Spectacular in the Sahara

The journey was exhausting, the accommodations were wretched and furious sandstorms periodically lashed the seemingly endless rows of tents. Yet hundreds of thousands of banner-waving, Koran-thumping volunteers last week continued to swarm into Morocco's southernmost town, Tarfaya. "So many people want to volunteer for the Saharan march that application forms are being sold on the black market," said one sheik who had traveled from the east-central province of Ksar es Souk. While awaiting orders to cross the Spanish Saharan border 21 miles to the south --the "go" signal may be given this week --bejeweled women and turbaned men formed semicircles around dervishes who whirled to the beat of tambourines and clapping hands. Younger marchers, sporting mirror sunglasses and carrying transistor radios, kept up a steady chant of "the Sahara belongs to us" and "the Sahara is Moroccan."

"This is a march of 350,000 people, but it is really ideas that are marching," Morocco's King Hassan II told TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager last week in his ocher palace in Marrakech. One of the ideas on the march might well be the old notion that the shortest route to enhanced power is through a neighboring country's land. In his determination to annex the phosphate-rich Spanish colony, King Hassan has ignored an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that denied Morocco's claim of outright sovereignty over the Sahara. Spain, after promising to hold a referendum on independence among the colony's 70,000 people --mostly nomadic tribesmen--now seems willing to renege on its pledge rather than risk confrontation with the adventuristic Hassan. After a flurry of diplomatic moves, Madrid reportedly agreed last week to recognize Morocco's claim to the territory. Such an agreement may be challenged, perhaps even militarily, by Algeria, which has backed a leftist liberation movement in the Sahara. Although the marchers' objective may well be gained before they ever set foot on Saharan soil, Hassan said last week that he would be hesitant to call off the crusade. "I do not want to frustrate my subjects," he explained, "because a people is not a toy."

Hassan has reason to know. In his 14 years as monarch, he has survived three leftist plots to overthrow him and two military assassination attempts (one at his 42nd birthday party in 1971, when 98 guests were killed, and one a year later, when his official jet was strafed). The autocratic Hassan, who claims descent from the Prophet Mohammed, owes his survival to his skill at playing off one Moroccan faction against the other and rallying support through emotional appeals to the religious fervor of his 17 million subjects. The popular success of the march is a case in point.

Sybaritic Swath. He was going into the Sahara, Hassan explained, "so that my children and grandchildren may take pride in inheriting a real crown and a true scepter." They also stand to inherit Hassan's fortune (estimated at more than $500 million) and his eight palaces, four of them with golf courses designed by Robert Trent Jones. When Hassan dies, he expects to be ensconced in the mausoleum he has had built for himself in Rabat, a $7.5 million structure that looks like a cross between a pagoda and the Taj Mahal. Not bad for a onetime playboy prince who cut a sybaritic swath through Paris in the 1950s, lavishly displaying his enthusiasm for women, fast cars and Western clothes.

When he assumed the throne in 1961, just before the evacuation of French colonial military forces negotiated by his father Mohammed V, the new King told his people: "The man you knew as Prince Moulay Hassan no longer exists." He adopted a quieter life, refused to set up an official harem, and married Lalla Latifa, a commoner who has borne him two sons and three daughters. Hassan, who earned a law degree at the University of Bordeaux, has written three different constitutions, each of which guarantees freedom of the press, speech and religion. Such freedoms have receded as his reign has continued, however; the Saharan crisis was recently cited as an excuse for again putting off promised elections to re-establish Parliament. The last such body was dissolved in 1972.

Hassan, the only King left in North Africa, is well aware that his is "a job that tends to disappear." His rule remains personal and absolute. When he spent a month recovering from hemorrhoid surgery last January, the government ground almost to a halt. Despite the tension with neighboring Algeria, Morocco has strong ties with most other Arab nations; except for issues involving Israel, it is basically pro-Western in foreign policy and open toward European and American investments. Since 1973 Hassan has emulated his oil-rich Arab allies by pushing up the price of phosphate rock from $14 to $68 a ton. Morocco controls 60% of world trade in the vital fertilizer ingredient even without the Sahara deposits, and the price increase last year meant an added $1 billion to a booming economy.

Still, tens of thousands live in shantytowns around the main cities, there is a 75% illiteracy rate, and annual,per capita income is $400. Whatever the result of Hassan's Saharan foray, those problems will continue to pose a threat to his rule and his life.

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