Word: berber
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...centuries the fierce Berber tribes, sons of Ham, have been the scourge of Morocco. Time and again they have come galloping down from the Atlas Mountains to loot and rape. Because the French have not hesitated to use them for "pacifying" rebellious villages, they were always a threat to the Moroccan independence movement. One exception were the Tafilalet Berbers, led by Chief Addi ou Bihi, who sided with exiled Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef. When Ben Youssef was restored to the throne in 1955 to become the first Sultan of Free Morocco, one of his first acts was to appoint Addi...
...sons or retainers, and the nationwide judiciary reform, which ruled that caids must be replaced by government-appointed judges, struck at the roots of tribal power. When the national government sent inspectors and emissaries, Addi jailed a few. He rejected a summons to Rabat and began assembling his Berber warriors...
...learned that a new government appointed judge was on his way to Tafilalet. The judge arrived by air in Midelt, a mountain village built around an old red clay crenelated fortress in a cedar forest below the snow-capped Atlas peaks. Addi gave the signal, and some 3,000 Berber horsemen clad in white-and-brown burnooses swept down on Midelt. They quickly surrounded the fortress, captured the Rabat-appointed judge and 18 local policemen...
...more than 50 members and alleged sympathizers of Présence Française, the organization of diehard colons who cannot reconcile themselves to Moroccan independence. A week earlier Moroccan police had discovered that Présence Française was circulating leaflets which urged Morocco's Berber minority to rebel against "Arab domination" and "the Arab Sultan." No one seriously believed that a handful of leaflets would succeed in inflaming the Berbers, who are fiercely loyal to Sultan Mohammed V. Nonetheless, the Moroccan government had decided to use "the Berber tract affair" as an excuse for mass deportation...
Claude Gerard, a heroine of the resistance who fought alongside Robert Lacoste, now French Minister Resident in Algeria. Last month Reporter Gerard spent ten days with three rebel units in the Berber area and in western Constantine, made a forced march with them. Back in Paris, she wrote her story for the new Socialist weekly Demain, which generally backs Premier Guy Mollet's foreign policy but opposes him on Algeria. Staunchly anticolonialist, the story referred to the rebels throughout as "le Maquis"-a name synonymous in France with the glory of the undercover fight against the Nazis...