Regime launches assault on workers movement NOT LONG ago, the Tunisian government demonstrated its total subservience to US imperialism by failing to make more than a pathetic protest after the Israeli-American raid on the PLO headquarters near Tunis, and by its subsequent complicity in the US highjacking of the Egyptian plane carrying Abu-Labbas and the members of his group.
Only a few days after this bending of the knee to US imperialism, this same government did not hesitate to launch a vicious onslaught against the UGTT, the country's main union confederation, which is considerably larger than its pro-government rival, the UNTT. SALAH JABER
TUNISIA recent years the UGTT has evolved into a specific combination of a union and a mass workers party.
Thus, this year, the UGTT chose, in line with the rest of the opposition, to boycott the municipal elections, and decided to transform its weekly publication Ash-Shaab into a political daily. At the same time, a discussion started up within the union about the advisability of running independent workers slates in the parliamentary elections scheduled for 1986.
This politicalization of the UGTT, combining with successive waves of radicalization on the social front in struggles given impetus by the economic crisis convinced the Bourguiba regime to act before a political crisis came along to complicate things further. Causes for worry in this regard are the frictions with Libya and the possibility that the fading Bourguiba may finally pass away.
Since the start of this year, repressive pressures have built up against the UGTT. Trade-union meetings in the plants have been banned. There have been arrests and layoffs of strikers (in particular in transport). The daily AshShaab was suspended after five days of publication. The police surrounded union headquarters. The state-administered dues check-off of 1% of wages, the union's main source of funds, was abolished. The state stopped paying trade-union full-timers. And so it went.
Then, on October 23, the impresario of the January 26, 1978, repressive operation, Zine-El-Abine Ben Ali, a top cop and notorious pro-American, was promoted to the rank of minister for national security. This came in the context of a ministerial reshuffle aimed generally against the UGTT and coincided with the launching of the latest repressive offensive.
This is not the time for balance sheets, although it is already clear how much the union bureaucracy failed to prepare the workers for this confrontation, thinking that it could avoid a showdown by increasing its concessions and partial retreats. Now is the time for a fightback. The response, however, so far has been unfortunately weak on the scale of the country as a whole, aside from a strike in the banks (one of the most radicalized groups of workers) and student demonstrations.
However, in the southern part of the country, strikes are growing. A general strike was called for November 5. At the same time, workers defense groups have been set up to defend the union headquarters. This is certainly the road to follow throughout the country - the formation of workers defense groups and a general strike until all the arrested unionists are released, police persecution is ended, and the occupation of the union beadquarters is called off.
In the last week of October, the militia of the Destourian Party, the Tunisian version of the parallel repressive forces typical of fascist or populist dictatorships - forcibly took over the headquarters of several UGTT regional organizations, in particular the one in Stax, one of the largest and most militant working-class concentrations in the country.
At the same time, the Bourguibist party set up so-called provisional committees of the UGTT, which were supposed to represent the union's "rank and file" against the Achour leadership, which was accused of being unpatriotic and serving the interests of Libya.
Since this grotesque frameup failed, the government threw its official guard dogs into the fray occupying by military force the headquarters of the regional unions in Sfax and Tunis on October 30, and then, on October 31, the national headquarters, in Tunis and almost all the regional headquarters except for those in the southern part of the country, an area with a tradition of opposition to the government and where there are also big working-class concentrations, such as the Gafsa mines.
Simultaneously, the government rounded up dozens of trade-union activists and leaders on various pretexts, going from crude police manipulation, such as the claim that knives and copies of Kadhafi's "Little Green Books" were found in Sfax, to the charge of adultery (!) lodged against Jared, a member of the UGTT Executive Bureau and the right-hand man of the general secretary, Habid Achour. Achour's son was also arrested on an obscure charge of evading customs, just in time to blacken his father's name.
This vast offensive by the government whose methods Achour correctly described as gangsterlike, is aimed at
International Viewpoint 25 November 1985 destroying the UGTT as an independent representative of the Tunisian working class and reducing it to what it was ten years ago, what the yellow splinter group, the UNTT is today, that is a transmission belt between the regime and the workers.
The radicalization of social struggles in Tunisia over the 1970s led progressively to a divorce between the UGTT bureaucracy headed by Achour and the Bourguiba regime, a divorce that was to be consumated by the general strike of January 26, 1978, and the violent repression that then came down on the workers movement and the union bureaucracy.
In the medium term (1981) it was the union that emerged victorious from this test of strength. It maintained its organizational continuity despite the government's repression and established a political autonomy that has grown continuously since then. This process went so far that in the most