Word: tunisia
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From diminutive Tunisia last week came a brash ultimatum to the free world's two greatest powers. "The time has come," trumpeted Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba, "for the United States and Britain to choose between colonialism and freedom. Since these two countries, after the Sakiet bombing, requested us not to go before the U.N. Security Council, it is impossible for them not to take a stand in favor of the country which has been the victim of aggression and against the country which has been guilty of aggression...
Bourguiba even set a time limit within which Britain and the U.S. must agree to support Tunisia against France, "to prevent eyes from turning toward the Communist bloc or other countries." Announcing that he had canceled Tunisia's March 20 Independence Day ceremonies "because we are no longer convinced we are truly free," Bourguiba declared: "March 20 is the fatal day. By then we can see what direction we must take. If we cannot find the support of the West, I will be obliged to say that I have made a mistake...
...Face-Saver. Bourguiba's ultimatum, with its implicit threat that Tunisia would turn against the West unless he got his way, was an overt attempt at blackmail. And international blackmail is something which neither the U.S. nor Britain can afford to pay even once. Gloomily, many a chancellery and much of the world's press concluded that the three-weeks-old Anglo-American effort to mediate the quarrel between France and Tunisia was headed for failure...
Fact was that Bourguiba's tough talk seemed primarily designed to impress his countrymen. Having unwisely led his people to assume that all French forces would be out of Tunisia by March 20, Bourguiba now apparently felt obliged to make a dramatic gesture to direct popular attention from the fact that the French have not budged. But scarcely had he delivered his face-saving blast when Tunisian diplomats in Washington hustled around to the State Department to explain that his speech did not really mean what it seemed to mean...
...guillotine as have 127 other Algerians in the 3½-year rebellion. Outraged at the dubious procedures of her trial, French newspapers from the Communist L'Humanite to the conservative Le Figaro to the right-wing L'Aurore are protesting her coming execution. India's Nehru, Tunisia's Bourguiba, Russia's Voroshilov have appealed for clemency as have writers, labor leaders, professors, bishops and philosophers from Norway to Switzerland to Lebanon...