The New Zealand Times SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1926. PEACE IN MOROCCO

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12459, 29 May 1926, Page 4

The New Zealand Times SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1926. PEACE IN MOROCCO

By the defeat and capture of Abd el Krim, the rebel chieftain of Morocco, the cloud long hanging over North Africa is dispersed. It was a cloud with a historic lining of several colours, Saracenic, Moorish, Turkish, dated from the Middle Ages upward. Added was the shadow of the Carthagenian colour, which so seriously obscured the expansion of the great Roman Republic, before its forceful ending made possible the Roman dominion of the world. In the present century, events showed the capacity of this region for embroiling the world in war. These events centred round two International Conferences, at which the world looked on with bated breath. The conference at Algeciras held the torch to the powder magazine of Europe, and hardly had the world recovered breath when the conference at Agadir came near to blowing the civilised world into fragments. The Great War found this region quiet, but after Versailles its provocative attraction dragged Spain and France into a formidable war with the Riff tribes under Abd el Krim. For a while there was fear of a kind that this disturbance might spread outwards, doing the wide mischief that Algeciras and Agadir failed to do. What it might have done had the Kaiser’s pompous Protectorship of Islam not been crushed with his Imperial throne, one can easily imagine. It is not too much to say that in that event the Kaiser might have headed a pan-Islamic crusade in alliance with Germany, in a Punic war on the hegemony of the world. But even without such danger, the start of the Franco-Spanisfi operations against Krim inspired his enemies with fears of a PanIslamic movement. The King of Spain actually appealed to the world, on this account, for help against the Arabs of North Africa. One thought of the great Saracenic outburst which conquered much of Asia Minor, submerged North Africa, annexed Spain, and was stopped by the Franks of Charles Martel at Tours. One thought of the Turks on the other side of Europe, who, after the conquest of Constantinople and the subjugation of a vast area of Eastern Europe, were finally turned back at Vienna by the valour of John Sobieski and the brave Lancers of Poland. And one thought also of the other blow, struck by Christian forces under John of Austria at Lepanto, which struck the Turk as decisively at sea as Sobieski struck him on land. King Alfonso conjured Up these events with his suggestion of a Mohammedan world rising under the green war standard of Krim, carried by Turks from the Bosphorus, Arabs from Egypt, ana Syria, and Arabia, the Soudan, and Tripoli, and Moors from Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco. Krim helped this terror by his daring pretension to religious zeal and fanatical inspiration. But Krim has collapsed in the Franco-Spanish net, and there is no leader for Pan-Islam, and history tells us that the great Mohammedan movements were nothing without leaders. In modern times the names of Schamye, Ab-el-Kader, the Mahdi, and, lastly, this Krim, tell the same tale. With his fall the predictive terror ceases, and the world can watch a settlement which will deprive North Africa of its disturbing influence for evermore. iiitiiiinuinnTiniuinifrniim'irTTTnirmHmnuniiiiiiiuHnmhiiiiniiinminiiniiiiniiHiiiDiumiiiiiimiriumjiiijj: