Category: France

  • French President Emmanuel Macron won a second five-year term on Sunday, but the neoliberal incumbent’s victory over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen was significantly closer than it was in 2017 — portending an ominous future for the country in the absence of far-reaching egalitarian reforms.

    Macron received a projected 58% of the vote to Le Pen’s 42%, becoming the first French president since 2002 to be reelected. Macron’s 16-point margin of victory, however, underscores how much ground Le Pen’s openly xenophobic and Islamophobic party has gained since the previous election when both candidates faced off in the runoff round for the first time. Just five years ago, Macron beat Le Pen much more soundly — 66% to 34%.

    Earlier this month, Daniel Zamora Vargas, an assistant professor of sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, argued on social media that Macron, a former investment banker who has reduced the corporate tax rate and exacerbated economic inequality and insecurity, “is no centrist.”

    “He was the most right-wing president of the 5th Republic,” said Zamora. “He created the conditions for the extreme-right to be able to win the presidential election.”

    Macron, who has pursued anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies of his own, “legitimated all the topics of the extreme-right” and “totally normalized” Le Pen, Zamora wrote as first-round votes were counted on April 10.

    French people were forced to “vote for Le Pen or vote for what created a favorable environment for Le Pen’s ideas,” Zamora said last week. “It’s a choice between an evil and the cause of that evil.”

    On Sunday, British Labor Party parliamentarian Zarah Sultana made a similar point: “By trying to outdo the far-right, ‘moderates’ legitimize and mainstream them. That’s the context for Le Pen gaining 8% from 2017.”

    “We need progressive anti-systemic alternatives,” she added.

    Left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon came up just short of a second-place finish in the opening round. Fortunately for Macron, Mélenchon advised his disappointed voters to “not give a single vote” to Le Pen.

    In her concession speech, which she delivered shortly after polls closed, Le Pen said that “the ideas that we represent have reached new heights.” She called Sunday’s performance a “striking victory” and said that her National Rally party is “more determined than ever.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • [Do what you want but vote for Macron; Libération, 6 May 2017]

    The second round of the French Presidential election will be held on Sunday 24 April. The two front runners contesting the election from the first round are Emmanuel Macron (27.85%) and Marine Le Pen (23.15%). The left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon came a close third (21.95%).

    Macron and Le Pen also met in the 2017 election, gaining 24.0% and 21.3% in the first round, with Macron winning decisively in the second round with two-thirds of the vote. It was extremely convenient for Macron that the front runner for the 2017 election, François Fillon (President Sarkozy’s Prime Minister, 2007-12), was found to have employed family members at public expense and for no recognisable work (emploi fictif) – a perennial practice but for which Fillon was found to be a culprit of some consequence.

    It will be closer this time, reflecting a protest vote against the incumbent President. Marine Le Pen (MLP) is a stayer, having run in the 2012 election, surprising pundits by coming third in the first round with 18% of the vote.

    Another facet of the 2022 election was the candidacy of journalist/author Éric Zemmour. Stridently anti-immigrant, and his interpretations of history controversial (for example, the treatment of the Jews under Vichy, 1940-45), he was given saturation media coverage – not least on billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s CNews. Zemmour’s star faded into fourth place with 7% of the vote – whose numbers will presumably flow to MLP.

    In the medium term, the rising votes for MLP are a protest not merely against Macron but also against his two predecessors in office and their two Parties – Nicolas Sarkozy (Union pour un mouvement populaire, now Les Républicains) and François Hollande (Parti socialiste).

    The previously formidable LR and the PS have now gone to the dogs, appropriately, with LR’s Valerie Pécresse getting 4.8% and PS’ Anne Hidalgo 1.7% in the first round. Getting under 5% means that the Parties aren’t reimbursed for their campaign expenses. Pécresse, as President of the Île-de-France Council, has demonstrated indifference and incompetence in office. Hidalgo, as mayor of Paris, has accumulated a huge debt – not least with madly acquiring the deadweight Olympic Games for Paris in 2024 as a means of leveraging her running for Presidential Office. Hidalgo is so much on the nose that in Paris itself she managed to garner only 2.17%.

