$Unique_ID{COW03727} $Pretitle{289} $Title{Tunisia Chapter 2B. Ethnic Groups and Languages} $Subtitle{} $Author{LaVerle Berry and Robert Rinehart} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{arabic french population social tunisia independence modern society class language} $Date{1986} $Log{Camels*0372701.scf } Country: Tunisia Book: Tunisia, A Country Study Author: LaVerle Berry and Robert Rinehart Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1986 Chapter 2B. Ethnic Groups and Languages The Peoples of Tunisia Modern-day Tunisians are a mixture of Berber and Arab stock. The Berbers, the indigenous people of North Africa, have no generic name for themselves. The Romans called them barbari, or "barbarians," the term applied to those peoples who lived outside the framework of Greco-Roman civilization and from which the designation Berber probably comes. Of stocky physique and having a high incidence of light hair and blue eyes, the Berbers are Caucasians akin to other Mediterranean peoples. The Arab component of the society was introduced during the conquests of the seventh, the eleventh, and succeeding centuries. Racially, the Arabs brought a slender build, dark eyes and hair, and darker skin to the community from which most modern Tunisians are descended. The Berbers quickly accepted the religion, language, and culture of the invaders and intermarried with them. In modern times most Tunisians claim Arab ancestry, speak Arabic, profess Islam, and find only traces of Berber culture in their lives. In this respect Tunisia contrasts with Algeria and Morocco, where in the 1980s people still ethnically identifiable as Berbers made up substantial minorities of the population. The relative completeness, as well as the early date, of the arabization of the Tunisian Berbers may have been in part because most of the Berbers occupied a relatively compact geographical area. It may also have been because long before the coming of the Arabs, the Berbers had undergone a substantial degree of assimilation under the Carthaginians and the Romans. In the 1980s small Berber communities were still found on the island of Jerba, in a few villages and oases on the edge of the Sahara, in highlands along the Libyan border, and in the mountainous northwestern corner of the country. The Berbers numbered about 180,000, or less than 3 percent of the total population, of which less than one-half had retained their native Berber speech. The Arab-Berber population is dispersed over the whole country. Subtle racial distinctions, however, are discernible: the coastal and northern peoples tend to have the stocky Berber physique, while those of the inland and southern regions where Arab concentration has been highest are slender and darker skinned. Cultural differences are also noticeable between inhabitants of the coastal region and those of the hinterland. Since the time of the Phoenicians, Tunisia has had a sedentary coastal civilization and a nomadic interior populace (see Early History, ch. 1). The Arab invasions increased the cultural and linguistic homogeneity of the population but sharpened this ancient division, which remains visible in the form of dialects, in the sedentary versus the nomadic life, and in the rate of acceptance of modernization in the two areas. Since the end of the Arab invasion the ethnic composition of the population has changed little. Black Africans, once widely used as household slaves and concubines, have affected the composition of the population only slightly, although skin color ranges from bronze to black in the southern oases. In the fifteenth century the Tunisian population received an infusion of Spanish blood with the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain. Intermarriage between Tunisians and Balkan peoples, Greeks, Turks, and European Christians made a significant social and commercial impact on the coastal society but did little to alter the Arab-Berber population as a whole. With the disappearance of these foreign elements, their characteristics have diffused in the ethnic majority. Jews, indigenous and foreign born, were once far more numerous in Tunisia. Their numbers have declined steadily over the last few decades, from about 86,000 at the time of independence in 1956 to some 60,000 in 1966, to perhaps 5,000 in the early 1980s. About 2,500 still reside in Tunis, and others live in Zarzis and elsewhere in Tunisia; but probably the most interesting enclaves are the tiny communities on Jerba Island. Numbering about 1,200 in the early 1980s, the Jews of Jerba were one of the last remnants of once extensive Jewish communities that were scattered across the Maghrib. Most of them were merchants or skilled crafts-people. They have lived according to age-old cultural traditions and have preserved a form of theocratic republican government under the tutelage of a leading rabbi. Both Tunisian and foreign-born Jews left in large numbers at national independence and have continued to do so in smaller numbers in response to tensions arising from events in the Middle East. At the time of the Arab-Israeli June 1967 War, anti-Jewish demonstrations in Tunis resulted in heavy damage to the principal synagogue. Rioting in three southern towns occurred in 1982 after the murder of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and two Jerban Jews were killed when anti-Jewish sentiment again ran high in late 1985 in the wake