The Betrayal
The question every Moroccan subject in the Americas eventually asks is: where was the Emperor? Where was the Empire? If these were his subjects — if this treaty was real — why did no one come? Why did no one protest? Why did no one demand the treaty's protections on your behalf? The answer is documented in primary sources. The dynasty that signed your treaty was the same dynasty that enslaved you within the Empire's home territory simultaneously. The Kingdom of Morocco that exists today is France's 1956 colonial exit mechanism — it is not the Empire of Morocco that signed the treaty. And when the US government finally tried to declare the treaty "obsolete" in 1959, it failed on twelve independent legal grounds — every one documented. The remedy does not run through any of them. It runs directly through you.
The Arab ruling class within the Empire's home territory had a name for you. Sūdān — "blacks." The same racial classification the colonial apparatus used in Virginia, the Arab intellectual tradition had already embedded inside the Moroccan political structure for centuries.
After the Arab Umayyad conquest of Al-Maghrib in 708–709 CE, the Moroccan political structure was gradually reshaped by Arab-descent dynastic elites who brought with them a racial hierarchy documented in Arab intellectual tradition across centuries. Arab scholars writing in Arabic had for centuries distinguished, at the most basic level, between bīdān — "whites," those claiming Arab pedigrees — and sūdān — "blacks," darker-skinned populations of Amazigh and African descent.
This was not just a social description. It was a political hierarchy. The bīdān — the Arab-descent ruling class — were the Sultanic dynasties: the Idrissids, the Marinids, the Wattasids, the Alaouites. The sūdān — the Amazigh, the haratin, the darker-skinned Moroccan population — were structurally subordinate within the Moroccan political structure. The EOM subjects in the Americas — who had been reclassified as "Negro," "Colored," and "Black" — were the sūdān. The Sultans who signed the 1786 and 1836 treaties were the bīdān.
"The Arabic term for 'black' (aswad) became interchangeable with 'slave' ('abd)."— Chouki El Hamel, "Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam," Cambridge University Press, 2013
In Arabic, the word for the racial description — "black" — was made legally interchangeable with the word for a legal status — "slave." The colonial American equation of racial category and legal bondage (Virginia Slave Code 1705: "Negro" = slave) was not a uniquely European invention. The Arab ruling class within Morocco had developed the same equation within the Moroccan political structure. Two colonial systems, two continents, same target population, same equation.
Sultan Moulay Ismail (1672–1727) enslaved 221,000 dark-skinned Moroccan subjects within Morocco — while the Virginia Slave Code was simultaneously classifying the same population as "Negro" in the Americas. Same people. Same years. Two colonial systems. One target.
Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif was the second Alaouite Sultan — the dynasty that would later sign the 1786 and 1836 Treaties of Peace and Friendship. He reigned from 1672 to 1727. During his reign, he made a decision that is documented in primary sources and archived in Morocco: he ordered the enslavement of all "blacks" within the Kingdom, including those who were free. His target was the haratin — the dark-skinned Moroccan population of mixed Amazigh-African descent. The same population the colonial system in Virginia was classifying as "Negro."
The question "where was Morocco?" has four documented answers. Not one. Four. Each standing independently of the others.
The Kingdom of Morocco, established March 2, 1956, is France's colonial exit mechanism. It is not the Empire of Morocco that signed your treaty. The 1959 State Department Note directed at the "KOM" — the wrong party — was therefore also addressed to the wrong sovereign.
The 1836 Treaty of Peace and Friendship was signed between the United States and the Empire of Morocco — Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, the Farthest West, the sovereign domain whose western extension included the Americas. The Empire's government was dismantled by France and Spain through the Protectorate (1912–1956). When France departed in 1956, it did not restore the Empire. It created the Kingdom of Morocco — a new governmental construct that succeeded France's administrative apparatus, not the EOM's imperial sovereignty.
Even as of October 1956, the US State Department was still treating the 1836 Treaty as operative. FRUS 1955–57, Document 199 — the Cannon-Balafrej letter — shows the US government treating EOM subjects as "subjects of Morocco" protected by the treaty 88 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified. Three years later, in 1959, the State Department unilaterally declared the same treaty "obsolete." The Cannon-Balafrej letter proves the US itself contradicted the "obsolete" conclusion with its own contemporaneous conduct.
The remedy does not run through the KOM. The treaty class — the EOM subjects, the Moroccan subjects of the Empire of Morocco — holds Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty directly. The EOM government was suppressed. Its absence does not transfer the people's treaty rights to a colonial successor state. The rights vest in the people. The KOM's recognition of the treaty class is relevant but not required.
On March 17, 1959, the US State Department issued a note declaring the 1836 Treaty "obsolete." The note fails independently on twelve separate legal grounds. Any single one voids it. All twelve fail simultaneously.
The Knox-Lansing Constitutional Rule — established by Secretary of State Knox in 1913 and confirmed by Secretary of State Lansing in 1917 — states that treaty termination "can only be" accomplished "by a treaty...regularly ratified by the United States Senate." The 1959 Note was a diplomatic communication, not a ratified treaty. Under the Knox-Lansing Rule, it was constitutionally void from the moment it was issued. The eleven additional grounds below are independent of the Knox-Lansing Rule — each one separately voids the 1959 Note.
