Tunisia

AT HOME, Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba is immensely popular, while in the rest of the Arab world, he is all too frequently berated as a colonialist jackal or a tool of Zionism. The ostensible reason for the name-calling is that last March, Bourguiba suggested negotiations with Israel based on the 1947 and 1948 United Nations resolutions on Palestine. However, Nasser has on several occasions made similar suggestions without being called any nasty names by his Arab brethren. Therefore, something else about Bourguiba rankles. It is probably that at heart he considers Tunisia a Western nation, part of the Arab world by geographical accident rather than vocation. He said in a speech last June: “Tunisia freed herself centuries ago from the ties that bound her to Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul.”

Tunisia has also been freed from the Islamic mystique which other Arab leaders use to stay in power, Nasser most of all. Its basic elements are demagoguery, religious fanaticism, and prestige politics. The great demagogic hoax is that the Arab world is going to rise as one to reconquer Palestine. As Bourguiba points out, the antiIsrael crusade has been imminent for seventeen years.

In reality, the Arab leaders are bent on preserving the status quo which keeps them in power. The liberation of Palestine, far from being a program of action, becomes nothing more than a propaganda device to maintain the illusion of Arab unity. If it went beyond that, the illusion would crumble under the weight of Arab differences and lack of preparedness.

What most annoys Bourguiba about his fellow leaders is their hypocrisy. Publicly they attack his Palestine position, but privately they admit he is right. King Hussein of Jordan told Bourguiba last April: “Our great mistake was to ask for Britain’s departure from Palestine. At least then Jewish immigration was limited and the Palestinians remained on their land.” Bourguiba replied, “So now we have come to the point of regretting British colonialism in Palestine.”

Religious fanaticism is another Arab instrument of political control which Bourguiba has scorned. In most Arab countries, the Muslim festival of Ramadan (which celebrates the revelation of the Koran in the ninth month of the lunar year) is strictly observed. Anyone who breaks the daylight fast, even by smoking a cigarette, can be fined or arrested. The result is serious absenteeism in factories and offices. Last year, on the third day of Ramadan, Bourguiba drank a glass of orange juice in the middle of a speech to a group of workers. “Eat or fast,” he said, “take your choice, as long as production does not suffer.” He has also advised his people against making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca because it affects the country’s balance of payments.

Family planning

And while other overpopulated Arab countries prohibit birth control (in Morocco and Algeria the French colonial anticontraceptive laws are still enforced), Bourguiba began a highly successful family-planning experiment a year ago. The strong opposition in Muslim families to contraception had to be overcome. The man considers a large number of children the tangible expression of his masculinity as well as an eventual source of wealth. For the woman, the birth of a child is a festive event which all her female relatives attend.

The Tunisian experiment began with the administration of contraceptives to women volunteers. It was found that abortion caused guilt feelings, that mechanical contraceptives and vaginal jellies were psychologically unpleasant, and that the pill required too much remembering and was too costly. The method finally adopted was the Lippes loop, a four-inch-long plastic wire named for its inventor, Buffalo doctor Jack Lippes. The loop fits in the woman’s uterus and acts in a way not entirely understood by doctors. It is, however, 98 percent effective, simple to insert, inexpensive, safe, and it lasts for years.

After a year-long propaganda program which reminded Tunisian women that there is nothing in the Koran against birth control, family resistance is weakening. Health officials plan to administer the loop to 50,000 women a year for the next four years. They hope to treat most Tunisian women who have had more than three children and keep the population under five million.

Under nobody’s thumb

Unlike his Arab neighbors, Bourguiba is not interested in military might. Tunisia’s 1965 budget spends 6 percent on defense and 25 percent on education, while it costs Nasser half a million dollars a day to finance his military expedition in the Yemen, and Algeria earmarks one fifth of its budget for its army. “If Tunisia were attacked,” says a Western ambassador, “its 18,000man army would be able to resist just long enough for Bourguiba to lodge a complaint with the Security Council.”

Nor does Bourguiba see much point in prestige industries. Nasser has poured millions of dollars into the production of an Egyptian automobile, the Ramses, and has to import steel to manufacture it. Tunisia imports cars, but has just opened a steel mill to process its small quantity of high-grade iron ore. Habib Bourguiba, Jr., Tunisian Foreign Minister, says, “We would be happy to sell Nasser our steel for the production of his car.”