    MLP heads the Rassemblement national, renamed in 2018 from the Front national (France creates and changes the names of its political parties with the weather). The universal qualifying adjective for the RN/FN is ‘far right’. The RN/FN policy agenda has varied, not least for opportunistic reasons, but the essential permanent planks are social conservatism and a hostility to (read African and/or Muslim) immigration. In respectable circles the Party and its adherents are the perennial subjects of vilification and condescension.

    Representative of the condescension is a July 2019 piece by academics Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen. It’s a juxtaposition between the rational and enlightened (the governing class and its minders – of which us) and the irrational and ignorant. More, the latter are prone to invent and believe in ‘conspiracy theories’ – from which ‘we’ are entirely immune! The problem is that these people have the vote and that their numbers keep growing.

    The French far right’s traditional stamping ground is in the South-East. But the 2017 election saw MLP popular right across the North and North-East, a veritable brown tide (the felicitous expression is a “vague bleu Marine”) across a landscape of long term de-industrialisation. For 2022 votes by Departments, see here; for votes by Communes, see here. For example, in Pas-de-Calais, MLP obtained 38.7% of the vote. MLP herself is a Deputy since 2017 in one of Pas-de-Calais’ 12 Constituencies, along with three other RN Deputies. None of the 12 Constituencies presently has a left-wing Deputy – historically unprecedented. Moving East, MLP obtained 33% in the Somme, 39% in Aisne, 30% in Marne, 36% in Ardennes, 35% in Meuse, 27.5% in Meurthe-et-Moselle, 30% in Moselle, but losing to Macron in the far-East Bas-Rhin.

    The astute commentator François Asselineau (of the Union Populaire Républicaine Party) has noted that, in the first round, MLP arrived at the head of 20,036 Communes of 35,080 (57%), whereas Macron won 11,861 Communes (34%).

    Orellana and Michelsen acknowledge the tangible background to the dissent:

    These [New Right alliances] depend on the continued presence of grievances that directly affect people’s lives, particularly growing poverty even when working, the collapse of stable and safe social identities linked to work, the increasing instability of employment security, and the rapid change of local communities due to emigration, migration, collapsing housing affordability, and redevelopment initiatives that displace communities. These provide precise and urgent electoral rallying points.

    They are particularly effective given that so many mainstream politicians ignore these basic grievances. … If their success is to be confronted, the basic grievances they claim to resolve will need to be addressed and solutions offered.

    But it isn’t going to happen, in France or elsewhere. These people are misguided trash and we’re not going to cater to them. Rather, the mainstream media (plus the ‘progressive’ media) have mounted a broadside against MLP and RN to ensure that France is rendered safe for the moment against the nasties. Representative is the online site Mediapart (originally created by a bloc of refugees from Le Monde). As per 2017, it devotes multiple articles to denigrating Mélenchon and his La France insoumise Party with the aim of keeping Mélenchon from the second round. With Mélenchon disposed of, Mediapart editorial (read Edwy Plenel) goes full bore against MLP and RN (corrupt, anti eco, anti worker, anti-Islam, etc. – and, worst of all, pro-Russia!), pretending that the always preferred candidate Macron is the journal’s reluctant choice by default.

    Nevertheless, Mediapart has in its stable admirable journalists – at least on French matters. On 14 April, the journal interviewed sociologist Didier Eribon (in French, paywall), who brings a close personal experience to the ascendancy of MLP and RN. Eribon notes that almost all his family have passed in less than ten years from voting Communist to voting FN. For Eribon’s mother, her vote has always been a protest vote. But underneath the continuity of protest there has been a profound transformation – from one background culture to another. The first involved industrial employment, membership of the communist-affiliated CGT union, communal solidarity built on workplace solidarity. The second involves unemployment or precarious employment, social isolation and desperation.

    Eribon lays special blame on the Parti socialiste in power from Mitterrand after 1983 but especially from the government of Lionel Jospin (1997-2002) onwards. The PS should have read the wind after Jospin, self-considered a shoe-in to the second round of the 2002 Presidential election against incumbent Jacques Chirac, was edged out by MLP’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen. But no. An incisive account of the PS’ ongoing self-deception is made by Serge Halimi in the June 2018 Le Monde Diplomatique (English, paywall).

    The PS’ neoliberal drift is reinforced by a new generation of intellectuals seeking to destroy the culture underpinning the long boom (“les trentes glorieuses”) in France, comprising academics, some industrialists and bankers, and journalists to sell the story. The establishment of the think tank la fondation Saint-Simon in 1982 encapsulated the onslaught. Sympathetic technocrats emanating from the École nationale d’administration, especially those ensconced in the Finance Ministry, completes the picture. As Eribon notes, Macron is the incarnation of this historical sequence.

