Salah Ben Youssef

Salah Ben Youssef (; October 11, 1907 – August 12, 1961) was a Tunisian politician and one of the key leaders of the Tunisian national movement.

Early life and advocacy of independence Born in Maghraoua, a small village near Midoun on Djerba, to a family of wealthy and influential merchants. He trained to be a lawyer, but became involved in politics where he was prized for his personal qualities. This would later lead to his ascension to being Habib Bourguiba's protégé.

He began his political career as the Secretary General of the Neo-Destour Political Party, a post where he played a role of key organizer during Bourguiba's exile. In August 1950, he was appointed as the Tunisian Minister of Justice in the government of Mohamed Chenik. Charged with bringing the Tunisian request for statehood to the United Nations, which was gathered in Paris in March 1952, he barely escaped arrest and deportation. He then traveled across the world for more than three years, during which he was received by Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and Zhou Enlai, Premier of the People's Republic of China. Meanwhile, Bourguiba signed agreements with France on establishing internal autonomy for Tunisia.

Confrontation with Bourguiba

Ben Youssef deplored the autonomy agreements, which took place without him, as "a step backwards and a setback". In his view, the wholesale evacuation of French Troops from the entirety of Tunisian territory was an indisputable prerequisite for genuine national independence.

Whereas Ben Youssef was previously a loyal friend of Bourguiba, when he returned to the country on June 1, 1955, he became Bourguiba's arch-enemy. According to Ben Youssef, his adversary was capable of practicing a "policy of denial and betrayal" of the Tunisian People and concerning the Algerian War. Having returned to Tunisia from Cairo on September 13, he began to organize unrest throughout the country.

Those aligned with Bourguiba, the "Bourguibists", and those aligned with Ben Youssef, the Youssefists, began to have numerous meetings to denounce and strike down the position of the opposing party. Convened on October 8, under Bourguiba's leadership, the Neo-Destour caucus decided to open session and thereupon demand that Ben Youssef be expelled from the party. Stripped of his roles and excluded from the party following the congress convened from November 15 to 19, Ben Youssef continued to campaign in the south of Tunisia where he organized a number of gatherings up to the end of November which resulted in clashes with Bourguiba supporters. On August 12, he was assassinated in a Frankfurt hotel by two accomplices.

Some published sources advance the argument that the leaders of the conspiracy to eliminate Ben Youssef were Bourguiba himself, his wife Wassila Ben Ammar, Mohamed Masmoudi, Hassen Belkhodja, Taïeb Mhiri and Béchir Zarg Layoun. The plan consisted of making Ben Youssef believe that these were officers of the Tunisian Armed Forces who wanted to see him in order to inform him of and request his presence in a Tunisian coup d'état. His widow Soufia only returned to Tunisia on December 22, 1987, after more than thirty years of exile in Cairo. She was received on January 2, 1988, by the President of Tunisia Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. She died in 2016. His granddaughter, Leila Ben Youssef, is an athlete who performs pole vaulting.

In April 2012, Al Jazeera Documentary Channel put out a film produced by the Tunisian Jamel Dallali about Ben Youssef's life, titled Salah Ben Youssef, un crime d'État (which translates to "Salah Ben Youssef, a Crime of the State").