Word: berber
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...centuries, on the barren brown mountains that were once a part of Spanish Morocco, the Riffs have lived, a sturdy Berber breed whose way of life was war. Feuding and fighting among themselves, they were seldom united; but Abd el Krim in the 1920s managed to bring them together long enough to drive out the Spaniards. Only after Paris dispatched Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain to lead 160,000 French troops against him was Abd el Krim defeated in 1926. Taken prisoner, he escaped to Cairo, where since 1947 he has continued to rant, first against the French...
...that voted yes are one by one declaring themselves republics, inside the French community. Following Madagascar, which made its choice in October, the French Sudan and Senegal led last week's parade. Next came a proclamation of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, in the land of the great Berber warriors who established the medieval Almoravide empire and built the fabled city of Marrakesh. Then to the east there followed tropical Gabon, the mineral-rich Republic of Congo, and big (496,000 sq. mi.), semi-arid Chad. Though France had expected its territories to act as they did, there seemed...
...Berber tribes of the interior were no readier to accept French authority than that of the Dey. Rallying behind AbdelKader, the handsome, 25-year-old son of a holy man, they launched a jihad (holy war) to expel the infidel. French General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a veteran of Napoleon's Spanish campaign, where the word guerrilla was invented, responded with a tactic called the razzia -a swift, merciless strike at a native village, sparing nothing and nobody. In one razzia, in 1845, nearly 500 Algerian men, women and children were asphyxiated by fires lit at the mouth...
...tried to wrest the banners away, and then, inevitably, a shot rang out. In sudden fury, bands of Moslems took off through Setif, savagely attacking every European they saw with clubs, knives and hatchets. And as word of the Setif "uprising" spread through the rugged mountains of Kabylia, bloodthirsty Berber bands, killing, pillaging and looting, set off on the warpath against the area's 200,000 Europeans...
Paradoxically, two of the leading moderates are the Cabinet's military men -Minister of War Belkacem Krim, a moody, 35-year-old Berber with five death sentences over his head, and Minister of Supply Mahmoud Cherif, 43, a onetime career lieutenant in the French army. The extremists are the politicians, notably Foreign Minister Mohammed...