of an Israeli bombing raid on Palestinian headquarters south of Tunis (see International Security Concerns, ch. 5). Throughout the years of the protectorate the population included a large number of Europeans, French and Italians predominating. The two groups were sociologically distinct, the French constituting a well-to-do elite and the bulk of the Italians consisting of working-class people from southern Italy and Sicily. In 1956 the European colony totaled more than 341,000 people, the majority of whom were French. During the first two years after independence about one-half of the Europeans departed, but their departure was less hurried than that from Morocco and Algeria. For a time the new government continued to employ more than 3,000 former French officials and a great many schoolteachers, and the replacement of French bureaucrats and business leaders was generally orderly. By 1966, however, the census showed that the population included only 66,834 foreigners, of whom only 32,520 were not Arabs. The size of the non-Tunisian population in the early 1980s was estimated at about 50,000, but some sources placed it significantly below that. Language and the Society Arabic is the official language of Tunisia and in its North African Maghribi form constitutes the native language of virtually the entire population. Berber, the indigenous tongue, is spoken by substantial ethnic minorities in Algeria and Morocco, but in Tunisia only about 1 percent of the population use it as their mother tongue. Berber speakers, who numbered about 70,000 in the mid-1980s, occupy villages on the edge of the desert in such areas as Sened, Matmata, Jerba Island, and Nefusa on the Libyan border. They also inhabit the oasis of Ghadames. Half of the population speaks French as a second language, and many French-educated Tunisians find themselves more at ease with French than with Arabic. French has declined somewhat in both usage and status since independence. Although it is widely used in government, education, and commerce, it is no longer an official language, as it was before independence. The apparent simplicity of language-use patterns is illusory. While Berber and French can be clearly identified, Tunisian Arabic is not a single language but rather a complex of different forms and dialects. Arabic is a Semitic tongue related to Amharic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. The predominant language throughout North Africa and the Middle East, it was introduced by Arab invaders and conquerors in the seventh, eleventh, and succeeding centuries (see Islam and the Arabs, ch. 1). Written Arabic is psychologically and sociologically important as the vehicle of Islam and Arab culture and as the link with other Arab countries. Four varieties of Arabic are in use in Tunisia: classical, modern literary (or modern standard), colloquial (or dialectical), and intermediary (or "educated"). The classical Arabic of the Quran is the basis of Arabic and the model of linguistic perfection, according to orthodox Islamic precepts. It is the vehicle of a vast historical, literary, and religious heritage, and individuals with a knowledge of classical Arabic can converse with their counterparts throughout the Middle East. Classical Arabic is employed for religious purposes or sometimes for literary or rhetorical emphasis. Modern literary Arabic is a derivation and simplification of classical Arabic in wide use throughout the Middle East in newspapers, magazines, and government communiques. In Tunisia modern literary Arabic is the official language of the mass media, formal government documents, and literature and is taught in the schools. For most Tunisians, however, it is a language as foreign as French, knowledge of which comes through education, especially in its written form. As a consequence, the form of Tunisian Arabic known as intermediary enjoys much wider popularity. A mixture of modern literary and colloquial Arabic, intermediary Arabic is increasingly employed by the media, the bureaucracy, and intellectuals. The popular dialects that make up colloquial Arabic occur in bewildering variety. They vary from village to village, although for the most part they are mutually intelligible within Tunisia. One of these dialects is called Franco-Arabic. A high-level dialect into which numerous specialized French terms and turns of speech have been woven, it is most commonly used by students, government officials, and professionals. The urban and coastal dialects resemble those spoken in other North African cities and are closest to classical Arabic. Dialects of the interior differ more substantially from the classical and have relatively low prestige. They are heavily infused with Berber words, particularly place-names taken from Berber terms for flora, fauna, and tools. In all Maghribi countries since independence, language and language policy have commanded a great deal of attention as a result of the colonial experience. The French sought to undermine Arabic and to impose French in their North African colonies as one way of "civilizing" the population and of isolating it from the larger Arabic-speaking world. As a reaction to this policy, independent governments in the Maghrib have sought to restore Arabic to the status and level of usage it enjoyed before the colonial era through policies that have aimed at the gradual substitution of Arabic for French. Known as arabization, this