The Tightrope Walker

Talking over the dispute between France and Tunis with a covey of senior Tunisian government officials one day last week, U.S. Ambassador Robert Murphy found that the conversation had turned to the Algerian war. Gently Murphy suggested that the conference get back to the subject it was supposed to be discussing: Tunisian demands for the evacuation of all French military bases in Tunisia.

"Very well, sir," agreed Tunisia's Foreign Minister Sadok Mokkadem. "From now on we won't talk about Algeria at all, unless you raise the matter yourself." Ten minutes later the conversation was once again back on Algeria.

Murphy's inability to keep the Algerian war out of conversational play was an inevitable consequence of 1) the weakness and confusion of France in crisis, and 2) the tightrope-walking nature of his own "good offices" mission. In Paris earlier in the week, France's Premier Felix Gaillard had belabored Murphy with the paradoxical French arguments that, on the one hand, "the essential question dividing France and Tunisia is the aid which the Algerian rebellion gets from Tunisian territory"; on the other, the Algerian war is a purely French concern and hence outside the scope of Murphy's mission. Added Robert Lacoste, Minister for Algeria, who sometimes seems to think he is running French policy from Algiers: "Good offices consist purely and simply of putting the two parties in contact. They should not be confused with mediation or arbitration. A mediator suggests solutions; an arbitrator compels them. We accept neither one nor the other."

But after flying on to Tunis, the tall, imperturbable U.S. troubleshooter scarcely had time to recover from a bout of airsickness before President Bourguiba was trying to persuade him that "it is up to U.S. leadership to convince France that the Algerian war is not profitable." Within 30 minutes of Murphy's departure from Bourguiba's Carthage residence, three leaders of Algeria's National Liberation Front arrived to dine.

At week's end, with Bourguiba firing off denunciations of the French plan to displace 70,000 people to create an uninhabited "no man's land" along the Algerian-Tunisian frontier ("an insult to humanity"), the deadlock seemed publicly as total as ever. But from backstage came reports that Bourguiba showed some signs of willingness to meet the French part way, let them retain the all-important Bizerte base provided that they evacuated all their other Tunisian bases.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.