Word: beys
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...fight, Premier Mendès-France found time to keep one prior promise: an attempt to bring peace and stability to France's shaky, strife-torn North African empire in Tunisia. Mendès himself, in his first weeks in office, had promised the Bey of Tunis internal sovereignty and an all-Tunisian government. Last week talks designed to bring substance out of the shadow of the Mendès proposals began in Tunis...
...Tunis too, the bright promise of local autonomy that Premier Mendès-France brought (TIME, Aug. 9) was already being tarnished by old habits of suspicion. The venerable (72) Bey of Tunis, with Mendès' backing, appointed Tahar Ben Amar, 68, one of the protectorate's biggest landowners, to be Premier. He was certainly as pro-French as anyone could wish. But he immediately ran into difficulties...
...would not accept. Only after Ben Amar dropped two out of six Neo-Destourians was his ten-man team approved. Every man on it is a moderate (what the French call "calm"). This week at a formal investiture, they kissed the right palm and left shoulder of the Bey of Tunis, received his "blessing of Allah...
...hours later Mendès rode through the heavily guarded streets of Tunis. In the vast crowd under the broiling sun women shouted, "Yo, yo, yo!"-the old Moslem chant of joy. When Mendès stepped down before the palace of the 72-year-old Bey, Sidi Mohammed el Amin, the Bey caused sugared almonds to be cast under the Frenchman's feet. Mendès read out his plan to give Tunisia the internal freedom and autonomy that its nationalists have long and ardently coveted, while safeguarding the rights of the French colons (settlers) and France...
Those of the audience who were on stage to attest the honesty of Bey's performance spent the ten minutes of his "airless interment" accusing the manager of fraud. He replied that they were all "unbelievers," and when Bey "returned from the grave" and distributed talismans to "ward of evil," the manager's epithet was quite valid. Those who saw the performance from the stage went away unbelieving...