Sakiet Sidi Youssef
Sakiet Sidi Youssef is a small town in the Kef Governorate in northwestern Tunisia with 17,500 inhabitants (as of 2014). It is the center of a Tunisian administrative district ( delegation ). The place is right on the border with Algeria .
The place is already mentioned by Claudius Ptolemy as Naraggara and by Polybius as Margaron . It also appears on the Tabula Peutingeriana .
There's a hospital there. It is located on the N 5 national road from Tunis, which becomes the RN 81 from the border on the Algerian side.
Bombing in 1958
The place is best known as the target of an air raid by the French army during the Algerian War on February 8, 1958. The attack took place on a Saturday, a market day at noon (around 10.50 a.m.) and there were over 70 dead and 130 wounded , mostly civilians. Among them were a dozen primary school students and two Red Cross trucks were hit. The Red Cross looked after a camp of refugees from Algeria near the place. 25 aircraft were involved (11 Douglas A-26 Invader bombers , 6 Corsair fighters and 8 Mistral bombers ). They neutralized the local flak and bombed an abandoned lead mine that served as a shelter for the rebels.
The Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba was outraged and demanded a withdrawal of the French and blocked their bases. The destruction of the site was shown to the international press the following day and the international criticism that followed contributed to ending the Algerian war. Bourguiba called the United Nations, which led to the British and the US interfering in the Algerian war and it was internationalized. That in turn led shortly after to the resignation of the French Prime Minister Félix Gaillard , who had lost the support of the population as a result. This led to a serious government crisis in France, and after the interim president Pierre Pflimlin was overthrown in May 1958 after the military coup in Algiers , Charles de Gaulle came to power (beginning of the Fifth Republic of France), which ultimately led to the Algerian war, contrary to original expectations Most of the French military in Algeria ended in 1962. For his part, Bourguiba was under pressure from, among others, Egypt, whose president Gamal Abdel Nasser - to whom his former right-hand man Salah Ben Youssef had also gone into exile - criticized him for his indulgent attitude towards the French, but initially did not want an open armed conflict stabilize the French, but rather the still young independence of the country and therefore gave in to the mediating role of Great Britain and the USA.
The attack was an act of retaliation by the French, as the place was suspected as a center of resistance in both Algeria ( National Liberation Front , Front de Liberation Nationale, FLN) and Tunisia. Tunisia had been officially independent since 1956, but there was still a strong French military presence, especially in the port of Bizerta , which was also important for the Algerian war , where the Bizerta crisis occurred in 1961 when the French bloodily suppressed an attempt by the Tunisians to block the base .
On the morning of the attack on the site, a French military machine was shot at by a machine gun close to the site and could make an emergency landing in Tebessa , and on January 30, a French T-6 was shot down near Sakiet Sidi Youssef. On January 11, around 300 Algerian rebels from Sakiet Sidi Youssef attacked a 50-man patrol of the French 23rd Infantry Regiment under Captain Allard, killed 14 soldiers and then withdrew across the Tunisian border with four prisoners. On January 2, the rebels had already succeeded in capturing four French soldiers in a border skirmish, whereupon the French President Gaillard sent General Buchalet to Bourguiba, who refused to receive him as a former opponent in the Tunisian struggle for independence. Later, on April 29, three prisoners were shot dead by the rebels, which escalated the Algerian conflict.
The attack was carried out by the French military without backing from Paris. The 5th Air District Commander, General Edmond Jouhaud, requested the attack in retaliation for the loss of his planes and presented the plan to the French Chief of Staff, Paul Ély , who obtained oral approval from Defense Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas . The Prime Minister Felix Gaillard was not informed, even if he took responsibility before the parliament (with reference to previous attacks from Tunisian territory).
literature
- Hédi Baccouche, L'aggression française contre Sakiet Sidi-Youssef: Les faits et les suites, La Manouba, Université de La Manouba, 2008