Moors Unmoored

In 1936 General Francisco Franco led an army of Moors and Legionnaires out of Africa to join in the Spanish Civil War that brought him to power. Ever since, lance-bearing, scarlet-robed Moorish cavalrymen have attended the dictator on state occasions. But the rude surge of Moroccan nationalism, threatening to overrun Spanish holdings in North Africa, put the old soldier's loyalty to his Moors under heavy strain.

Last week the Madrid government finally permitted its tightly controlled press to report that the Spanish garrison at Ifni had taken a beating. The first official casualty list enumerated 62 dead, more than 100 wounded. The government admitted that the Spanish defenders had abandoned the frontier outposts to the invading Moroccan irregulars, and had drawn back to regroup around the town of Sidi Ifni itself. Farther south in the Spanish Sahara, the Moroccan Liberation Army announced an offensive on Al Auin, declared that five desert outposts had been "liberated," with Spanish losses of 120 dead.

Spanish newspapers printed disturbing reports of Moroccan savagery against Spanish civilians: one eyewitness said he had seen the mangled body of a pregnant Spanish woman who had been raped, then disemboweled by tribesmen. (By contrast, said a Madrid communique. Spanish forces gave humane consideration to the "wife of a well-known extremist who fled his village, leaving her behind with three children of less than three years. Every time our planes flew over the village, they remembered to drop by parachute condensed milk and food for the little ones.")

The disclosures set off a storm of anti-Moroccan feeling all over Spain. In Madrid, crowds booed Franco's Moors in the streets, greeted their newsreel appearances with noisy catcalls. Reluctantly, Franco gave the order to disband, his faithful Moors.

Even more disturbing to Spanish pride were reports of restive stirrings in Melilla and Ceuta, the two cities on Morocco's Mediterranean coast that the Spanish hold and intend to hold, come what may at Ifni and in the south. Both cities are predominantly Spanish, have been ruled as part of Spain for more than three centuries. Last week the nervous Spanish garrisons' commanders had reportedly declared a state of emergency in the two cities, rounded up suspected Moroccan agitators, had hastily thrown up barbed-wire barricades along the borders facing independent Morocco.

So far, Franco had exercised considerable restraint. But Spanish officials were openly talking of using the "full weight of Spanish might" if the government of Morocco's King Mohammed V did not soon bring the aggressive Liberation Army under control.

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