    Emmanuel Macron is a cold fish, without empathy. In January 2017, I claimed that there was a touch of Chauncey Gardiner, the hollow character of Kozinski’s Being There, in Macron. But there is no malice in Gardiner. An expert has weighed in on this delicate subject. Dr Adriano Segatori, an Italian psychiatrist, has mercilessly decoded Macron’s persona. His presentation, in Italian with French subtitles, is here. An English translation of the essence of Segatori’s diagnosis is here. Macron displays the characteristics of a sociopath.

    A minor interaction with a ‘member of the public’ well reflects Macron’s mentality. The person, unemployed gardener, was anxious to improve his lot. Macron haughtily told him: “There are heaps of jobs, it’s necessary to find them! Hotels, cafés, restaurants, I can find you a job just by crossing the road”. Here’s the event recorded. Macron’s period in office is peppered with such arrogance and disdain for the hoi polloi.

    Macron was elevated into President Hollande’s administration and then into the Presidency courtesy of very well-connected patrons and mentors, supported by a private media dominated by very wealthy businessmen and by a compliant public media. Since 2017, private media ownership has become even more concentrated, with the bulk owned by five billionaires – Bernard Arnault (luxury goods), Vincent Bolloré (transport and logistics), Martin Bouygues (construction), Patrick Drahi (telecom) and Xavier Niel (telecom). Add the Dassault family, who have long held the dominant conservative paper Le Figaro, and Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, who in 2018 secretly bought a controlling interest in the iconic daily Le Monde. Macron faces no opposition from this coterie, other than pressure to hasten his neoliberal agenda.

    As Economy Minister under Hollande, Macron led the introduction of the loi Travail in August 2016 which weakened workplace rules and protections, including measures to ease employer rights to sackings and to lower sacked employee payouts. After widespread resistance, including in parliament, the law was imposed under section 49.3 of the Constitution, a draconian secret of the Fifth Republic never before used for such purposes. Here was Macron’s authoritarian character on full display.

    Once elected in 2017, Macron set about abolishing the wealth tax, the Impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF). True, the tax was largely symbolic, and some wealthy were quitting the country. Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man, and in his maltreatment of employees having no sense of solidarity (vide François Ruffin’s documentary Merci patron!), threatened to clear out. Solidarity is also not in Macron’s makeup, as he had failed to report his sizeable earnings at Rothschild when becoming Economy Minister in 2014, lying about them, and thus avoiding his personal liability for the ISF.

    It is standard practice for neoliberal governments everywhere to cut taxes on the wealthy, to go easy on their tax evasion lurks, and then claim that fiscal prudence demands that arms of the ‘unsustainable’ welfare state be wound back (‘defense’ spending is, of course, off the table). This ruse is institutionalised in the EU, with Brussels pressuring national governments under the 1992 Maastricht strictures. In 2013, as Hollande’s economic adviser, Macron fostered the introduction of the Crédit d’impôt pour la compétitivité et l’emploi (CICE). This tax credit was granted in the claimed expectation that businesses would create a huge number of jobs. But the credit granted was in the form of relief on employer contributions to the social security fund. This mechanism was thus a direct redistributive vehicle from the welfare state to the well-off (the greatest beneficiaries were large corporates like the supermarkets). As President, Macron closed down the CICE at the end of 2018, but replacing it with a permanent comprehensive lowering of social security contributions by enterprises. The cost to the exchequer has been enormous, in tens of billions of euros, for estimated minor gains in employment generated from this poorly targeted measure.

    In the run-up to the 2022 election, Macron declared his candidacy belatedly and declined to campaign, declaring that his opponents didn’t deserve his attention. In any case, how could he run on his record?

    Macron’s obsession with enslaving wage labour has continued with his prolonged attempt to achieve ‘reform’ of the unemployment relief system (assurance-chômage). After two years of Macron trying, delayed partly by objections from no less than the authoritative Conseil d’État, the structure was belatedly installed in October 2021. The unemployed face lower payments, already derisory, and being readily ‘penalised’ – cut off from any payment for failure to adhere to impossible demands.

