Smooth Coup

In the dark of night last week, 300 French soldiers surrounded the house of Tunisian Prime Minister Mohammed Chenik. According to the French version, Chenik, an irreconcilable nationalist, was dressed and waiting when the police arrived. According to Chenik's son, the Prime Minister was rudely awakened "like a common murderer," and forced to dress in front of his captors. Either way, everyone agreed on what happened next. A plane left Tunis at dawn bearing Chenik and three other nationalist ministers to detention at a kerosene-lighted oasis hotel at Kebili, in the North African desert.

The coup had been smoothly engineered by France's new Resident General in Tunisia, Jean Marie Franc,ois de Haute-cloque, an idealistic onetime soldier and longtime diplomat, who, as a French representative in the Levant, saw France lose Syria and Lebanon in the dark days of World War II. In Tunisia, since the bloody riots last January, he had seen sabotage flicker over the country like heat lightning. Eleven post offices, seven bridges, 15 trains, 646 telephone poles had been blown up. Every time De Haute-cloque tried for a man-to-man interview with Sidi Mohammed el-Amin, the Bey of Tunis, whom Tunisians regard as their ruler, he found the 70-year-old Bey flanked by nationalist cabinet men. Finally, his patience worn thin, De Hautecloque ordered the Bey to throw the cabinet out. When the Bey appealed over the Resident's head to France's President Auriol, De Hautecloque took action for himself: off to exile went Prime Minister Chenik.

Paris shuddered at such tactics. Left-wing Paris dailies likened De Hautecloque to Hitler, and predicted dire trouble in Tunisia. Instead, after two days, the shaken Bey, who looks like a distinguished European actor impersonating an Arab, yielded to French demands. He went even further, blaming Tunisia's troubles on the nationalists, "men whose secret intentions were surely evil." Then he turned over Tunisia's Foreign Ministry to Resident De Hautecloque, agreed to withdraw Tunisian complaints from the U.N., and appointed a fat and wealthy pro-French Prime Minister, Salah Eddine Ben Mohammed Baccouche, 69, who proudly wears the cross of a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. It was a surprising victory for De Hautecloque. In Tunis, which is normally noisy at night, a rigid curfew kept things quiet except for the barking of dogs and the rumble of snub-nosed Renault riot cars patrolling the streets.

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In adjoining French Morocco last week, the 40th anniversary of the Treaty of Fez (by which the territory passed into French control) rolled around. In Tangier, an international port which Moors view as part of Morocco, rioters ran amuck in the streets, smashed shop fronts, looted, beat up Europeans. At least a score were injured, and several killed.

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