Habib Bourguiba

(click to enlarge)
Habib Bourguiba. (credit: Stuart)

(born Aug. 3, 1903, Monastir, Tun. — died April 6, 2000, Monastir) President of Tunisia (1957 – 87). He studied at the Sorbonne, where he met independence-minded Algerians and Moroccans. He founded a nationalist newspaper in 1932. In 1934 he founded the Neo-Destour Party and became central to the Tunisian liberation movement. His efforts led the French to imprison him for several years, but he negotiated Tunisia's independence from that country in 1956. The Tunisian monarchy was abolished in 1957, and Bourguiba became president. During his 30 years in office he kept the army small and devoted much of the budget to improving education and health. Made president-for-life in 1975, he was removed from office in 1987 because of ill health. He was succeeded by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

For more information on Habib ibn Ali Bourguiba, visit Britannica.com.

(b. Monastir, Tunisia, 3 Aug. 1903; d. 6 Apr. 2000) Tunisian; President 1957 – 87 After legal studies in Paris, Bourguiba formed the radical Tunisian nationalist Neo Destour (New Constitution) party in 1934. Over the next twenty years he was imprisoned three times by the French before they recognized he was the political leader capable of effecting a smooth transition to the inevitable independence of Tunisia. In March 1956, the nationalist movement, with Bourguiba as the Prime Minister, took effective control of Tunisia, deposing the Bey a year later. In the new Tunisian republic, Neo Destour became the official party and Bourguiba the head of state. He negotiated France's military withdrawal from Tunisia by 1962 and successfully devloped commercial contacts between the two countries. Bourguiba pursued a "Tunisian socialist" programme of socio-economic development which included expropriation of foreign owned land, collectivization of agriculture, and the education of women. It profoundly antagonized traditionalists. Although Bourguiba was declared President for Life in 1975, he faced mounting unrest. Widespread riots in 1978 led to more than fifty-one deaths; an attack on the town of Gafasa in 1980 by Libyan-backed insurgents of the Tunisian Armed Resistance resulted in French and American military assistance; a state of emergency was declared after looting, riots, and public-sector strikes in 1984 – 5 and, in 1986, he proved wholly incapable of suppressing a resurgence of the militant fundamentalist groups, Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique and Islamic Jihad, despite numerous arrests, imprisonments, and executions. During this period, Bourguiba's behaviour became increasingly erratic and in 1987 he was deposed on the grounds of his senility by the Prime Minister, Ben Ali.

Habib Bourguiba (born 1903) was president of the Tunisian Republic and played a primordial role in leading his country's nationalist struggle for independence.

Habib Bourguiba was born on Aug. 3, 1903, at Monastir into a modest family. He completed secondary school in Tunis, adhering to the Destour, or liberal constitutional, party. In 1924 he won a scholarship to study political science and law in Paris. Upon returning to Tunis, he joined the bar and in 1930 launched his political career as a Destourian militant. He founded the newspaper Tunisian Action, in which he defined his political goal as the development of a modernist, revolutionary, and laic nationalism.

Early Political Life

In 1934 Bourguiba founded the more radical Neo-Destour party. His dynamism so disturbed the French resident general that Bourguiba was deported to the south, where he remained for two years. He was liberated when the Popular Front government in France attempted to liberalize the colonial regime and initiated negotiations with nationalists in 1936. Talks failed to produce results, despite Bourguiba's moderation and his willingness to help reform the colonial system. His noteworthy achievement of the prewar years was the detachment of Tunisian workers from the Communist-dominated CGT and the creation of an autonomous labor union, the UGTT.

In April 1938 Bourguiba was again arrested and remained a prisoner in France until March 1943. The Axis forces liberated him and carried him off to Italy, where they tried to recruit him for their cause. However, Bourguiba declined. On the contrary, when returning to Tunisia in April 1943, he convinced Neo-Destour militants to support the Allies, hoping to win benefits from them after the war ended.

