Challenge to the King

The rumble of discontent in the bleak, brown Rif mountains of northern Morocco (TIME, Dec. 22) grew so loud that King Mohammed V and his politicians in Rabat could no longer ignore it. Last week gunshots, artillery fire and rocket explosions echoed through the Rif in the most serious challenge to the King's authority in the three years of Morocco's independence from France.

At first, the uproar had not seemed much more than the complaining of a few free-spirited tribal chiefs aroused by the tax collectors. A Royal Commission sent out from the capital in Rabat reported that the trouble was mainly economic and social--the tribesmen felt they were being treated like poor relations by the "city slickers" in the government. But privately, they warned that the problem was serious. Tribal leaders were "in touch" with the Algerian rebels, and spoiling for trouble. Their quarrel, insisted the tribesmen, was only with the politicians, not with King Mohammed.

The King could not see this fine distinction. Fortnight ago he broadcast a message to the rebels, and Moroccan air force planes showered reprints of the speech on the mountain slopes. Using the term "mutiny" and quoting from the Koran to warn of "cruel punishment" to come, the King gave the dissidents 48 hours to come down from the hills and surrender.

Some came out waving white flags of surrender. But in the Rif, warriors in brown and grey djellabahs, armed with old German Mausers and French muskets, swept down from the hills, cut the muddy coastal road leading to the city of Tetuan, surrounded a royal army barracks near the port of Alhucemas and seized an airport near by.

The King moved 20,000 troops--two-thirds of Morocco's army--into the hills, under the command of his son Crown Prince Moulay Hassan, 29. He sent tanks and artillery against rebel roadblocks and used six rocket-firing Morane jet trainer planes against rebel holdouts.

In one day's clashes, 150 rebels and 60 royal soldiers were killed. Held off on land, the Crown Prince commandeered smugglers' craft in Tangier harbor 175 miles awa)', hired a British-owned ferryboat, and landed troops at Alhucemas by sea. Commercial aircraft of Royal Air Maroc were pressed into service to transport supplies, despite the protests of the French pilots who were forced to fly them.

The siege around Alhucemas was relieved, the airfield recaptured, the road to Tetuan reopened. On a visit to Tetuan last week, new Leftist Premier Abdallah Ibrahim borrowed a phrase from France's famed pacifier of Morocco. Marshal Lyautey: "The government had to show force to avoid using it."

Actually, the government was using, as well as showing, force. Some Moroccan leaders dramatically likened the trouble in the Rif ''to the U.S. in 1860." Explained one: ''We must preserve the union. Central authority must be imposed.''

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