Despite all this unorthodox behavior, Bourguiba has shown that he is the only Arab leader with a strong enough political base to challenge Nasser’s oracular commands. When Nasser broke diplomatic relations with West Germany, he naturally expected the rest of the Arab world to emulate him. Only Bourguiba did not comply, because preserving the trade agreements Tunisia has with West Germany was more important to him than placating Nasser.

Indeed, it can be said that aside from Egypt, Tunisia is the only viable Arab state. The regimes of Syria, Iraq, and Yemen exist only with the support of Nasser; Kings Hassan of Morocco, Hussein of Jordan, and Mohamed Idris of Libya are forced to align themselves with Nasser because they cannot count on the complete allegiance of their own people. In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, political stability is bound to oil interests. Algeria has yet to show that it can escape what its own leaders disparagingly call “Congolization.” And Lebanon’s pluralist society is under constant pressure from a pro-Nasser minority.

And yet, what is Tunisia? A country which seems to have been created to prove Arnold Toynbee’s theory that civilizations are founded in defiance of nature — small, underdeveloped, half Saharan waste and half coastal farmland. “Tunisia,” a foreign ministry official explained, “has no oil, no minerals, no coal, no gas, twenty-two kinds of poisonous snakes, and four kinds of scorpions.” Its annual budget, $160,000,000, is less than what General Motors spends on advertising.

It is not powerful enough to play Eastern and Western blocs against each other for aid, as Egypt has done. Its weight is scarcely felt in the international scale. Its importance lies perhaps in the fact that a country which has been independent for ten years can point to political stability and economic improvement instead of chaos, coups, corruption, and economic bewilderment, the lot of too many other emerging nations.

A family business

Tunisia’s progress is related to its manageable size, which has made it possible for Bourguiba to operate the country like a family business. No aspect of national life is unworthy of his paternal attention. On a recent Sunday afternoon he scolded Tunisia’s two best soccer teams after a championship match. “The game was faulty because of lack of coordination,” he said. “The play was disjointed and choppy. I hope the quality of the playing will improve and that in the future you will play with your heads as well as your legs.”

Bourguiba spends three months of each year inspecting his domain. In each town and village, he knows the principal families by name. He listens to grievances and suggests improvements. Bourguiba’s visits have been as responsible for slum clearance and school construction as have his economic programs. The other side of the “Supreme Combatant’s” personality is that he cannot tolerate resistance to the team spirit.

Controlled socialism

Bourguiba also keeps tight control over the Socialist Destourian Party, the country’s only legal political party. Its 300,000 members spread his gospel, give the good example, and denounce heretics. The gospel is socialism, but it is less a doctrine than the answer of a pragmatist to the aspirations of the masses. Bourguiba’s socialism is simply the belief that the state must step in where the individual falters. Thus, he does not recognize the absolute right to private property. “It’s a way of saying that society respects your right as long as you don’t abuse it,” he says. “No one will take your property as long as you are working.”

State departments control mining, industry, agriculture, fishing, and tourism, and in the last few months there has been a tendency to increase state control in other areas. Bourguiba does not want a strong labor union questioning his decisions and disrupting his four-year economic plans with demands for higher wages. He is encouraging the development of party cells in factories and offices to sap the authority of the union.

At the same time, Bourguiba’s state-controlled economy is trying hard to attract private capital, with some success. Krupp is interested in building a shipyard, and in the last year, a Danish factory for diesel engines and a Swedish factory for superphosphates have opened. In underdeveloped countries, the borders of capitalism and socialism are often blurred. When Tunisia sought a long-term loan from the International Monetary Fund in 1964, the loan was granted on the condition that the dinar be devaluated and that wages be kept at the same level; this was not socialist but banker’s dirigisme.

Tunisia’s main economic problem is that it has little to export besides wine, olives, wheat, vegetables, and flowers; it finds it difficult to sell its products to European countries, which already have Common Market agricultural agreements. Until last year, Tunisia could sell its wine and its wheat to France at the interior French market price. But in May, 1964, Bourguiba abruptly nationalized 850,000 acres of forcignowned land, 90 percent of which belonged to the French. France suspended its twenty-million-dollara-year aid and its preferential trade agreements. It was a serious blow to the economy, for wine makes up one fifth of Tunisia’s exports. In 1964 it brought in more than $20 million, but by the first quarter of 1965, only 10 percent of the 1964 vintage had been sold, and there is no market for wine in a Muslim country.

