Frontiers in North Africa

iv) The Tringuet line and the Limite operationnelle

By 1956, however, the administrative border for Morocco had become a line which was a compromise between the two extremes, although the starting point appears to have been at Ighli and the western limit that proposed by the Protectorate. At this point, an attempt was made to provide this administrative border with a historical pedigree reaching back to the 1930s, with a suggestion by the French Protectorate authorities that the true border was the so-called 'Trinquet' line which corresponded to the 1956. Moroccan administrative border (Trout 1969; 415). The move for which there appears to be no evidence before 1956, was clearly designed to provide a territorial limit for the newly independent state of Morocco, now shrunken compared with its pre-colonial extent but to be provided, nonetheless, with definitive territorial borders as befitted a successor state to the Protectorate which had been fashioned in a European mould.

The Trinquet line never acquired the status of an actual border, for events in the Algerian war of independence soon overtook these legalistic arrangements for Morocco's borders. Not only were there Algerian border posts north of the line, controlling the roads to the south of it, but from mid 1956 armed clashes along the line became increasingly frequent between the Moroccan Army of Liberation and French troops there. The confrontation continued until 1958, when French forces, in conjunction with Spanish troops in the Western Sahara, forced out the Moroccan liberation army unit, their auxiliaries and tribal supporters, mainly from the Reguibat Lagouacem. France set up a new boundary - the 'Limite operationnelle' - which ran from the Jabal Grouz, via the Jabal Zelmou, north of the Hamada du Guir and the Kem Kem plateau, to join up with the Dra river at Ktaoua. Morocco accepted, on May 23, 1958, that - for the time being - its forces would observe this delimitation, although it clearly did not accept that this was to be the frontier (Trout 1969; 425).