But in 1945 France returned to Tunisia as its colonial master. Bourguiba then sought external support among the Arab states and in the United States. Until 1950 he continued to hope that France would adopt a conciliatory position and accept his seven-point program designed to lead Tunisia toward internal autonomy. Instead, the French authorities in Tunis oriented reforms toward cosovereignty. For Bourguiba this was the signal for revolt.

Fight for Independence

Bourguiba carried the Tunisian case to the United Nations and simultaneously launched appeals for combat in Tunisia against French intransigence. In January 1952 he was arrested for a third time and remained incarcerated until July 1954. In Tunisia armed terrorists organized urban guerrilla attacks against Frenchmen, while the Tunisian elite refused to form a rubber-stamp government.

In 1955 the president of the French Council, Pierre Mendès-France, pressed by the Algerian War, recognized Tunisia's right to internal autonomy. In the difficult negotiations which followed, intransigent Tunisian nationalists and French colons attacked all compromises, but Bourguiba forced his followers into line.

Conventions were signed in May 1955, and Bourguiba returned to Tunisia as a hero. In March 1956 Bourguiba profited from the sudden independence of Morocco to reopen negotiations which led on March 20, 1956, to Tunisia's independence. In April he was elected president of the Constituent Assembly and chief of the government. The Assembly proclaimed Tunisia a republic in July 1957, and in 1959 it ratified the constitution, which established a presidential regime. Bourguiba was then elected president of the republic by universal suffrage.

Development of Bourguibism

Twenty-five years of political activity and nine years of prison permitted Bourguiba to realize his goal of independence by steps. Bourguibism was the name given to his tactics and his doctrine. Tactically, he willingly employed negotiations and persuasion first, but he used force when necessary to achieve his ends. His doctrine, more pragmatic than ideological, can be reduced to four essential points: decolonization by stages, laicization, pro-West foreign policy, and measured economic planning.

Bourguiba was very attached to the Occident and interested in continuity and order. Thus, he approached the problem of decolonization with caution and diplomacy. But inevitable tensions erupted over the Algerian War and the pro-Egyptian activities of Salah Ben Youssef, the secretary general of the Neo-Destour. The crisis of Bizerte in 1961, when French soldiers killed more than a thousand Tunisians, gravely compromised relations between Paris and Tunis, as did Bourguiba's unilateral decision to nationalize lands belonging to Frenchmen in 1964. Normalization of relations between the two countries in 1969 resulted from Bourguiba's constant desire to pass from confrontation to friendship.

A Moslem, but at the same time a reformist, Bourguiba gave Tunisia a laic constitution and even encouraged the nonobservance of major religious rituals, such as the fast of Ramadan. Despite fierce resistance to these innovations, Tunisia went further than its neighbors in desacralizing politics and social life. More in tune with Western liberalism than with Arab nationalism, Bourguiba turned Tunisia toward the West. As a crusading anti-Communist, he opposed Soviet and Chinese penetration into Africa and supported the United States in Vietnam. In return, the United States offered Tunisia significant economic aid. As for planning, 1962 marked a decisive turning point in Tunisia's economy and in Bourguiba's doctrine of liberalism. Under the direction of Ahmed Ben Salah, Tunisia formed agrarian and industrial cooperatives and state-run factories. But mismanagement and internal opposition to forced collectivization of land led Bourguiba in the fall of 1969 to dismiss Ben Salah and slow down Tunisia's conversion to socialism.

In November 1969 he was reelected to a new 5-year term as president, though he turned many of his presidential duties over to his prime minister because of an onslaught of medical problems. Bourguiba sought medical treatment and rest outside of Tunisia for most of 1970 and 1971. Although he faced political challenges when he returned, Bourguiba maintained governmental control.

His health improved during 1973, and Bourguiba became a peacemaker in an Arab-Israeli conflict, a role that seemed to be short-lived when Bourguiba and Libya's Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi discussed creating a federation between their countries in early 1974. The talks of unification lasted only a week. Later that year he was named President for Life. He ruled rather unremarkably during the remainder of the decade, surviving political and medical problems. Bourguiba remained in office almost another decade.

