Abd el Krim’s intermediaries had long been in quiet contact with those of Lyautey, repeatedly assuring him that the Rifians had no designs on the French zone and wanted merely to free themselves from the Spanish. Nevertheless, Abd el Krim rejected the authority of the sultan for whose government Lyautey was explicitly responsible throughout Morocco, and Rifian successes were aggravating the normal hostilities among the tribes along the zonal border. Lyautey was also anxious lest international interest in Abd el Krim should encourage renewed diplomatic interference in Franco-Moroccan affairs. Despite all the foreign attention, however, apart from a few soldiers-of-fortune the only practical help on offer to the Rifians was funding from businessmen eager for mining concessions, and the amir was happy to exploit their greed. Besides the cheerfully venal merchants of Tangier, he was courted by representatives of German and British firms, and some of the latter encouraged him to hope for eventual British diplomatic support, despite London’s absolute rebuffs to his several overtures. (His failure to recognize the vanity of this hope was a blind spot in Abd el Krim’s understanding of power relationships in the outside world.)38
Abd el Krim’s unprecedented success in keeping a pan-tribal fighting force in the field for several years, inflicting repeated tactical defeats on the Spanish Army, in fact seems to have owed very little to the sort of political vision that his foreign propagandists attributed to him, and much to the traditional attractions of such leaders: the appeal to Islam, backed by a proven ability to deliver profitable victories. In Egyptian exile in his old age he would play the tunes that the modern generation of Arab nationalists wanted to hear, denying that his war was religiously inspired, but there is no doubt that he was a devout Muslim reformer. He was deeply hostile to the manipulative religious brotherhoods such as the Derkaoua; he voraciously taxed both the tithes of their zaouias and the endowments of mainstream mosques to fill his war chest, and he threatened to have uncooperative preachers strangled in the marketplaces with their own rosaries. However, the reforms that Abd el Krim (the Kairaouine-trained cadi) imposed in the areas that he dominated were sternly orthodox, subordinating Berber customary law to sharia and imposing punishments for violations of Islamic codes of personal conduct that were much stricter than was usual among these tribes.
El Krim was also a tribal empire-builder rather than a constitutional nationalist, and his unification programme was equally conservative. He spread his influence as tribal leaders had always done: by diplomatic pressure backed up immediately with pillage and killing – ‘if you are not with me, you are against me.’ At the personal level, he forbade blood-feuds and ordered the demolition of the traditional pillboxes of Rifian houses; one innovation was the establishment of three prisons, whose inmates suffered typical Moroccan conditions. It would be quite wrong to imagine that the Rifian tribes – or even all of the Ait Waryaghar clan chiefs – flocked to Abd el Krim’s banner in spontaneous enthusiasm for a ‘national’ cause. He built his confederacy by the usual parallel applications of persuasion, bribery and coercion, and there was a persistent story that he had two Ait Waryaghar caids who negotiated with the Spanish stoned to death ‘to save bullets’.39
For obvious reasons, Abd el Krim (the centralizing ruler) distrusted the traditional system of ever-shifting liff alliances, but he used his power of patronage creatively to balance factional leadership within the tribes from which he drew the part-time levies who provided most of his tens of thousands of fighting men. His younger brother Mhamed also created a hard core ‘regular’ brigade of up to 3,000 full-time, paid fighters equipped from central arsenals. As well as Abd el Krim’s green-turbaned huffaz bodyguard of Ait Waryaghar based at his Ajdir headquarters, these regulars were divided into five tabors of about 500 men, organized on the Franco-Maghzan model in companies, half-companies, platoons and squads. Officers, who owed their promotion to personal prowess, imposed severe and direct discipline, and displayed different numbers of red turban-cords as rank insignia; the 1st to 3rd Tabors were entirely Rifian, the 4th and 5th of mixed tribesmen. About 350 other regulars, distinguished by black turbans, manned some of the captured guns. (Partly prompted by the Rifians’ use of artillery, the press exaggerated tales about European renegades serving as intructors and even leaders in battle. Abd el Krim would state that he never had more than a total of about 50 white men between 1921 and 1926, nearly all coerced prisoners or deserters, who were kept out of the front line and employed as technicians.)40
Taken all in all, it is tempting to see in Abd el Krim’s Jibha Rifiya the first example of a phenomenon not unknown in our own times: a charismatic and ruthless central leadership, manipulating a diffuse pan-tribal organization that exploited modern weapons in the service of traditional guerrilla skills – a leadership articulating a simultaneous appeal to both ethnic pride and conservative Islam; understanding both the international commercial value of its local natural resources, and the narratives that appealed to parts of the international media; and with effective access to those media and the political interests that they served.
