Arabs: The Tunisian Torpedo

Thirteen heads of state were invited to last week's Arab League Meeting in Casablanca, but only twelve showed up. The absentee was Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba, who sent his regrets in the form of a 10,000-word memo randum intended to torpedo, if not the whole affair, at least its main personality, Egypt's Abdel Gamal Nasser.

Bourguiba has made no secret of his unhappiness with Nasser's efforts at singlehanded domination not only of the League but of most other Arab matters as well. But never before had he been so brutally frank; when shocked delegates gathered at the Prefecture on Casablanca's United Nations Plaza read the memorandum, they refused to publish it. That didn't stop Bourguiba. He happily handed it out to the press back home in Tunis.

What still bothered Bourguiba was Nasser's high-handed use of the Arab League to support his decision last spring to break diplomatic relations with West Germany. Under Nasser's leadership, Bourguiba acidly continued, "the Arabs have never been more divided; never have they slaughtered each other more ferociously than since the day Egypt took it upon itself to unite them." Warming up, he added, "There is not in the Arab world one single regime that Cairo has not attempted to overthrow whenever [that regime] showed signs of insubordination or refused to remain in the Egyptian orbit," and Bourguiba ticked off names and dates from Jordan in 1955 to his own country in 1959. To Nasser's further embarrassment, last week a Nasserite coup was staged in Iraq and failed abjectly (see below).

Private Bickering. If Bourguiba's memo was a devastating blast at Nasser, he was not the only critic. At the opening meeting of the Arab League, the conference host himself, Morocco's King Hassan II, repeated Bourguiba's themes but in milder terms. As conference chairman, Nasser weathered the storm with considerable aplomb, pointing out that the conferees would get nowhere if they limited themselves to diatribes. Then he cleared the hall of all but the twelve heads of state so that the Arab leaders could bicker on in privacy.

Nasser was not the only target of abuse. Egypt's Lieut. General Ali Ali Amer, commander of a proposed army of allied Arab states, bitterly complained that Jordan and Lebanon refused to allow foreign troops to be stationed in their countries. Jordan's King Hussein replied stubbornly: "This is just not the right time." Tiny Lebanon was again assailed for its reluctance to get moving on the long-delayed project to divert the Jordan River and deny its waters to Israel.

Ahmed Shukairy, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was outraged that not a single one of the 13 Arab League states had paid the assessments levied last September in Alexandria to build a Palestinian-Arab army, and only Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt had paid their dues for the political arms. In response, the deadbeat states demanded that Shukairy account for the funds he had already received, and one member accused Shukairy of spending $8,400 for custom-made suits at Rome's chic Caraceni tailors.