effort has entailed an official commitment to the use of modern literary Arabic in the media, education, and government administration at the same time that French has continued to be widely used. Compared with Algeria or Morocco, the issue has been somewhat less emotionally charged in Tunisia, where President Habib Bourguiba has decided upon only partial arabization and upon the retention of French as an integral component of Tunisian identity. The pace of arabization has been gradual, but it has faced the same problems as elsewhere in the Maghrib-too few trained teachers and a lack of teaching materials, resistance on the part of the French-educated elite, and the difference between modern literary Arabic and the colloquial Arabic spoken by a majority of the population. Nonetheless, by the mid-1980s arabization had begun to make a significant impact. In the education sector, Arabic was the language of instruction in primary schools, and French was introduced as a second language in the third year. On the secondary level, students could choose a bilingual option in which subjects such as history and philosophy were taught in Arabic while mathematics and the sciences were taught in French. At the University of Tunis, the only university in the country, French remained the chief medium of instruction; only in the faculties of theology, law, and Arabic language and literature was Arabic dominant. Arabic was increasingly used in public administration and in most government ministries (especially the Ministry of Justice), and proficiency in modern literary Arabic was a requirement for employment in the government. Even so, French was widely employed in both oral and written communications in most ministries and was essential in the fields of science, technology, and medicine. A similar situation applied in the armed forces. Although they had been completely arabized, there was a marked preference for French among the members of the officer corps, some of whom had been educated in France. Arabic was also making inroads in commerce and business, once the exclusive domain of French. [See Camels: Artisans loading camels with pottery produced on Jerba Island] More important than either the education system or the bureaucracy in promoting modern literary Arabic were radio and television. Because of this, French programming on government-controlled radio and television networks had declined over the last two decades while programming in Arabic, modern literary as well as colloquial, had increased. Current figures were roughly 60 percent Arabic and 40 percent French, with locally produced programs almost completely in Arabic. In addition to general programming, literacy campaigns employing radio and television had been designed to increase competence in modern literary Arabic among adults without access to formal instruction. In Tunisia as elsewhere in the Maghrib, the degree and pace of arabization have been debated extensively. Aside from the seeming remoteness of modern literary Arabic, another obstacle to rapid arabization has been the cost of language substitution. This has meant that however committed planners might be to the policy, it has had to be a gradual one, and individual steps have required a decade or more to be implemented. This certainly has been true in Tunisia, where arabization was not yet an accepted national goal. Whatever the obstacles, other factors may prove decisive to the success of arabization over the long run. Because of the departure of most of the French-speaking community, lessened emphasis upon French in the schools, and a general repression of French throughout the society, school-age youth have had fewer opportunities to speak French. The consequence has been a decline in proficiency in that language. At the same time, the upsurge in emphasis on Islam and Muslim culture, the inflow of funds from wealthy Arab countries, and the presence in Tunis of international institutions such as the League of Arab States (Arab League) have created a demand for Tunisians trained in a standard form of Arabic. The situation had produced a change in attitude toward learning modern literary Arabic based on cultural as well as economic grounds. In the mid-1980s developments such as these favored the continuation of arabization in Tunisia and could lead to pressures for intensifying the pace and scope of the program beyond what the Bourguiba government had envisioned. The Social System Throughout North Africa the population originally was made up of tribes, the basic unit of social organization for both Berbers and Arabs. In the 1980s a number of tribes were still to be found in rural parts of Algeria and Morocco, but in Tunisia they had all but disappeared. The foreign influences that had made the Tunisian society a cosmopolitan one at an early date had operated also to break down tribal organization, and under the French administration a deliberate and at least partially successful effort was made to bring the primarily nomadic tribal people into the mainstream of national life. Tribal shaykhs were made civil servants, and tribes-people were encouraged or coerced into becoming sedentary farmers. Soon after independence the remaining tribal lands were nationalized. In the 1980s a few tribes and remnants of tribes were still to be found in the more remote central and southern parts of the country, but the tribal system, as a significant