Calculated Insolence

Seated in a Lincoln sedan flying the U.N. flag, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold drove through the battle wreckage of Bizerte. Along the way, Tunisian troops presented arms. When the car reached a French roadblock, a paratrooper flagged down the Lincoln. "Who is this personage?" he demanded. Unimpressed on learning Dag's identity, the private poked his head inside the car, ostensibly looking for weapons. Then he ordered the chauffeur to open the trunk compartment. White with anger, Hammarskjold snapped: "You are probably unaware of the fact that I have diplomatic immunity." Replied the paratrooper: "I have my orders." While a knot of French soldiers grinned their amusement, a paratroop lieutenant asked lazily: "Who is Hammarskjold, anyway?"

Charles de Gaulle, who contemptuously refers to the U.N. as "ce machin" (thingumbob), was making it clear to its Secretary-General that he should keep his nose out of what France considers its own affairs. After all, Paris pointed out, the Tunisians fired the first shot. When Hammarskjold tried to see Admiral Maurice Amman, the French commander in Bizerte, he was curtly told that no interview was possible. Hammarskjold sent a message to De Gaulle proposing a private meeting in Paris. A Quai d'Orsay spokesman replied with a piece of calculated insolence such as only the French can manage: "The Secretary-General has been informed of the point of view of the French government by a note which will render his voyage to Paris unnecessary."

For Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba, the intransigent stand of the French can spell political extinction. At the funeral of Tunisians killed in the fighting, he solemnly pledged, over the very bodies of the dead, that he would get the French out of Bizerte. In two hour-long talks with Hammarskjold, Bourguiba explained that he had to make good his promise or go under.

Washington, wanting nothing more than that the Bizerte issue be solved swiftly and equably, tried to mediate. France bluntly replied that the affair was none of Washington's business. At week's end De Gaulle ominously broke his long and lofty silence: he sent a congratulatory message to the French troops in Bizerte.

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