Tunisia
ACROSS the fetid waters of the Lake of Tunis, not far from the earth-buried ruins of what was once the proud city of Carthage, is a patch of rocky ground which has been reserved for nonarchaeological excavation. Here, the visitor is told, may one day rise a gleaming monument to Tunisia’s independent dynamism and progress, a picturesque Arab-domed annex to a great luxury hotel. Though still in the blueprint stage, the annex has already been named the Carthage-Hilton, but local wits are prepared to wager that by the time it is built it will be called the Bourguiba-Hilton.
This ironic piece of speculation is, in its own backhanded way, a tribute to Tunisia’s President, Habib Bourguiba. What Nasser is to Egypt and Nehru to India, Bourguiba is to Tunisia, but to a more absolute degree. This is not only because Tunisia is a relatively small country, of four million inhabitants; it is also because Bourguiba has proved himself, since Tunisia won its independence, to be a master of political maneuver as well as an indefatigable and spellbinding orator.
In the four and a half years of Tunisia’s independence Bourguiba has successfully liquidated the old Turkish beydom, set up a republic, and had himself elected President. He has defied Nasser, taken Tunisia out of the Arab League, separated church and state, jettisoned an outmoded system of Koranic law for a Western code of justice, and launched an ambitious program of general education on frankly secular lines. Bourguiba has also favored the emancipation of Tunisian womanhood, with the result that last June, for the first time, a Miss Tunisia could display her charms at the Miss Universe beauty contest at Miami Beach. Last spring he shocked Islamic traditionalists by openly denouncing as a hindrance to honest toil the rigid fasting rules — nothing to eat from sunrise to sundown — which prevail during the Lenten month of Ramadan.
Tunisian Ataturk
Bourguiba has been called a Tunisian Ataturk, a title which does not altogether displease him. His methods, while less ruthless than those of the great Turkish dictator, have been no less effective. Though he has not strung up any of his political opponents from the branches of his capital’s treelined avenues, as Ataturk once did in Ankara, he has had his chief political adversary, Salah ben Youssef, expelled; he has thwarted several Egyptsponsored attempts to assassinate him; and he has hopelessly divided all organized opposition to his personal ascendancy.
Several years ago, when the ambitious young head of the Turkish Workers’ Union, Ahmed ben Salah, seemed to be getting too big for his boots, Bourguiba quickly engineered his removal and fobbed him off with the politically unimportant Ministry of Public Health. When Tunisia’s leading weekly, L’Action, dared to criticize Bourguiba in the late summer of 1958 for harsh measures aimed at certain wealthy Tunisian families, he peremptorily had it closed down and gave its editors a couple of years to think better of their waywardness.
Within the government which he heads there are three principal political tendencies, represented respectively by Mohammed Masmoudi, the Information Minister, who is frankly proWestern; by Taieb Mehiri, the Minister of the Interior, who is in favor of a rapprochement with Cairo; and by Ahmed ben Salah, who advocates a bold, progressive policy of social mobilization, land reform, and rapid industrialization along frankly collectivist lines. Bourguiba favors various policies, as circumstances dictate, but he has never allowed any one trend to dominate the others or to threaten his freedom of action.
His hold over the dominant Neo-Destour Party is so great that at its last congress, held at Sousse in March of 1959, Bourguiba was unanimously reelected party leader. The unicameral legislature meets at regular intervals, and its ninety members put in a certain amount of useful spadework on various parliamentary committees, but everyone understands that the National Assembly’s essential purpose is to ratify measures prepared by the Tunisian President and his ministers. The actual administration of the country is entrusted to thirteen provincial governors, who are officially subordinate to the Minister of the Interior but who in fact owe their appointments and report directly to Bourguiba himself.
There is no organized opposition from any rival political parties, so that elections are apt to be a foregone conclusion. During the last elections, in October of 1959, a group of eight Communists were rash enough to present an electoral slate in the city of Sfax. On the eve of the voting day one of the candidates was kidnaped and badly beaten up by unidentified toughs, and the next day the list, having at that point only seven instead of the eight candidates required by law, was declared disqualified.
This political system goes under the name of “controlled democracy,” but in the present troubled state of the Arab world, and above all, in a vulnerable country like Tunisia, where mass unemployment is rife and where there is an ever-present danger of the Algerian war’s spilling over the country’s borders, it is probably the best that can be hoped for.
Government by rhetoric
The other secret of Bourguiba’s extraordinary hold over his countrymen is his gift for rhetoric. When he speaks — and, aside from his regular weekly broadcast, he may give a speech every day to one group or another — it is with all the histrionic arts and tricks of a born actor. The habitual dark glasses are removed, the gray-blue eyes dilate, roll, and throw out sparks, the dazzling Bourguiba smile alternates with a stormy knitting and unknitting of brows, the shoulders heave, and the conjurer’s hands gesticulate with the golden flash of a ringed finger and the upturned palms of an Arab storyteller invoking the witness of Allah.
