TUNISIA: Neighbor's Duty

Just five years ago swarthy, blue-eyed Habib Bourguiba was a little-known Tunisian lawyer and nationalist leader scornfully dismissed by the French Resident General of the day as "a dangerous maniac who actually thinks he might become a figure in world affairs." Today Habib Bourguiba, 54, is President of his country (pop. 3,800,000) and indubitably a world figure. Last week, having successfully obtained U.S. and British arms over French objections, the Tunisian leader flew to Rabat to work out with Morocco's King Mohammed V a new formula for mediating in France's Algerian war.

The two Arab leaders presented a sharp contrast: Mohammed in flowing white robes. Bourguiba in striped pants, morning coat and red fez. Outside the council room, shabby in worn mackintoshes, hovered two leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), Belkacem Krim and Abdelhafid Boussouf.

The Outsiders. Though both Moroccan and Tunisian delegates summoned them separately to conferences, the Algerians were invited to none of the official banquets or meetings. They waited outside the palace in a car for the final communiqué. When it was ready, Morocco's Crown Prince Moulay Hassan himself went out to hand it to them before it was distributed to the press. The communiqué announced that Bourguiba and the King, scheduled to fly to the U.S. this week to visit President Eisenhower (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), had agreed to put their good offices at the "disposal of France and the Algerian National Liberation Front" to negotiate "sovereignty for the Algerian people." Bourguiba sententiously cited an old Arab proverb: "When a house is on fire, the neighbors' duty is to put it out."

The French promptly rejected the offer on the ground that it meant recognition of the rebels. The Algerians retorted that they were interested only in negotiations based on "independence," not sovereignty. But French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau termed the tone of the Rabat offer "moderate," and Bourguiba, in a radio chat with his people, predicted that it would assist the "ripening" of cease-fire sentiment inside France.

Moderation is the basis of Bourguiba's effectiveness as an Arab spokesman. He was a nationalist leader when the strutting colonels of Egypt and Syria were adolescents, and he has built up a mass political following organized down to the cell level in 700 Tunisian cities and villages. Trained as a law student on Paris' Left Bank and married to a French wife, he was imprisoned again and again by colonial authorities, still kept up his wide contacts with more progressive French politicians in Paris. "I hate colonialism," he said, "not the French."

Brothers & Arms. Elected President after deposing the old Bey of Tunis last summer, Bourguiba moved into a lavish, state-owned seaside villa in Carthage, told aides to take care of Tunisia's other problems, and turned his own attention to winning peace in Algeria. His immediate purpose is to get arms enough to stop French forces from chasing rebels across his Algerian frontier under the doctrine of "hot pursuit." To get them he has not hesitated to use Communist or Egyptian arms offers to underscore his independence of the French over the Algerian fight.