EXTENSIÓN DE TIERRA VEGETAL

The fear of US-RDA leaders for Tamasheq political opposition to their rule came to a height between 1956 and 1959, when the territorial integrity of Soudan Français came under attack in various ways. The discovery of mineral riches in the Algerian Sahara in 1956, together with the gradual granting of autonomy and independence to the colonies of the Maghreb and French West Africa, provoked a political and military battle over Saharan territory involving France, Morocco and the political elites of Mauritania and Northern Soudan Français. The French attempted to keep the Sahara French through the creation of a new Saharan colony: The Organisation Commune des Régions Saharien- nes. Simultaneously the Moroccan Istiqlâl party claimed parts of the Sahara including Mauritania and the Soudanese north up to Timbuktu on historical grounds. These claims were enhanced, supported and juxtaposed in Mauritania and Soudan Français by a number of political players advocating either the Moroccan claims on Mauritania and Soudan Français or their own claims on a greater Mauritania. These advocates of a greater Maghreb formed a small poli-

46 _{Arrêté Territorial 191D. 1-3/10-4/1958, published in the Journal officiel du Soudan}

tical party, the Nahda al-Wattaniyya al-Mauritaniyya, Parti pour la Renaissance Mauritanienne (Mauritanian Renaissance Party), which played a crucial role in the conflict. Various Tamasheq and Bidân leaders in Soudan Français actively supported either the French or the Moroccan and Mauritanian claims, or all at the same time. Their support for these ‘foreign’ claims made them highly suspect in the eyes of the Malian nationalists. After independence they were regarded as enemies of the Malian state and ‘vassals’ to the ‘French neo-impe- rialist cause’.

The OCRS

The OCRS was an attempt to keep the Sahara French, despite the imminent independence of the Maghrebin and West African colonies. Although the French efforts to remain in control over the Sahara became more intense after the discovery of hydrocarbons in the Algerian Sahara and the start of the Algerian war of independence in November 1954, the idea of a French Sahara predated these events. The first idea to unify the Sahara into one territory dates from 1951, when Emile Belime, the former director of the Office du Niger in Soudan Français, proposed to nationalise the Sahara. Belime headed a study committee for the creation of a French Sahara, which published its findings in 1952, and in that same year Senators Pierre Cornet and Pierre July proposed to regroup the Sahara into one autonomous Région under a High Commissioner of the Republic or into a Département. Their propositions were voted down in the National Assembly, but the idea remained alive and in 1953 Senator Paul Alduy invited the Government to promote the rational organisation of the economy in the Sahara.47 _{In 1956, the idea resurfaced with more urgency. In February 1956,}

oil was struck in Algeria, near the Libyan border, in the northernmost part of the Tamasheq world.48 _{Five months later, the largest oil well in Algeria until pre-}

sent started spouting its riches at Hassi Messaoud, while natural gas was pumped up at Hassi R’mel. At Colomb-Béchar, coal was mined. Various metals and other minerals were discovered in the Hoggar Mountains of Southern Alge- ria, and phosphor and iron ore were located in Mauritania. In a contemporary study on the creation of the OCRS, Jean-Louis Quermonne, professor of law in Grenoble remarked with some glee:

47 _{Based on: Keita, N. 2005. 3; Annexe au proces-verbal de la séance de l’Assemblée} Nationale du 9 mars 1956. ANSOM – 1affpol/2321/3; Jean-Louis Quermonne, L’Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes selon la loi du 10 janvier 1957. AMSAT – Dossier 35 – OCRS 1957-1962.

When he gave France a lot of Sahara for a lot of Sudan, Lord Salisbury declared: “The French Cock likes to scratch the Sand!” It seemed unlikely then that the Great Desert could harbour any useful riches, or at least not for a long time.49

Well, the French cock had scratched the sand and the discovery of natural gas, petroleum and other minerals underneath transformed the Sahara from a worthless stretch of sand and rocks into a potential goldmine. But the ongoing war of liberation in Algeria was threatening to spread into the Sahara, which would endanger the effective exploitation of this mineral potential. Unifying the Sahara into one territorial and administrative unit would facilitate countering military and propaganda actions from the Forces de Libération Nationale (FLN): the Algerian Liberation Army. Furthermore, the imminent independence of the sub-Saharan territories and the independence of the Maghreb could mean a loss of Saharan riches for France. This was made clear by the Moroccan claims on Mauritania, South Western Algeria and Northern Mali, and the subse- quent Moroccan invasion of Mauritania in 1956.