The End of an Era

Bourguiba celebrated his 25th year of power in 1983 amid civil and religious unrest. A decline in the economy and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism led to the problems in Tunisia. The following year was marked by rioting and killing in the streets over an 80 percent increase on food prices. These food riots, combined with a 25 percent unemployment rate and increasing tensions with other African nations, marked the beginning of decline for Bourguiba.

In 1986, Bourguiba separated from his wife, his son, and his prime minister. Bourguiba also appointed all members to the Central Committee and Politburo (those positions were usually elected). In 1987 General Zine el Abidine Ben Ali was appointed prime minister (the third man to hold that office in 22 months). Ben Ali staged a coup and deposed of the President for Life, maintaining that Bourguiba was mentally unfit.

Further Reading

An early biography of Bourguiba is in French: Roger Stephane, La Tunisie de Bourguiba (1958). The most definitive biography is Derek Hopwood Habib bourguiba of Tunisia: The Tragedy of Longevity, St. Martin's Press, 1992. Since Bourguiba's career is so closely intertwined with Tunisian nationalism and politics, see Clement Henry Moore, Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government (1965), Lars Rudebeck, Party and People: A Study of Political Change in Tunisia (1967); Jean Lacouture, The Demigods: Charismatic Leadership in the Third World, Knopf, 1970; and L.B. Ware, "Ben Ali's Constitutional Coup in Tunisia, " Middle East Journal, Autumn 1988, 587-601.

c. 1903 - 2000

Leader of Tunisia's independence movement and first president of the Tunisian republic, 1957 - 1987.

The seventh child of a former army officer, Habib Bourguiba was born, according to some sources, on 3 August 1903, in Monastir, a small village in the Sahil, Tunisia's fertile coastal region. Other sources claim that Bourguiba was born in 1901. He was an intelligent youngster and won admission to Sadiqi College, a Tunis secondary school established before the imposition of the French protectorate in 1881. This institution provided the sons of the Tunisian elite with a superior education in both Arabic and French. He then went on to study law at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1924 to 1927, where he met and married a French woman, the mother of his only child, a son named Habib Bourguiba, Jr. (He later married Wassila Ben Ammar, the daughter of a powerful Tunis family.) In Paris, Bourguiba encountered other Maghrebi (Moroccan and Algerian) intellectuals as well as French liberals, and his interest in politics deepened. Upon his return to Tunisia, he opened a law office and became active in the Tunisian nationalist party, known as Destour (Constitution).

The Struggle for Independence

By the early 1930s, as the Great Depression deepened, Bourguiba grew impatient with the inability of the predominantly bourgeois Destour leaders to address the disproportionate burden of the economic crisis borne by Tunisian peasants and farmers while French settlers were being given special dispensations by protectorate authorities. He founded a French-language newspaper in 1932 to give voice to his demands on behalf of the predominantly rural Tunisian population, and in 1934 he led a secession from the Destour, establishing what became known as the Neo-Destour Party.

Openly agitating for independence with Bourguiba at its helm as secretary-general and later president, the Neo-Destour methodically organized a countrywide network of branches, turning the nationalist cause, previously an elite campaign, into a genuine mass movement. Moreover, although Bourguiba was clearly the principal figure in the movement, his willingness to encourage other leaders within the party ensured that his colleagues were able to sustain the momentum of the movement in the face of French repression. Many Neo-Destour leaders were repeatedly imprisoned or exiled, including Bourguiba himself, who was in detention for nearly ten years between 1934 and 1955.

In July 1954, facing rising local agitation, the French government (then headed by Pierre Mendès-France) decided to open negotiations with the Tunisian nationalists. In April 1955, the French granted Tunisia autonomy, reserving control of defense and foreign affairs, and within a year Bourguiba concluded a treaty granting the country full independence. On 25 June 1957, the Tunisian monarchy was abolished and Bourguiba was elected president of the new republic. It was not until 1963, however, and at the cost of nearly a thousand Tunisian lives following a military showdown in the French naval base of Bizerte (July - September 1961), that the French evacuated their last military base.