This marked fondness for rhetoric has been a strength in that it has helped Bourguiba establish an almost hypnotic hold over his countrymen. It has been a failing to the extent that it has led a man who got his training at the Paris Faculty of Law and in revolutionary journalism to believe that ruling a country is essentially a matter of verbal magic and that economics can be ignored. Recently, however, there have been signs that the Tunisian President is beginning to realize the limitations of government by rhetoric. Last April he caused general surprise by driving around Cape Bon with the French economist Gabriel Ardent, whose book on the development of underdeveloped countries, La Terre en Friche (Fallow Land), he has since recommended to associates and visitors alike.
Tunisia’s land hunger
Like its neighbor Algeria, Tunisia is plagued by serious land hunger, soil erosion caused by deforestation, a backward agriculture, a population that is growing at the alarming rate of 2 per cent a year, and a serious lack of investment capital, which has been an inevitable byproduct of decolonization. The French, during the seventy years of their protectorate, were shortsighted enough to encourage a sizable influx of French and Italian farmers into a country which enjoys far less fertile land and far less rainfall than Morocco. To make room for them the local peasants were driven from the fertile valleys up onto the surrounding hills, where they carved out rugged plots for themselves by chopping down the trees, thus creating a serious erosion problem that continues to plague the country to this day.
Although the French and Italian farmers are gradually being squeezed out, their eviction cannot be accomplished overnight, for the simple reason that they still cultivate 40 per cent of the wheat, 60 per cent of the vegetables and citrus fruits, and 90 per cent of the wine, which go into the exports needed to keep Tunisia’s balance of trade on an even keel. The Tunisian peasants brought in to replace them — as, for example, in the lush valley of the Medjerdah, just outside of Tunis — have first to be taught modern agricultural methods, and this necessarily takes time. Even then, there is just enough land to satisfy a population which increases by 70,000 each year, which requires 23,000 new jobs per annum to keep from starving, and which has an unemployed population that oscillates (depending on the season) between 300,000 and 400,000.
The lead in tackling the erosion problem has been given by President Bourguiba himself. Several years ago he instituted a “National dree Day,” usually the last Sunday in November, when every ablebodied patriot is encouraged to take a young sapling —mostly eucalyptus or Aleppo pine provided by the Forestry Service — and plant it along some barren stretch of country highroad.
Although forestry experts regard this as a costly experiment, since half of the young trees thus planted usually die, the campaign is justified on the grounds that this is the only way to make a powerful psychological impression on people with a nomadic heritage who are only too ready to chop down the nearest tree for firewood.
The war in Algeria
Troublesome as these economic growing pains are, they are overshadowed by Tunisia’s most pressing problem, the ever-present threat posed by the continuing war in neighboring Algeria. This bloody conflict has brought to Tunisia more than 100,000 Algerian civilian refugees, a rebel army of between 10,000 and 15,000, and a self-styled provisional government in exile which has often bucked the pressure exerted on it by Bourguiba.
The relations between these exiled Algerians and the Tunisians have not always been cordial. The most serious source of friction between Tunisians and Algerians is due to the F.L.N.’s maintenance of a fully armed guerrilla army on Tunisian soil. There is a sizable chunk of Tunisian territory in the northwestern corner of the country, around the town of Ghardimaou, where the F.L.N. has its military headquarters, which is virtually off limits to Tunisians and which is controlled by F.L.N. sentinels.
For a long time nostalgic French Cassandras were predicting that these F.L.N. warriors were going to march into Tunis and take over the country. The mere threat that they could do so made Bourguiba the frightened victim of their blackmail. Though there has always been a grain of truth in this deliberately pessimistic view of the situation, the balance of forces today is no longer so unfavorable to the Tunisians, whose regular army is now approaching its planned quota of 20,000 men.
The threat, nonetheless, remains. The Algerians now have their own trucks for bringing in arms across the Libyan desert, and the younger ministers of the provisional Algerian government have been pressing hard for more aid from Red China, which has given the F.L.N. six times more financial help in the last two years than has the entire Arab League.
Bourguiba has always sought to keep the Cold War out of North Africa, and to do so today he has even envisaged the possibility of amalgamating the Tunisian and Algerian states into an indissoluble whole. This, he appears to believe, could help “internationalize” the Algerian conflict, much as the Congo problem was internationalized last summer.
No one knows better, however, the grave risks of such a scheme. For, while it might enable him to exercise greater control over the autonomous F.L.N., it would provide French Army hotheads in Algeria with a ready-made excuse for once again violating the “privileged sanctuary” of Tunisia.
Such a maneuver, if successful, might one day allow Habib Bourguiba to lead a Tunisian-Algerian delegation to Paris. But should it fail, he would surely end up the prisoner of the F.L.N. and would have exposed his country to a new and far more serious Sakhiet.