Farhat Hached
Farhat Hached (فرحات حشاد; 2 February 1914 – 5 December 1952) was a Tunisian labor unionist and activist who was assassinated by La Main Rouge, a French terrorist organization operated by French foreign intelligence. He was one of the leaders of the pro-independence Tunisian national movement, along with Habib Bourguiba and Salah ben Youssef. His assassination is attributed to La Main Rouge (The Red Hand), an armed organisation that favoured a French presence in Tunisia. More recently, on 18 December 2009, it was confirmed to the Al Jazeera news organisation, by a man called Antoine Méléro, who claimed to be a former Main Rouge member, that the Main Rouge had been a military wing of the French Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service) or SDECE. Farhat Hached was born at El Abassia on the Islands of Kerkennah, the son of Mohamed Hached, a sailor, and Hana Ben Romdhane. He spent eight years at the village primary school in Kellabine which was run by a French head teacher. He received his Certificate of Primary Education which might have opened the way to further education, but his father's death obliged him to abandon his studies and take on paid work. In 1930 he took a job as a courier with "la Société du transport du Sahel", a transport company based at Sousse. In the same year he established a basic trades union at the company which he affiliated to the French Trades Union Confederation (CGT). This was the start of his career in Tunisian trades unionism. He took on a range of union responsibilities locally and in the region and, later, in national administration, working with fr. As a result, he was dismissed from his job in 1939. During the Second World War, with Tunisia subject to the French puppet government at Vichy, a ban on political and trades union activity made life difficult. Hached therefore volunteered for work with the Red Cross in order to look after the injured, a task which he undertook outside his working hours.
