Category Archives: Maghreb

by Joel | 12 May 2025 · 3:42 pm

French Empire Overstretched, 1952

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 405-408:

The possibility of a French withdrawal seemingly grew more real that January, as Paris lawmakers prepared to begin a full-dress debate on Indochina in the National Assembly. De Lattre’s death on January 11, just a few days before the start of the debate, set a somber mood for the proceedings, and it was soon clear that a broad cross section of delegates questioned France’s continued commitment to the war. Views that a year earlier would have been labeled “defeatist,” or “unpatriotic,” were openly expressed, and not merely by the left. How could France afford, many delegates asked, to continue a struggle that in 1952 would consume between one-seventh and one-sixth of the entire budget? Answer: She could not, certainly not if she was also to build up a large army in Europe, which alone would enable her to pull her own weight in the organization of Western defense. “I am asking for a change of policy in Indo-China,” declared Pierre Mendès France of the Radical Party.

…

Influential voices in the French press said in essence the same thing; Le Monde and Le Figaro both noted that, absent dramatically increased U.S. aid, France would soon have to choose between fulfilling her European responsibilities and seeking a rapid diplomatic solution in Vietnam. At the U.S. embassy in Paris, a despondent David Bruce saw French hopes for victory dashed and the public eager for peace. “A snowball has started to form,” the ambassador warned Washington. Absent greater American assistance for the war effort or some kind of “internationalization”—meaning U.S. and British guarantees to defend Indochina militarily—public sentiment for withdrawal would continue to build. The CIA, for its part, said that a full-fledged French reappraisal of Vietnam policy was at hand, with potentially major implications for the United States.

Ultimately, the Pleven government prevailed in the debate, and the Assembly approved by a wide margin the appropriation of 326 billion francs for land forces in Indochina during 1952. This sum, however, did not cover the air force or navy, and as in previous years a supplemental allocation would be required before long. Pleven declared that the government had secured a fresh mandate for the vigorous prosecution of the war, and he lauded French forces for their “magnificent” performance in the field; a year or eighteen months hence, he predicted, France could secure a negotiated settlement “from positions of strength.” His words rang hollow. The dominant mood in the Assembly after the vote, observed one journalist, was that “it couldn’t go on like this.” If the appropriation passed, “it was only because the French army in Indo-China could not be left high and dry without money or equipment.”

Two other factors no doubt shaped the outcome of the vote. One was the growing nationalist restiveness in North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Tunisia. In Rabat, the French faced growing pressure from the sultan, Mohammad Ben Youssef, to grant independence, while in Tunis negotiations had broken down just a few weeks earlier over nationalist demands for home rule. For some Paris officials, the North African tensions were an added reason for withdrawal from Indochina—in the words of Radical leader Édouard Daladier, so long as 7,000 French officers, 32,000 NCOs, and 134,000 soldiers were “marooned” in Vietnam, France would be hopelessly outnumbered in her North African possessions. The alternative view, and the one that won out in the end, was that early disengagement from Vietnam would only intensify nationalist fervor in the Maghreb. (If the Vietnamese can win independence, why can’t we?) For the sake of the empire, then, France had to stay the course in Vietnam. Second, Premier Pleven won political points for his announcement, timed perfectly in advance of the Assembly vote, that he had secured agreement for a three-power conference on Indochina, involving Britain, the United States, and France, to take place in Washington later in the month. Pleven assured delegates that France would press for a joint Western policy toward the Far East and direct Anglo-American support in the event of a Chinese Communist move into Indochina.

The prospect of a Chinese military intervention dominated the discussion of Indochina at the tripartite meetings, though there was a divergence of views on the seriousness of the threat. At the start of 1952, the PRC had about two hundred and fifty thousand troops in the provinces bordering Indochina, many of them ready to cross the frontier on short notice. Both the CIA and the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the likelihood of an invasion, and so did British intelligence. With the Korean War still ongoing and claiming vast Chinese resources, and with the Viet Minh holding their own against the French, these analysts thought Beijing would almost certainly be content to maintain its current level of support—arms and ammunition, technicians and political officers, and the training of Viet Minh NCOs and officers in military centers in southern China. The French, however, insisted on the very real possibility of direct, large-scale Chinese intervention and requested a U.S. commitment to provide air and naval support in that event. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council agreed it was important to decide on a course of action should the Chinese move. But which course?

