toni solo on resistance:
The Rif independence campaign led between 1920 and 1927 by Emir Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi was just one instance of global resistance to colonial domination before and after Versailles and the end of the 1914-18 war. Resistance flared from Ireland to Iraq to India, from Algeria to Syria to Indo-China, and from Java to the Congo. Sandino's war against the US marines in Nicaragua began in 1926. Revolt in China against Chiang Kai Shek's pro-imperialist regime lasted from 1925 through 1926. The period between the two world wars was marked by repeated outbreaks of such resistance - invariably repressed with ruthless barbarity by the colonial powers and their allies among local elites.
(...) The impetus for French and Spanish dominion over Morocco came with the 1906 Treaty of Algeciras, part of that era's crude imperialist game of swap between Britain, France, Germany and the other colonial powers. In 1907, French troops occupied Casablanca. A Berber uprising in 1911 led France to move into the Moroccan interior and later to declare Morocco a French "Protectorate" in 1912, the same year Italy imposed dominion over Libya. Spain bagged control of the northern coastal Rif region and of the tiny pocket of Tarfaya/Ifni. The status of Tangier was dubious until, in 1923, it was made a tripartite international port controlled by Britain, France and Spain. In his earlier career, Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi had worked with the Spanish colonial authorities until his imprisonment in 1917 for criticising Spanish designs on the Rif, for its mineral resources, which before then had remained outside the sphere of direct colonial rule. In 1919, el-Krim returned physically to his native region around Ajdir and morally to the salafiyyah inspired ideas of national and cultural renaissance of his student days in Fez. From that time on, he worked to organize resistance in the Rif to Spanish colonial dominion.
(...) Youssef Girard observes, "For Spain, Anoual was one of the most grievous defeats in its history. The Spanish troops had not just suffered a defeat but had lost face to an enemy judged to be technically and racially inferior. In a world marked by racist and ethnocentric prejudice, Anoual was a symbol : it was that of the victory of people of colour over a nation of whites ; it was the effacement of the Cross by the Crescent ; it was the revenge of the Orient over the West."
(...) The Moroccan king, afraid of the threat to his own position posed by el-Krim, refused to fight. Instead, the monarchy collaborated with the colonial powers in their war on the Rif. (Its successors have used similar aggression against the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic in the western Sahara. Morocco invaded Western Sahara in 1976, bombing fleeing refugees with napalm. Today it applies systematic repression against Western Sahara's occupied population.)
(...) The French-Spanish counter-offensive in the Rif did not discriminate between civilians and combatants. Losses among the Berber population have been reckoned at around half a million just for the years 1925 and 1926. Villages were subject to artillery and aerial bombardment both by conventional munitions and by poison gases including mustard gas, following the example of the British in Iraq in 1919. The overwhelming offensive by Spain backed by Europe's strongest military power, France, forced el-Krim to negotiate. By 1927 active resistance in the Rif was effectively over. Spain had secured its colony.
(...) It may be the case that history teaches nothing except that people learn nothing from history. Santayana believed peoples who forget their history are condemned to relive it. In any case, events seem to survive somewhere between interpretation and remembrance as well as through their immediate physical and economic aftermath. It is hard to contemplate the aggression against Iraq and the genocide against the Palestinians without wondering about the relevance of previous imperialist wars against Muslim countries. The resourceful, ferocious and determined asymmetrical campaign of Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi against the vastly more numerous and better equipped conscript and mercenary forces of France and Spain is relevant to the war on Iraq and the pending attack on Iran.
(...) Despite overwhelming air superiority and the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons, the subjugation of a hostile population requires huge numbers of infantry. Since such numbers can only be secured via a military draft, colonial wars by modern democracies cannot be "won" in the conventional sense. Despite this, the United States government has chosen to abandon the façades of democracy and prepare for an endless series of colonial wars. The Bush regime's pursuit of that alternative vindicates its critics who argue that two main objectives of the Iraq war were the enrichment of Bush regime corporate cronies and a deliberate wrecking operation on democracy in the United States.
(...) Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi himself insisted he harboured no hatred towards Spain or its people, that his resistance was aimed at the colonialist policies of the Spanish government. He wrote, "The Rif isn't fighting the Spanish and holds no hatred towards the Spanish people. The Rif is fighting that arrogant imperialism that wants to strip it of its liberty using the moral and material sacrifices of the noble Spanish people......people of the Rif fight against the Spanish military who try to abuse their rights, and at the same time hold their doors open to receive unarmed Spanish people such as technicians, business people, industrialists, farmers and workers." (2)
(...) One returns again to Steiner's paradox of Bluebeard's Castle, a paradox consistently noted earlier over centuries by many anti-colonialist writers : utter barbarity coexists readily with advanced cultural achievement. The spiralling genocide in Palestine and US threats to use nuclear weapons against Iran are the latest colonialist outrages in a long history of criminal barbarism inflicted by countries that preen themselves on democratic processes many of which in reality are mostly nugatory, rendered trifling by the power of corporate elites. The story of the Rif Republic is just one of innumerable episodes in that bitterly shameful history worth revisiting and remembering.