ABSTRACT

Between 1951 and 1962 the five states of North Africa – Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania – gained their independence and individually began what has proved to be a very difficult road towards economic development and modernization (see Figure 6.1). Libya was the first state to become independent in 1951. In September 1969 its monarchical regime was finally removed by an army-based coup headed by Colonel Mu’ammar Qadhafi, the current Libyan ruler. Independence followed for Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, when France decided to abandon its Protectorate regime in each country, in the face of growing indigenous resistance. In Morocco, the original Alawite monarchy, which had been preserved by the French, retained control under King Mohammed V and after 1961 under his son, King Hassan II. In Tunisia, however, the leader of the powerful Neo-Destour independence movement, Habib Bouguiba, dominated Tunisia until November 1987, when he was removed in a palace coup by Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, the current president of Tunisia. Spain continued to hold on to its colony in the Western Sahara until 1975, when it abandoned it, and it was then annexed by Morocco. The nationalist independence movement, a Sahrawi national liberation movement known as the Polisario Front, was thus left to fight against steadily increasing odds for independence from, first, joint Mauritanian-Moroccan control of the former Spanish colony and then, after

1979, from Morocco alone (Hodges 1983; Joffé 1987:21-3). Mauritania had been granted independence within the French Union in 1960, as part of General De Gaulle’s postcolonial dissolution of France’s African empire. Finally, in 1962, the ferocious Algerian War of Independence was brought to an end, after perhaps as many as 1.5 million Algerian deaths (French official figures are lower), when Algeria, too, was granted independence. The early chaotic socialism of the regime led by Ahmad Ben Bella was replaced by an austere, disciplined regime under Houari Boumedienne, in 1964. After Boumedienne’s unexpected death in 1978, his state capitalist ideology was gradually abandoned by his successor, Chadli Ben Jedid.