Guest Column
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
GUEST COLUMN Dienbienphu and North Africa By Arnold Beichman "TUNIS, May 10 (Reuters) —Violence flared in Tunisia again today as a gang of thirty-five bandits set fire to a gun-powder factory...
...Must more trains be fired upon and more factories sacked until at last we wearily open our atlases to learn the location of Sfax, Enfidaville, Sousse and Gafsa...
...We have "another chance" in North Africa, particularly in Tunisia, where there is a people that is not clamoring against "white imperialism," a people with strong cultural ties to the West, a people whose leaders understand the need for military security against Communism and still eschew the slogans of neutralism...
...The Neo-Destour in Tunisia and the Istiqlal in Morocco are independence movements grounded on the principles of freedom and free trade-unionism...
...But Habib Bourgiba...
...Today we can look back on Indo-China, as we can look back on China, and see the mistakes of the free world and wonder whether, if we had another chance, we could do otherwise...
...We underwrite imperialist exploitation and have become apologists for imperialism instead of its grave-diggers...
...Actually, Tunisian Jews are prominent in the Neo-Destour movement...
...Bandits in the same area fired on a railway car, injuring the engineer and a Tunisian passenger...
...Shall we wait while the Soviet Union, garlanded with victories—China, the Korean "truce," Vietnam—energizes the anti-colonial struggles in Africa...
...Tunisian labor, in fact, after a taste of the Communist World Federation of Trade Unions, left and joined the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in 1951...
...French governments have come and gone, talking all the while about doing something about Tunisia and Morocco, but it has been talk mixed with wily propaganda about Communist dangers or, more shamefully, the danger that if North Africa were freed anti-Semitism would be rampant...
...When do we learn...
...Is it not time for America to make an agonizing reappraisal of its policies toward French North Africa...
...GUEST COLUMN Dienbienphu and North Africa By Arnold Beichman "TUNIS, May 10 (Reuters) —Violence flared in Tunisia again today as a gang of thirty-five bandits set fire to a gun-powder factory near Gafsa after removing all explosives...
...New York Times, May 11, 1954 Let us now, while we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories about Dienbienphu and what might have and could have been, let us now talk about North Africa, Tunisia and Morocco, and the "bandits" who seek independence from French colonialism...
...There was a moment, after Secretary of State Dulles came into office, when it seemed as if he might become the champion of freedom for the North Africans, but that moment vanished...
...But it is quiet now in North Africa, and the "incidents" are few and a little monotonous...
...Behind the struggles of the North African people for self-government stands the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions...
...How often have today's "bandits" become tomorrow's patriots...
...It did not discommode anyone's anti-Communist conscience that America was underwriting the war of the French against the Vietminh, because, whatever the guilt, the danger of totalitarian victory was too formidable...
...North Africa lies dormant now like a wasp with a waiting sting...
...They do not say, "If you of the West do not help us, we will turn to the East...
...So we are tied down to French colonialism...
...In America, the AFL and the CIO have over and over again pressed the State Department for support of the North Africans...
...But the North Africans, when they rise, will not be a Soviet auxiliary...
...Ho Chi Minh, yesterday, was a guerrilla chieftain...
...Tunisia and Morocco are not infiltrated by Communist guerrillas...
...that, if we ignore the desire of colonial peoples for freedom and self-government, the Communists will satisfy this unquenchable desire in their own demagogic fashion...
...a smiling Tunisian and one-time guest of the AFL and CIO, was assassinated at the age of 39 on December 5, 1952 and his killers are still unknown...
...Their leaders are strongly anti-Communist and anti-totalitarian, and they know that the enemy, the long-term enemy, is Moscow, not Paris or Washington...
...Will we underwrite the war of the French colons against them...
...Must we give away our friends, one by one, to French colons, while Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade piously informs us that colonial liberation "too soon" is a peril...
...Their independence leaders are not "bandits" made in Moscow...
...I say let us talk now because the time is now, as it might have been "now" for Indo-China in 1946 and 1947...
...today he is an army with allies, and he sits like a conqueror in Geneva...
...Farhat Hached...
...leader of the Neo-Destour and onetime guest of an AFL convention, is in a French concentration camp and his son is an exile...
...This is the moment when we must act to prevent another disaster...
...These are people on "our side...
...It is by now a clich...
...the Vietminh was a Soviet force and had to be fought...
...Tunisia and Morocco are splendid places for action...
...How many more Dienbienphus do we need before we learn...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 21
