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Ahmed Balafrej
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أحمد بلافريج
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Ahmed Balafrej in 1950
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| Representative to Hassan II and Minister of Foreign Affairs | |
| In office 5 January 1963 – 13 November 1963 | |
| Monarch | Hassan II |
| Preceded by | under the authority of Hassan II |
| Succeeded by | Ahmed Reda Guedira (as Minister of Foreign Affairs) |
| President of the Governing Council of Morocco and Minister of Foreign Affairs | |
| In office 12 May 1958 – 13 December 1958 | |
| Monarch | Mohammed V |
| Preceded by | Mbarek Bekkay (as prime minister) |
| Succeeded by | Abdallah Ibrahim |
| Minister of Foreign Affairs | |
| In office 28 October 1956 – 16 April 1958 | |
| Prime Minister | Mbarek Bekkay |
| Preceded by | office established |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1908-09-05)5 September 1908 Rabat, Morocco |
| Died | 14 April 1990(1990-04-14) (aged 81) Rabat, Morocco |
| Political party | Istiqlal |
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Ahmed Balafrej (Arabic: أحمد بلافريج; September 5, 1908, in Rabat – April 14, 1990[1]) was the Prime Minister of Morocco between May 12, 1958, and December 2, 1958.[2] He was a significant figure in the struggle for the independence of Morocco.
Balafrej was the architect of the unity of the Moroccan Nationalist Movement (mainly of the Istiqlal party of which he was the secretary-general from 1943 to 1960), which led to the independence of Morocco on March 2, 1956.
More of a diplomat and statesman than a party man, after a stint as President of the Council in 1958, he distanced himself from the crises and splits that rocked Istiqlal after independence.
He abandoned public office in 1972 without having given evidence of his direct participation in the history of Morocco.
Like many of his friends at the time, he offered the excuse of the disappearance of his archives in the multiple police searches, which violated his long fight for the independence of Morocco.
Ahmed Balafrej was born in 1908 into a family of notables from the medina of Rabat, a small city of fewer than fifty thousand inhabitants at the time. His family name links him to the descendants of the 3000 Muslim Hornacheros from Extremadura, expelled from Spain, who landed on a beach in Rabat in the spring of 1610 and founded the legendary republic of Bouregreg there.
His family financed his primary studies at the school of the notable Bab Laâlou, and his secondary studies at the Muslim College of Rabat, later known as the Moulay Youssef college. The colonial system did not allow him to pass his college classes in Rabat, so he obtained his baccalaureate in Paris at the Lycée Henri-IV.
He completed his Arabic studies at the Fouad I University in Cairo during the year 1927, then back in Paris at the Faculty of the Sorbonne (degree in letters, diploma in political science) from 1928 to 1932. This intellectual training, exceptional under the Protectorate (only 53 Moroccan high school graduates between 1920 and 1934), shaped his national pride, then his nationalist commitment.
May 1926 saw the bloodthirsty crushing of the Rif Republic, the last act of armed resistance to colonization. Balafrej, like his young companions, took note of the occupier's military superiority and counted on the patient wear and tear of colonial totalitarianism to its self-destruction. He became "the architect" of the political organization of the nationalist claim and it will remain so until the day after Independence.
In August 1926, he created "The Society of Friends of the Truth" in Rabat, the first form of a Moroccan nationalist organization, which was as much a secret society as a political discussion club.
He began his history studies at La Sorbonne in December 1927. At the time this was the ideal course to study for any diplomatic career, and marked the start of his ambitions as a man of a future Moroccan state. This very naturally led him to participate in the creation of the Association of North African Muslim Students in France (AEMNAF) alongside Mohamed Hassan Ouazzani, his junior in Parisian studies, and the Tunisian Ahmed Ben Miled. This association was located in Latin Quarter in Paris at 115 boulevard Saint-Michel and its members included Mohamed El Fassi and Abdelkhalek Torrès, emblematic figure of the nationalist struggle in Morocco under Spanish occupation. Led by Ouazzani in 1929, then by Balafrej in 1930, at the time it was qualified by the police as a "Nationalist Association", following its decision not to accept Maghreb students (mainly Algerians, Algeria being then a French colony), who would have accepted French naturalization.
He was twenty-two years old in 1930. The Berber Dahir, imposed by the colonial authority as the first step towards direct administration, was at the same time intended to break the nationalist agitation that animated the urban elites of Morocco.
Balafrej, from Paris, alerted by his companions in Salé and informed of the protest movement that was developing in mosques in Morocco, actively participated in the internationalization of the protest.
