Couitéas affair

However, the people who actually occupied the land, members of the Souassi and fr:Jlass tribes, refused to pay him any rent, arguing that they had always been there and that their ancestors had never paid anything.

The three legal owners publicised their situation in a pamphlet, “History of the auction of Tabia & El Houbira”,[4] and decided to combine their efforts by creating a joint property management company on April 27, 1894, which they invited Basilio Couitéas to join.

[3] Couitéas was a Greek national, born in Sparta in 1860, who had arrived in Tunisia in 1879, where he set himself up in the grain trade with the help of a French brother-in-law, a trader based in Annaba.

Become very rich following a family inheritance of two and a half million francs, he married in 1897 Alice de Faucamberge, daughter of the colonel commanding the garrison of Kairouan.

[3]: 30–31 Faced with intimidation, some of the traditional occupants of the land gave in and accepted the new leases offered priced at five dollars per méchia (or thirty cents per hectare).

On December 16 1895 he filed a request with the mixed court to have his title deeds validated and his ownership registered, stating that the purchase price had been an annual enzel (perpetual annuity) of 2,100 francs.

The request was rejected on March 2 1901 as the court found that most of the occupants of the land in question did not recognise his ownership, and the stated purchase price seemed implausibly low for such a large estate.

[6] In parallel with this case Couitéas tried to argue his claim with the Department of Agriculture but its response in 1898 was that "even if the titles that Mr. Couitéas has provided are authentic, they do not have the value he attributes to them, and nothing can prevail, in justice or in law, over the immemorial possession of hundreds and thousands of natives.”[7] An official decree of the protectorate government of January 14, 1901 sought to put an end to any attempts to dispossess the Tunisian tribes by decreeing "that these collective territories are inalienable, the members of the tribe having only a right of use over them".

He hired Moroccans who confiscated herds of animals found on the property and only returned them in return for payment; fights broke out between his guards and the occupants, who told the gendarmes who were trying to restore order: "We are in our own home here, no one will chase us out, and if we folded up our tents when the huissier de justice came and ordered us to do so, it is only because there were only women here on the day he appeared.”[5] Couitéas bought out the shares of his three partners on November 13, 1904, for an amount, according to him, of 701,500 francs.

[3] Armed with his property titles, he demanded from the Tunisian occupiers an exorbitant rent of 11 francs per hectare instead of the 30 centimes that they had previously been asked for and that they already refused to pay.

Finally, a beylical decree of November 23, 1908 overturned the decision of the arbitration commission: "Considering that the compromise of 14 and November 15, 1904, the additional act of January 20, 1905 and the arbitration report of the February 15, 1906 have not been subject to our sanction, they are void and therefore cannot stand in the way of the application of the law; Considering, moreover, that these acts, far from having the result of resolving the disputes which they were intended to settle, have only aggravated local difficulties and that it is important to put an end to a situation likely to compromise public tranquillity; On the proposal of the Prime Minister, after being assured of the consent of the French government:

The survey of collective lands of tribes in the caïdat des Souassi prescribed since the August 15, 1906 will be carried out in the territories which have remained outside their scope until today.

In March 1911, the League of Human and Citizen's Rights published a brochure entitled L'arbitraire en Tunisie, written following the investigation of one of its members, the lawyer Goudchaux-Brunschvicg.

Two months after it was published, Jean Jaurès signed an editorial in L'Humanité, in which he warned those who were aligning themselves with the businessman: “There are newspapers, whose good faith was undoubtedly taken advantage of, where the just protest against the iniquities and the looting in Tunisia is accompanied by a kind of apology for Mr. Couitéas.

However, Mr. Couitéas made the most scandalous attempt at expropriation committed in Tunisia against Tunisians […] What is certain, which, from the point of view of political and social morality dominates the whole debate, is that thousands of natives who had been in possession for generations were suddenly threatened with expulsion by the production of a title that was more than suspect: it is that Mr. Couitéas tried to seize forty thousand hectares from them, acquired by him from a daring trafficker, for the cynically ridiculous royalty of thirty-two millimes, just over three cents per hectare per year.

I have in my hands the receipts showing that he paid 743,500 francs for this property to the three co-owners who had acquired it from the descendants of the marabout to whom a decree of the bey had granted it in 1731"[13]The Socialist Federation of Tunisia was furious at these speeches because it had already alerted its Parisian colleagues to the facts.

His supporters argued that as his title deeds had been officially recognized, their cancellation by a beylical decree drafted by the Residents General was an abuse of power.

[3] The Couitéas affair was only one of the numerous scandals brought to light in speeches by deputies involving the spoliation of Tunisian properties for the benefit of private individuals.

[5][20] The Conseil d’État considered Couitéas’ claim for compensation for damages caused by the refusal of the protectorate government to clear the occupants off his property despite the court injunction he had obtained.

[23] The Couitéas case illustrates the difficulties encountered by the government of the protectorate in reconciling the demands of French settlers and the rights of indigenous tribes.