Word: hassan
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They swapped cavalry stories in the Oval Office and reviewed the international scene while riding Lipizzaners along the banks of Virginia's Rappahannock River. But casual as it may have seemed, Moroccan King Hassan IFs visit with President Ronald Reagan last week was productive for both sides...
...last February, that would allow the U.S. to use Moroccan military facilities if troops ever have to be ferried to the Persian Gulf in an emergency. The plan was part of Haig's continuing attempt to forge a "strategic consensus" to contain Communist influence in the Middle East. Hassan was amenable to the idea on the basis of an unwritten agreement, though the U.S. was still hoping to talk him into signing a formal statement to that effect...
...approved by Congress, would enable the King to buy armaments he needs to pursue a six-year-old desert war that neither the Moroccans nor their enemies appear to be capable of winning. The war, centered in the former Spanish Sahara to the south of Morocco, pits Hassan's armed forces against the guerrillas of the Polisario Front. The rebels, who are supported by Algeria and Libya, hope to create an independent state in the barren, 103,000-sq.-mi. territory...
...Moroccans have claimed the disputed region since precolonial times. In 1975, when Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco lay on his deathbed, Hassan led 300,000 of his unarmed subjects on a March across the border into the Spanish Sahara. The ploy worked. Spain withdrew from the colony immediately, I leaving the northern two-thirds to Morocco and the southern third to Mauritania. Nobody asked the inhabitants, believed to number about 100,000, what they wanted for their country. As it turned out, many of them wanted independence and, toward that end, banded together in a guerrilla fighting force...
...warfare continued, Mauritania renounced its claim to any part of the former Spanish colony. Hassan held on, but understood that he was in a bind: he could not defeat the Polisario, even though he was spending about $ 1 million a day in trying; and he could not withdraw because his countrymen of every political persuasion, whatever they might think of his other policies, were wildly enthusiastic about the war in the Sahara...