SUMMARY

[Note to reader: this Country page primarily contains brief information about state-based violence during the period 1946–1974, and to some extent 1975–1988. For more detailed information on organized violence after 1989, please consult the specific Conflict and Dyad pages available on the left-hand side of this page. These pages contain more detailed information regarding all three categories of organized violence in this country from 1989 and onwards (when applicable), as well as detailed information about state-based violence 1975–1988. The left-hand side menu also contains links to Actor pages for all groups involved in organized violence since 1989 in this country, as well as actors involved in state-based violence 1975–1988.]

Tunisia was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1881 when the country became a French protectorate. After the Second World War peaceful developments towards Tunisian autonomy halted due to the opposition of French settlers in Tunisia. Against this background pro-independence movements organized countrywide strikes, demonstrations, and the killing of French settlers and pro-French Tunisians in the beginning of the 1950s. One of the most radical pro-independence groups, the National Liberation Army, instigated an extra-state conflict in 1953. Massive fighting between rival Tunisian factions occurred. The conflict was terminated when Tunisia was granted independence in 1956 and the French troops withdrew.

France kept control over the Tunisian seaport Bizerte, however, which was of strategic importance as a naval base for the French army. On 17 July 1961, the Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba formally demanded the immediate withdrawal of French troops. A few days later, he ordered Tunisian forces to block the French positions in Bizerte. In the ensuing interstate conflict the Tunisian troops were defeated. After negotiations between the two conflicting parties and a vote in favour of withdrawal of France in the United Nations General Assembly, the French troops ceded their base in Bizerte in 1963.

Tunisia’s first president Habib Bourguiba established an authoritarian regime that in many respects resembled a presidential monarchy. He was elected president for life in 1975. Strikes and political turmoil increased in the late 1970s and in 1980 the previously unknown Résistance Armée Tunisienne (Tunisian Armed Resistance) attacked the Tunisian town Gafsa and unsuccessfully urged the population to rise up against Bourguiba’s “dictatorship”. The group was quickly defeated in a short intrastate conflict.

In 1987 Bourguiba was removed from office in a bloodless coup. He was replaced by Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, who kept his hold on power into the 21st century.

Since 1946 Tunisia has experienced the extra-state, interstate and intrastate categories of UCDP organized violence.