The fears, frustrations, and resentments of decolonization and the Cold War permeated international public responses to the disaster. For advocates of the French empire, the earthquake unleashed resentments and fears related to grow-ing American influence and the decline of French hegemony in Morocco. Mean-while, critics of French imperialism suspected malfeasance by the French state. A month after the disaster, the president of Liberia, William Tubman, accused the French of causing the earthquake by conducting a nuclear arms test at Reggane in the Algerian Sahara on February 13.17 This idea was also reflected in a memoir by a French officer at the base outside Agadir, who described the arrival of Mo-roccans at the base immediately after the earthquake who had come to express anger at the French, which the officer attributed to a Moroccan belief that the atomic tests had caused the earthquake.18
Both French and American diplomats hoped that disaster aid would bring
“political benefit,”19 particularly regarding the issue of base tenure. The inter-national character of the disaster response was shaped not only by the legacy of French colonialism but also by the consequence of the Cold War geopoliti-cal situation: the American military presence at Port Lyautey and three Strate-gic Air Command airbases meant that American as well as French forces had played a prominent role in the immediate response, alongside Royal Moroccan Army troops. As in the case of the floods of December 1958 and January 1960, those French and American officials who hoped to use disaster response to fos-ter goodwill were disappointed when the resulting publicity fell short of expec-tations. Competing to gain public relations capital in the Moroccan political market, both French and American diplomats complained that their NATO ally was suppressing information. The French embassy in Rabat complained that the Moroccan press gave full treatment only to American earthquake relief, a fact which officials attributed to the more accommodating policy of the United States regarding base evacuation.20 In addition, a daily paper in Tangiers, Es-paña, had run photographs of military rescue efforts provided by the US Con-sul General there; one of these photos depicted French sailors and airmen, but they were not identified, and the credit caption “U.S. Navy” seemed misleading.
An American diplomat meanwhile accused the Agence France-Presse and the French-language papers of Casablanca of giving short shrift to American contri-butions.21 The French also hoped that their efforts in Agadir would earn good publicity elsewhere in Africa, but expressed disappointment when the press in
Accra, forged in the anti-colonial struggle, failed to mention French disaster assistance when covering Agadir.22
Both the Moroccan opposition press and the Palace were quick to capitalize on the apparent crassness of French hopes that gratitude for disaster aid would translate into the extension of French base tenure. Information Minister Ahmed el Alaoui stated that “Aid from a foreign country in such a catastrophe does not mean the foreign country has a right to bases there.”23 The Istiqlal opposition party’s Arabic-language daily, Al Alam, was more acerbic, stating that, if disaster aid were to result in permission to maintain bases, then it was the Americans and Spanish who should keep their bases, since, according to the paper, these coun-tries had played the largest role in rescue efforts. Moreover, the paper asserted sarcastically that Moroccans might as well invite Italy and West Germany to establish bases, since they, too, had provided aid.24 The weekly Al-Istiqlal called upon Moroccans to remain focused on nationalist priorities despite the earth-quake, citing the importance of not only base evacuation but also Moroccan support for the cause of Algerian independence and the pursuit of Moroccan control of the Sahara—the latter cause made more urgent by the French atomic testing “in our territory.”25
To the dismay of would-be disaster diplomats, voices of discord soon emerged among the French. In Orléansville and Fréjus in the 1950s, advocates of empire had stressed solidarity between the European French and the Algerians, who had recently been declared fully equal citizens of France. Journalists and com-mentators such as Gaston Bonheur had often added their voices to the official chorus of solidarity. Because Morocco was independent, there was less French motivation to present a public face of solidarity, resulting in hostile polemics in the press.
