Shopping for Arms

To be as loyal as he is to the West, complained Tunisia's peppery President Habib Bourguiba, is "beginning to verge on downright sentimentality." He was angered by French troops invading Tunisia in hot pursuit of Algerian rebels (some of whom, say the French, make hit-and-run raids into Algeria from Tunisia). Independent Tunisia, snapped Bourguiba, must have guns, "no matter what the price."

Last week Bourguiba's government accepted an offer of arms from Egypt's Nasser, even though Bourguiba himself has long resented Nasser's internal intriguing in French North Africa on behalf of Cairo-centered Arab nationalism. Within three days of taking Nasser's arms, President Bourguiba was able to inform his people that the U.S. had decided to help Tunisia get arms. They would be "Western arms, whether from Italy or elsewhere," he said, and they would arrive by October.

Repudiating any thought of "bargaining" over Tunisia's loyalty to the West, Bourguiba said in his weekly radio broadcast: "The best proof that we did not want to depart from our position of wisdom is that even when our arms crisis was most acute, we negotiated with a Czech economic mission and did not even raise the question of arms." As for the "small quantity" of Egyptian arms, Bourguiba blandly said: "We accepted them as a fraternal gesture. The Egyptian offer helped us by its timeliness, but we know that Egypt herself is seeking arms for her own needs, and we would not wish to impose further burdens on her."

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