For this purpose, in the summer of 1930, he met with the Druze Amir Shakib Arslan, then a refugee in Lausanne, and emblematic figure of the Nahda.
The personality and the political intelligence of this great Syro-Lebanese leader and intellectual of Western and Arab dual culture could only seduce Balafrej who, as an orphan, encountered a paternity figure not only of character but of conviction.
The passionate friendship that bound them from that point onward strengthened their feeling of legitimacy to go on to modify the course of the history of Morocco, and, of the Arab nation.
They both shared the same conviction that the offensive of de-Islamization of the Arab nation, in which the Berber Dahir participated, was a determining factor of the colonial occupation. He was opening up to pan-Arabism.
In return, he involved Chekib Arslan in the international protest against the Dahir and in the support of the Maghreb nationalist claim. Extending a trip to Andalusia, Arslan met with Balafrej, El Fassi, and Benabdeljalil, in Tangier, on August 8, 1930. He then started a series of conferences at the invitation of Haj Abdesslam Bennouna and Abdelkhaleq Torrès in Tetouan for ten days. His visit served to federate nationalists from North and South Morocco for the first time.
Through leaflets sent from cities, alms tours took place as a pretext for propaganda or gatherings on the return of pilgrims from holy places; links were forged between urban youth and tribal notables from the countryside. In 1932, while police violence and arrests stifled internal protest against the Dahir, Balafrej developed protest from outside. Meeting Chekib Arslan again in Madrid during his trip to Morocco, he supported the creation of the "Hispano-Muslim Association" in Tetouan created by Abdesslam Bennouna on the initiative of the deputy of the young Spanish Republic, José Franchi Roca (es).
The protest against the Dahir was only one of Balafrej and his companions' commitments. At the beginning of 1932, Balafrej, Ouazzani, and Ben Abdeljalil approached Robert-Jean Longuet, Parisian lawyer, anti-colonialist, and socialist, to secure the defense of the Moroccan nationalists harassed by the authorities. Balafraj and Ouazzani founded the journal Maghreb in 1932.[3]
With Longuet in charge of it, Ahmed Balafrej was the most prolific editor, accompanied by El Ouazzani, Lyazidi and Ben Abdeljalil. Entirely funded by nationalist circles, over a thousand copies were distributed in Morocco and France starting in July 1932; Balafrej's articles allowed him to make his first contacts with French liberal and socialist political circles, as well as the leading spheres of the young Spanish republic. It was banned from broadcasting in Morocco in 1934, like all the nationalist-inspired press.
Despite the annoyances and arrests, the international press campaign generated from Paris, Cairo, and northern Morocco forced the colonial authorities to render the Dahir practically meaningless in April 1934.
The years 1933-1934 saw the appearance of the Moroccan Action Committee (CAM), a grouping of young urban nationalists with cells created in Fez (Allal El Fassi and Mohamed Hassan El Ouazzani), Rabat (Ahmed Balafrej and Mohamed Lyazidi), Salé (Saïd Et Abdelkrim Hajji, Ahmed Maâninou, Mohamed Hassar, and Boubker El Kadiri), and Tétouan (Abdesslam Bennouna, Abdelkhalek Torrès, and Mohamed Daoud). The CAM constitutes the historic heart of the Moroccan nationalist movement.
From 1934, he participated in the drafting of the CAM platform known as the "Plan de Réforme". His name does not appear in the document, because at the same time he was negotiating the authorization to open the M'hammed Guessous school in Rabat, the first non-colonial bilingual Moroccan school, which would become the crucible of the new Moroccan elite of post-independence.
This 134-page printed memoir on French policy in Morocco, of reformist inspiration, was published in Arabic and then in French in November 1934; at the time it did not contain any request for independence. Its argument, very legal in its form, simply demands that the colonial authority respect its own laws.
Ignored by the circles of the Parisian parliamentary left, he received no comment from the authorities of the French Republic.
In February 1937, he became the secretary-general of the CAM, replacing Mohamed Hassan El Ouazzani, whose restless ambition, at least equal to that of Allal El Fassi, urged him to create, together with a small handful of militants, his own organization, which would later become the modest PDI.
The prohibition of the CAM by the colonial authority led to the organization of the clandestine congress of the new "National Party" in Rabat in April 1937. The incidents of October 1937 led to the arrests and banishment of leading executives, including Allal El Fassi, who was exiled to Gabon for nine years.
For these Moroccan nationalist youth, these events marked the definitive abandonment of the hope of any sharing of power with the colonial authorities.
End of colonial rule and complete independence; such are the conclusions drawn by the whole of Moroccan society, paradoxically deprived for five years of its most effective activists.