element in the Tunisian social complex, had given way to more modern forms of organization. Traditional Social Groups Under the Turkish regency and later under the French protectorate, traditional Muslim society evolved as a class hierarchy consisting of four elements. At the top were the baldi, the urban aristocracy; other town dwellers were the tunsi. The afaqi were sedentary rural villagers, and the arabi were the nomadic and seminomadic people of central and southern Tunisia, some of them still organized in tribes. These traditional class distinctions have become increasingly blurred, only the baldi exhibiting significant class consciousness after independence. Important remnants of all four remained, however, either as elements of new social groups or as centers of resistance to modernization. Sometimes referred to as the traditional aristocracy or as the old upper class, the baldi traced their ancestry to the Prophet Muhammad or to one of his important followers and regarded themselves as the guardians of Islamic civilization. They rarely married outsiders, although for several centuries particularly wealthy commercial families strengthened the baldi ranks through arranged marriages. Children of the baldi received a strict religious education culminating in studies at the old Zituna Mosque school in Tunis (now the Faculty of Theology and Religious Science at the University of Tunis). The prestige of the baldi was based in large part on their administering habus land (the numerous large agricultural estates held in trust for religious and charitable works), other religious charities and the mosques, and through their positions in the Islamic court system. Thus the domain of the baldi extended far beyond the agricultural properties and the commercial establishments they owned individually. The baldi families were related to and closely associated with the ulama, the religious scholars and notables who elsewhere in the Maghrib formed an important elite element in traditional society. The ulama played a much less significant role in Tunis, however, where in addition to being conservative and intellectually uninspired, they tended to be servile in their dealings with the French administrators. Since independence the ulama have disappeared from view as an identifiable social element, and the loss of baldi wealth and influence has severely restricted the role of that group. The postindependence nationalization of habus land, the reduction in the size of the estates, and the general modernization of society have combined to force the baldi to give way to a new elite. Seldom heard since independence, the term tunsi was formerly applied to all town dwellers other than the elite. Wealthy as well as poor and educated as well as illiterate, the tunsi represented an extremely fluid element in urban society, where much upward mobility could be attained. The tunis also represented a channel of interaction between town and countryside, and the group's relatively open and liberal social values made it natural for the better educated and wealthier among its ranks to associate and sometimes ally with the Europeans. With the flow of migration that commenced in the 1930s, they have given way to other social groups, but the tunsi contributed many leaders to the independence movement. Afaqi, or sedentary villagers, had their archetype in the prosperous farmers of the Sahil. Looked down on by the tunsi as well as by the baldi for their social aggressiveness and lack of sophistication, they were highly industrious, thrifty, and forward looking. Few Europeans took up residence in the already heavily populated Sahil, but it was the afaqi from this subregion who showed the greatest adaptability to Western values and institutions. Many were prosperous peasant proprietors able to send their children to French schools, and these young people played a leading role in the developing nationalist movement early in the twentieth century. Later a disproportionately large number of postindependence party leaders and civil servants were afaqi of Sahilian origin. The populations of the relatively underdeveloped interior of the country were generally described as the arabi. Newly arrived but still unassimilated migrants to the cities as well as nomads and seminomadic villagers, these people occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder. Their customs and life-styles, however, were too diverse for them to have developed a sense of belonging to a society larger than that of their own village or nomadic tribe. The term arabi is now seldom heard. A corresponding lower social element, however, continues to possess many of the characteristics of the arabi. In the countryside much of the population still lives by subsistence farming outside the mainstream of national life. In the cities and towns, newly arrived migrants continue to be identified with their villages of origin rather than with their new homes. Social Stratification in Modern Tunisia By the time of national independence Tunisian society, especially its uppermost echelons, had undergone significant modification as a result of French colonial influence. Among the most important innovations were Western-style education and the use of examinations to fill lower positions in the colonial service. These innovations provided a new avenue for social and political mobility and permitted the slow emergence of a new class of