Tunisia's Beaches, Antiquities and Crafts Attracting 3.6 Million Tourists Annually

By Richard H. Curtiss

Tunisian Minister of Tourism and Handicrafts Mohamad Jegham, a handsome man with just a touch of grey in his carefully combed hair, radiates friendly competence. At age 52 he is self-assured, helpfully taking questions in English but responding in French to make sure that his rapid, fact-filled answers are completely accurate.

After more than five years in his present position, he has been in Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's cabinet longer than any other minister. Tourism is Tunisia's biggest foreign exchange earner and, after agriculture, largest employer. Tourism earns $1 billion annually for Tunisia, and directly employs 60,000 people, such as hotel workers, and indirectly employs another 250,000 people, such as taxi-drivers.

It has given rise to whole new industries, such as the many greenhouses to supply the country's hotels with fresh fruits and vegetables year-round, and new-old occupations, such as ''camel men," in the south, where European vacationers leave the sand and sea of Tunisia's Mediterranean beaches for one-day excursions into the Sahara to explore the nearly vanished world of desert oases and caravan stops

A major component of Mr. Jegham's job is to bring together Western tourism promoters with wealthy entrepreneurs, particularly investors from the Arabian peninsula and Gulf and the Arab development banks in which the Gulf countries have their petroleum earnings. In this capacity, Tunisia's tourism minister also finds himself a major player in regional development–seeking to take the tourism jobs to the country's less-developed areas where the potential employees are, and thus slow the rural migration to the cities that underlies so many social and economic problems in other developing countries.

One such regional project is in Tabarka, an area of spectacular beauty only two hours west of Tunis. the national capital. At Tabarka, just inside the border from Algeria, the eastern foothills of the Atlas mountain range, which traverses Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, meet the sea.

Here, on Tunisia's ''coral coast'' in an area of sculptured sandstone rocks, clear waters perfect for snorkelers and scuba divers, and white sand beaches, the Tunisian government has promoted a major joint venture with the Kuwait Development Bank to create a popular and rapidly expanding resort region.

It is an area where European visitors and wealthy Tunisians have for many years built get-away villas on the slopes overlooking a small fishing harbor and ancient castle dating back to the days of the Barbary pirates, and earlier. Now the old port has new shopping arcades and a spectacular hotel of the country-wide Abu Nawas chain. The hotel opened this spring and is jointly owned by the Abu Dhabi Development Bank and the Tunisian government.

Visitors to the hotel or its surrounding villas may lounge around an Olympic-size pool, swim in the gentle surf only steps from the hotel, or play the 18-hole golf course overlooking the sea. Similar new tourist complexes in the southeastern end of the country take advantage of the broad white sand beaches of Tunisia's east coast to push tourist horizons further and further south toward the Libyan border and Tunisia's sparsely inhabited desert interior.

The result is an impressive story of successful tourism development that began in 1960, only four years after Tunisia gained its independence from France. This year the country expects 3,600,000 tourists, most of them from Western Europe, for an average stay of 9 days each. For a country of 8 million inhabitants, this amounts to a flood of hard-currency-bearing travelers, and accounts for the fact that Tunisia, although only recently self-sufficient in oil, is a moderately prosperous country without the sharp gulf between rich and poor characteristic of the Third World.

In fact, travel in any direction reveals prosperous small towns and villages whose people are indistinguishable in dress or demeanor from the residents of the sophisticated seaside capital. Ethnically diverse Tunisians are homogenized by their shared Arabic language and Muslim religion. The country has a huge middle class and the crowds promenading evenings on tree-shaded Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the main street of Tunis, with older men in suits and ties and their wives in Western dresses, and the young of both sexes in jeans and cutoffs, would be almost indistinguishable in appearance from the crowds in the Mediterranean cities of Spain, the south of France and Italy.

Winter and Summer Visitors

While most of the country's winter tourists come from sun-starved England, Germany and northern Europe, in the summer the northern European vacationers are augmented by huge numbers of tourists from the Mediterranean countries of Europe. Tunisia's tourist amenities are comparable to their own, but the summer resorts are not as crowded and the prices are far more reasonable. Germany slightly leads France in annual visitors to Tunisia, with well over half a million visitors each, while Italy and England are in third and fourth place respectively. Some 80 percent of Tunisia's visitors come on charter flights or in group tours, and about a quarter million of them interrupt their visits to seaside hotels for at least a one-day excursion into the desert.

There also are specialized tours. This year the Tunisian government invited veterans of the great North African battles of World War II for 50th anniversary ceremonies commemorating the May 13, 1943 surrender to combined British, Free French and American forces of a quarter of a million crack troops of Germany's Afrika Korps on Tunisia's Cap Bon peninsula, from which allied air and naval forces had prevented their escape to Europe.

Annually, Sephardic Jews now living in France but with ancestral roots in Tunisia return for a pilgrimage to the island of Jerba. There an ancient synagogue is still maintained by Tunisian Jews on an island far better known for its spectacular beaches and quiet resort town.