Bourguiba's willingness to pursue a gradualist approach in negotiations with the French enhanced his reputation in the West as an artful, pragmatic leader, but it earned him enemies at home. In fact, the autonomy agreements nearly precipitated a civil war, as Bourguiba was opposed by other nationalist leaders, such as Salah Ben Youssouf, who argued that Bourguiba had conceded too much. Although Bourguiba won the war and eventually independence as well, he took the challenge very seriously. It was alleged that he ultimately arranged Ben Youssouf's assassination in 1961 at the latter's place of exile in Cairo.

Ideological Independence

Bourguiba's policies in the early years of independence demonstrated an independence of mind that only some of his fellow statesmen, both at home and abroad, appreciated. During the 1960s, like many Third World rulers, Bourguiba embraced socialism, declaring the Neo-Destour (later known as the Parti Socialiste Destourien) the sole political party, nationalizing much of Tunisia's trade and industry, and establishing cooperative farms. By the end of the decade, however, the policy was meeting increasing domestic resistance, particularly among the coastal farmers, who had been Bourguiba's most important supporters in his battles with the French and later with Ben Yusuf. In 1969, in a dramatic reversal, Bourguiba dismissed the prime minister associated with the policy, Ahmed Ben Salah (later to accuse him of treason), and became one of the Arab world's earliest proponents of economic liberalism as the surest path to development.

Bourguiba's ideological independence - the pragmatism that became known in Tunisia as Bourguibisme, contesting Egyptian Nasserism, which accentuated the importance of pan-Arabism - was also evident elsewhere. On 6 March 1965, during a visit to Jordan, he spoke in Jerusalem and at a Palestinian refugee camp at Jericho, openly urging Arab leaders to opt for a negotiated settlement with Israel to end the Arab - Israeli conflict. Bourguiba elaborated the reasons why the Arabs should recognize Israeli sovereignty: Military confrontation with Israel always ended in Arab defeat and this was bound to also be the outcome in the future; not only was war counterproductive, but the United States would never allow the Arab states to defeat or decimate Israel; prudence and wisdom had to prevail over emotionalism, for this only made Israel more powerful; Arabs needed to rid themselves of the feelings of humiliation that had resulted from past wars, and Israelis had to free themselves of the complex of em-battlement; coexistence with Israel, even de facto recognition, would result in regional stability and prosperity for all parties involved in the conflict; and negotiations with Israel would mean direct Arab-Israeli contact, with Palestinian representatives leading the process from the Arab side. Bourguiba did not offer himself as a mediator and doubted that there would be a quick solution to the conflict.

At the time, such an initiative was virtually unimaginable. The Israelis followed his proposals closely, even though they would require Israel to accept U.N. Resolutions 181 (the 1947 Partition Plans) and 194 (repatriation of the 1948 Palestinian refugees). On the other hand, most Arab leaders opposed it outright.

This placed Tunisia on the fringes of inter-Arab politics. Similarly, although Tunisia was described in its constitution as an Islamic country, Bourguiba had little patience for what he viewed as the anachronisms of religious observance. Thus, he advocated abandoning the obligatory fast during the month of Ramadan, arguing that the consequent loss of worker productivity interfered with the country's development. He also engineered Tunisia's family code, one of the most far-reaching personal-status laws in the Muslim world, so that it outlawed polygamy and made access to divorce, support, child custody, and the like benefits that enabled women to be more equitable with men.

Weakening Influence

While many of these positions won him great esteem abroad, by 1975, when the national assembly declared him president for life (a position he had previously refused), Bourguiba's command of the Tunisian political scene had begun to weaken. Health problems that had appeared in 1967 recurred periodically, and although he proved not to be nearly as frail as many feared, his intellectual agility diminished. In the 1970s, his government was drawing increasing criticism for failing to accompany its economic liberalism with political reform. The architect of his economic policy, Prime Minister Hedi Nouira, was openly contemptuous of multiparty politics, but it was not until he suffered a stroke in 1980 that Bourguiba saw fit to replace him.

Nouira's successor, Mohammed Mzali, initially lived up to his more liberal reputation, authorizing a number of opposition parties and calling for contested elections, but he was soon consumed by the jockeying for position among the political elite that was precipitated by Bourguiba's increasingly erratic behavior. Bourguiba was said to be out of touch with most daily events, often preoccupied with plans for his own state funeral, yet unwilling to surrender any of his virtually absolute authority.

