Word: tunisia
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...come to free you from a dictatorial regime, and here are your arms." This call to revolt was issued by 30 armed men who sneaked across the Algerian border early last week and made their way to the phosphate mining town of Gafsa (pop. 30,000) in central Tunisia. Joined there by 20 confederates, the invaders tried to seize Gafsa's civil and military installations. The local populace refused to join the insurrection, but it took Tunisian troops 20 hours to subdue the commandos. The battle left 41 men dead and more than 100 wounded...
Tunisian Interior Minister Othman Kechrid accused Libya of launching the attack in an attempt to overthrow ailing President Habib Bourguiba, 76. Though he did not mention Tunisia's oil-rich eastern neighbor by name, Kechrid clearly had Libya in mind when he denounced "a neighboring state specializing in this kind of operation." Premier Hedi Nouira also accused Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi of "a diabolic plot" to make it appear that Algeria was responsible for the attack. The Tunisians expelled the Libyan ambassador and withdrew their own envoy from Tripoli, a move just short of breaking diplomatic relations...
Libyan authorities expressed "astonishment" at the Tunisian charges. But hostility and distrust between the two countries have been simmering ever since Bourguiba abruptly backed out of a 1974 agreement to merge Tunisia with Libya in a single Islamic Arab Republic. According to Tunisian sources, Gaddafi continues to harbor a deep personal resentment over the incident, and has supported several previous attempts to engineer Bourguiba's downfall...
...Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was condemned not only by Western leaders but by numbers of Third World countries, including Egypt, Tunisia and the Sudan. The Saudi Arabia-based Islamic World League declared that "the Communist aggression aims at eliminating the Muslim presence in Afghanistan. In Turkey, which has been plagued by mounting economic problems and political instability (see WORLD), military leaders alluded to the Afghanistan crisis when they warned rival civilian politicians to start working together or face overthrow...
...prison from torture, and crude political assassinations. In Argentina alone, Amnesty International documented the names of 2,500 among an estimated 15,000 political disappearances during a three-year period. Allegations of torture and ill-treatment in prison were reported in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia in the Middle East. The report also mentions the more than 100 executions known to have taken place in Iran, at the command of Ayatullah Khomeini's revolutionary tribunals...