(1) I use the term elite here to refer to a group of Moroccans who for diverse reasons have an actual or potential influence on decision making and the distribution of spoils and patronage, and who articulate, occasionally or persistently, their demands. Their influence results from their clientele, who may or may not be formally organised. Such clientele groups include parties, unions, student groups, regional interests, tribes, officer corps, ulema, shurfa, etc. Neither education nor wealth is a criterion for membershiping the elite, although most members tend to be wealthy or educated or both. Access to the elite is strictly through cooptation. For an excellent analysis of the components of the Moroccan elite, see Marais, Octave, La classe dirigeante au Maroc, Revue française de science politique, XIV (1964), 709–737.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(2) The demand of the UNFP in 1962 for a constituent assembly to draw up the country's constitution is a negative demand, for it challenged the absolute sovereignty of the monarchy, and implied that such an assembly could, à la Tunisie, abolish the monarchy if it so desired.

(3) This analysis is borrowed from Leonard Binder's concept of negative and positive system challenging. See Binder, Leonard, Iran: Political Development in a Changing Society (Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1962), pp. 286–298.Google Scholar

(4) The movement of Al-Glawi, a protectorate-blessed baron of Marrakech, and Abdulhay al-Kettani, head of a religious brotherhood, cannot be taken as such a threat for their objective was not to alter the regime. In fact they simply engineered the deposition of one Sultan and replaced him with another one amenable to their views.

(5) The Istiqlal party was founded in 1944 and held within its ranks the great majority of the nationalists. Between 1956 and 1963 it was represented in all Moroccan governments, but since 1963 has been in quasi-opposition. The Mouvement populaire was founded in 1957 basically as a counterforce to the Istiqlal as to give some voice to the bled.

(6) It has rightly been called to my attention that the Berber College at Azrou, whose students were selected from important rural families, has contributed several elite members. Hassan Zemmouri and Thami Ammar were both Ministers of Agriculture as well as nationalists. The College at Azrou has indeed supplied elite members disproportionate to the size of the College itself, but not in numbers great enough to alter significantly the urban bias of the elite.

(7) In May 1958 Mohammed V specifically charged Ahmad Balafrej, the newly-appointed Prime Minister, with the drawing-up of a code of basic civil rights (later known as the Charter of Public Liberties). It was known at the time that one of the results of the code would be the inability of future governments to withold authorisation of newly-founded political organisations. For months the Istiqlali-dominated government had been refusing to authorise the Mouvement populaire.

(8) See Jules et Aubin, Jim, Le Maroc en suspens, L'Annuaire de l'Afrique du Nord, t. III (Aix-en-Provence 1964), p. 76.Google Scholar Figures do not include armed forces but do include police and are based on lists prepared for civil service budget. See also al-Fassi, Mohammed, Le problème des cadres au Maroc, Problèmes des cadres dans les pays tropicaux et subtropicaux (Brussels, INCIDI, 1961).Google Scholar

(9) This date is significant for in January 1963 the three Istiqlali ministers resigned from the government, and the party has been in ‘opposition’ ever since. The UNFP has been an opposition party since the King dismissed the Ibrahim government in May 1960.

(10) Not least among the factors making for the success of tactical appointment is unabashed power hunger. To so state is not to judge the morality of the Moroccan elite. It would seem that in transitional societies in general, power hunger is more pronounced than in either ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ societies. For a cogent explanation of this phenomenon, see Riggs, Fred W., Administration in Developing Countries: the Theory of Prismatic Society (Boston 1964), pp. 131–132.Google Scholar

(11) Gellner, Ernestexamined a variant of this tactic, utilising the threat of rural dissidence, in Patterns of Rural Rebellion: Tribes as Minorities, Archives européennes de sociologie, III (1962), 297–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(12) Akhbar al-Dunya, El-Dunya bikhair, Kawalis: successive titles for the same weekly, whose circulation reached 35,000.

