Justice in Marrakech

Before he died of cancer last winter El Glaoui, the wily and tyrannical Pasha of Marrakech, had groveled before the new Morocco, represented by Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef (TIME, Nov. 21), and had been forgiven. But a good many of the new Moroccans bitterly remembered the bloody clubs with which El Glaoui's police, protected by the French, had for years enforced an arbitrary justice in their city. They remembered the huge levies collected at gunpoint to swell his coffers. Feeling that the returned Sultan had let the old pasha off far too easily, they formed an underground organization and drew up a list of 230 former Glaoui aides deemed deserving of death. It included onetime Khalifa Bel Mekki, who brutally broke up a shopkeepers' strike in the pasha's city, Mohammed Bouregba, who held a lucrative post as guardian of the religious wealth, as well as important caids and former police officers.

Last week, after the French formally transferred police powers to Moroccan authority, vengeance began. As the former Caid Omar Sektani and his secretary drove past a dusty camel market in Marrakech, their car was stopped by a mob, who shot both men, dragged their bodies to a nearby garbage heap and set them afire. Another mob burst into the home of Bel Mekki, shot him, cut up his body and tossed the pieces into a fire. Glaoui's old guards were caught, put into carts, tortured publicly, burned alive. Throughout the day and night mobs rampaged through the native quarters of Marrakech committing further horrors. "Don't mix in this," a huge, bare-to-the-waist Moor told one French cop. "It's not your business." Native police refused to fire on their countrymen.

At the end of two days, though not a Frenchman had been touched, 42 Moroccans were dead. The worried Sultan sent three high officials to Marrakech to appeal for order. "Nobody," he said, "has the right to administer justice for himself."

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