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The Consequences. The consequences came swiftly. Morocco's Sultan protested that France had doublecrossed him: "The worst blow my honor has ever been dealt," cried he. "Morally it's worse than my exile in 1953. If I had been in Paris I would have said imprison me and my son, but free these men who are prisoners only because they trusted me." The Tunisian ambassador to Paris wept at the news. Alain Savary, Mollet's Secretary of State for Morocco and Tunisia, resigned. Tunisia's French-educated Bourguiba recalled his ambassador from Paris and went into an all-night Cabinet session. "This was going to be a peace conference, and it's liable to become a council of war," he said. "North Africa is moving toward a showdown of force."
In Algeria French forces reported killing 30 more guerrillas. But this was more than offset by the stirring up of anti-French feeling in Morocco and Tunisia, which had been quiet for weeks. In Tunisia eight members of Bourguiba's irregular forces died fighting French troops near the Algerian border. And in Morocco young Arabs marched through the streets chanting "Free Ben Bella" and "Liberate Algeria." When the Meknes police chief tried to stem the mob, one of his own men shot him to death. Screaming crowds raged through the city, killing any European in sight, stopping cars and burning them with passengers inside. Mobs burned some 200 French-owned farmsteads in the countryside, killed 40 Europeans. Reluctantly Moroccan authorities had to let French forces restore order. General René Cogny, supreme commander in Morocco (and commander in North Viet Nam at the time of Dienbienphu), rushed to Meknes to direct the defense in person. The Moroccan government of Premier Si Bekkai, a moderate, fell. In its place the Sultan named a new government, dominated by the anti-French Istiqlal (Independence) Party.
In Paris, determined to make the best of their coup, the French announced that they had captured 25 Ibs. of secret and incriminating documents in the DC-3 and were sure that they could now prove the complicity of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Algerian rebellion. But hitherto the proved method of minimizing Nasser's influence in North Africa was to establish a climate of friendship among Arab leaders. The Sultan of Morocco and the premier of Tunisia, the two men who by their moderation have done most to restore order in North Africa, stood discredited before their people for trusting the French. In the end this melancholy fact was apt to outweigh 25 Ibs. of captured documents.
* But Mollet's government has been perfectly willing to deal with these "criminals" before: Pierre Commin, acting secretary-general of Mollel's Socialist Party, acted as Mollet's go between in September at secret meetings in Rome with one of the arrested rebels, Mohammed Khider.