Tangier, the most international of Moroccan cities, became a focal point of French anxieties. Far from the carnage, resentments about France’s new relation-ship with Morocco erupted, resentments which centered on the apparent lack of a sense of dependence on the part of the Moroccan leadership, and on fears of France’s declining influence vis-à-vis other foreign powers in the kingdom. On March 3, Pierre Bouffanais, the French minister plenipotentiary at the Tangier consulate, accused Radiodiffusion Marocaine of “disloyalty,” for “systematically minimizing the contributions of the French armed forces in organizing relief.”26 Bouffanais also resented the lack of coverage given by the Agence-France Press, which, in his view, should have devoted less front-page space to Sekou Toure’s visit with Mohammed V, and more to the Catholic mass for the dead celebrated
at the French church in Tangier. Bouffanais blamed this on the “Moroccaniza-tion” of the agency’s staff.27
Bouffanais’s complaints went beyond the frustrations of underpublicized di-saster diplomacy, however. A speech by Crown Prince Hassan declared that a new Agadir would be inaugurated on March 2, 1961, and connected this inau-guration with the five-year anniversary of Morocco’s independence. Bouffanais alleged that French colonists interpreted this as a continuation of Moroccan
“anti-French excitation campaigns.” 28 According to Bouffanais, the French of Tangier had “reacted forcefully” against this alleged ingratitude, with the result that their “initial grand élan of solidarity with all the victims” became more “nu-anced,” and the French community very quickly shifted their generosity toward the goal of assisting only the French disaster victims, making it difficult to coor-dinate relief collection efforts with the Moroccan authorities. Bouffanais linked the purportedly new “cleavage” between Moroccans and foreigners to anxieties about the new French relationship with the whole Arab world, “where Islam reigns, where the forces of pan-Arabism are unleashed.”Bouffanais also stated that suspicions about religious discrimination in the distribution of donations had been expressed by Moroccan Jews and were shared by the French as well.29
French colonists, according to Bouffanais, deplored what they saw as the hos-tility and incompetence of the Moroccan state, characterized by “panic and inef-ficiency” as well as by publicity-seeking egotism. (How colonists in Tangier were well-placed to judge the emergency response in the Moroccan south remains unclear.) The French minister concluded that the root of the problem was “the power of the word in Arab countries,” and the “illusion” that words could sub-stitute for effective government.30 The ideas expressed by Bouffanais were not new: they echoed old colonial discourses about threats to French dominance.
Accusations of “verbalism” had been a common disparagement of dissidents who challenged French power in the colonies.31
By March 12 the uproar in Tangier had reached Paris. Senator Bernard Lafay of the center-left Gauche démocratique formally asked whether the Ministry of Foreign Affairs might request that the Red Cross conduct an inquiry into the
“hesitations” and “counter-orders” that had resulted in the deaths of individuals, buried in the ruins, who might have been saved by quick and resolute action.32 Going beyond Bouffanais’s vague assertions of state “incompetence,” and La-fay’s thinly veiled implication, Paris Jour explicitly accused Prince Hassan of misconduct for his decision to halt rescue operations on the third day after the earthquake.33 Al-Istiqlal responded by accusing Lafay and the French press not only of insensitivity toward Moroccan suffering but also of violating Moroccan
sovereignty by questioning the handling of internal affairs. When catastrophe had struck Fréjus, the paper noted, Moroccans had sent donations without med-dling in French domestic matters.34
On March 30, Europe-Magazine in Brussels put forward still more acerbic accusations of Moroccan incompetence, alleging that Moroccan troops had ar-rived tardily on the scene and had “accomplished practically nothing except issue lamentations and implore Allah” while French, American, and Dutch troops engaged in rescue efforts. The article went on to mock Moroccan ambitions for base evacuation, despite the role played by the bases in rescue efforts, and ridi-culed plans for the reconstruction of Agadir (“With what money? Undoubtedly with ours, and that of the other European powers, and America.”) Hassan was accused of self-aggrandizement in pursuit of personal popularity in a country where he was “unanimously detested.”35 Similar arguments were expressed in still stronger terms in Le Figaro by André Figueres, who stated that more lives would have been saved “if the rescue work had been directed by someone seri-ous.” Figueres singled out the thirty-year-old Hassan, stating that the “panic and nonchalance of a ridiculous adolescent had condemned people to death, undoubtedly including French families.”36 Figueres blamed the French left for handing over power to such incompetents: the problem, for him, was inherent in decolonization, which spelled doom for the accomplishments of the colonial period. For French diplomats, however, the anti-Moroccan sentiment exhibited in the wake of the disaster threatened French interests. The minister-counsellor at the French embassy, Le Roy, pointed out that Crown Prince Hassan was one of France’s most important allies within the Moroccan government, and that by attacking him, the French press was playing into the hands of the Palace’s opponents, presumably meaning the Istiqlal party that was demanding the im-mediate evacuation of the French military bases. Moreover, Le Roy feared that these attacks might undermine any possibility that the positive role played by the French base in Agadir would lessen the king’s support for their evacuation.37