While seeking to create an investment climate to attract entrepreneurs to build more tourist amenities to accommodate European visitors along Tunisia's miles of Mediterranean coast, Tunisia's tourism minister also is looking across the world for new categories of tourists. This year the first small charter groups will arrive from Eastern Europe. In April he was in the U.S. and Canada to discuss group tours on a large scale from both countries.

At present some 5,000 Canadians, many of them from French-speaking Quebec province, and another 5,000 Americans visit Tunisia annually. Some, of course, come for the professional and business conventions which help to fill the capital's major hotels year-round. Others are attracted by Tunisia's leading roles in several eras of world history. The country's museums display relics of Tunisia's Punic civilization, which began with the arrival of a Phoenician queen from Tyre in present-day Lebanon. On the site of present day Carthage her followers founded a seafaring civilization that, through both Phoenicians and Carthaginians, linked the cities of Egypt, Persia, and the Eastern Mediterranean to the Iberian peninsula, the British Isles, and the coasts of West Africa some 2,500 years ago.

The metropolis of Carthage, whose ruins now have been excavated among the northern suburbs of Tunis, competed first with the Greek city-states and then became Rome's rival for world domination. Rome finally triumphed after years of warfare in which the Carthaginian general, Hannibal, landed his army and its African elephants in Spain and then passed through France and over Alpine passes into Italy.

The Roman general, Scipio Africanus, not only laid waste to Carthage but salted the earth in a vain attempt to keep the North African metropolis, with its magnificent east-facing harbor, from ever again becoming a threat to Roman domination of the world. Ironically, in subsequent Roman, Byzantine and Islamic eras, Carthage flourished even after Rome itself had been sacked and laid waste by Vandals and other invaders from northern Europe.

Relics from all of the long sweep of Tunisian history have been uncovered over years of active archeological excavation and restoration in many parts of the country. Many of the treasures are displayed in the capital's Bardo museum, in a newer museum on the site of Carthage, and at regional museums. This is an aspect of Tunisia that draws visitors from North America, who obviously must invest considerably more time and money in the trip than participants in a charter tour making the two-hour flight from Germany.

Tourism Minister Jeghem is proud of the country's five golf courses, installed particularly with tourists from farther away in mind. They may come at any time of the year not only to immerse themselves in the country's unique history, but also its mild Mediterranean climate, roughly comparable to that of Southern California.

Japanese groups, too, are coming to Tunisia for the first time. They, Jeghem reports, show particular interest in the country's unique handicrafts.

It is no accident that he is the minister of handicrafts as well as tourism. It is a rare tourist who leaves the country empty-handed in a land that produces incomparable ceramics, unique and instantly distinguishable oriental rugs incorporating elements of Berber design as well as traditional Middle Eastern patterns, tile work famous throughout the Middle East, leather work ranging from purses to suitcases, and now designer clothing competitive with that produced in Europe, both in terms of price and design.

One reason for the flourishing of Tunisian handicrafts is the Tunisian government's strict quality control. Every Tunisian rug bears a government label which describes precisely the length, width, total area and weight, and grades the rug on the basis of thickness and knots per square centimeter. In addition to the network of dealers in handicrafts in every town, and in the spectacular medina or old city marketplace of Tunis, the Ministry of Tourism and Handicrafts also maintains a large showroom, the Artisanat, in the capital. There samples of virtually every kind of handicraft produced in Tunisia may be examined or purchased.

For the visitor in a hurry, it is one-stop shopping. The government emporium also enables more adventuresome visitors to become familiar with the pieces available and price them before setting out to one of the country's suqs to seek something comparable or more exactly to the visitor's taste, and possibly at a better price.

The combination of governmental regulation and widespread free enterprise works. Last year handicrafts brought $3.6 million in foreign exchange into Tunisia and, there is no doubt, provided an important additional attraction to distinguish a visit to the surf, sun and sand of Tunisia from vacations closer to home.

In fact, Tunisian handicrafts are proving so popular that Jegham is planning expansion into Europe itself. The tendency in Tunisia, as in much of the rest of the world, is to get the government out of the marketplace and encourage private entrepreneurs to enter even the fields traditionally handled by the government. However, in looking for such private entrepreneurs to continue touristic expansion in Tunis itself, he also is encouraging private outlets for Tunisian handicrafts abroad.

Last year a Tunisian-owned handicraft emporium opened in Marseilles. The minister is hoping that similar outlets will open soon in other parts of France as well as in Spain, Italy, and, someday, the United States. Given existing quality controls and the widespread popularity of the products with those who know them, the idea of Tunisian handicraft outlets throughout Western Europe and the United States in coming years is not an impossible dream.

It certainly is no more unlikely than the dream of Tunisian planners in 1960 that the small North African country wedged between oil-producing Algeria and Libya might, in a generation or two, not only attract far more visitors than its two giant neighbors combined, but also enjoy a level of individual prosperity that would be the envy of any country on the entire continent of Africa.