    The spontaneous and prolonged protests, in the form of the ‘yellow vests’ movement, against his contempt for struggle street have been met with brutal repression.

    Macron has nothing but disdain for public infrastructure. He has been happy to kowtow to Brussels’ demand to facilitate ‘competition’ in areas where natural monopolies prevail (electricity generation, transport). He presided over the cynical privatisation of Toulouse-Blagnac airport – a strategic public asset adjoining a major Airbus facility. He wanted to privatise the core Aeroports de Paris, but was forced to back off due to the public backlash.

    Macron has had no overall industry policy. He legitimised the scandalous selloff of Alstom Energy – the dominant part of the French flagship (fleuron) Alstom – see my articles here and here. The only beneficiaries have been vulture advisory law firms and banks. He overlooks ongoing de-industrialisation. He tacitly endorsed the predatory and anti-competitive takeover of Suez by Veolia.

    His election manifesto to instigate ‘the start-up nation’ appears formally to have had some success. Macron boasted of such in January. But a 23 February article in Le Canard Enchaîné is cautionary. Many start-ups are in flippant domains, and with minimum employment prospects. Those in substantive fields, like Exotec which makes small industrial robots, are rare. Insiders note that “The concept of a unicorn [start-up reaching a billion dollars in market valuation] rests on a sole criterion: the capacity of an individual to convince investors to hand over their money. That says nothing of the capacity of an enterprise to be profitable, of its social and environmental impact, of its employment generation capacity …”. Quite. To date, there is little to see here with respect to overall employment generation and regional township viability.

    Macron has consciously neglected the health system, subject to long term corporatisation and funding cuts. The ravages of Covid have seen no change of heart. Respected medicos have pleaded with the government for assistance, without effect. I wrote a short piece on the background to the health system crisis after the early months of Covid in June 2020. In early June 2020, France had witnessed 29,000 deaths attributed to Covid. Now the figure is over 144,000. Meanwhile the aged care system (ehpad), subject to the diabolical excesses of for-profit companies, remains a national disgrace.

    Macron’s interventions in both higher and secondary education are reactionary and divisive.

    His environmental record is heavy on rhetoric and devoid of substance.

    His administration has involved a series of scandals, none of which have rubbed off on him because of complicity of relevant institutions of state (in particular, the Parquet national financier). The placement of his income (essentially a gift from his patrons) from employment at Rothschild and the sources and extent of his 2017 campaign spending remain mysteries. Representative of the scandals are Macron’s employment and defense of bully boy Alexandre Benalla and the most recent disclosure of the fabulous sums spent on advisory firms (McKinsey in the first rank) in the outsourcing of public policy advice and operation.

    As for the European Union, Macron has done nothing to offset the ongoing dominance of the EU’s institutions by a selfish Germany. His duplicity and weakness, with Germany, in prevarication with respect to Ukraine’s non-compliance with the two Minsk Accords, and its implied subjugation to US imperatives, has facilitated the catastrophic outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war which we currently endure.

    Finally, Macron’s foreign policy has been quixotic and chaotic – most striking in France’s humiliating retreat from the Sahel – the work of an absolute novice.

    In short, Macron’s reign has been wretched. Macron deserves, like his predecessors Sarkozy and Hollande, to be consigned to irrelevance and to write his memoirs regarding his salutary role in public life.

    If re-elected for a second term (quinquennat), Macron’s first agenda will be unfinished business with the welfare state – ‘reform’ of the retirement system (retirement age pushed back from 62 to 65), against which he has also faced dogged resistance.

    Régis de Castelnau has been a long time lawyer turned legal scholar and commentator. He blogs at Vu du Droit. From an ‘old’ family, he has acted for clients on the left of the spectrum (due to lessons learned from working on the factory floor). However, his commentary is detached, unique and astute.

    de Castelnau notes:

    to vote for Macron for a non-renewable term will have him engage in open slather. We know his project. Social security and the retirement system will be dismantled to the profit of private pension funds. McKinsey will be charged at great expense to put it in place and those such as Blackrock will walk off with the loot. That which remains of French industry will be auctioned off, to the great pleasure of the investment banks organising the selloff. Our sovereignty will finish by being dismantled to the profit of a EU dominated by Germany, to whom we will acquiesce to share our seat on the UN Security Council and to access our nuclear force of dissuasion. The all of course in the name of a “European sovereignty” which doesn’t exist.  … At the end of these five next years, France will be unrecognisable and it will be irreversible.

