Following World War II the Neo-Destour Party reemerged under the leadership of Habib Bourguiba and Salah ben Yusuf. Already Bourguiba had enlisted the close support of the national labor union, the Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT). It was the successor of the short-lived Tunisian union organization, the Confédération (CGTT), which the French had suppressed in 1924.[204] During the 1940s Farhat Hached had then followed the CGTT example and organized the UGTT, which was nationalist and not associated with the communist-led French union CGT. Quickly UGTT entered into a lasting alliance with Neo-Dustour.[205][206] As Secretary General of the party, ben Yusuf pursued a policy of opening it to all Tunisians. He formed alliances with large commercial interests, with the Zaituna Mosque activists, and with pan-Arab groups favored by the Bey. In Paris in 1950 Bourguiba had presented the French government a program for gradual independence.[208] Eventually the French proceeded to introduce limited reforms, e.g., in which the nationalist would receive half the seats in a legislative council, with the other half retained by French settlers. Due to the lack of signigicant progress during 1954 armed groups of Tunisians, called Fellagha, began to muster and conduct operations in resistance to French rule, beginning with attacks in the mountains. The Tunisians coordinated their national struggle with independence movements in Morocco and Algeria, although Tunisia seemed to be better at the fine points of marshalling its nationalist forces. The Moroccan professor Abdullah Laroui later wrote about the social and historical similarities between the independence movements in the three different countries of the Maghrib. ______________ Abdullah Laroui provides a very abstracted summary this sequence of events in Tunisia (cultural reformism, political reformism, political activism), noting that the parallel sequence in Algeria and Morocco differed somewhat. He then abstracts for the entire Maghrib: secular political reformism (moderate both in ideology and action), religious reformism (radical in ideology but moderate in action), and political activism (moderate in program, extremist in methods of action). Laroui, History of Maghrib (1970; 1977), pp. 363–364, 366, 367.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 17:46:59 +0000
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