Many of the French troops in Indochina came from France’s African colonies, some of the best from Morocco and Senegal. By 1952 “the fighting had killed 3 generals, 8 colonels, 18 lieutenant colonels, 69 majors, 341 captains, 1,140 lieutenants, 3,683 NCOs, and 6,008 soldiers of French nationality; 12,019 legionnaires and Africans; and 14,093 Indochinese troops. These numbers did not include the missing or wounded—about 20,000 and 100,000 respectively.” (p. 458)

Glaswegian Goodwill Tour in Tangier

From The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, by Frederick Forsyth (Penguin, 2015), Kindle pp. 62-64:

Tangier in 1956 was an extraordinary place, my first taste of Africa and the world of Islam. Morocco had been, until very recently, a French colony, but Tangier was under tripartite administration between the British (the post office), the French (police and law courts), and the Spanish (general administration).

There was a vigorous independence movement called Istiqlal, which rioted elsewhere, but the Tangerines are known for their civility and tolerance, so Tangier was spared the rioting, at least while we were there.

…

My parents played the tourist out of the El Minzah Hotel, but I could not, like them, retire to bed at ten p.m., so I would steal back out and explore the bars and dives of the port quarter. It was here I met the Marine Commandos.

There was a British warship moored in the outer harbor on what is called a “flying the flag” mission. The idea was to spread pro-British goodwill along the African coast. It was in a dockside bar that I came across a group of Marines who were having terrible trouble making themselves plain to the bar staff, who spoke only Moorish Arabic and Spanish.

I tried to help and was promptly press-ganged as unit interpreter by the senior sergeant. They were all from Glasgow, from, I believe, Gallowgate, or the Gorbals: about five feet tall and just as wide. The problem was not between English and Spanish. That was easy. It was between English and Glaswegian. I could not understand a word they said. Eventually a corporal was discovered whom I could decipher and the three-language enigma was solved. We moved from bar to bar as they spent their shore leave and accrued pay on pints of beer and triple-scotch chasers.

Another problem, and quite a big one on a goodwill mission, was that they tended to leave each bar looking as if a bomb had gone off. I solved this by suggesting a gratuity for the staff. Contrary to rumor, Glaswegians are not stingy. When I explained the Tangerines were dirt poor, the Marines chipped in generously. But I explained to the bar staff that the extra money was the house-repair budget. Smiles all around.

Each morning, I was decanted from a taxi outside the El Minzah at about five, just in time for a short nap before joining my parents for breakfast at eight. On the third day, the Royal Navy warship weighed anchor and cruised off, taking the commandos to continue their friendship-building mission somewhere else.

Berber Awakenings in the Maghreb

In the wake of the Tunisian Revolution in 2011, The American Interest published a backgrounder article headlined The Berber Awakening by Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, who had just published a book on The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (University of Texas Press, 2011). Here are a few excerpts from the article.

North Africa has long been the neglected stepchild of Anglo-American Middle East academe and policy institutes. This region, commonly known as the Maghreb, was traditionally the near-exclusive preserve of European (mainly French) policymakers and scholars, owing to proximity, colonial experiences, linguistic familiarity and economic interests.

This neglect is now coming to end. North African studies have flourished recently in the scholarly realm, in English as well as French. On the policy side, the wake-up call came for some with the radical Islamist challenge and bloodletting in Algeria during the 1990s. For others, it came with the discovery of young men of Moroccan and Algerian origins in the ranks of al-Qaeda. For democracy and civil society promoters, Morocco under King Mohamed VI offered a model to emulate. But if any of these didn’t happen to grab your attention, there was Tunisia 2011, which provided the spark for the explosions of popular protest rumbling across the entire Arab world and parts of the Muslim world beyond….

Constitutionally, Algeria and Morocco are certainly Arab-Islamic states, with Arabic being the sole official language. Organizationally, they are both members of the 22-nation League of Arab States, as well as the largely moribund five-nation Arab Maghreb Union (along with Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania). Beginning in the 1930s, the ideologues of Algeria’s national movement proclaimed the Arabic language, along with Islam and territorial nationalism, as the central pillars of their challenge to a century of French settler-colonialism and incorporation into metropolitan France. Morocco’s urban nationalist elite had a similar Arab-Islamic orientation.