    As with 2017, there is no satisfactory option. Some principled people have given notice that they intend to vote blank – an option ultimately to little effect unless tens of thousands demonstrate by such means their disgust. The French electoral system being non-compulsory, the abstention rate is a significant player – in the local vernacular, many choose to ‘go fishing’. In the 2022 first round, the abstention rate (voters relative to enrolled citizens) was a high 26.8%. There is a tug between those who call to come out in droves to keep ‘the fascists’ from gaining power and those individuals who can’t bring themselves to endorse either of the poxy alternatives.

    Whatever the outcome, France’s immediate future is guaranteed to be not much fun.

    The post The French Presidential Election first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ANALYSIS: By Marwan Bishara

    The French have done it again. Despite having been utterly scandalised by the result of their own vote in the 2017 presidential elections, they have propelled the unpalatable Emmanuel Macron and the deplorable Marine Le Pen to yet another runoff.

    But such is the state of French politics — chaotic and in flux. Now, the power of the traditional centre-left and centre-right parties has diminished, and the Fifth Republic is changing beyond recognition, with dramatic consequences for Europe.

    After five years in power, the incumbent won only 28 percent of the vote in comparison with Le Pen’s 23 percent in the first round two weeks ago, and the result of the second round, due to take place tomorrow, looks even less certain than ever, considering Macron’s controversial domestic and foreign policy record.

    In 2017, Marcon defeated Le Pen by 30 points, but today she’s too close for comfort, with some polls putting them almost at the same level, given the 3 percent margin of error. Although some polls have also shown him opening a significant lead.

    Predictably, most of the other candidates have lent their support to Macron as he rushed to emphasise Le Pen’s “extremism” and present an ultimatum: It is me or the far right (read the neofascists), or in the words oft attributed to King Louis XV, “After me, the deluge”.

    But the trick may not work as well as it did the last time, because this time it smacks of despair and duplicity.

    The president looks desperate if he chooses to focus on Le Pen’s record instead of focusing on his own, especially now that he has a record to run on. And he looks desperate if he engages in the politics of fear instead of laying out a hopeful agenda for the next crucial five years.

    Neither the pain nor the gain has spread evenly
    In terms of numbers, and considering Brexit, the pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Macron has actually done better than expected for the French economy as a whole; better than most other Western economies.

    Yet, neither the pain nor the gain has spread evenly during his term.

    Despite lower unemployment and higher growth, Macron is widely seen as a “president of the rich”, focused on improving corporate performance as the engine of growth, investing more in white-collar jobs than in blue-collar labour, and showing no sympathy for struggling families.

    Macron has proven a good speaker but a bad communicator; better at lecturing than listening, condescendingly talking at people instead of talking to them.

    Some now fear that, free of electoral pressures in his second and final term in office, Macron could become even more indifferent, raising the retirement age, undermining labour rights and shrinking the welfare state to suit his neoliberal economic agenda.

    Either way, Macron should have mustered the courage in the past two weeks and beyond to set the record straight about where he is taking the country. This is especially important because Macron also needs to come clean about a record of double standards.

    He, who had appealed for “hope over fear”, was quick to spread panic about so-called “Islamist separatism” during his presidency, in an opportunistic manoeuvre to deflect attention from his failures and salvage his waning popularity on the right.

    Accused Muslims of living on margins
    He accused Muslims living on the margins of French society of offending democratic and secular values, instead of fulfilling his promise to end social marginalisation in France.

    In the process, he paved the way for the likes of populist candidate Eric Zemmour to claim Islamists and Muslims are one and the same; demonising Islam as an imminent danger to the French republic.

    Paradoxically, just as Macron embraced such a xenophobic image, Le Pen shed hers in order to appeal to mainstream conservative voters.

    Though she has not changed her fanatic views or chauvinistic agenda, the far-right candidate has replaced her image as an angry extremist, obsessed with immigration, Islam and French identity, with a more moderate one of a warm caring leader, speaking to peoples’ economic and personal anxieties.

    Instead of her usual rants against EU authoritarianism, Le Pen has railed against high prices and high taxes in order to rally her base.