The parliamentary debates, bills and amendments on the Sahara between 1956 and 1957 show the ambiguity of the plan to unify the Sahara, and the resistance to these plans from African politicians. In March 1956, several differ- ent proposals were made in the National Assembly for Saharan unification. Proposition 1131 proposed to erect the total Saharan zone in a group of three French Départements with special status called Afrique Saharienne Française. Proposition 1198 simply proposed to ‘proclaim the French Sahara a “National Territory”’, as did propositions 1068 and 1627.50 _{What all these plans had in}

common was the idea that the Sahara should be put under direct French metropolitan rule. The Sahara was seen as French property, a mineral rich no- man’s-land, to be efficiently exploited and administered.

However, none of these projects had included Mauritania or the Soudanese, Nigerien, or Chadian parts of the Sahara. When the members of the Political Bureau of the Ministry of Overseas Territories discovered that these Saharan territories were not included, they brought this to the attention of their supe- riors.51 _{Overseas Territories was of the opinion that non-inclusion of the Saha-}

ran zones of AOF within a new Saharan territory would only enhance the admi- nistrative chaos. However, since all projects spoke of ‘nationalising the Sahara’, their idea to include the Saharan parts of these territories within the new ‘National Sahara’ met fierce resistance from African politicians.

49 _{Jean-Louis Quermonne, L’Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes selon la} loi du 10 janvier 1957. AMSAT – Dossier 35 – OCRS 1957-1962.

50 _{Sahara, administration générale, correspondance et études au sujet de l’OCRS,} 1954-1956. ANSOM – 1affpol/2321/4.

51 _{Sahara, administration générale, projets parlementaires et gouvernementaux au sujet} de l’organisation du Sahara, 1953-1956. ANSOM – 1affpol/2321/3.

One problem in the debates about administrative unification was how to delimit the French Sahara.52 _{To the west, north and east, this problem was easily}

solved. The French Sahara started in the west at the border with the Spanish Sahara. It ended to the north at the Moroccan border and the non-Saharan Algerian Départements and in the east at the border between Chad and the Republic of Sudan. Problems arose in the South. First, the leaders of Chad, Niger and Soudan Français did not relish the prospect of losing part of their future national territory, and the potential mineral riches it might conceal. The Soudanese leaders in particular fiercely opposed any territorial and political reorganisation that could be detrimental to their national territory.

A second problem was on what criteria the border between Sahara and Sahel should be drawn. On one side of the argument, the supporters of the Saharan unification believed the Sahara ended where the Soudan started. Here Soudan meant the original Arabic Bilâd as-Sudân – the ‘Land of the Blacks’. Both the Bidân and the Kel Tamasheq were seen as racially ‘white’. Accordingly, it was felt that those areas inhabited by the Bidân and the Kel Tamasheq were Saha- ran, and areas inhabited by the black population were not. The French oppo- sition to territorial restructuring countered this argument. They stated that many Bidân and Kel Tamasheq were black, that the majority of the Kel Tamasheq lived as far south as the Niger Bend and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), which could hardly be called Saharan, and that these populations were socially and economically interwoven with the populations surrounding them. Therefore, the idea of creating a new administratively unified Saharan territory including the AOF parts of the Sahara would end in chaos and problems for the nomad popu- lations.

Eventually, the project to unify the Sahara was put in the trusted hands of the Ivorian RDA leader and French Minister of State Felix Houphouët-Boigny, who managed to remove all the political angles. His focus was on the creation of an Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes (OCRS), in which no mention was made of any political or territorial reorganisation, or of the delimiting of Saharan borders. All Boigny proposed to do was to create an umbrella structure to coordinate economic and social developments in the Sahara, regardless of territory or state. Nevertheless, he had to defend his project against the Sou- danese leaders who still looked suspiciously on the OCRS as a French plan to annex their Saharan territory. Even in the final debates on Houphouët-Boigny's

52 _{Based on: Affaires politiques, Sahara, administration générale 1947-1958. ANSOM} – 1affpol/2207/1; Affaires politiques, Sahara, administration générale, 1951-1958. OCRS, correspondance, débats, études (militaire, sociale linguistique etc...). ANSOM – 1affpol/2208/1, under embargo until 2019.

project, the Soudanese Senator Amadou Bâ proposed to amend the law such that:

The organisation of the Saharan regions should in no case lead to the creation of an autonomous territory.53