American aid

Because it has to import such staples as dairy products, meat, and most manufactured goods, Tunisia has an unfavorable trade balance. In 1964, for example, it imported $220 million worth of goods and exported about half that much. It will be years before Tunisia can successfully diversify the colonial, one-market economy inherited from the French, and in the meantime, the economy is relying heavily upon American aid. As President Johnson has noted, two thirds of U.S. aid goes to seven countries, and Tunisia is one of them. Since the beginning of the aid program in 1957, Tunisia has received a total of $413,800,000. The gross aid in 1964 was about $100 per capita, the highest in Africa, although lower than Jordan ($192) and Israel ($450).

Bourguiba’s Secretary of State for Planning and the Economy, Ahmed Ben Salah, left for Washington last May 9 and returned to Tunis eleven days later with assurances that the level of U.S. aid would be maintained. Tunisia then embarked on an 800-million-dollar four-year plan, about 40 percent of which wall be financed by foreign (mainly U.S.) aid. Tunisia hopes to maintain a rate of growth of 6.5 percent a year and raise the per capita income from $77 to $100 a year by 1970.

U.S. aid pays for such varied projects as the construction of a law school and a long-range reforestation program; forty-five million trees have already been planted, mainly Aleppo pines and eucalyptus, in the hope of restoring Tunisia to the fertile times when North Africa could be crossed in the shade.

Tunisia also has the largest Peace Corps contingent of any African country. Its director is Richard Graham, a Wisconsin businessman who was the butt of some ridicule when he arrived two years ago because he insisted on riding a bicycle everywhere, which the Tunisians interpreted as a concession to their underdevelopment. “What we need is assistance, not acrobatics,” as one Tunisian put it. After showing what it can do, however, the Peace Corps has been given high marks, and its tractor-repair teams have been particularly successful.

Away from Marx

Skeptics attribute Bourguiba’s solid pro-Western stance to the amount of aid he receives from Washington. But beyond the helping hand it offers, Bourguiba has been drawn to the West out of disappointment with its alternatives. He turned away from Communism when he was a young revolutionary struggling against French colonialism.

“What Marx wrote was true of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution in England and France,” he says. “It was true in that conjuncture. But afterward, things were not that way. His previsions for the proletarian revolution were not realized. There was no class struggle. I saw man as a moral being who escapes the laws of rank. I wanted to lift him in a climate where there would be no oppression and no chaos, where the balance between liberty and anarchy would be kept.”

Bourguiba has also found panArabism and pan-Africanism a burden. Those of his policies which have been prompted by the fear that he was not keeping up with the revolutionary pace of his neighbors, such as nationalization of foreignowned lands, have proved economically disastrous. In many instances, Tunisia’s efforts to maintain Arab or African solidarity have backfired. “Since we are no longer able to use ships on the Arab League blacklist,” an official explained, “we have to pay more for freight, which often has to change ships at Genoa.”

When Nasser calls him an American stooge, Bourguiba replies: “Don’t tell me that to be a good Arab I have to fight America.” While other Arab leaders visit Moscow for guidance, Bourguiba visits Scandinavia. He finds that the Scandinavian countries have problems similar to his own and practice the kind of socialism he would like to adopt.

Our best friend in Africa

Bourguiba is fond of saying that Tunisia is at the same time nonaligned and “the best friend the United States has in Africa.” An interesting example of this proWestern nonalignment is Tunisia’s position toward Red China. When Premier Chou En-lai came unexpectedly to Tunis in the middle of his 1964 African trip, Bourguiba recognized Red China. But at the banquet of recognition, he denounced Chinese foreign policy. Last March Tunisia rejected a Red Chinese note on Vietnam as “discourteous and unacceptable.” “China,” Bourguiba said, “is trying to extend its influence in Asia — some countries forget that the United States intervened after a request from an independent state which did not want to be under Communist rule.”

Bourguiba’s son, familiarly known as “Bibi,” is a resolutely proWestern foreign minister. He was ambassador to Washington during the New Frontier and was admitted into the privileged circle of President Kennedy’s personal friends. He was impressed on a visit to Washington last spring that President Johnson took the trouble to receive him at the height of the Dominican crisis.

American diplomats in Tunis work in a climate of warm friendliness. Ambassador Francis Henry Russell is a career diplomat whose last post was Accra. In comparing Bourguiba’s Tunisia with Nkrumah’s Ghana, he has drawn some interesting conclusions about oneparty, one-man systems in emerging countries, and why they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail.