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40 CHAPTER 11959, without ever being active in the PSP. But he did so only after the newSoudanese administration had threatened to dismember his confederation andthus curtail his chiefly powers.Despite later attempts to win them to their side, the US-RDA kept distrustingTamasheq society in general and its chiefs in particular. The continued supportof the chiefs for the PSP did not help their cause against a US-RDA bent ontheir abolition. In the first government installed after the implementation of theLoi-cadre, Minister of the Interior and US-RDA left-winger Madeira Keitastarted to curtail the chiefs’ power. In 1957 he wrote a first circular about themodernisation or the possible abolition of the traditional chiefs. On 10 April1958, the ordinance on the chiefs of March 1935 was withdrawn. 46 But despiteits formal opposition against the chiefs, the US-RDA very well knew its powerand influence in the North to be insufficient to do without them. The nomadtribal chiefs were kept in place because of their influence over their subjects andtheir knowledge of the country. At the time, the US-RDA was not yet stronglyimplanted in the extreme North and the political events of the moment were notin favour of losing grip on a group suspected to be politically active to the disadvantageof the new regime. But the Tamasheq chiefs were certainly not wellregarded. Soon after independence in 1960 the new regime started to curtailtheir power.International complicationsThe fear of US-RDA leaders for Tamasheq political opposition to their rulecame to a height between 1956 and 1959, when the territorial integrity ofSoudan Français came under attack in various ways. The discovery of mineralriches in the Algerian Sahara in 1956, together with the gradual granting ofautonomy and independence to the colonies of the Maghreb and French WestAfrica, provoked a political and military battle over Saharan territory involvingFrance, Morocco and the political elites of Mauritania and Northern SoudanFrançais. The French attempted to keep the Sahara French through the creationof a new Saharan colony: The Organisation Commune des Régions Sahariennes.Simultaneously the Moroccan Istiqlâl party claimed parts of the Saharaincluding Mauritania and the Soudanese north up to Timbuktu on historicalgrounds. These claims were enhanced, supported and juxtaposed in Mauritaniaand Soudan Français by a number of political players advocating either theMoroccan claims on Mauritania and Soudan Français or their own claims on agreater Mauritania. These advocates of a greater Maghreb formed a small poli-46Arrêté Territorial 191D. 1-3/10-4/1958, published in the Journal officiel du Soudanfrançais 1379, 1958. In Ernst, K. 1976: 114.