While undergoing treatment in a sanatorium in Switzerland, Ahmed Balafrej escaped the roundup. He was only 29 years old and one of the few nationalist leaders who were practically enjoying full freedom.
France's defeat in June 1940 altered the balance of the colonial powers. Like all the nationalists of the French colonies in that period, in the midst of a war that was not theirs, Ahmed Balafrej grasped the opportunity to further the cause of independence as far as he could.
In the summer of 1940, he moved to Tangier, which the Spanish authorities, profiting from the invasion of France by the German army, annexed on June 14, 1940.
The new colonial masters, heady from their military victories, declared intentions, if not unclear, at the very least obscure. The entire Arab Maghreb, Morocco included, were annexed by fascist Italy, while Nazi Germany wanted to bring fascist Spain out of its neutralism by granting it the annexation of all of Morocco. At the same time, Radio Berlin or Radio Bari, beamed pro-nationalist propaganda including all the acts of nationalist resistance censored by the colonial administration. Few were the brilliant men who were able, in the autumn of 1940, to give clear directives in the nationalist struggle. Balafrej assumes his responsibilities.
Driven by Chekib Arslan, who arranged the meeting, he travelled from Switzerland to Berlin for a few days in October 1940, to signal to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the importance of acknowledging Moroccan independence without delay. "I am trying to see what likely fate awaits us, but I can tell you right now: do not let yourself take part in the German siren call", he wrote in a letter addressed to his companions.
He was one of those figures of Arab nationalism who was very much in opposition to any alliance with Nazism, refusing in advance any support from the Axis forces, which in any case would never come.
Balafrej secretly returned to northern Morocco at the end of 1940, prior to his receiving authorization in December 1942, which was to grant him freedom of movement in his country amid Operation Torch, which, at a cost of 1,800 dead, allowed the landing of Anglo-American troops on the coasts of Casablanca.
At the end of 1942, the Moroccan population was in an alarming general state, in conditions of near starvation, aggravated by a typhus epidemic which decimated cities and the countryside. Food was rationed, despicably more for the Moroccans than for the colonists; the colonial administration, whose Pétainist bracket had strongly exacerbated anti-Arab racism; Muslims and Jews alike were taken over by the Free France government of General de Gaulle. In 1943, Allal El Fassi was still in exile, and apart from timid approaches, quickly broken off, it was rather through the surveillance of military security that contact continued between nationalists and the new colonial authorities.
The new leadership change came from the Sultan who met one-on-one with President Roosevelt on January 22, 1943, on the sidelines of the Anfa conference.
Assured of American support for the reinstatement of the monarchy, he decided from that date to publicly assume the independence claim, which he held to until independence.
In 1944, having intelligently anticipated the process of decolonization that the Anglo-French would inevitably initiate after their victory over Nazi Germany, Ahmed Balafrej is the historic drafter of the Manifesto of Independence of Morocco (Ouatiqate al-Istiqlal) signed by 67 of his nationalist friends. He also contributed to the founding of the Istiqlal party in 1944 becoming the first secretary of the party.
Publicly submitted to the sultan on January 11, 1944, this first public claim to independence led to his arrest by the French military security under the orders of Philippe Boniface, on January 28, 1944, and the arrest of 17 of the signatories, on the grounds that there was sharing of intelligence with the enemy. The explosion of protest which followed caused 60 deaths, and did not prevent, after four months of prison without trial, his exile in Corsica in May 1944. Moreover, the authorities were led to give up forcing him into exile in Madagascar, due only to his state of health, after they threatened him with the death penalty in a trial devoid of all reason and which would never see the light of day.
Amnestied and having returned to Morocco in June 1946, in September he founded the first national Arabic-language newspaper, Al Alam, of which he was the first editor-in-chief.
In 1947, following the historic keynote address by Sultan Mohamed V, in which the latter officially endorsed the independentist theses, the French colonial lobby lobbied for imposing General Juin, a colonial radical, as resident general in Morocco.
In 1947, Ahmed Balafrej took his family to safety in Tangier, and Madrid, from where he conducted a diplomatic campaign in the United States, Switzerland, France, and Spain in order to promote the Moroccan cause there.
Secretary General of the Istiqlal Party, he was considered above all, by those who knew him at that time, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of independent Morocco prior to its occurrence.
He gave priority to the internationalization of the national cause and pursued a diplomatic campaign aimed at increasing the recognition of Morocco's independence.
In particular, in New York, as a true spokesperson for the Moroccan cause, he ran the "Moroccan Bureau of Information and Documentation", whose releases he supervised even during his frequent trips.
Its strategy partly paid off, consists in forcing the French government to negotiate the abandonment of its prerogatives in matters of police, diplomacy, currency and the army to any sovereign Moroccan authority within internationally recognized borders.
Protected by a Pakistani diplomatic passport, it quickly gained the support of non-aligned countries. On the other hand, he must fight hard to convince American diplomacy to transfer from its French ally to an independent Moroccan power the defense of its strategic interests in the Mediterranean, in the midst of the cold war,
So in October 1953, he defended the cause of independent Morocco before the United Nations General Assembly. The vote on a resolution calling for Morocco's self-determination is adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. This decision should be placed in the context of the formalization of the concept of non-alignment six months later at the Colombo meeting, a prelude to the Bandung conference which made the French authorities aware that independence was inevitable.
In December 1952, the violent demonstration of the central quarries of Casablanca, in protest against the terrorist assassination of Tunisian trade union leader Ferhat Hached, is the pretext used to behead the national movement, all organizations included. The troops shoot the demonstrators killing a hundred, imprison some four hundred cadres of the Istiqlal party, exile its forty most senior officials. The sultan himself was exiled with his family to Madagascar in 1953.
Politics by Arms
Since 1952, but particularly in 1954, the violent repression of any independentist public expression, the flight abroad, or the clandestinity of the main leading cadres of the Independence Party, the very opportunistic Soviet military aid to the triumphant Egyptian nationalism favored the birth of armed resistance. "Politics by arms" competes with "the arms of politics".
Playing on the tolerance of the Spanish occupier of northern Morocco, the first groups of young resistance fighters were organized in Tetouan. Then gradually, around Nador, with the support of the first heads of the Algerian FLN, a Moroccan Liberation Army (ALM) was formed which, at the end of 1955, operated in a territory of around one hundred kilometers from the Rif to the Middle Atlas. The control of these armed groups becomes a strategic issue for the actors of independence: the Istiqlal party (Allal El Fassi, Ben Barka, Torres), emissaries of the royal family (Dr Khatib), or irredentists (Sanhaji, Mesaadi) ).
By conviction as much as by character, Balafrej favors the weapons of diplomacy. Unlike Allal el Fassi who, from Cairo, claims to be leader of the secret resistance, he maintains a distance from armed action, but without ever condemning it.
He never took sides in the violent clashes for the control of the armed groups that marked the first years of independence.
Incapable of resisting international pressure, especially American pressure, Paris is looking for interlocutors in Morocco with whom to build a Moroccan authority that is admittedly independent but docile, and to maintain its military presence throughout the Maghreb in order to play on an equal footing with the American Atlanticist power.
France is negotiating with Istiqlal
Thus in August 1955, drawing inspiration from the negotiations with Bourguiba which led to the independence of Tunisia, the French government decided to negotiate with the party of Balafrej and his companions, considered until then as extremists.
A French delegation of five ministers led by Edgar Faure meets in Aix-les-Bains, after some notables collaborators, or opportunists, or not very representative like the PDI, a delegation of Istiqlal led by the young Abderrahim Bouabid6. Not having been authorized to stay in France, Balafrej, from Geneva where the delegation meets daily, follows and directs the talks.
Aware of the risks of generalization of political violence, as well as of the possible hold-up of independence by some influential tribal notables, he sets the priorities of the Independence Party: return of the Sultan from exile as a non-negotiable prerequisite, then constitution, under the authority of the Sultan, of a transitional government, finally abrogation of the colonial treaty of Fez of 1912. This is the scenario that history retains.
The Istiqlal accompanies the monarchy
Without his inflexibility and that of the Istiqlal negotiators, Morocco would never have welcomed the return of Sultan Mohamed V and his family from his forced exile in early November 1955. This debt owed to him by the royal family, explains in part the singular loyalty that he maintains with Sultan Mohamed V, then his son Hassan II, until the divorce of 1972.
In November 1955, the Sultan of Morocco and Prince Hassan returned to Morocco. Their triumphant return, which popular memory still retains today, is organized and protected by the tremulous Ben Barka, effective "steward" of the Istiqlal party. The royal family, assailed by individual testimonies of allegiance or rallying, became aware of the indisputable representativeness of the party of which Balafrej was the strategist7.
A competition begins for the control of executive power where Balafrej tries to get the sultan to compose the transitional government according to a program and not a balance of rivalries which the royal cabinet would be the arbiter. On November 22, 1955, he summons and obtains in Madrid the agreement of the historical leaders of Istiqlal, including Allal el Fassi, against whom he opposes a personal rivalry of public notoriety, on the program assigned to the provisional government that the sultan s 'ready to constitute.
From left to right: Bouabid, Balafrej, Abdeljalil, Benjelloun returned from exile in November 1955.
Quickly, his return from exile with his companions on November 25, 1955, and the extraordinary congress of the Istiqlal party that he organized in Rabat in December 1955 and which confirmed it in his post of secretary general, authorized the promulgation of the first Moroccan transitional government. The way opens for the abrogation of the Treaty of Fez and the declaration of independence of the Kingdom of Morocco on March 2, 1956.
Modernist spirit, inspired as much by the thought of a Chekib Arslan as of a Djemâl ad-Dîn al-Afghânî, he was able to capture and integrate into his political struggle the moral rigor of anti-colonial French such as Robert-Jean Longuet, Daniel Guérin, Charles André Julien, François Mauriac, as much as respect for French politicians (Edgar Faure or Pierre Mendès France).
A certain idea of Morocco
Building the voice of Morocco in the world
In March 1956, independence entrusted power to a compromise government where his party agreed to have only 9 ministers out of 21, in accordance with the La Celle-Saint-Cloud agreements.
Prince Hassan takes command of the new National Army, assisted by Captain Oufkir, son of a collaborator and former officer of the French Army.
Now independent, Morocco must urgently organize the international representation of its interests. On April 26, 1956, Ahmed Balafrej officially became the Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of independent Morocco. He is reappointed to this post in the second government of M'barek Bekkai.
He is the true founder and initiator of Moroccan diplomacy. It was he who opened the first Moroccan embassies abroad, who set up the first consulates and who made Morocco's accession to major international organizations including the UN in July 1956, the League of Arab States and the organization. of African Unity. -
1956, first Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Balafrej and his collaborators8
Its first mission is the signing of the Franco-Moroccan convention of May 20, 1956, consecrating the foundation of a Moroccan diplomacy freed from French tutelage. Then there is the liberation of Tarfaya negotiated with Spain, then a Spanish colony, as well as the return of Tangier under Moroccan authority.
Without experienced executives, dependent on the commercial and financial flows of a France from which it is emancipating itself, ensuring its internal security through an Istiqlal party with authoritarian tendencies inherited from years of clandestinity, the Bekkaï government does not resist. not to clashes between clans and people.
On May 12, 1958, the Sultan resolved to appoint Balafrej President of the Council of the first and only fully istiqlalien government in the history of Morocco. Until December 2, 1958, he worked to build a modern constitutional monarchy for Morocco.
One of its outstanding actions is the promulgation of the code of public freedoms and the right of association, largely inspired by the French republican code in this area.
This law, although very widely violated since its edition, has never been called into question.
It remains the legal basis and the Moroccan singularity as much of the multiparty system as of the legal existence of non-governmental organizations, a potential melting pot of a civil society in the making.
It displays an uncompromising nationalist position with regard to French and American military presences on Moroccan soil but without really having the means for its policy.
It was Prince Hassan, who became King Hassan II, in his capacity as Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, who personally negotiated and obtained the evacuation, final in 1960 for the French soldiers, in 1963 for the American bases present. on Moroccan soil.
A situation of political violence shakes the newly independent Morocco at the end of 1958. Relinquishment of control of the new army commanded by Prince Moulay Hassan, far from the executive apparatus of the party and the violent clan struggles that shake it, forced to negotiate step by step and at the lowest cost the recovery of the prerogatives still under the control of the former colonial powers, Prime Minister Balafrej draws the consequences and presents the resignation of his government.
The unity of the National Movement that he embodied shattered with the series of splits from January 1959. The epilogue of this half-century of struggle for the independence of Morocco is sealed with the deletion, on the proposal of Allal El Fassi, from his post as Secretary General of the Istiqlal Party at the January 1960 Congress.
In 1962, he was once again briefly appointed by Hassan II as Minister of Foreign Affairs, then from 1963 to 1972, personal representative of the King, a protocol function on the sidelines of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs controlled by the confidants of the Royal Cabinet9. To date, he is the only one to have been given this function which, while paying tribute to his qualities as a statesman, "depoliticizes" the former head of a party in rivalry for hegemony with the Palace. .
In 1972, the arbitrary arrest by the political police led by General Oufkir of his son Anis, a modernist activist, made him resign from all his official functions.
He remains one of the only Moroccan politicians who had the courage to impose his resignation in a political system where this act of individual freedom remains inconceivable.
From that date, he retired from all political activity and died in May 1990 in Rabat following a long illness.
Place chosen by him during his lifetime, he rests inside the Moulay Mekki mosque
| Preceded by | Prime Minister of Morocco 1958 – 1958 |
Succeeded by |
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