Word: riffed
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High in the Rif mountains this week 4,000 young Moroccans hacked away with pick, shovel and sledge hammer, gouging a road out of the wilderness. Even for the peasants who made up three-quarters of the group, the work was exhausting, as temperatures simmered up over 100°. City boys desperately tried to toughen their torn hands with tannin from the bark of cork trees. The work was hard, and nobody got paid-but the whole business was somehow satisfying. The young nation of Morocco was building something for itself...
Back home again, Ben Barka began casting about for suitable self-help projects, soon thought of the rugged Rif mountains, which form a natural barrier between North and South Morocco and until last year marked the boundary between the French and Spanish zones of occupation. Following the classic policy of divide and rule, the two occupying powers had left the central Rif roadless and virtually impassable. One thing Morocco could do, decided Ben Barka, was to build a road through the Rif...
...July the first of three batches of 4,000 volunteers were at work in the Rif. Rising at 5 a.m., they walked to their work sites and worked through till noon, with only a half-hour break. Lunch over, the volunteers moved on to a different kind of task: classes in the ABCs of civic responsibility. And out of each group, the brightest 80 were sent off to a special camp where the nation's top politicians lectured them on such matters as "the rights of a citizen" and "the democratization of Morocco...
...bitterly as they do the French. Morocco's Cairo leader is Allal el Fassi, chief of the Istiqlal Party, who was exiled by the French 18 years ago. Last week, despite France's belated granting of independence to Sultan ben Youssef, rebels in Morocco's Rif Mountains fought on, reportedly at El Fassi's command, while El Fassi himself flew to Madrid to discuss Arab claims on Spanish Morocco...
...more kindly of cooperation with France. With a faintly patronizing air, French Resident General André Louis Dubois drove over to the Spanish zone for a "courtesy" call on his Spanish counterpart, Lieut. General Rafael Garcia Valino. Dubois' main concern was to get Spanish cooperation in halting the Rif raids across the border. Garcia Valino seized the opportunity to announce Spain would introduce political reforms to institute "parallel evolution" in its zone. At week's end, Franco conferred long and late with his Cabinet, authorized a guarded statement promising that Spain would "follow attentively" events in the French...