MOROCCO: Running the Gauntlet

IT was the morning of Islam's greatest feast day, Aid el Kebir. On that day, by sacrificing a ram. the faithful learn whether the year to come is to be peaceful and prosperous--or disastrous.

With pipes and drums, 5,000 Berber tribesmen, camped below the palace in the Moroccan city of Rabat, greeted the appearance of a wizened old man in a white gown whom the French a year ago made Sultan of Morocco. Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa was nervous. The last two times he had shown his face in public, he had narrowly escaped assassination by fanatic nationalist supporters of his exiled predecessor, Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef.

Ordinarily, the Sultan rides outside the palace walls to cut the ram's throat.* The new Sultan prudently preferred the safety of a mosque inside the palace grounds. Carefully, he thrust his knife into the animal's throat, then stood back while the carcass was placed on a jeep and rushed off to the palace. The tradition is that if the sacrificial sheep arrives at the palace alive, the land will be blessed. A few minutes later came word from the palace: "The animal arrived still breathing."

The omen was favorable. But who could depend on it? Behind locked doors, many Moroccan nationalists celebrated the day in the name of exiled Ben Youssef. A more significant omen for Morocco's future took place in the city of Port Lyautey. There 8.000 to 10.000 resentful Arabs, led by single-minded nationalists, had gone on a rampage in the medina (native quarter) the week before. They killed seven Europeans, including a woman and her daughter, whose stomachs they slit open with knives. The women's bodies were dragged through the streets of the medina. The French last week retaliated with a brutal show of force known as ratissage, literally a "raking-in." TIME Correspondent Frank White, an eyewitness, cabled this description:

THE French cut off the medina with three cordons of troops, through which no Arab could escape. Inside the medina were detachments of Foreign Legionnaires, colonial infantry with tanks, barefoot Berber goumiers, whose hatred of the Arabs is legendary, and French police from whose wrists swung weighted truncheons. Police men, working with maps, split the medina into half a dozen sectors. Then the legionnaires, working systematically, began breaking down the doors of every house.

Once a door was smashed, in went the goumiers and drove out every male, except small boys. Women cried out in terror, and were beaten back with clubs or gun butts.

On top of a low hill in Port Lyautey's medina is a dusty sheep market. Legionnaires drove the Arab men there and herded them under the muzzle of a Patton tank. A dozen policemen formed a gauntlet, six on either side. One by one, the Arabs were thrust forward, each with his hands on his head.

"Entrez done, Monsieur," said a reserve police colonel. "The session is about to begin." He smiled broadly, then hit a middle-aged Arab with his right fist, below the belt. As the Arab went down, the colonel kneed him in the groin. The Arab tried to get up; another cop caught him across the jaw with a club. Down went the Arab and the next cop kicked him, twice. He got up again and ran into the arms of still another policeman, who poked him into a sitting position with the muzzle of a carbine.

Crying "Allah." Altogether, more than 20,000 Arabs were routed out of their homes to run the gauntlet that day. Slugging, clubbing and beating that many men is an exhausting job, so the police spelled one another. They invited civilians to lend a hand, and one brute of a youngster accepted and enjoyed himself.

The gauntlet was only a beginning. After they had run it, some seriously beaten, some only scratched and kicked, each man was placed in a long line. The line shuffled past a 6-ft. pasha, who wore brown checked pants and a blue sports coat. A gesture, a slight shove from the pasha, and an Arab was pushed into one of two groups: those who were suspected of having participated in the past week's rioting and those who were charged with nothing. Before the day was done, 6,000 men, including most of those between 17 and 25, had been herded into the suspect group.

They were loaded into cement trucks and hauled off to jail. As they went, their womenfolk came pushing out of the houses, screaming and crying "Allah." The police fired into the air to force the women back and to keep the prisoners' heads down in the trucks. The cops were not too careful about keeping their fire high.

Crying Necessity. The man whose job it was to preside over the ratissage was 55-year-old Jean Husson, Port Lyautey's civilian controleur, and a civil affairs officer in Morocco for 33 years. Husson did not enjoy it; he often intervened to pull the police off Arabs who had been seriously hurt. But Husson was convinced that a show of force was necessary. "We know these people," he explained to me. "To do anything less than we are doing would be to invite further disturbances. I hope you won't be too severe with us."

The ratissage ended at 6 p.m. Then a tall, somber pasha made a speech to the medina people: "You must resume your peaceful way of life. If you don't, the same thing that happened today will happen again. Only next time it will be worse . . . with jet airplanes shooting down on you from the sky." At about that moment, a flight of French jets flew low over the crowd.

That evening, as the troops and tanks rumbled back to their barracks along the boulevards of the European section, French men and women poured out from their sidewalk cafes, lined the streets, and cheered the military. The office of the French Resident General in Rabat announced tersely that a ratissage had been held in Port Lyautey, and that in the course of the roundup, 20 Arabs died.

* In memory of Abraham, who sacrificed a sheep in place of his son Ishmael. ancestor of all Arabs.

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