) as a haven for Canary Islands fishermen, but the Spanish did not get around to taking it over until 1934. King Mohammed V tacitly agreed to leave Ifni to the Spaniards at the time of the 1956 declaration of independence. But Morocco, growing confident in its new nationhood, last August asked Franco to give Ifni back. The demand was part of Morocco's reassertion of its ancient claims on the Sahara region stretching from the Atlantic coast down to French Mauritania (part of French West Africa). "Every grain of the Sahara belongs to Morocco," cried bearded Si Allal el Fassi, chief of Morocco's dominant Istiqlal Party. Guerrillas of the old Moroccan Army of Liberation, no longer occupied with fighting the French, moved into the scrublands around the Ifni frontier. No sooner had the King departed for his visit to the U.S. than the irregulars assembled a motley force of some 1,200 townsmen and tribesmen and launched an attack on Ifni.

Long Live Death. In their first thrust the black-turbaned, khaki-uniformed irregulars swept into Sidi Ifni itself, a small (pop. 10,000) fishing town of unpaved streets. They slaughtered a score of sleeping Spanish sentries and made off with some trucks and mules. The Spanish, who last month jailed a few local Moslems for demonstrating in favor of King Mohammed, had quietly reinforced the Ifni garrison with several hundred paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires. Shouting their battle cry of "Long Live Death," the Legionnaires led a counterattack into the hills that drove most of the invaders back across the frontier and cost them an estimated 100 dead, 200 wounded. Announced Spanish casualties: 5 dead, 43 wounded.

The Moroccans managed to hang on to some of Ifni's border outposts. Spanish paratroops dropped from the skies to retake one, a heavy cruiser lobbed shells into others. Madrid ordered World War II Heinkels and Messerschmitts south from the mainland to bomb and strafe along the ill-defined frontier. Istiqlal partisans charged that the Spanish were striking roads and villages on the Moroccan side. In Rabat young (28) Crown Prince Moulay Hassan ordered Moroccan troops to shoot back at any plane attacking Moroccan territory, and indicated that Morocco would demand "our door to the Sahara"--that part of the old protectorate south of Ifni still administered by the Spanish as "Southern Morocco."

Authority & Oil. By week's end the fighting between Moroccan nationalists and Spanish colonial forces had spread south to the Spanish Sahara. Moroccan newspapers reported nationalist attacks on a village at the mouth of the Saguia el Hamra (Red River) and Spanish bombing raids on the inland villages of Smara and Sidi Ahmed el Aroussi; more than 200 Moroccans were reported killed.

At the time of last year's independence declaration, when he was trying to make a reputation as a special friend of the Arabs, Franco secretly agreed to cede Southern Morocco to the Moroccans some time in the future. He has since changed his mind. Reason: prospectors have found indications that the sandy wastes of Spanish Sahara, like the French Sahara farther east, may hold oil, a resource to be found nowhere else in Spanish territory. At week's end. Franco rushed 3,500 more troops into Ifni and had beefed up his Spanish West Africa garrison to 5,000 with reinforcements from the mainland. Morocco's partisans, regular or irregular, were not going to get the Spanish Sahara and its oil (if any) without a fight.

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