After further debate, Houphouët-Boigny managed to convince the Souda- nese of the good intentions of the OCRS. His legal proposition was accepted and the OCRS was created on 10 January 1957. For Soudan Français this meant the inclusion of the Saharan parts of the Cercles Goundam, Timbuktu and Gao in the new structure. Soudanese suspicions were revived however, by the re- action of the French political establishment. François Mitterand, then Minister of Justice reacted in favour of the OCRS, but

I would nevertheless have liked a more structured Saharan territory, in greater conformity with its geographical realities, administratively more autonomous from Algeria and the Black African Territories bordering to the South.54

The ensuing creation of a Ministry of Saharan Affairs in June 1957, headed by Max Lejeune, former secretary of state at the Ministry of Defence made matters far worse. The new ministry was endowed with economic, social, diplo- matic and political competences over the Algerian Territoires du Sud, reshaped into French Départements in August 1957, and the Northern parts of Soudan Français, Niger and Tchad (the limits of which were never specified). The diplomatic and political competences given to this ministry made clear that the French had more than economic intentions with the OCRS.55 _{From that point}

onwards, the political leaders of the AOF were no longer the only ones to oppose the OCRS. The Ministry of Saharan Affairs had been created to the detriment of the competence of the Ministry of Overseas Territories. Thus, some colonial administrators in AOF, who did not want to lose a part of their job or influence, and the Ministry of Overseas Territories, which felt likewise, now backed the African politicians against the competition of this new ministry.

Marcel Cardaire and the Qadi of Timbuktu

The OCRS had fierce supporters within the French administration and military services, and also among the Bidân and Kel Tamasheq elite. Two players in particular stand out: the French intelligence officer in Soudan Français, Marcel

Cardaire; and the Bidân notable, Mohamed Mahmoud ould Cheick, better

known as ‘the Qadi of Timbuktu’.

53 _{Sahara, administration générale, correspondance et études au sujet de l’OCRS,} 1954-1956. ANSOM – 1affpol/2321/4.

54 _{François Mitterand in L’Essor, 08/03/1957. In: Keita, N. 2005: 7.} 55 _{Keita, N. 2005: 5.}

Of all the officers who served in Soudan Français and in the Sahara in the late 1950s Marcel Cardaire was probably the most influential and certainly the best known. It is no exaggeration to place him in line with early colonial ethno- graphers and intelligence officers as Paul Marty or Maurice Delafosse. An offi- cer in the Colonial Infantry, in 1954 Cardaire was posted in Soudan Français where he was integrated in the Bureau des Affaires Musulmanes. He was ob- sessed with the possible threats that pan-Islamism and various modernist cur- rents in Islam, generally labelled Wahabism, could pose to French influence in Muslim Africa, a subject he wrote an elaborate and well-informed book on.56

He initiated the so-called ‘Counter Reform’ movement to safeguard the in- fluence of quietist Sufi Islam on African Muslim civil servants, in collaboration with Amadou Hampaté Bâ and Abdelwahab Doukouré.57 _{Cardaire’s involve-}

ment in Saharan affairs began in October 1956, when he was asked by the Ministry of Defence to study the Spanish Sahara, the Saharan areas of Algeria, and the connections of its inhabitants with the AOF in political and religious matters.58 _{This request was connected to the conflict between Morocco and}

France over Mauritania (infra), and the ongoing Algerian war of independence. Cardaire took Mohamed Mahmoudould Cheick as his travel companion and interpreter, because of his connections with the communities Cardaire wanted to visit. They visited Tindouf, Atar, Colomb-Béchar, Ouargla, Ghardaïa, and Al- giers. Cardaire was rightly convinced that to the inhabitants of the Sahara, the French administrative frontiers played no role whatsoever when it came to in- formation, affiliation and travel. Such peoples like the Arab Rgaybat, Tajakant and Berabish tribes, and the Kel Tamasheq, thought and acted in interlinking networks of commerce, clan, and family affiliation extending from Colomb- Béchar, through Tindouf to Timbuktu and Agadez.59 _{In these networks Cardaire}

saw a possible danger for continued French control over the Sahara, should local leaders decide to side with Morocco or the Algerian FLN. In his report Cardaire recommended that the borders between Algeria and AOF should be considered non-existent when it came to intelligence and military operations. Preferably the borders should be officially abolished. Furthermore, France should take actions among the Saharan population to ensure their continued loyalty to France, if they felt any, or to win their loyalty to the detriment of pan-

56 _{Cardaire, M. 1954.}

57 _{On the counter reform movement, see Brenner, L. 2000.}

58 _{Personnel de l’Administration Affaires Musulmans, 1942-1959. ANSOM – 1affpol/} 2235/2.