(13) Arrests of this kind are most frequent in local party organisations where they receive minimal publicity. In this respect the Istiqlal has been almost as vulnerable as the UNFP. Nonetheless party leaders are sometimes jailed also. Leaving aside the plot arrests of 1963, the examples of the four-month detention of Yusufi and Basri (UNFP) in 1960, and the arrest of Omar Benjelloun (UNFP) on March 15, 1965, are to the point.

(14) Estimates of the deaths resulting from the riots vary between 400 and 800.

(15) The petty tradesmen of the Souss region (Agadir province) and the wealthier bourgeoisie of Fez have maintained an implacable rivalry over several decades. Since the establishment of the French protectorate this rivalry has been centered in Casablanca, where transplanted Fassi importers and Soussi retailers have found their interests to be at variance. The younger members of the Istiqlal, when they revolted against the older, predominently Fassi executive committee, won the sympathy of the Soussi merchants. A striking example of this came in the May 1960 elections to the Chambers of Commerce and Industry, at which time, in Casablanca, the numerically superior, although financially inferior, Soussis elected their favorites in the name of the UNFP, excluding almost all the Istiqlali/Fez candidates.

(16) The term ‘traditional base’ is used here to refer to a large sector of the Istiqlal rank-and-file which was first organised after 1944 but before 1952 and therefore included neither the labor unions nor the resistance. It is a traditional group in more than a temporal sense in that it was and is composed of petty tradesmen and artisans of the old established urban centers, whose outlook on commerce is similar to that of their grandfathers, and whose whole way of life is profoundly influenced by Islam and a certain basic monolingualism in Arabic.

(17) See Al-Tahrir, 09 7, 1959.Google Scholar

(18) Both men are members of the defunct UNFP executive committee. However, while Ben Seddiq is Sec. Gen. of the UMT, Ibrahim has no direct connection with that organisation. He is in some way Ben Seddiq's political mentor (since they were in prison together in 1954) and serves as his political façade.

(19) A few figures may help delineate the position of the UMT. As of 1963 the fully-employed industrial labor force of Morocco was 70,000. Another 60,000 were employed seasonally in food and fibre industries. The total of 130,000 roughly corresponds to the unionised, industrial labor force. At the same time there are approximately 250,000 unemployed in Casablanca alone. For more details, see The Economic Development of Morocco (IBRD Mission, mimeo. 12 1965), pp. 172–173.Google Scholar

(20) At the time of the legislative elections in May 1963, the UMT recommended that its members vote for ‘progressive’ candidates, without, however, naming the UNFP. Except for a few supposedly unauthorised candidates, the UMT ran none of its own. UNFP candidates won 16% of the total votes cast, but one wonders how many it would win were the UMT to back a separate slate of candidates in any future elections.

(21) The Resistance is represented in the UNFP leadership by Fqih Basri, Mohammed Mansour, and Dr. Abdellatif Benjelloun. Abdullah Senhaji has gone his separate way.

(22) The latter two were later condemned to death along with Ben Barka and Hamid Berrada (UNEM), both in absentia. Basri and Benjelloun were pardoned in Spring 1965.

(23) For a complete analysis of the Moroccan armed forces, see “Le Maroc” in Hamon, Léo (ed.), Le rôle extramilitaire de l'armée dans le Tiers-Monde (Paris, PUF, 1966), pp. 31–56.Google Scholar

(24) Jules et Aubin, Jim, op. cit. p. 83.Google Scholar

(25) Bouabid, Abderrahim, interview, Rabat, 05 17, 1966.Google Scholar

(26) Lewis, W. Arthur, Politics in West Africa (London, Allen and Unwin, 1965).Google Scholar

* The study resulting in this article was made under a fellowship granted by the Foreign Area Fellowship Program. Howewer, the conclusions, opinions and other statements in this article are those of the autor and are not necessarily those of the Fellowship Program.

(27) In fact the riots of March 1965 were touched off by disgruntled students protesting a directive of the Ministry of Education that provided for the automatic transfer of certain secondary school students over the age of 18 to trade schools, thereby ending their hopes for a university education, in a manner the students found arbitrary.