Translation 6: Commentary on the Death and Funeral of Habib Bourguiba |
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Note: This is a compilation of translations put together into an article about the events surrounding the death of Habib Bourguiba, President of Tunisia from 1957 to 1987. He died on the morning of Thursday, April 6, 2000 at the age of 96 (some say 98) in Monastir, Tunisia, his birthplace, south of Sousse on Tunisia's coast. Some of the articles I drew on are in the endnotes. This article was placed on the website oriiginally on April 17, 2000 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And protect him Ben Ali did, dispatching Bourguiba back to Monastir and to such total obscurity that, as a result of the news black out, we assumed him dead. Bourguiba was only permitted to leave his house arrest once a year to visit his family cemetery plot. He was forced to make the journey either before dawn or after dusk to minimize contacts with the outside. He was permitted a few visitors over the years, including a number of important French personalities, but the meetings were never private and always monitored by Monastir's provincial governor, a Ben Ali appointee. Occasionally he went to the beach to bath where passers by claim he would be sitting talking for hours to some of his old comrades, most of whom had been dead for years. A sad portrait of a man in decline.(2) Zine Ben Ali had nothing to fear from his predecessor who spent more time after his removal from the political scene talking to ghosts than people. And it is doubtful that Ben Ali ever worried about a Bourguiba return to power. He was far too gone and by the end of his rule, Bourguiba had alienated a large percentage of the Tunisian people who had grown tired of his excesses and delusions while the country went to hell in a handbasket. There were riots in 1984 after Tunisia bowed to IMF demands to lift price controls on bread and by 1987 a political opposition had clearly taken shape. But it is one thing to destroy the man and quite another to undermine the myth. For despite all his foibles the myth lived on...Bourguiba, the anti-colonial leader languishing in French prisons, Bourguiba the Arab modernizer fighting for women's rights to an extent unparalleled (although not without limitations) in the Arab world, Bourguiba the international Cold War tight rope walker between the United States, France and the USSR. The supreme commandant might have had a supreme loss of support in the last decade of his life, but his achievements were genuine. Even De Gaulle, legendary for his `compliment-stingyness', once praised him It was not for want of trying that Ben Ali failed to destroy the myth. Given the long period of Bourguiba's failing health, Ben Ali had a long time to prepare for Bourguiba' funeral. The main tact taken was to minimize Bourguiba's contribution at Ben Ali's expense. Where Bourguiba had failed, Ben Ali had picked up the ball - that kind of rot. Ben Ali worked systematically to minimize Bourguiba's influence, enhance his shortcomings with an eye on undermining whatever remaining support Tunisia's president had among his people. Having been Tunisia's ambassador to Poland during the rise of the Solidarity movement there, he had seen first hand how popular mass movement could undermine a leader's credibility and was intent on learning from that experience. Ben Ali did all he could to erase the image of a popular Bourguiba from memory and to claim for himself the social progress the country had enjoyed, even if that progress is somewhat overstated. Indeed, minus the ice-pick, Ben Ali was to Bourguiba essentially as Stalin was Trotsky. A thousand statues came down, a million photos followed, the supreme commandant's name disappeared from newspapers and school texts. Until slightly before the funeral, it seemed that the very word `Bourguiba' itself had been purged from the national culture with the silence being so pervasive it was not entirely illogical to presume him dead. Yet in spite of these efforts and his own limitations, respect for Bourguiba's achievement remained in tact and his death provoked ambivalence and nostalgia. It also led to inevitable comparisons between the country's two presidents. And it was here, that Ben Ali feared a challenge to his legitimacy - a legitimacy already shaken by nasty riots in the country's south in February of this year. The national mood was well expressed in a statement issued on April 9, 2000 from Paris by the Tunisian Community in Europe (Collectif de la Communaute Tunisienne en Europe). The community expressed its `mixed emotions' about Bourguiba's life. It `mourned the death of the great nationalist' but not `the dictator he became'. Bourguiba's role in the anti-colonial struggle against the French was recognized as was his modernist political and social vision which remains unique in the Arab world. But he was criticized for having illusions of grandeur (une megalomanie sans bornes) and for his increasingly dictatorial style as time went by, a shortcoming which opened the door for Ben Ali and `reversed many of the fruits of independence'. The comparison made between Bourguiba and Ben Ali was decidedly unfavorable to the latter. The statement spoke of the hopes Tunisians had for the government replacing Bourguiba, that it would begin a `genuine democratization of the country' but regretted that this did not happen. Instead Ben Ali was accused of installing `an even more brutal dictatorship than his predecessor' that included `breaking world records for enhanced police surveillance, torture and the suspension of human and democratic rights'. It concludes with the comparison that Ben Ali has dreaded all these years: the Bourguiba era appears today as something of a lost democratic paradise in comparison.(3) Even before this statement appeared it was apparent that President Ben Ali's jihad to destroy Bourguiba's reputation had failed. He knew for sometime before the latter's death that some kind of national recognition would be necessary. How deeply he must have feared and resented this for he knew the stakes were high: his political credibility. Still, he bowed to political reality and political reality demanded a national period of mourning and a funeral. He chose to proceed with these events hoping to downplay Bourguiba's passing and to use the funeral to make favorable comparisons between himself and the nation's founder, and at all costs to limit popular opinion from emerging to distinctly from its enforced cocoon. Ben Ali was not mistaken in his appreciation of the funeral's impact. The Economist had a similar opinion, describing the funeral as `the most serious challenge yet to Ben Ali's legitimacy...a watershed...galvanizing a generation too frightened to speak'.(4) Ben Ali's campaign to discredit his Bourguiba required considerable orchestration,
a major propaganda offensive and no small amount of subtlety. After all,
it gets a little dicy dumping on a nation's founding father - even if
you're president - and so it had to be done with finesse and bureacratic
tactics rather than a full scale offensive. It began a full month before
Bourguiba's death. As his condition deteriorated, Bourguiba was transferred
to a hospital in Tunis. Although done covertly, the word soon got around
the capitol that the supreme commandant was fighting his final offensive
in a Tunis hospital. The pilgrimages immediately began. Visits from friends,
old acquaintances, supporters, some people that never knew him. The myth
had not entirely died and appeared to be gaining steam. This spontaneous
outpouring, modest in scope though it still was, was too unacceptable.