In the late 1970s, Bourguiba agreed to have the headquarters of the Arab League of States moved from Cairo to Tunis. At the time, the Arab world was boycotting Egypt for signing a peace agreement with Israel. Between 1958 and 1967, Bourguiba had regularly walked out of Arab League meetings, regarding it as an instrument of Nasser's involvement in inter-Arab politics. In 1982, Bourguiba allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization to establish its headquarters in Tunis after the Israel Defense Force ousted it from Lebanon.

By the middle of the 1980s, however, the country needed a strong hand; it faced serious economic problems, a growing Islamic political movement (alNahda, whose participation in Tunisian politics was anathema to the secularist Bourguiba), and a political elite divided by a preoccupation with its own political future. Although Bourguiba had designated Mzali his successor, he dismissed him in 1985, appointing in his place General Zayn al-Abidine Ben Ali, the first military officer ever to serve in a Tunisian cabinet.

As Bourguiba, long an advocate of a small and apolitical military establishment, might well have predicted, it was Ben Ali who ended Bourguiba's political career. After a Tunisian court failed to hand down death sentences to Islamists convicted on charges (real or trumped up) of seeking to overthrow the state, Bourguiba demanded that they be executed anyway. Instead, Ben Ali arranged to have several doctors certify that the president was too ill and too senile to govern effectively and Bourguiba was deposed in a coup on 7 November 1987. He retired to live in seclusion in the palace he had earlier built for himself in Monastir. He died on 6 April 2000.

Bibliography

Anderson, Lisa. State and Social Transformation in Tunisia andLibya, 1830 - 1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Laskier, Michael M. Israel and the Maghreb: From Statehood toOslo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

— LISA ANDERSON UPDATED BY MICHAEL M. LASKIER

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Habib Bourguiba حبيب بورقيبة
1st President of Tunisia
In office July 25, 1957 – November 7, 1987
Preceded by	Bey Mohamed Lamine (as Bey of Tunis)
Succeeded by	Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Born	August 3, 1903
Died	April 6, 2000
Nationality	Tunisian
Spouse(s)	Mathilde Lorrain (1st wife) Wassila Ben Ammar (2nd wife)
Religion	Islam

Habib Bourguiba (Arabic: حبيب بورقيبة Ḥabīb Būrqība‎) (August 3, 1903–April 6, 2000) was a Tunisian statesman and the Founder and First President of the Republic of Tunisia from July 25, 1957 to November 7, 1987. He is often compared to Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk because of the pro-Western reforms enacted during his presidency. During the time Bourguiba was president, education was a high priority. Bourguiba also promoted women's rights as a way to gain Western support for his regime during the Cold War. Though these set important legal precedents by prohibiting polygamy, expanding women's access to divorce, and raising the age at which girls could marry to 17 years of age - he simultaneously banned women's rights groups from organizing. The new Personal Status Code passed in August 1956 expanded women's rights, though it remains open to debate how much this transformed Tunisian society in practice. Notably, the Code also institutionalized the role of the father as head of the family. After independence, Tunisia's Jewish Community Council was abolished by the government and many Jewish areas and buildings were destroyed for "urban renewal."

Bourguiba's mausoleum in Monastir

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Early political career 3 The Neo-Destour 4 Colonial Oppression 5 World War II 6 Fighting for independence 7 Presidency 8 Social reform 9 Retreat 10 Death 11 Personal life 12 See also 12.1 External links

Early life and education

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The youngest of eight brothers and sisters, Habib Bourguiba was born on August 3, 1903 in Monastir (100 miles south of Tunis). Habib Bourguiba attended school in Tunis at the famous Collège Sadiki and then at the Lycée Carnot. He obtained his Baccalaureat in 1924 and went to the University of Paris to study law and political science. While in Paris, the adult Bourguiba met Mathilde Lorrain, his lodger at that time, whom he married in 1927, and who bore him on April 9, 1927 his only son, Habib Bourguiba, Jr.

Early political career

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The same year Bourguiba graduated in law and political science, he went back with his newly formed family to Tunisia where he got immediately involved in the political arena by joining two newspapers in 1928: l’Etendard Tunisien (The Tunisian Flag) and Sawt At-Tunisi (The Tunisian Voice). In 1931, the French colonial authorities prosecuted him for his alleged “Incitement to racial hatred”. Subsequent to this, Bourguiba launched a militant newspaper L’Action Tunisienne, laying the ground for strong action against the colonial power.

The Neo-Destour

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As a member of the Executive Committee of the Destour Party, Bourguiba found himself less in tune with the mainstream party vision, which culminated in the Monastir incident of August 8, 1933 relative to the burial of a naturalized Tunisian citizen. Bourguiba was pushed to resign from the committee, which led to the creation of the Neo Destour Party in Ksar Hellal on March 2, 1934 with Bourguiba as the Secretary General of the Political Bureau. From that moment, Bourguiba set out to crisscross the country to try to enroll the majority of Tunisians from the countryside; and thus create a more popular base for his newly formed party so that he managed in a couple of years to set up more than 400 branches (cells) of the Neo Destour....

Colonial Oppression

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In September 1934, the colonial representative (Resident General) Mr Peyrouton ordered that Bourguiba be confined to Borj-Leboeuf, a remote place on the border of the Sahara desert, until April 1936 when he was released with most of his companions. After the famous popular uprising of April 9, 1938, where colonial troops opened fire on demonstrators killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, Bourguiba was once again imprisoned on June 10, 1939 along with a group of militants on charges of plotting against the state security and incitement to civil war.

World War II

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At the outbreak of World War II, Bourguiba was transferred to the Teboursouk prison and then in May 1940, to the Haut Fort Saint Nicholas near Marseilles until November 18, 1942 where he was taken to Fort Montluc in Lyon. After which he ended up in Fort Vancia in Ain until the Germans released him and took him to Chalons-sur-Saône. In a manoeuvre by the Germans and Italian Fascist regime to gain Bourguiba's alliance, he was received with full honours in Rome, in January 1943, but to no avail; the Italian Foreign Affairs Ministry tried to obtain a statement in their favour; on the eve of his return home, he accepted to deliver a message to the Tunisian people by “Radio Bari”, cautioning them against “all the appetites”. In his return to Tunis, on April 7, 1943 he made sure that the message he had sent from his prison in August 1942 reached the general population as well as the militants, that Germany was bound to lose the war and that Tunisia’s independence would only come after the victory of the Allies. He emphasized his position by putting it as a question of life or death for Tunisia.

Fighting for independence

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After the end of World War II, Bourguiba, after many sterile efforts to open a dialogue with the French authorities, came to the conclusion that the Tunisian cause had to be brought to the attention of the world opinion. In March 1945, he left Sfax secretly, on a small fisherman’s boat, heading to Libya, and from there, on foot and on camel’s back, he managed to reach Cairo, which he used as a base for his international activity. He took part in the setting up of the Greater Maghreb Office. He travelled continuously to the different Arab countries, members of the newly born Arab League, Europe, (Switzerland, Belgium), to Asia, (Pakistan, India, Indonesia) and USA to promote the Tunisian aspiration for independence and met with high and influential personalities to help the Tunisian cause. On September 8, 1949, Bourguiba returned to Tunis to reorganise the Party and resume his direct contact policy with the population by visiting small towns and villages throughout the country.

In April 1950, he laid out a seven-point program aiming at ending the system of direct administration in Tunisia and restoring full Tunisian sovereignty as a final step to independent statehood. In 1951, he embarked on a second round of trips to promote his program at the international level. In light of the French Government refusal to concede to national claims, Bourguiba toughened his stand and called for unlimited resistance and general insurrection. This tactic led to his arrest on January 18, 1952 and his confinement in Tabarka, then Remada then in La Galite and finally Groix Island at the Ferte Castle.

Pierre Mendès-France became French prime minister in 1954; his positions on France’s colonial policies opened the door to Tunisian home-rule. June 1, 1955 saw the return of Bourguiba. The “Internal Autonomy Agreement” was a big step to total independence. After several arduous negotiations, independence was proclaimed on March 20, 1956, with Habib Bourguiba as president of the “National Constituent Assembly”, and Head of the Government.

Presidency

On July 25, 1957, a republic was proclaimed abolishing the monarchy and investing Bourguiba with powers of President of the Republic. Bourguiba's long and powerful presidency was formative for the creation of the Tunisian state and nation.

After a failed experiment with socialist economic policies, Bourguiba embarked from the early 1970s on an economically liberal model of development spearheaded by his Prime Minister, Hédi Nouira for a ten-year period. This witnessed the flourishing of privately owned business and the consolidation of the private sector.

On the international front, Bourguiba took a pro-Western position in the Cold War, but with a fiercely defended independent foreign policy that challenged the leadership of the Arab League by Egyptian President Nasser. In March 1965, he delivered the historical Jericho Speech advocating a fair and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis based on the UN 1947 Resolution that created two states. In 1979 Tunis became the headquarters of the Arab League after the Camp David Accords and in 1982, it welcomed the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) leadership in Tunis, after it had been ousted from Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.

In March 1975, the Tunisian National Assembly voted Bourguiba president for life, as an exceptional measure. In the 1980s Bourguiba made efforts to combat both poverty and a rising Islamist opposition, spearheaded by the Nahda party.

On November 7, 1987, Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali declared President Habib Bourguiba impeached on medical grounds and constitutionally replaced him as President of Tunisia, on the basis of a strict reading of Article 57.

Social reform

The Bourguiba government's reforms include female emancipation, public education, family planning, a modern, state-run healthcare system, a campaign to improve literacy, administrative, financial and economic organization, suppression of the "Waqf frozen property," and the building the country's infrastructure.^{[citation needed]}

Retreat

Tomb of Bourguiba in Monastir

Bourguiba remained the President of Tunisia until November 7, 1987, when his newly-appointed Prime minister and constitutional successor impeached him, claiming his old age and health reasons as certified by his own doctors made him unfit to govern.

President Bourguiba lived in Monastir under government protection in the Governor's Mansion for the last 13 years of his life.

Death

President Bourgiba died on April 6, 2000 at the age of 96. He was buried with national honors in Monastir, in a mausoleum built on April 8, 2000.

Personal life

In 1925, Habib Bourguiba met his future wife, Mathilde Lorrain, in Paris while he was studying law at the Sorbonne. She converted to Islam and chose the name Moufida Bourguiba. She bore him one son: Habib Bourguiba Jr. in April 1927. In a second wedding, he married the influential Wassila Ben Ammar and adopted a daughter, Hajer Bourguiba.

See also

• Tunisia

Preceded by Bey Mohamed Lamine (as Regent of Tunis)

President of Tunisia 1957–1987

Succeeded by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

v • d • e Presidents of Tunisia Habib Bourguiba • Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

v • d • e Prime Ministers of Tunisia Grand Viziers al-Tabi (1800-15) · Khoja (1822-29) · al-Taba'a (1829-37) · Mustapha Khaznadar (1837-73) · Pacha (1873-77) · Mohamed Khaznadar (1877-78) · Ben Ismail (1878-81) · Mohamed Khaznadar (1881-82) · Bouattour (1882-1907) · M. Djellouli (1907-08) · Djait (1908-15) · T. Djellouli (1915-22) Prime Ministers Dinguizli (1922-26) · Bouhageb (1926-32) · Lakhoua (1932-42) · Chenik (1943) · S. Baccouche (1943-47) · Kaak (1947-50) · Chenik (1950-52) · S. Baccouche (1952-54) · Mzali (1954) · Dupoizat (1954)* · Ben Ammar (1954-56) · Bourguiba (1956-57) · Ladgham (1969-70) · Nouira (1970-80) · Mzali (1980-86) · Sfar (1986-87) · Ben Ali (1987) · H. Baccouche (1987-89) · Karoui (1989-99) · Ghannouchi (1999-) * interim

External links

• Official site run by his family
• History of his life by the BBC
• Obituary from The New York Times

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