administrators and professionals alongside the older aristocratic families and large landowners. According to one estimate, one-third of the population at independence was clearly in the modern sector, which could be found almost entirely in the cities and larger towns and in the Sahil. Another one-third was transitional, moving out of the traditional stage and consisting principally of urban migrants. The remaining one-third, including the rural population of central and southern Tunisia, remained almost untouched by the modernizing social and economic forces that were changing the rest of the society. Four broad socioeconomic groupings could be distinguished in the 1980s, all with roots clearly discernible in the colonial period. The first grouping consisted of the country's rulers and the upper middle class, who comprised an elite that dominated the country politically and economically. Here were found members of the old aristocratic families, the new class of Western-educated civil servants and professionals who governed the country, prominent businesspeople, and large landowners. The second grouping was the lower middle class, consisting of low-level civil servants, secondary- and primary-school teachers, small businesspeople and shopkeepers, skilled workers in industry and the service sector, and small independent farmers in the Sahil, Cape Bon, and Bizerte. The third grouping included subsistence farmers and agricultural workers, who resided in the interior and the south of the country and who formed the largest proportion of the working population. The fourth grouping consisted of the day laborers, the unemployed, and the underemployed-a sizable group that resided both in rural areas and in shantytowns around the major towns and cities. Members of the elite were linked by common values and experiences. Education served as a principal denominator and a strong tie traceable in many cases to shared experiences in French secondary schools. Many of its members had received advanced education abroad, usually in France, although a few possessed only a secondary education or were products of the traditional Zituna Mosque school. Among older members, a preponderant majority had attended the prestigious Sadiki College, which in the years before independence managed with considerable success to synthesize Arabic and French culture. A decade after independence the University of Tunis, founded only in 1958, began to contribute substantial numbers to this group. For the most part Western-educated, the Tunisian elite admired Western institutions and values and had a special attachment to French culture and life-styles. Having adapted themselves quickly to Western customs and ways of dressing, they were for the most part strongly committed to rapid modernization and an egalitarian national society. They were united in their rejection of the precolonial social order. In terms of social background, some were urban-born professionals, but many came from important commercial or landowning families. Others were of lower middle-class origins; their fathers were merchants, shopkeepers, bureaucrats, or small farmers of the Sahil. In all cases their families could afford the cost of education, the prerequisite for membership in the uppermost stratum of independent Tunisia. The elite came disproportionately from the Sahil, with significant additions from Tunis, other large urban centers, and Jerba Island. Bourguiba himself was perhaps the ideal example of a Sahilian of poor but respectable origin who achieved prominence through ability, education (provided by the Sadiki College and university studies abroad), intense patriotism, and adroit political activity. The decade from 1956 to 1966 witnessed a great expansion of the Tunisian middle class. This was an era of unprecedented social mobility, brought about by the departure of the French, Italian, and Jewish foreign communities. Because these groups had monopolized most important positions in business, commerce, and government, their departure opened up immense opportunities. In the first few years after independence, Tunisians scrambled to fill tens of thousands of jobs vacated by Europeans in such fields as industry, transportation, large and small businesses, skilled trades, and government service. Those with education and skills established themselves firmly in the middle class, henceforth being in a position to determine the future of the country together with the already existing national elite. At the top of the elite structure were the leaders of the Destourian Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste Destourien-PSD), bound together by old student-day friendships, by intricate political ties, and to some extent by marriage. They had studied in France and, speaking French fluently, tended to look down on those not familiar with the French language and customs. In the years just before independence the leading members of the party were young men devoted to changing the Tunisian society. In the mid-1980s these men were in their sixties or older and were entrenched in positions of authority. Beginning in the mid-1960s a new group of technically trained men began to join the government and the elite. Graduates of the University of Tunis or Tunisian technical schools, these technocrats in the 1980s were aged 40 to 60 and played a commanding role in managing the affairs of state under the tutelage of the