Introduction

The Sixth Congress of the Tunisian Communist Party (Parti Communiste Tunisien, PCT) (29–31 December 1957) is considered by former militants just as memorable an event as the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held some 21 months earlier (14–25 February 1956). The Sixth Congress marked a breakthrough, since it decided on the Tunisification of the party cadres and a nation-centred programme. ‘It was the congress of self-criticism’, points out Habib Kazdaghli, a historian who had been a party cadre in the 1980s. ‘Until then, the party had been focused on external factors which are important but it had limited itself to them.’ To highlight the break, the party name was changed from ‘Communist Party of Tunisia’ (Parti Communiste de Tunisie) to ‘Tunisian Communist Party’ (Parti Communiste Tunisien).

Although, in its early days, Marxism rejected nationalism and the nationstate as instruments of power of the bourgeois class, in the 1950s the nationalist option, with its emancipatory value, was rehabilitated with regard to the oppressed countries. The Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist Countries gathered in Moscow in 1957 agreed upon ‘the spirit of combining internationalism with patriotism’ and ‘a determined eff ort to overcome the survivals of bourgeois nationalism and chauvinism’.

The internal nationalist stance did not erase the PCT's international commitment to socio-political changes, but rather channelled it into the defence of liberation struggles worldwide. A sense of responsibility tempered the revolutionary impetus of the PCT, that rejected maximalism at home in favour of a democratic and social revolution, and spared no eff ort on the external front, not without caution. Despite the sense of belonging to a global community of meaning, the nationalist-oriented PCT campaigned mainly for the Vietnamese cause and the Arab movement of national liberation. In this essay, I shall focus on two specific cases, that is to say Palestine – ‘the foremost all-Arab concern’6 – and western Sahara. While the Palestinian cause caused much ink to flow, especially following the 1967 and 1973 Arab–Israeli wars, an eloquent silence enveloped the Sahrawis’ struggle, which Moroccan communists had opposed since the 1960s.