Word: berbers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...That looks like one of them," said the grim-faced French colon. From the six Moroccan tribesmen bound together with a single rope, he picked out a shaven-headed Berber, captured by the French Foreign Legion in the plundered shambles that had been the prosperous town of Oued Zem (pop. 4,600). A helmeted Legionnaire slapped the suspect on the head and led him out to be shot. Thus, last week began France's bloody revenge for one of the bloodiest massacres of Europeans in modern colonial history...
With pipes and drums, 5,000 Berber tribesmen, camped below the palace in the Moroccan city of Rabat, greeted the appearance of a wizened old man in a white gown whom the French a year ago made Sultan of Morocco. Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa was nervous. The last two times he had shown his face in public, he had narrowly escaped assassination by fanatic nationalist supporters of his exiled predecessor, Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef...
...French cut off the medina with three cordons of troops, through which no Arab could escape. Inside the medina were detachments of Foreign Legionnaires, colonial infantry with tanks, barefoot Berber goumiers, whose hatred of the Arabs is legendary, and French police from whose wrists swung weighted truncheons. Police men, working with maps, split the medina into half a dozen sectors. Then the legionnaires, working systematically, began breaking down the doors of every house...
...test. In complete silence he stuck his wrinkled face up to mine and said, with a look of infinite cunning, the only American word he knew: 'Okay.' I replied emphatically, 'Okay.' The sheik shouted his approval, the tribesmen clapped their hands, and the Berber women set up their welcoming...
Knowledgeable French sources say that France-Soir's stories, though sometimes embellished, are essentially true. Some relatives of the dead victims, demanding blood money, have launched complaints in Casablanca, and an investigation has been started. Ben Youssef's implacable Berber enemy, the old Pasha of Marrakech, is supposed to have had a hand in spreading the stories. The French Foreign Office professes to be horrified. Digging up old tales about him at this time, said a Quai d'Orsay spokesman properly, is "not fair play...