oldest generation of political leaders. Behind them, however, there was a sharp drop-off in the number of youthful members of the party and the government. According to one source, only about 15 percent of the elite was less than 40 years of age at a time when roughly one of every two Tunisians was age 20 or younger. The lower middle class also expanded greatly after national independence and had both urban and rural components. It was predominantly urban, however, and included middle- and lower-grade civil servants; members of labor unions; self-employed individuals, such as taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and tailors; and the more substantial wage earners. In Tunis, in particular, members of this class were often reported to be recent migrants who retained strong ties with their villages of origin and who identified with the traditional town dwellers only in the second or third generation. However, they looked up to the Westernized elite, whose life-styles they sought to emulate. The most upwardly mobile of Tunisians, these people had high aspirations for their children. Occasionally an entire migrant group was successful in establishing itself in a particular occupation that lifted it into the middle level of society. This process occurred, for example, when migrants from Jerba Island were generally successful in establishing themselves as grocers on the mainland. The farmers and villagers of the Sahil and the northeastern coastal lowlands formed the nucleus of the rural lower middle class. Probably more than any other social group, they had taken advantage of opportunities in the social and political realms in the three decades since independence. Although small merchants or olive growers and of only moderate means, they nonetheless managed to afford Western-style education for their children, many of whom went on to staff the bureaucracy or to assume positions of importance in politics and business. Despite obvious links with the political elite, they remained fiercely independent and opposed governmental interference in rural affairs that ran counter to their best interests, such as the abortive attempt to institute widespread cooperative farming in the 1960s (see Land Tenure and Reform, ch. 3). The situation of the farmers and merchants of the Sahil, miners and factory workers, school teachers, civil servants, and other members of the lower middle class was definitely preferable to that of the lowest strata of Tunisian society-subsistence farmers and paid agricultural workers in rural areas, day laborers in the gourbivilles around Tunis and other major urban centers, and the underemployed and the unemployed in both settings. These people constituted the bulk of Tunisia's labor force. Subsistence farming was concentrated in the interior and the south; day laborers, who often came from the poorest rural areas, shared many characteristics with middle-class migrants but differed from them in their general lack of education and skills. Underemployment was common in both groups. Least enviable were the unemployed, a substantial category of unfortunates. Often but not necessarily uneducated or unskilled, they constituted a class of economically marginal people without a useful role to play in the society. Composed to an ever increasing degree of disenchanted youth, the plight of the unemployed posed a troubling challenge to the established social and political order. For the rural population in general, socioeconomic changes that commenced during the protectorate years have continued to disrupt the age-old pattern of life without replacing it with a clearly identifiable alternative. Education, health care, and welfare services have spread throughout the countryside, and there have been attempts at land reform and land redistribution in the years since independence. Even so, the more capable and ambitious of the rural population have shown a marked inclination to migrate to urban centers such as Tunis, Beja, and Kasserine rather than to remain on the land and work for social improvement there. Change has been slowest in the desert lands of southern Tunisia and in the semiarid interior. Both have become areas of out-migration in which only women, the old, and the very young have remained at home. Over the years since independence Tunisian society has often been described as open, equitable, dynamic, modern, and democratic, especially in comparison with neighboring states in North Africa and those of the Middle East. While there has been cause for such description, the situation since the mid-1970s has become less sanguine, and the cleavages inherent in the country's social structure have become more pronounced. What formerly appeared to be one of the most politically stable and socially progressive states of the region has yielded evidence over the past few years of tensions and oppositions that if left unaddressed by responsible authorities portended an unsettled future. Two major dichotomies underlay contemporary Tunisian society, one an old phenomenon, the other more recent. The older dichotomy was the regional opposition between the interior and the coast, which coincided economically with the division between the underdeveloped and the developed sections of the country and socially with that between the rural and the urban segments of the population. The opposition between the interior and the coast can be traced to antiquity; since