The Knox-Lansing Constitutional Rule (Pre-Ground)
Knox, 1913: Treaty modification or termination "can only be" accomplished "by a treaty...regularly ratified by the United States Senate." No administrative note — no matter how senior the official, no matter how diplomatically framed — satisfies this requirement.
Lansing, 1917: Explicitly carved the 1836 Treaty class rights OUT of the broader Moroccan protectorate arrangements, confirming that the treaty's subject matter could not be handled administratively.
Result: The 1959 Note was constitutionally void under the US government's own stated rule, as confirmed by two prior Secretaries of State, before any of the following twelve independent grounds are even reached.
The 1959 Note fails on all twelve grounds simultaneously. Each ground is independent — voiding the Note on any single ground makes the others academic. All twelve are presented not to overwhelm but to demonstrate the depth of the legal defect: the US government did not merely make a procedural error. It failed on the most fundamental requirements of constitutional authority, treaty law, international instrument classification, and sovereign domain acknowledgment — all at once.
The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series — the State Department's official diplomatic record — contains the primary source documentation that voids the 1959 Note. These are not hostile sources. They are the US government's own archive.
COINTELPRO (1956–1971) was the federal government's systematic response to every organization that moved the treaty class toward its own national identity. The betrayal was not only historical — it was conducted in living memory, documented by the US Senate itself.
The bīdān/sūdān betrayal operated over centuries. The 1959 Note was the formal diplomatic betrayal. COINTELPRO was the contemporaneous operational betrayal — the FBI program that identified, infiltrated, disrupted, and neutralized every organizational vehicle by which the treaty class might have learned its own legal identity.
The betrayal was triple-layered. The EOM's Arab ruling dynasty betrayed the sūdān class through the bīdān/sūdān hierarchy and Moulay Ismail's enslavement. The French Protectorate betrayed the treaty class by dismantling the EOM and withholding information from the successor KOM. The US government betrayed the treaty class by declaring the treaty "obsolete" on twelve void grounds while simultaneously running an illegal federal program to suppress the organizational vehicles by which the treaty class might have learned to contest that declaration. Three betrayals, three different perpetrators, all producing the same result: the treaty class did not know what it held.
In 1600, a Sa'adian Sultan was negotiating with Elizabeth I to jointly colonize the Americas under Moroccan-English authority — treating the western territory as within the EOM's sovereign domain. England engaged as an equal.
In 1600–1601, Ahmad al-Mansur al-Dhahabi — the Sa'adian ruler of the EOM (the "Sultan" title itself was a Sa'adian-era Arab introduction; the original title was Agellid, and the treaty title is Emperor) — sent an ambassador to Elizabeth I's court in London (the Moorish Embassy of 1600–1601, led by Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud). The correspondence that followed included a proposal for joint Anglo-Moroccan military action against Spain's colonial possessions in the Americas. Ahmad al-Mansur's position was that the Americas were within the EOM's sphere — and that the Empire should populate the western territory under Moroccan authority.
England engaged. Elizabeth I treated the Sa'adian Sultan as a diplomatic equal with recognized western hemisphere interests. The same England that was simultaneously enacting colonial statutes in Virginia that would classify Moroccan subjects as "Negroes" engaged the Sultan who claimed those subjects' territory as his own domain in direct diplomatic negotiation about that territory's future.
Ahmad al-Mansur died in 1603 before anything materialized. The Sa'adian dynasty collapsed; the Alaouite dynasty (which signed the 1786 and 1836 treaties) succeeded it in 1631. But the diplomatic engagement is documented: England recognized EOM western hemisphere interests at the same moment it was building the colonial apparatus that would deny those interests in its own American territories. This is the same contradiction — acknowledging the EOM's sovereignty in one context and denying it in another — that runs through every subsequent document in the colonial record. The primary source text is held at the British National Archives, Kew — State Papers Foreign, Morocco, SP 71/1.
The remedy is rebuilding. Not restoring through the KOM. Not waiting for the US to reverse the 1959 Note. The treaty class holds the rights directly — and the international forums are open to receive the claim right now.
Three separate governments betrayed the treaty class through three separate mechanisms: the EOM's own dynastic racial hierarchy, the French Protectorate's information suppression, and the US government's COINTELPRO + the 1959 Note combination. None of these betrayals extinguished the treaty class's rights. The rights vest in the people, not in the governments.
The path does not run through the KOM — whose Arab-descent ruling dynasty has the same structural interest in managing the sūdān question that Moulay Ismail's dynasty had in 1672. The path does not run through the US civil rights framework — which accepted the colonial reclassification as its premise. The path runs directly through the treaty, through the international forums (IACHR, HRC, C24), and through the treaty class members themselves asserting Article 21.
The 1959 Note fails on twelve independent grounds. The Knox-Lansing Constitutional Rule requires a Senate-ratified treaty to terminate the 1836 Treaty — and no such treaty has ever been concluded. The FRUS documentation chain — the US government's own primary source archive — confirms the treaty was operative in 1956. Three years later, the State Department declared it "obsolete" in a diplomatic note that was legally void on twelve independent grounds before it was issued.
The treaty is still in force. It is the supreme law of the land under Article VI of the US Constitution. H.Res.251 (March 25, 2025) confirms it as "the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in United States history." The road is long. The legal foundation is solid.