Word: mauritania
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...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...
...Seville) to dark Senegal and the swamps of the Niger. The new kingdom of Morocco occupies about a fifth of this old Almoravide empire. The remainder of the area is divided between Spain's Rio de Oro, a corner of Algeria, the huge French West African province of Mauritania, and a chunk of the French Sudan reaching a few hundred miles north of legendary Timbuktu. Except for the coastal strip it is sun-scorched desert, rich in minerals, which the French, since they finally subdued the tribes in 1934, have mapped but have hardly tapped...
...Fassi's battle for the Sahara sand is a picayune affair so far. Commandos of his liberation army, no longer needed to fight the French in Morocco, have been trucked down through the Rio de Oro and loosed in vast, sparsely settled Mauritania. Joined by turbaned camel riders who dearly love to fight, Moroccan irregulars have launched attacks on isolated French outposts, killed half a dozen French soldiers and burned a few French armored cars. North of Fort Trinquet last month there was a more serious clash in which, according to Moroccan reports, the French lost 22 men. Nevertheless...
...Leader. The political story is that as members of the French Union, the interested tribesmen and traders of Mauritania elect one representative to the French National Assembly in Paris. Ten years ago Mauritania sent to Paris, on the Socialist ticket, an olive-skinned, white-haired Moslem politician named Horma Quid Babana. In last year's general election Quid Babana lost his seat to a hated rival, whose election he tried to invalidate. Failing to secure a patronage job as district tax collector in France, he became violently anti-French and joined the "Cairo" movement. Recently Ould Babana turned...
What worries the French, more than the troubles in Mauritania, is the new outburst of expansive nationalism in Morocco. To get their iron and copper out of Mauritania and western Algeria, they would like to go through Morocco, and to do that they need good relations with the kingdom they recently freed. Fortnight ago the Moroccan government officially asked France to negotiate on the future of the Saharan frontier. Last week Si Allal el Fassi brought out the first edition of a 16-page weekly propaganda sheet, called The Moroccan Sahara, dedicated to freeing "our Sahara...