Slow Exit

For much of last week, France's reputation abroad and the fate of its government at home rested in the shaky hands of a hesitant old man--Morocco's Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa. All week long, Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay telephoned anxiously from Manhattan, in hopes of favorable news to influence the U.N. Assembly vote on the Algerian situation. From Paris, Premier Edgar Faure telephoned urgently to Morocco's Resident General Boyer de Latour; unless Ben Moulay Arafa had "voluntarily" departed before the National Assembly met this week, the Faure government was doomed.

By midweek, De Latour had worked out a compromise with the leaders of the Presence Franc,aise: Ben Moulay Arafa would leave, but turn over the royal seal, symbol of the Sultan's authority, not to the Regency Council but to a member of his own family. The old Sultan seemed ready to agree, but then balked. His chief adviser, Vizier Si Hadj Abder Raman el Hajou, had talked him into refusing any compromise at all. De Latour acted. At 4 one morning, police arrived at El Hajou's apartment in downtown

Rabat soon after he returned from the Sultan's palace. El Hajou took one look at them, made a dash for his big white Cadillac, and roared off into the dawn. The police, full of pro-Arafa men, were careful not to catch him.

Poor Listener. With the Vizier out of touch, the Sultan gave in. Shortly before dawn next day, light tanks and armored cars converged on the palace. Squads of police materialized on street corners; troops lined the roads to the airport. At 7 a.m. the Sultan, leaning heavily on a gold-headed cane, his eyes veiled behind dark glasses, emerged from his palace for only the third and last time in his unhappy two-year reign (on both previous occasions, someone had tried to assassinate him).

At the airport, the old man's lips quivered as Resident General de Latour pronounced the incantatory words of political exorcism over his head: a letter from President Rene Coty praising "the high nobility of the sentiments which once again guide Your Majesty in the serious decision you have been pleased to take." Ben Moulay Arafa scarcely listened, laboriously climbed aboard the waiting plane. An hour later, the plane landed at Tangier, where Ben Moulay Arafa will live at French expense in a hastily rehabilitated villa which once belonged to another throneless Sultan of Morocco.

Our Cousin Moulay. Behind him, Ben Moulay Arafa left decrees announcing his decision to leave "without in any way relinquishing our rights," and delegating "to our cousin Moulay Abdullah ben Moulay Abdel Hand the task of taking care of matters relative to the crown." The nationalists were not pleased. They knew little about Hand except that he is a stout, 50-year-old man working in a government office in Rabat. The government was obviously embarrassed, insisted that Hand's appointment would not "exclude" Faure's plan for a three-man Regency Council.

Arafa's departure came twelve hours too late to help France in the U.N. But it probably staved off, for a while at least, the fall of Faure's government.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.