MOROCCO. .

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2598, 4 September 1909, Page 5

MOROCCO. .

A WARNING FROM THE POWERS. United Press Association— Copyright. LONDON, Sept. 2. The Powers have issued a collective note, summoning Mulai Hafid to prohibit the torture of prisoners, and punishments involving mutilation or lingering death.

The present Sultan of Morocco, says an exchange, is in the way of pleasing neither Moors nor foreigners. It is true that Europeans may travel in the interior of the country with some degree of safety and freedom, and that they have access to the Sultan and his Ministers, but that is precisely what the Moors complained of in the policy of Abdul Aziz. “They see~The man who promised to restore the good old days of isolation from the infidel,” says Mr. Ashmead Bartlett in the “National Review,” “receiving Europeans, signing treaties and accepting the services of military missions; in fact committing all those offences that made Abdul* Aziz so unpopular and finally cost him his throne.” Mulai Hafid cannot help himself. The Europeans are in the country and intend to stay, and he cannot reign without the assistance of the European. Powers. But his methods are not likely to commend him to the goodwill of civilised nations. A cable message which we publish this morning describes some of the tortures that are awarded as punishments in the ordinary course of business in Fez. __ Mr. Bartlett gives a painfully impressive account of the scenes that are enacted when the Sultan descends to the courtyard of his palace to watch the administration of justice. A local preacher, who had supported Mulai Mohammed, the Sultan’s brother, in a conspiracy, was put on trial for treason. Troops were being drilled, the bands organised in Kaid Maclean’s days -were playing their only tunes, and the foreign Consuls were patiently awaiting for an audience. The. Sultan eat cross-legged on a- yellow sofa in his summer-house. At his feet were his Ministers, and around him were the judges. Sentence was pronounced, and the prisoner was seized and laid on the ground at the foot of the steps leading to the summerhouse. The executioner was at hand, and with him an assistant bearing a bag of salt. The troops marched into the court-yard, where already floggings were being administered. Groups of idlers stood looking on, and among the Consuls and other foreign visitors was one bearing a silver tea service for plantation to the monarch: With these people for spectators the punishment was carried- out. The palms of the prisoner’s hands were slit open, and the wounds 1 filled with salt, and then the fists were clenched and sewn up in leather gloves. In the easy day&"• of Abdul Aziz such barbarous customs were forgotten, but Mulai Hafid is made of sterner stuff. His enemies do not live long. Mulai Mohammed ended a term of imprisonment with a dose of arsenic. The man who had been Foreign Minister under Abdul Aziz was ■■fund dead in his bed. The poison cup and the instruments of torture are’ parts of the regular machinery of administration, ana, as we have seen, barbarity goes On under the very eyes or the representatives of foreign powers. But the day of Morocco’s isolation is past, and we may look now for the gradual assertion of civilised influences in the country.