ARAB LEAGUE: Defying Nasser

In the Arab world a leader has to decide whether to play along with Nasser’s Arab “brotherhood” or to play against it. Neither choice has paid off well, since Nasser’s idea of brotherhood is one in which he alone is Big Brother. After months of trying to hold his own against the cawing Cairo Radio, Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba three weeks ago decided to join the Arab League, a Cairo organization now dominated by Nasser.

At their very first session, the Tunisian delegates attacked “some Arab countries that attempt to dominate the league’s meetings.” In a huff, the Egyptian delegation walked out. Since this might be admitting that the charge was true and the shoe pinched, the Egyptians returned four days later, full of glossy assurances of “our brotherly relations with Tunisia and of sincere cordiality.” But without quitting the Arab League, Tunisia took a further step last week: it broke off diplomatic relations with Cairo. Why the abrupt shift?

Habib Bourguiba told his Constituent Assembly: “We have the proof that our disagreement with the U.A.R. is more than a simple misunderstanding.” In Cairo lives the exiled Salah ben Youssef, who once fought alongside Bourguiba in the battle for Tunisian independence. Ben Youssef, says Bourguiba, has made seven attempts to kill him, has organized a private army in southern Tunisia to snipe at Bourguiba’s soldiers. Bourguiba now has evidence, he went on, that Nasser’s government was egging on Ben Youssef’s conspiracy.

Anticipating Nasser’s propagandists, Bourguiba said defiantly: “Yes, I am Western, and I will remain so.” Tunisia’s pro-Western policy, he said, “has enabled us to avoid many troubles.” Nasser, he declared, is “not aware of the danger of Communism. Once the Iron Curtain drops, there is no escape.”

Morocco, which joined the league when Tunisia did, refused to go along with Bourguiba’s attack. Said one Moroccan lawyer, however: “Bourguiba is terribly awkward, but he said what most of us believe. The Egyptians take millions from the Communists and have the nerve to call us lackeys for accepting a penny from America.”

Lackey was one of the mildest words Cairo had for Bourguiba. Nasser’s radios warned the Tunisian President that he faces “the same destiny as Nuri as-Said,” the assassinated Premier of Iraq.