Pride & Practicality

TUNISIA Pride & Practicality

Patrolling the Algerian side of the Tunisian border early one morning, Captain Rene Allard and 43 men of France's 23rd Infantry Regiment came under heavy mortar fire. Before long, 15 Frenchmen lay dead. The rebels, Allard later reported, had launched their attack from nearby Tunisia, were accompanied by vehicles of theTunisian National Guard. When French reinforcements arrived, the Algerians fled back into Tunisia, carrying with them four French prisoners.

In France, where Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba has long been charged with giving aid and comfort to the Algerian rebels, Allard's report offered Premier Felix Gaillard an excellent opportunity to play upon France's touchy national pride --the kind of opportunity he invariably seizes when he finds himself in domestic political difficulties. Last week, little more than 24 hours after the attack, French Ambassador to Tunisia Georges Gorse appeared at the Tunisian Foreign Ministry with a stiff note of protest demanding the return of the four captured Frenchmen.

The Tunisians, offended by the "bellicose tone" of the note, refused to accept it. Next day the Tunisian government declared: "It is inexact that the Algerian elements withdrew into Tunisia with French prisoners." (Best guess as to the truth: the four Frenchmen were whisked into Tunisia for a day or so, then shipped back to a rebel base in Algeria.)

At this rebuff, Felix Gaillard promptly suspended discussion of the military and economic aid pact that France has been negotiating with Tunisia. Simultaneously, he dispatched a pair of personal aides--one of them Army General Georges Buch-alet--to Tunis with a private message for Bourguiba. Bourguiba took the general's presence as an implied threat, coldly refused to receive him. After a two-day impasse the two French envoys, their message undelivered, flew back to Paris. "An affront to France," cried Paris newspapers.

In reply, Bourguiba told his National Assembly that he wanted friendship with France, but friendship with dignity. "The time for intimidation is past," he said. As for the prisoners, a representative of the International Red Cross had arrived in Tunis to talk to representatives of the Algerian rebels, and he hoped that the rebels would release them.

For all his tough talk, hard-driving little Habib Bourguiba has done his best to keep Tunisia on good terms with France, a month ago even suggested a formal alliance between the two countries. His tiny army is no match for the hard-bitten Algerian forces that have infiltrated Tunisia, and the sympathies of the Tunisian peoples are with the Algerian rebels. If Gaillard brought too much pressure to bear on Tunisia, there was a real danger that Bourguiba might be replaced by someone fanatically hostile not only to France but to the entire West.

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