59 _{Rapport de chef de bataillon Cardaire sur les chaînes commerciales sahariennes,} janvier 1957 – fiches de renseignement sur les Hassan, Tekna, Ahel Ma al Aïnin, Tadjakant, Kounta, Regeibats. Affaires politiques, Sahara, affaires diplomatiques. ANSOM – 1affpol/2261/7.

Arab, pan-Islamic and Moroccan or Algerian nationalist sentiments.60 His ideas and recommendations would return later that year in the debates surrounding the OCRS.

If there has been one advocate of the OCRS and the loyalty of the Saharan population to France, it is undoubtedly Mohamed Mahmoud ould Cheick, the ‘Qadi of Timbuktu’ and principal informant to Cardaire on Saharan matters. Mohamed Mahmoud ould Cheick originated from theAhlAraouan tribe of the Berabish federation living north of Timbuktu. He was installed as Qadi of the Ahl Araouan in 1932, but had to resign his post in 1935, due to resistance from the local religious elite. Although he was reinstalled in his function, he resigned for good in 1949.61 _{Nevertheless he kept using his title of Qadi, and remained}

involved in the social and political games of the Tamasheq chiefs’ milieu. His main advantage over other Bidân and Tamasheq chiefs was that he could speak, read and write French, and had an extensive knowledge of French political and general culture through his travels and his library, which contained works on French penal and criminal law and the Petit Larousse Illustré.62 _{In 1946 Mo-}

hamed Mahmoud joined the PSP. He was befriended by its leaders (except for Mohamed Ali ag Attaher Insar, who was a bitter enemy), but left the party in 1956.63 _{The Qadi’s finest hour came with the creation of the OCRS. Like the}

various senators and ministers discussing the creation of a Saharan territory in France, Mohamed Mahmoud ould Cheick was convinced that the existing bor- ders in the Sahara were a problem. But unlike French administrators and jurists, ould Cheick did not see any problem in drawing a new border in the Sahara that would separate the ‘white’ nomads from their ‘black’ sedentary neighbours. Or rather, ould Cheick felt that his native Timbuktu and the whole of the Niger Bend belonged culturally and economically to the Sahara, and should fall under the political supremacy of the nomads inhabiting the region, under the aegis of France. To prove his point he wrote a book on the history of Timbuktu and the Niger Bend entitled Kitâb al-turjuman fi tarîkh al-Sahrâ’ wa-’l-Sudân wa bilâd Tinbuktu wa Shinqît wa Arawân (A Biographical Book on the History of the Sahara and the Sudan and the Lands of Timbuktu and Chingetti and Arawan).

60 _{Personnel de l’Administration Affaires Musulmans, 1942-1959. ANSOM – 1affpol/} 2235/2.

61 _{Affaires politiques, Soudan, administration générale, évolution politique (rapports,} télégrammes officiels, presse), 1947-1957. ANSOM – 1affpol/2198/11.

62 _{Rapports politiques et tournées Cercle Tombouctou 1943-1957. Fiche de renseigne-} ments (personnages religieux) concernant le Mohamed Mahmoud o/ Cheick. ANM – FR 1E-42/II.

63 _{After the PSP’s dissolution, the Qadi formed a new party – the Parti du Rassem-} blement du Soudan – together with PSP’s second man Hamadoun Dicko. This party was short lived. Schachter-Morgenthau, R. 1964: 298.

According to Bruce Hall, this book is exceptional in two points. The first is that it contains praise on the merits of French occupation. The second is that it meticulously ‘whitens’ the history of the lands described, arguing for nomad supremacy.64

In 1957, the Qadi started a campaign to promote the OCRS among the Saharan chiefs and notables, and to make their support for the OCRS and France known to the outside world. His campaign was based on the following arguments: the inhabitants of the Sahara are full citizens of France according to the Loi-cadre of 1956; they have become French subjects by signing treaties with France, and not with the leaders of African independence movements with whom they feel no affiliation; they are white and do not want to be incorporated into a territory or state dominated by blacks; they have their own specific culture and society and do not want to be incorporated into a North African state or territory. The Qadi maintained therefore that the inhabitants of the Sahara should either be given their own territory within the Union Française, or should remain French citizens like they were at that moment. In January 1957,