On 25 September 1963 Moroccan army units, numbering around a thousand men, crossed into Algeria and seized the two border posts of Hassi Beida and Tindjoub, escalating a crisis which had been simmering since Algerian independence in July 1962. In the following days both countries held back from the brink as negotiations were convened in Oujda, the Moroccan city nine miles from the border. But when these discussions broke down on 5 October the way was open for war. Algerian forces retook the two border posts three days later.

The world was stunned. It could not understand why these neighbours were fighting. Both were Sunni. Both were a product of the complex interaction between the Amazigh, the indigenous inhabitants of north Africa, and the Arab cultures that arrived in the seventh century. Both, too, had been involved in bitter anti-colonial struggles which had been marked by huge amounts of pan-Maghreb solidarity. In the Moroccan case this had led to independence from France and Spain in 1956; with Algeria the violence was much longer and bloodier, lasting from 1954 to 1962. Why did the relationship between two countries with such closely shared histories break down so badly in 1963?

Historic ties

At its root the conflict was territorial. In one sense, it was the result of the fundamental tension between two new nation states whose respective leaders were determined to assert postcolonial sovereignty over populations, resources and borders. But it was also the result of deeper, pre-national histories anchored in complex pilgrimage and trading routes that did not match the new national boundaries. The Algerian-Moroccan conflict – which would become known as the Sand War – was symptomatic of the international stresses caused by the wreckage of colonial empires, where the battle for control of frontiers in the name of new states produced bitter disputes across the globe.

In the case of Morocco and Algeria, the frontier’s outline was first drawn in the 16th century when the Saadi Sultanate, ruling from Marrakech over a territory which extended far into sub-Saharan Africa, successfully resisted Ottoman expansion, the only north African state to do so. This banner of independence was taken up by the Alaouite dynasty, which continues to rule Morocco today. During the mid-17th century, the second Alaouite sultan, Moulay Ismail (r.1672-1727), went to war with Ottoman Algeria, establishing a chain of frontier fortresses.

Even so, the border between the two states remained a grey area, criss-crossed by trading networks, pilgrimage routes and, significantly, the High Atlas Plain. Straddling the region along a west-east axis, the mountains were the gateway to the Middle East and, ultimately, to Mecca. The extent to which the border was a movable entity is apparent from the fact that when the French invaded Algeria in 1830, the inhabitants of Tlemcen, its most westerly city, detached themselves from Ottoman Algeria and preached allegiance to the sultan.

Such allegiance explains why the Alaouite sultan Abd al-Rahman came to the military aid of Abd al-Kader, the Algerian leader of Muslim resistance to the French invasion. It was the sultan’s sacred obligation to defend the far western tip of the Islamic world from Christian attack – a duty that ended in humiliating defeat in August 1844 when 11,000 French troops overran the sultan’s larger, but poorly disciplined, force on the banks of the river Isly, a few miles from the Algerian border. A year later the Convention of Lalla Marnia was signed, the first and last agreement between the two powers, which settled the question of physical frontiers and spheres of influence.

The Convention’s focus was on separating the populations into those tribes who would remain under the sultan’s authority and those – given that they had traditionally recognised the suzerainty of Ottoman Algiers – who would now be under French jurisdiction. But the border remained vague. While there was agreement on a frontier that went some 100 miles inland from the coast to the mountain pass on Teniet Sassi, and then south of that point to Figuig, an oasis town between the Atlas Mountains and the northwestern edge of Sahara, beyond that nothing was demarcated. The area south of Figuig, the French argued, was an uninhabited desert belonging to no one.

Thereafter, French Algeria ate away at Moroccan territory, a process culminating in the establishment of a French protectorate in 1912. Following this, the French drew a line south from Teniet Sassi to Figuig before turning west to effectively annex Colomb-Bechar, Kenadza and Abdla to French Algeria along with the desert oases of Touat, Tidikelt and Gouara. Although intended as a customs barrier to regulate Saharan trade rather than a formal international border, this line was used by officials and was reinforced by a second administrative delimitation in the mid-1930s which established the division between French Algeria and Morocco at the watershed of the Draa Valley. In both cases, Moroccan nationalists argued, these decisions were unjust because at no point was the sultan, or the local population, consulted.

The frontier question

The extent of Moroccan grievances was captured in visual form in 1956 shortly after the country won independence. A map of ‘Greater Morocco’ was published by Istiqlal (Independence), the Arab nationalist party that had led the anti-colonial struggle. According to Istiqlal’s map, ‘Greater Morocco’ encompassed the Western Sahara (then under the control of Franco’s Spain), Mauritania (a French colony) and parts of French Algeria (a sovereign part of France). For Istiqlal what mattered was the situation before the arrival of European rule and here, it argued, the facts were simple: the people in these areas had always sworn allegiance to the sultanate state. Istiqlal conjured up a powerful narrative of colonised territories which needed to become Moroccan again.

Despite his belief in these claims Mohammed V, the Moroccan sultan, put them to one side in 1956 in the name of anti-colonial solidarity. Mohammed had played a pivotal role in the battle for independence. Deposed by the French in August 1953, he was exiled with his family to Corsica, and then Madagascar, before returning in triumph in November 1955 as a martyr to the nationalist cause. He refused to negotiate with the French government over the border issue. Instead he would wait for an independent Algerian state which, he assumed, would be sympathetic to Moroccan demands, given the extent of his support in espousing the Algerian cause, accepting Algerian refugees and providing military bases for the Algerian army.

On 26 February 1961, however, Mohammed V died unexpectedly during a routine operation. He was just 51. Before his death he had been angry at the independence granted to Mauritania on Morocco’s southern border the previous year. Mauritania, he said, was a fiction, invented by the French to undermine Morocco’s post-independence power. For this reason, in Cold War terms, he turned away from France and the US and reached out to the Soviet Union. In January 1961 he hosted the Casablanca Conference which, by bringing together Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali and the Provisional Algerian Government, positioned Morocco among the hardline pro-Soviet African states.

Morocco’s anti-Mauritania campaign had been taken to the United Nations in New York in 1960 by the crown prince, Hassan, who delivered a speech condemning the Algerian War. Shortly after his accession as King Hassan II, he pressed the Moroccan case with the Provisional Algerian Government in Tunis, believing that he had come away with a binding agreement to resolve the issue.

Hassan was dismayed, then, when the Provisional Government was defeated in a brief, but bloody, internal power struggle with Ahmed Ben Bella, who was backed by the Algerian army. Ben Bella was one of the nine leaders of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) who had launched the liberation struggle in November 1954. Captured and imprisoned by the French in October 1956 (after they surreptitiously diverted the Royal Air Morocco plane flying him and four other FLN leaders from Morocco to Tunisia via Mallorca), Ben Bella saw himself as the incarnation of the Algerian revolution. On these grounds, released from captivity in 1962, he denounced the Provisional Government as usurpers who had given too much away to the French.

Once in power Ben Bella took a very different view on the frontier question. For him it was unthinkable that Algeria would concede any territory to Morocco given the sacrifices of the Algerian people in a struggle officially called the ‘war of one and a half million martyrs’. In legal terms he was adamant that Algeria now had sovereign control over all territories that had been controlled by French Algeria. This view was endorsed by the inaugural charter of the Organisation of African Union (OAU) in May 1962, which stipulated that newly independent countries adhere to the borders established during the colonial era unless both parties agreed to the change. There was also the question over whether this border region was more than just sand, given that France had already discovered vast reserves of oil elsewhere in the Sahara just a few years earlier.

The conflict became highly personal. The clash between Hassan II and Ben Bella – the king and the socialist revolutionary – was exacerbated by the fact that they had much in common. Both were charismatic, exuding self-assurance that could easily tip into verbal and physical confrontation. Both were young heads of state: Ben Bella was 45, Hassan was 33. Both were uncompromising in their beliefs.

Their quarrel was not just about one man trying to outwit the other in the quest for territory and resources. It was also ideological. Ben Bella vilified Hassan as ‘neo-colonial’, a puppet for the French who were looking to thwart the ongoing global anti-imperial revolution through a network of willing post-independence African leaders. Hassan attacked Ben Bella as an extremist on a mission to spark a pan-African revolution.

Ideological clash

These differences were thrown into sharp relief by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. In the weeks leading up to the crisis Ben Bella met with John F. Kennedy at the White House, but then chose to fly immediately to Cuba where he was given a hero’s welcome by Fidel Castro as a symbol of global anti-imperialism – much to the consternation of the US president who was even more aghast when Algeria took a pro-Cuba stance during the crisis itself. The move particularly stung because, as a young senator, Kennedy had been an early supporter of Algerian independence. In contrast, Hassan took a clear pro-US position. He cemented this friendship with a three-day state visit at the end of March 1963 where Hassan, accorded the full red-carpet treatment, reminded the world of the two countries’ special relationship, given that the US’ first ever treaty, signed during the War of Independence, was with Morocco. In October Hassan returned the hospitality when Jacqueline Kennedy was his personal guest for a private visit to Marrakech, just a month before her husband’s assassination.

The border conflict thus became intertangled with an ideological conflict which in turn became connected to an internal conflict, in particular in Morocco. Hassan disliked the way Algeria was radicalising Moroccan society; many Moroccans, angry at social inequality, were now talking about the Algerian revolution as a model for change.

The personification of this desire for Algerian-style transformation was Mehdi Ben Barka. By 1962, at the age of 42, Ben Barka was an anti-colonialist veteran. One of the key authors behind the January 1944 Moroccan Charter calling for independence, as well as a leader in the final negotiations that ended French rule, in 1959 he engineered a left-wing break away from Istiqlal which led to the foundation of the National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP). He had also risen to become one of the stars of the global anti-imperialist movement – his allies included Fidel Castro, a young Nelson Mandela and, most importantly of all, Ben Bella – because for him the liberation of Morocco was inseparable from the liberation of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Intriguingly, Ben Barka and Hassan had a longstanding personal history: the former had been the latter’s maths teacher. By the early 1960s, however, any lingering respect had long since degenerated into mutual loathing. The king viewed Ben Barka as the monarchy’s most potent foe, while Ben Barka saw Hassan as an enemy of the Moroccan people, the wider pan-Maghreb revolution and, ultimately, a peaceful resolution to the frontier question. Ben Barka’s other primary target was Mohammed Oufkir, the hard man of Hassan’s regime, whom he saw as the embodiment of neo-colonialism because, as a decorated veteran of the French army, he was still willing to do France’s dirty work in Morocco via a ruthless police network trained by the CIA.

War

The flash point between Algeria and Morocco was the border town of Tindouf. It had been annexed to French Algeria in 1952 and for Moroccan nationalists was emblematic of the unjust frontiers; thus Algerian independence triggered an occupation by the Moroccan army. This incursion was repulsed by the Algerians, but from that moment on the border area became fraught. Some Moroccans were shot by Algerian border guards, others were blown up by mines as they wandered into the contested frontier zone, while in Tindouf a group of inhabitants, styling themselves as Moroccan insurgents, became involved in an armed confrontation with the Algerian army.

This ongoing escalation exacerbated divisions within Morocco. Istiqlal talked about the frontier issue as an abscess that needed to be lanced in the face of Ben Bella’s duplicity. In contrast the UNFP called for revolutionary unity, the only true solution to the problem in their opinion, and denounced Hassan as a reactionary. But if in public it was a war of words, in private both sides put out the feelers for peace, diplomatic channels that led Hassan to make an official three-day visit to Algeria in March 1963 where he was greeted triumphantly – a moment of elation that seemed to herald a new era.

Yet hope soon gave way to renewed hostility. That summer, on the Moroccan side, Oufkir claimed he had uncovered a plot to kill the king with weapons supplied by Algeria. This became the pretext for the wholesale repression of Moroccan leftists, some of whom were imprisoned and tortured while others sought exile in Algeria. In Algeria, Ben Bella was confronted by internal revolt in the mountainous region of Kabylia where, although none of these insurgents looked to Morocco as a model (their argument was with his proclamation of a single party FLN system), Ben Bella still accused Hassan of sowing divisions in advance of an invasion.

In this tense atmosphere the region slid into war at the end of September. There was heavy fighting at three key points: in and around Hassi Beida and Tindjoub; a Moroccan offensive to take Tindouf – the prize catch; and an Algerian attack on Ich on the frontier in the north. By the end of October 1963 dozens had been killed on both sides.

By this point Ben Bella had ordered a general mobilisation, strengthened initially by the rebels in Kabylia, who had put down their weapons in the name of unity, secondly by the involvement of a thousand or so battle hardened Egyptian soldiers, and thirdly by the covert arrival of hundreds of Cuban troops on 22 October, dispatched by Fidel Castro who saw this war as a proxy. In Cairo, the Algerian war effort was also supported by Ben Barka who, in exile there, denounced the conflict as ‘a war of aggression against the Algerian Republic’ on Egyptian Radio.

However, in diplomatic terms the international scales had already tipped against Hassan. The Organisation of African Unity condemned Morocco’s action on the grounds of the inviolability of the inherited colonial frontiers, a position supported by Egypt and other Arab states. Moreover, despite Hassan’s requests, neither Spain nor France provided military assistance, while Kennedy had no appetite for a war that might lead to a direct conflict with Cuba.

Isolated, on 29 October Hassan met Ben Bella in Bamako, Mali, under the auspices of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Mali’s Modibo Keïta. Together the four men brokered a truce that was announced the following day. This resulted in an OAU-mediated treaty in February 1964. Eight years later, the frontier was formally ratified by both countries.

External peace did not bring about internal peace. In March 1965 there were huge student protests in Morocco. In June Ben Bella was overthrown by a military coup; in October Ben Barka was murdered in Paris. The Moroccan kingdom seemed particularly vulnerable, but over the next decade Hassan proved to be the great survivor, seeing off the pro-Algerian revolutionary left as well as two military coups, one led by Oufkir in 1972. In August that year Oufkir was found dead with five bullets in his body, a death officially described as suicide.

Frozen sand 

Throughout these tribulations Algerian-Moroccan enmity became anchored as a pillar of both systems. This was reinforced by Hassan’s Green March in 1975 when, following Spain’s abandonment of the Western Sahara, hundreds of thousands of Moroccans marched into the territory to claim it as part of ‘Greater Morocco’ – a move that was immediately opposed by the Algerian regime who backed the Sahrawi guerrilla organisation. It was a major international conflict that remains unresolved today.

In 1989, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hassan justified his Cold War choices as the right ones on French television before a group of journalists. He hoped that the way was now paved for open borders, but these were shut again in August 1994 as an act of retaliation by the Algerian authorities. Caught up in vicious conflict with Islamist guerrilla groups, they were angry at Rabat’s accusations that the Algerian secret services had orchestrated a bombing attack in Marrakech. This state of affairs was still in place 30 years later. In 2021 Algeria broke off diplomatic relations with Morocco because of the latter’s recognition of Israel in the Abraham Accords.

So despite the deep historical ties that bind the two nations, never have the two regimes been so far apart. The paradox of Algerian and Moroccan relations which first flared up in the hostilities of the Sand War have been carried into the post-Cold War era. They show no sign of thawing.

Martin Evans is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sussex. His new history of contemporary Morocco is forthcoming with Yale University Press.