Leaders In Profile Habib Bourguiba Knows Politics And Prisons

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28620, 24 June 1958, Page 11

Leaders In Profile Habib Bourguiba Knows Politics And Prisons

[By

SIMON KAVANAUGH]

LONDON, June 3. Habib Bourguiba, President and benevolent dictator of the Tuni- , sian Republic, is a connoisseur of nationalist politics—and French prisons. ’ He has known 25 years of private hell—arrest, release, exile and re-arrest, mostly on the orders of swiftly changing French governments. ’ Today his face is prematurely aged by imprisonment and illness. And yet he is undaunted. Last year he said: “I could not have fought France so long had I not loved France so much.” Bourguiba is a squat, ebullient ma with piercing blue eyes. Like Israel’s Ben Gurion, he has the air of a minor prophet. He also has a remarkable talent for inflaming mobs. Paradoxically, he has a reputation for quiet reasonableness in overseas negotiations—no small measure of his mercurial temperament. For Bourguiba is at once a clown, although with grim undermeaning, and a fanatical idealist. He can convulse the Tunisian Constituent Assembly with his imitations of well-known French personalities. He can have them roaring fierce acclaim at his forceful oratory. Bourguiba is probably of Berber, as distinct from Arab, descent. He has a ruggedly handsome race, slightly hawked nose, a square chin and a high tenor voice. His pale eyes can shoot sparks. Met informally at his comfortable villa perched on the Mediterranean shores, he will probably be dressed in dazzling grey and white silk smoking jacket with a belt. In public, he invariably wears a dark suit with, a tarboosh (fez-like hat) jammed squarely on his head.

J “Direct and Earnest” Bourguiba is a direct and earnest speaker. He has great personal charm, can be very modest, , yet feels he has a high mission t as a statesman. ■ When sitting talkings, he win tap his listener’s knee incessantly, • using gestures and grimaces to ■ illustrate his point, rather like a voluble Frenchman. But then it is said, of him that he is half demagogue and half French intellectual. Certainly he knows more about France than most Frenchmen. Pouxes are his passion. He is and is inclined to brush aside a master of ruse and manoeuvre, incidental technicalities. A senior French official in Tunis once said that, with all his experiene as a diplomat, he was no match for the craftiness of the little Tunisian President. Bourguiba is today the living hope of an independent but Westbiased union of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. He is also fighting hard to shake off the last vestige of Tunisia’s former French protectorate status —that is, the remaining 15,000 French soldiers—and his way of doing this is to make the outward signs of independence plainly visible. In all this, he has been an outspoken enemy of communism (“an evil; alien doctrine”), equally outspoken in his defence of the Algerian nationalists (“their counV?- ls „t he Palestine of North Africa ), and increasingly exasperated with France’s attitude His fear is that, with the continuance of the Algerian war, his neighbours will fall victim to the wiles of Egypt’s Nasser and consequently the embrace of the Kremlin. Bourguiba’s nationalist fervour has landed him in loads of trouble. He was gaoled in 1934 by a conservative government for alleged complicity in Tunisian nationalist agitations, gaoled again in 1936 during reaction against the Front Populaire, with whom he was aligned. In 1939, accused of plotting against the State and inciting to civil war. he was again gaoled and transferred to Marseilles. He

was still awaiting trial when, in 1942. the occupying Germans released him with the hope that he would get Tunisia’s support for the Axis powers. Suspicious Allies rearrested him in 1943. He was freed bv France’s General Juin, only to be shut up again by Juin’s successor, General Mast, and exiled. After four years in exile, he

came back into politics with a “watching brief” in the FrenchTunisian negotiations with French Premier Schuman in 1950. But when these talks broke down he was back to prison bv the new French Premier. Mr Pinay. In 1955, he was released by the then Premier. Mr Faure, and sent home with an agreement giving the Tunsians limited but real self-government. A year later, the agreement was formal!’

signed and, after 75 years of direct French rule, Tunisia was on her own.

Habib Bourguiba was born into the poorest section of the Tunisian middle class at Monastir (a small coastal town south-east of Tunis), the youngest of eight children. He began troubleshooting early. When only 15. he was expelled from his secondary school for “strikes and bad behaviour,” but, after two years of lung trouble, went on to a Paris university, graduated in law and political science. and flung himself enthusiasticallv into Tunisia’s nationalist struggle. Bourguiba first joined the fanatically Muslim Destour Party, which was dedicated to complete independence for Tunisia. But the party’s religious basis conflicted with the values he had learped in France, and in 1934 he formed his own, more Westernised. NeoDestour (new constitution) Party, moderate and secular, and aimed at securing self-government. The Ned-Destour is today the only party of any consequence in Tunisia.

Now came the opportunity for his sense of drama. Secret cells were organised in every locality, rigid discipline was imposed, youth and women’s movements were formed. Soon came an almost mystic devotion to Tunisia's national cause, and personifying that cause was Bourguiba.

Agitations harassed the French Resident General. He ordered the arrest of Bourguiba and his political friends and packed them off to the fringe of the Safeara. They were freed when the Front Populaire Government of Leon Blum took over in 1935, but Bourguiba

I was again in prison by the summer of 1939, after a general strike and street clashes. Released by Germans In 1940, he was transferred to a prison at Marseilles, where the invading Germans later became interested in him, released him and sent him in style to Rome. There, he was housed in a palace and asked to negotiate for a lineup of Tunisia with the Axis bloc. Bourguiba did not refuse, but he made the conditions so impossible that the talks broke down. In 1943, he was returned to Tunisia and remained there until the end of the war, always a firm believer in an Allied victory. But the new France did nothing to implement Bourguiba’s claims for self-government. His disappointment grew. In 1945, he announced that “to count solely on French good sense for the liberation uf Tunisia is to waste one’s time,” and set off on a series of world tours that took him to the other Arab countries, and Asia, the United States and Britain. Meanwhile, nationalist tension in Tunisia was mounting. Exasperated French authorities banned a Neo-Destour Congress, which Bourguiba was to have addressed, and, after bloody street clashes, the little nationalist leader was again arrested and sent off to house arrest on the island of Tabarka. This was followed a few months later by the imprisonment of the Tunisian Premier, Mohammed Chenik. France thereupon proclaimed a state of siege and, after much heart-burning among the Tunisians, a new Premier, Mr Barrouche, formed a shaky Ministry. Bourguiba was finally freed by Faure’s Government in 1955, and at long last the battle for Tunisian self-government canib to a close. Bourguiba returned to Tunis with the agreement he wanted. It was signed a year later, and in 1957 he deposed the Bey of Tunis, hereditary ruler of the country, and proclaimed a republic. Bourguiba is today a benevolent dictator—and a skilful one. He knows to what lengths he can go, but at the same time he has to keep a careful eye on his excitable countrymen, for Arab moods can change in a flash.

He has an enormous financial problem, for, under French rule, naturally-poor Tunisia relied largely on subsidies from France and expenditure by the French people and troops. Since independence, however, over 100,000 “’rench people have left Tunisia (leaving about 80,000), and because of violent disputes with Paris over frontier incidents and other aspects of Tunisian support for the Algerian nationalist cause, the French Government has blocked most of its credits. Bourguiba still faces West, but there is little sign of the West facing Bourguiba. France has turned her back, and America is aver ting her eyes so as not to incur French anger. Bourguiba has fought a long, hard battle. He is undaunted by nearly half a life-time of imprisonment and exile.

Sentiment flew out the gaol window’s long ago.—Express Feature Service.