then the tribesmen and small villagers of the central area and the south have been pitted against the urbanized population of the coastal lowland. The manifestation of this opposition in the mid-1980s lay in the regional distribution of the membership of the PSD and the General Union of Tunisian Workers (Union Generale des Travailleurs Tunisiens-UGTT). On the one hand, most of the party's membership and the country's political leadership came from an axis stretching from Bizerte to Jerba Island, and the peoples of the interior and the south were poorly represented. Trade union membership and leadership, on the other hand, were heavily concentrated in the interior. Hence one encountered a basic geographic division between Tunisia's politicians and wealthy middle class and its small farmers, miners, and shepherds. It was no accident that a preponderance of the political upheavals the country experienced after the mid-1970s originated in the interior or in trade union activity (see Political Dynamics, ch. 4). The second major dichotomy was the generational gulf that separated those under 25 years of age from the generation over 40 years of age. This split had its roots in contemporary demographic reality: more than one of every two Tunisians was under the age of 20. As with the regional dichotomy already noted, this generational division was of enormous economic and political significance. From the point of view of the young, the age-group from 40 to 60 controlled the government and the economic life of the country and monopolized nearly all desirable positions associated therewith. While new positions were being created, they were far too few to satisfy the demands and expectations of those newly arrived on the employment scene. As a result, approximately one-half of the population-overwhelmingly young, often educated, and aspiring to careers in statecraft, business, and commerce-saw itself as excluded from any meaningful role in the country for the indefinite future. Those under 25 increasingly seemed to have little in common with their elders, and the hallmarks of the post-1956 era-independence, Bourguiba, and the PSD-had largely ceased to be relevant to their concerns. Several factors were at work in Tunisia that helped to perpetuate or to exacerbate these two overiding dichotomies. The first was long-term population pressure. Since the mid-1970s Tunisia's population has been growing at an annual rate of about 2.5 percent. While this was less than the growth rate of the 1960s and better than in either Algeria or Morocco, it was still quite high, given the meager natural resources and industrial base of the country. Through the mid-1970s the economy barely managed to contain the increase; since then, even that modest accomplishment has been impossible to maintain, despite efforts on the part of the central government to create new jobs. Directly related to the high birth rate was the rate of unemployment. High by any standard and characteristic of all age-groups and locales, unemployment and underemployment fell especially hard on young people and the poorly educated, running at rates at 20 percent and more among these groups. In many cases the young and the unemployed had despaired of ever finding satisfactory occupations. They survived on the margins of a society that often appeared not to care about them or their welfare, eking out a meager living incommensurate with their hopes, expectations, and education and resentful of the wealth and success of the middle classes and the elite. Poverty was another source of social and political malaise. It was especially widespread in the center and the south of the country, where the farming potential was limited and industry was non-existent. These regions had long suffered from neglect on the part of economic planners and from a standard of living considerably lower than that of the neighboring Sahil. As a consequence of its destitution, the poverty-stricken hinterland has produced a steady flow of young migrants to the larger towns and cities, to neighboring countries, and to Western Europe. Partly as a result of internal migration, the annual growth rate of the urban population in recent years has been in excess of 4 percent, leading to a severe housing shortage and the relentless extension of slums around Tunis and other urban centers. Finally, there were the inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. An enormous gap in income existed between the elite and the middle classes on the one hand and the lower classes and the unemployed on the other. The general consensus in the mid-1980s was that both the differential in incomes and the level of poverty continued to grow. This disparity was well established at the time of independence, but it widened measurably during the 1970s when government-sponsored economic reforms caused an expansion of the middle class and fostered the emergence of a new class of small-scale entrepreneurs and businesspeople. Wealthy upper-class Tunisians benefited disproportionately from public and private sector employment and government spending programs, and they were often accused of corruption, dodging taxation, using their positions for personal enrichment, and obstructing reforms. The gap in income and wealth between them and the poorer segment of the population played a major role in fomenting the violence that convulsed Tunisia in 1978 and a gain in 1984.