Ben Ali had Bourguiba, now on death's doorstep, moved back to more remote
and politically less sensitive Monastir for his final days, a maneuver
that did sit well with Tunisians who found the gesture undignified.(5)
But that was just the opening salvo. If I were a betting man, I'd put money on the theory that Zine-The-Meanie's recurring nightmare in those days just prior to and after the supreme commandant went over the hill was that Bourguiba's funeral might mirror that of Hassan II of Morocco who had gone the way of all flesh just 9 months prior, triggering a national outpouring of emotion. Such a response in Tunisia would have greatly hastened Ben Ali's political demise. There are suggestions that below the surface was a genuine sadness for his passing and a kind of repressed rage for how the funeral was organized.(6) A kind of pervasive official defensiveness, bordering on fear permeated the atmosphere combined with a continuation of what might be called coffin politics. Bourguiba died in Monastir, but public opinion and common decency dictated that the casket be brought to Tunis, the capitol, to lay in state. This was done, although with another twist. The TunisAir plane carrying Bourguiba' body was named `7th of November' - the day of the coup that overthrew the supreme commandant - a fact not lost on the Bourguiba family. In a like manner, at first the government declared seven days of national mourning but government offices and banks received instructions at the same time to say open and conduct business as usual. The week of lying in state shrank to less than 24 hours. In Tunis the coffin was brought to the headquarters of the ruling party, the Rassemblement constitutionnel democratique (RCP) which had previously been called the NeoDestorian Socialist Party in Bourguiba's time. Despite the time restraints, several hundred people did show up to pay their respects, this despite a heavy presence of plain clothed and uniformed police. A few cries of `Allah Akbar' (Arabic for God is Great and heard often at funerals) were tolerated, however when some young mourners showed up with a poster reading `With our blood and souls we are ready to die for you, Bourguiba', the police sprang into action. The poster was quickly destroyed and the young protestors expelled from the crowd in short order. The casket remained in place in Tunis under heavy police guard most of the night as a stream of people passed by to pay their respects. But by early morning, Ben Ali had had enough and he ordered the coffin removed and flown back to Monastir in the same `7th of November' AirTunis plane. In his enduringly immodest way, Bourguiba had asked that his ashes be carried through all the country's provinces by Tunisian youth, perhaps hoping that a little bit of his remains could be placed at each of his 20 or so palaces he had built for himself throughout the countryside. It should be no surprise that Ben Ali had other, more restrictive plans that entailed Bourguiba's speedy and direct return to Monastir followed by his immediate burial in an effort deflate the growing national grieving as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once the plane landed, the funeral procession immediately began. Although there was no way to avoid a funeral procession, again, every precaution to mimimize public contacts was taken, starting with the media. Both Tunisian state tv and a French satellite station TV 5 had come to Monastir to cover the funeral live. At the very last minute permission was refused by an order of the interior ministry and, as a result, to nothing short of national fury, the country was deprived of a chance to participate in the process. Along the same lines, the route chosen from the airport to the cemetery - avoiding the main streets of course - took the procession on a route reserved for those who had shamed their families (suicide, etc), another slight to the Bourguiba family, and perhaps the whole nation. All the same, as in Tunis, crowds came out and lined the streets, among them, as in Tunis, a curiously high number of youths. Again there was security overkill. This time 9 ninja-like special forces soldiers in bullet-proof vests and ski masks - to protect their faces from the biting Tunisian cold - surrounded the coffin no doubt protecting it from potential attack. Spectators were kept behind a metal railing with police contingents both in front and back. This crowd was considerably more rowdy than the one in Tunis. A chant `Bourguiba lives' was repeated along the procession line accompanied by what was described as a barrage of insulting remarks targeting Ben Ali who was walking directly behind the coffin. When the crowd moved to accompany the hearst and other vehicles into the cemetery, they were stopped short of the gate. No question of letting ordinary Tunisians watch `Tunisia's first son' go to his finale abode, a privilege reserved only for high government officers, a few elite foreign guests (Jacques Chirac among them), and a small delegation of Bourguiba's immediate family. Ben Ali delivered a short, sterile eulogy claiming that his presidency had `begun a new stage in Tunisia's history ...and had achieved a new level of national solidarity' rather hollow words. And so it ended but not quite. The next day the gates of Bourguiba's mausoleum were chained with a bicycle lock to bar access and security vans sat vigilant nearby. After all, the danger exists that the mausoleum could become a shrine... Rob Prince/Denver Colorado/April 17, 2000 2. Even before his removal from office, Bourguiba's dementia had become a serious problem. The NY Times reported that in his last year in office he had appointed a new chief delegate to the United Nations, but immediately forgot it and named another person shortly thereafter. In the same month, he appointed several cabinet ministers one day only to deny he had done so several days later. (NY Times, April 7, 2000). While true, this information was given recently by government officials to try to legitimize the 1987 coup and undermine Bourguiba's credibility. 3. Statement of the Collectif de la Communaute Tunisienne en Europe of April 9, 2000 that appeared on the internet. 4. . Economist. April 15, 2000 5. Liberation. April 8, 2000 6. Liberation. April 9, 2000 |
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