Ahmed Ben Salah

1926 -

Tunisian political and labor leader.

Ahmed Ben Salah was born in Moknine, attended Sadiqi College in Tunis, and began his political career as a Destour student leader at the University of Paris. Neo-Destour was the Tunisian political party that led the nationalist struggle against French colonial control. Returning to Tunisia in 1948, he remained active in the party but became involved with the Union Generale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (General Union of Tunisian Workers, UGTT). From 1951 until 1954, he worked with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Brussels. Following his election as general secretary of the UGTT in 1954, he advocated the introduction of socialist economic concepts.

In 1955 Tunisia was granted autonomy by France; Ben Salah's success in maintaining UGTT loyalty to Habib Bourguiba, leader of Destour and first president of the Republic of Tunisia (1957 - 1987), when he was threatened by a radical movement within the party headed by Salah Ben Youssuf, assured Ben Salah of an influential political role. Although Bourguiba initially rejected Ben Salah's socialist approach, the deterioration of the new republic and the economy led to Ben Salah's appointment as minister of planning in 1961.

Ben Salah, who was dubbed the economic czar, introduced a ten-year plan built around socialist development projects, intending to promote self-sufficiency and raise living standards. His ideas generally met with success in the industrial sector, but his insistence on organizing state-run agricultural cooperatives and his plan to bring all cultivable land under state management provoked widespread rural antagonism. Accusations of corruption and mismanagement followed and, in 1969, fearful that popular opposition to these policies would undermine the entire government, Bourguiba renounced Ben Salah, who was arrested and sentenced for ten years but escaped in 1973. In exile, he organized the opposition party Mouvement de l'Unite Populaire (MUP), embodying the socialist principles he had tried to introduce while in office. A group of dissidents led by Mohamed Bel Haj Omar later left the MUP and established a new party, the Parti de l'Union Populaire (PUP). In 1988 Ben Salah returned briefly to Tunisia, but left later for his European exile because of denial of his political rights. Ben Salah finally returned to Tunisia in September 2000 and did not assume an active political role.

Bibliography

Ben Salah, Ahmed. "Tunisia: Endogenous Development and Structural Transformation." In Another Development: Approaches and Strategies, edited by Marc Nerfin. Uppsala, Sweden: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 1977.

Moore, Clement Henry. Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.

Perkins, Kenneth J. Tunisia: Crossroads of the Islamic and European Worlds. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986.

— KENNETH J. PERKINS UPDATED BY EMAD ELDIN SHAHIN