NORTH AFRICA: Tough Talk

From diminutive Tunisia last week came a brash ultimatum to the free world’s two greatest powers. “The time has come,” trumpeted Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba, “for the United States and Britain to choose between colonialism and freedom. Since these two countries, after the Sakiet bombing, requested us not to go before the U.N. Security Council, it is impossible for them not to take a stand in favor of the country which has been the victim of aggression and against the country which has been guilty of aggression.”

Bourguiba even set a time limit within which Britain and the U.S. must agree to support Tunisia against France, “to prevent eyes from turning toward the Communist bloc or other countries.” Announcing that he had canceled Tunisia’s March 20 Independence Day ceremonies “because we are no longer convinced we are truly free,” Bourguiba declared: “March 20 is the fatal day. By then we can see what direction we must take. If we cannot find the support of the West, I will be obliged to say that I have made a mistake.”

The Face-Saver. Bourguiba’s ultimatum, with its implicit threat that Tunisia would turn against the West unless he got his way, was an overt attempt at blackmail. And international blackmail is something which neither the U.S. nor Britain can afford to pay even once. Gloomily, many a chancellery and much of the world’s press concluded that the three-weeks-old Anglo-American effort to mediate the quarrel between France and Tunisia was headed for failure.

Fact was that Bourguiba’s tough talk seemed primarily designed to impress his countrymen. Having unwisely led his people to assume that all French forces would be out of Tunisia by March 20, Bourguiba now apparently felt obliged to make a dramatic gesture to direct popular attention from the fact that the French have not budged. But scarcely had he delivered his face-saving blast when Tunisian diplomats in Washington hustled around to the State Department to explain that his speech did not really mean what it seemed to mean.

The Sticking Point. Determinedly undiscouraged, the U.S.’s “good offices” Representative Robert Murphy and his British partner, Middle East Expert Harold Beeley, last week continued to shuttle between Bourguiba and French Premier

Felix Gaillard. By week’s end the two “good officers” had brought France and Tunisia closer to an agreement than at any time since the bombing of Sakiet. Despite his loud public defiance of Tunisian demands, Gaillard had agreed in private to withdraw all French forces in Tunisia to the naval base of Bizerte, even to discuss the future status of Bizerte itself. The chief remaining sticking point was Tunisian insistence that any settlement must be accompanied by a general discussion of the Algerian war. The French, still clinging to the notion that Algeria is a purely domestic problem, flatly reject any such discussion.

This was a deadlock that diplomatic ingenuity could surely break—provided both Gaillard and Bourguiba controlled their apparent compulsion to put on occasional public displays of unruliness.