DURING THE CAMPAIGN SEASON OF 1923, while Poeymirau’s columns were fighting their way up into the Middle Atlas, in Spain the machinery of the state was breaking down. There were mutinies in Barcelona and Malaga among troops mobilized for Morocco, ministers were resigning in despair, and (with King Alfonso’s tacit approval) a group of generals carried out a military coup. Their choice of a leader – in the avuncular person of the Captain-General of Barcelona, Don Miguel Primo de Rivera – was interesting; although a popular and much-decorated veteran, he was known to be an abandonista at heart. In his manifesto of 23 October 1923, Primo promised all things to all men, appealing for support for a carefully unspecified programme. His regime imposed strict censorship and banned demonstrations, but also launched major public works and gave Army NCOs a generous pay rise.41
The fighting on both Moroccan fronts was costly but indecisive for both sides during the bad winter of 1923/4; more than a quarter of the available troops were tied down in static positions, and the Army, while greatly enlarged, had no coherent plan for regaining the intitiative. In May 1924 the pace of Moroccan attacks picked up, particularly along the Oued Lau on the eastern edge of the Djibala, where a series of assaults were orchestrated by a young former soldier of the Regulares and one-time protegé of Raisuli, Ahmed Heriro of the Beni Hozmar tribe. After shifting his loyalty to the brothers Abd el Krim the previous year, he did not immediately try to enlist the Ghomara and Djibala tribes explicitly in his new masters’ cause, but roused them to fight the Spanish for their own good reasons. In June, the fighting came close to Tetuan, and by late July these warriors had isolated the Oued Lau outpost line and were fighting off relief attempts. (Shaken by their first encounters with armoured cars, the Berbers had quickly adapted; they discovered that the crews’ vision was very restricted, so they lay flat until a car passed close and then leapt up to shoot through the ports and set fire to the fuel tank. The crew of an immobilized and isolated armoured car faced an unenviable choice.)
On 24 July 1924, Primo de Rivera arrived to visit both fronts; recognizing the wretched state of the Army, he favoured withdrawal from the whole hinterland and indirect rule through negotiated agreements with local leaders, including Raisuli and Abd el Krim. This proposal to accept defeat aroused furious resentment among the dedicated combat officers of the Tercio and Regulares, but while Primo handled this deftly, he only modified rather than abandoned his plans.42 On 8 September he unveiled them: in the western theatre all the troops would withdraw into the most northern and western parts of the peninsula behind a new ‘Primo Line’ of posts (see Map 20).
The tribesmen, predictably, did not let them go easily. There were many desperate rearguard actions, stores and arsenals were abandoned yet again, and Sergeant Barea wrote that the Spanish ransomed some blockhouse garrisons by paying the Berbers two rifles per soldier to allow them to escape. With the exception of elites like Lieutenant-Colonel Franco’s Tercio, Prim
o de Rivera was appalled by the Army’s low spirits and levels of skill, and took personal command of operations (narrowly escaping from an ambush imself]. The climax of this series of evacuations was a major operation by some 40,000 men to cut a broader corridor through from Tetuan to Chefchaouen in order to withdraw its garrison. This meant heavy fighting under torrential rains until mid-December, and the total cost of the withdrawals to the Primo Line – never admitted – was conservatively estimated at some 18,000 casualties. Worn out, but at least comforted by Primo’s decisive command style, the western army settled in behind a tight line of outposts sited 500 yards apart and protected by searchlights and minefields.43
THE TRIBESMEN HAD CAPTURED more rich booty, the Spanish area of control had been halved, and, thanks to Ahmed Heriro, the Abd el Krim brothers had gained great prestige in the Djibala. The last obstacle there was Raisuli, and in January 1925 the younger Abd el Krim moved decisively against him. He gave Heriro 300 regulars with four machine guns and 600 Ait Waryaghar and Timsaman levies, who, on 23 January at Tazrut, captured Raisuli, his armoury and his gold. For so many years a legend of cunning and tyranny, the great brigand was now a notably diminished figure; although still only in his early fifties he had long been suffering from dropsy, and his grotesquely swollen legs would no longer support him. He was carried to the coast and then by motorboat back to the Rif, where he died (perhaps even of natural causes) at Tamasint in April 1925. Those Djibala tribes that had remained in thrall to him now came over to Heriro and Abd el Krim with some haste. Since the Spanish front west of Melilla was still stalled around Tizi Azza, by early spring of 1925 virtually the whole area bordering the French zone was unguarded and vulnerable to a triumphant and geographically unified bloc of the Rifians and their allies. The still unsubmitted tribes of the zonal frontier territory were mesmerized by Abd el Krim’s success, and south of them only a thin crust of the peaceful Hayana and Cherarga confederacies stood between him and the western Fez – Taza corridor.
Lyautey was confronted, just 40 miles from the capital of French Morocco, by the creeping edge of what he called ‘an autonomous Muslim entity, organized and modernized, supported by numerous and warlike populations exalted by their constant success against the Spanish’.44 The marshal was exaggerating the Rifians’ organization and modernity, but the immediate threat they posed was real enough. He now found himself in direct competition with Abd el Krim for the cooperation of the tribes who lay between them, of whom the most important were the 25,000-odd Beni Zeroual along each side of the Ouergha river valley. On the outcome of that competition depended the continuing obedience of the Tsouls and Branès further east, astride the road from Algeria; and they in turn were the gatekeepers of the defiant Taza Pocket of the northern Middle Atlas. If Abd el Krim could collapse the lintel of the French archway it might bring down much of the eastern pillar. Primo de Rivera’s withdrawal from most of the zonal border had finally exposed the potentially fatal contradictions of the Franco-Spanish agreement dating from the birth of the Protectorate in 1912.
Abd el Krim’s own options were far from clear-cut. Whatever his renown among Western liberals innocent of Moroccan realities, the only foreign support that could make any difference was overt recognition by a national government, and whatever their distaste for Spanish methods, no government was going to challenge France and her client sultan by endorsing Rifian independence before the fact. What Abd el Krim needed was another divided, pessimistic Spanish cabinet that could be harassed into making some hasty concession – almost anything would do, so long as it could be presented to the world as implying some measure of de facto recognition. Instead, he faced a dictatorship that was relatively tolerable to most middle-class Spaniards, headed by a general whose calming leadership might nurture a gradual renewal of the Army’s offensive capabilities. Despite the Rifians’ many tactical successes, Abd el Krim’s only long-term strategic hope lay in the inherent instability of Spanish politics. In the meantime, it was clearly in his interests to avoid goading the French into active opposition.
THE FOCUS OF LYAUTEY’S and Abd el Krim’s mutual sensitivity had for some time been the large and grain-rich Beni Zeroual tribe that formed the buffer between them on both banks of the Ouergha. Technically this free people lay within the Spanish zone, but since the Spanish had never come this far south they allowed the French to handle all relations with the tribe, and the influential sharifian leader of the Derkaoua religious brotherhood, whose zaouia was at Amjot, was in Lyautey’s pocket. Domination by either their northern or southern neighbours was equally unwelcome to the Beni Zeroual, whose leaders had to make continual recalculations of the relative threats and rewards offered by each. Both the French and the Rifians would venture into their territory by the old methods of clan-by-clan persuasion, but Abd el Krim’s was the rougher wooing.
In 1924, the Rifians had increased their pressure for alliances, tribute and rations, crossing into Beni Zeroual territory to take what they wanted by violence. Encouraged by Lyautey’s agents, some Beni Zeroual clans took up arms to resist them during April 1924; accepting French subsidies and the insurance of a limited presence in their territory carried the risk of creeping French control, but in the face of the immediate and more violent Rifian threat it was attractive to some chiefs. In May, 12,000 French troops crossed to the north bank of the Ouergha, by agreement, to install outposts on the hills protecting the grainlands from the north. One of the units involved was the Mounted Company/2nd REI, now commanded by Captain Prince Aage, who forded the Ouergha from the assembly point at Ain Aicha and marched through a richly cultivated country between villages that were aloof but unthreatening. When the Colonial troops began building their posts, there was one Rifian attack near Bou Adel on 6/7 June, but its easy defeat increased French prestige locally. In the first week of July, the posts were finished and the covering troops marched back to Fes.45
The French advance had surprised Abd el Krim, and the new posts cut him off from the Oued Ouergha breadbasket in a season when the Rif was suffering yet another bad harvest. His attempt to lure Lyautey into de facto recognition with an offer of border demarcation talks had been rejected. Lyautey increased his political pressure on the Beni Zeroual to accept a more definitive alliance, and some leaders agreed to this divisive suggestion. In September 1924, while the Rifians’ attention was held by Spanish operations around Chefchaouen, more Colonial troops were sent into Beni Zeroual country to thicken up the line of ‘doorbell’ outposts on the hills, and this in turn provoked those chiefs who opposed the Derkaoua Sharif to seek alliances with Abd el Krim. As winter closed down active operations, both French and Rifians stepped up their political and logistic preparations in the frontier marches separating them. While Paris was distracted by financial crises and trouble in the occupied Rhineland, Lyautey – his army throughout Morocco now reduced to about 54,500 men – continued to warn of the danger posed by the Rifian pseudo-state, and requested reinforcements to strengthen the zonal border. These were few, and long delayed; nevertheless, the marshal still had faith in his old repertoire of political manoeuvres, and was emphatically against any direct French involvement in ‘Spain’s war’.46
IT MUST HAVE BEEN during the first months of 1925, after his destruction of Raisuli consolidated his grip on the Djibala, that Abd el Krim reached the opposite conclusion. Exactly what he hoped to gain by the gamble of opening a third fighting front has been widely discussed. He and his counsellors were far too well informed to imagine that they could gain control of significant areas of French Morocco, most tribes of which would instinctively resist Rifian incursions (not on the sultan’s or Lyautey’s account, but on their own). His followers could raid and destroy, but could not occupy territory in any great depth or hold captured towns.
Sophisticated or not, Abd el Krim was still the son of a culture in which war between comparable rivals was the prelude to intertribal negotiations, and whatever the disparity in their resources, he saw himself as Lyautey’s equal in
dignity and legitimacy. He may not have grasped the fundamental differences between the Spanish and the French national moods – the one worn down by decades of failure; the other victorious, at huge sacrifice, in an infinitely greater ordeal, and motivated by an impatient sense of entitlement. He had killed many thousands of Spanish soldiers and forced their vacillating governments to treat with him; now they had fled before him again, abandoning much of what they had previously gained. Perhaps, unable fully to imagine the French psychological legacy from 1914 – 18, he believed that if he could shock and humiliate them by taking Fes and/or Taza he could provoke widespread rebellions and force them, too, to negotiate to his advantage. He certainly listened to those over-confident advisers – both French Communists and European mining interests – who still held out the prospect of foreign support.
Behind these calculations we may presume that he was simply carried along by the need to ensure the continued loyalty of the fickle tribes by feeding his newly enlarged domain and maintaining the momentum of his victories. Whatever the balance of reasons for his decision, its consequences would be spectacular.
18.
Dropping the Baton
1925
These native chiefs . . . we know them well. They are really simple fellows. Properly handled, they respond to kindness. There is, of course, not the slightest chance that this one will ever attack us.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 70