Upon achieving independence, both countries directed their educational and cultural nation-building efforts toward the east, toward the Mashriq, linking their societies’ roots to the rise of Islam and the spread of its Arabic-language civilization across North Africa beginning in the late 7th century. Both Algeria and Morocco had to work hard at “becoming Arab”, importing thousands of teachers from the Mashriq to instill a standardized version of written Arabic to replace French as the language of administration. This Arabic differed sharply from the North African dialectical Arabic (darija) spoken in daily life—let alone from the widely spoken Berber dialects. There are three primary dialects in Morocco, and two primary ones in Algeria, along with two additional ones spoken by smaller groups.

So who are the Berbers, and why are they worthy of attention? Simply put, the Berbers are North Africa’s “natives”, the population encountered by the region’s various conquerors and “civilizers”: Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Vandals, Arab-Muslims and Europeans. Berber social organization was classically tribal, and they spoke varieties of a single, mainly unwritten language classified today as Afro-Asian. Their encounters with foreign forces, which generally were more powerful, produced a variety of responses ranging from resistance and retreat to acceptance and assimilation. Overall, Berbers straddled multiple worlds, assimilating the “other” with whom they were engaged in one form of accommodation or another, but retaining distinct attributes of their own.

Inevitably, given their relative weakness, this collection of tribal groupings was branded by a derogatory term: “Berbers”, from the Greek and Roman appellations for “barbarians.” Subsequent Arab-Muslim conquerors quickly adopted the term, and it has stuck ever since. Not surprisingly, modern-day Berber militants reject such stigmatization imposed from the outside, and prefer to call themselves Amazigh, which translates into “free men.”

The Amazigh are worthy of our attention for several reasons, one of which is their underappreciated demographic significance. Speakers of one of the Berber/Tamazight dialects constitute approximately 40–45 percent of the population in Morocco, 20–25 percent in Algeria, 8–9 percent in Libya and about 1–5 percent in Tunisia. They total some 15–20 million persons, a number that exceeds the total population, for the sake of comparison, of Greece or Portugal. These numbers, while considerable, are significantly lower as a percentage than they were a century ago, thanks to complex processes of economic and political integration that have occurred throughout the region.

Indeed, it is this very decline that has helped spur the modern Amazigh identity movement, one which explicitly foregrounds a collective Amazigh “self”, complete with a flag, anthems, collective memory sites (lieux de memoire), a “national” narrative and ancient and modern icons. Thus the movement seeks to renegotiate the terms of Berber accommodation with various “others”: the nation-state, Islam and modernity. The movement’s central demands are recognition by state authorities of the existence of the Amazigh people as a collective and of the historical and cultural Amazighité of North Africa. The most immediate and concrete manifestations of that recognition would be to make Tamazight an official language equal to Arabic and to begin redressing the multitude of injustices which they say have been inflicted on the Berbers in both the colonial and independence eras through corrective educational, social and economic policies. More generally, the movement challenges the fundamental national narratives of these countries, which until recently consigned Berber cultural expressions to state-sponsored folklore festivals, complemented by National Geographic-type television programs on remote and exotic mountain villages, on par with the nomadic Touareg “blue men” of the desert.

In their efforts to fashion a “modern” ethno-cultural collective identity out of the older building blocks of their societies, the Amazigh activists are part of a more general trend that challenges hegemonic Arab-centered nationalism. Ironically, the ever-accelerating processes of globalization, which some thinkers have heralded as the harbinger of a long-awaited post-national age, are also generating an intensified “politics of identity.” The new politics of identity in the Muslim world is marked by the ethno-cultural assertion of formerly marginalized minority groups, combined with a demand for the democratization of political life. For some, like the Kurds, this has reached a critical mass, morphing into full-fledged nationalism. For others, like the Muslim residents of Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, this kind of nationalism is forming fast. Berbers have not yet reached that stage, and they may never reach it. But they, too, have achieved a measure of recognition and self-definition that was inconceivable a generation ago.