    Le Pen’s clever but deceiving repositioning has allowed her to make inroads to the political centre without losing the radical right, and propelled her to the top of the polling charts along with Macron, despite her dark past and her admiration for Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, both very unpopular in France.

    She has long shared Putin and Trump’s vision of nativist white Christian nationalism, but understood that French voters today are fixated on domestic woes, not on foreign worries, and therefore spoke only in slogans about making France strong, authentic and great again.

    Activist president on world stage
    But Macron has been an activist president on the European and world stage, believing that France must lead on both fronts. What he lacked in experience, he made up for in youthful energy, bouncing about world forums, hosting important leaders and expressing an opinion on every issue.

    Yet despite his energy and ambition, Macron has fared worse on foreign policy than he did domestically. Not only did he fail to make any breakthroughs on any major issue, but much of what he touched also seemed to blow up in his face.

    In Europe, he failed to score any gains in his so-called “Normandy format” summit in 2019 and later failed to anticipate, prevent or reverse a Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the process, his vision of European defence autonomy at the expense of a “brain-dead” NATO dissipated to no return.

    In Africa and the Middle East, Macron failed to preserve or expand French influence, especially in the Sahel and North Africa. He also fared miserably in Libya, Lebanon and in Palestine despite PR stunts on the streets of Beirut and Jerusalem.

    His hastily arranged photo-op with warring Libyan leaders early in his presidency underlined his amateurish approach to foreign policy, as the conflict hardened and France’s role waned. Macron’s appeasement of authoritarian Arab regimes while preaching human rights has been utterly hypocritical.

    Macron has lost huge multibillion-dollar arms deals to the United States, including those with the Australian navy and European air forces. Unable to make up his mind about Beijing, or settle on a strategy, he failed to create any form of partnership or make economic inroads with China.

    And yet again, it is the immediate bread-and-butter (and, ahem, cheese) issues that count most for the French in these elections, not far-off conflicts and conspiracies.

    Faced and debated Le Pen
    So far, President Macron has used France’s turn at the presidency of the European Union and the threat Russia’s invasion of Ukraine poses to European security to avoid debating other candidates or defending his record — until this week’s traditional television debate.

    He faced and debated Marine Le Pen, who is much better prepared, more polished and experienced than the last time. Any major faux pas in the next two weeks could have cost him the presidency, but he seems to have the edge as demonstrated in the debate.

    Winning back the Elysees is not the only challenge facing him. He will also have to win back the majority in the National Assembly come June legislative elections, in order to pass any major laws or programmes.

    It should come as no comfort for the incumbent that his victory was driven, not once but twice, by the electorate’s fear of his far-right opponent

    But Macron could still turn a second mandate into a second chance and show the French that he can ensure that the gain, as well as the pain, is fairly shared.

    Marwan Bishara is an author who writes extensively on global politics and is widely regarded as a leading authority on US foreign policy, the Middle East and international strategic affairs. He was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • French President Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen are headed to a runoff on April 24 after winning the most votes in France’s first round of presidential elections on Sunday. We speak with Rokhaya Diallo, French journalist and writer, who says France’s political landscape is now dominated by three parties — the far-right, the liberal right and the left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who urged his supporters to not vote for Le Pen in the following election. Diallo also explains how Le Pen — who ran against Macron in the last presidential election — has since softened her xenophobic rhetoric. “She has hidden in a way the real agenda of the National Rally, which is explicitly anti-immigrant, xenophobic and also sexist,” says Diallo.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    French President Emmanuel Macron and the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen are headed to a runoff election on April 24th. In the first round of voting Saturday, Macron won over 27% support. Le Pen placed second at 23%. Macron urged French voters to reject Le Pen’s xenophobic policies.

    PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON: [translated] I solemnly call on my fellow citizens, whatever their leaning and whatever the choice they made in the first round, to join us. … At this turning point for the future of our nation, nothing will ever be the same. This is why I want to reach out to all those who want to work for France. I am ready to invent something new to gather different convictions and leanings in order to build with them a common action for our nation for the coming years. It is our duty.

    AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, after the vote, Le Pen called on French people of all parties to vote for her in the runoff later this month.

    MARINE LE PEN: [translated] From this moment, I’m calling on all French, from all sides, from the right or left or elsewhere, French of all origins, to join this great national and popular movement. Together we will build, with enthusiasm and conviction, this victory to implement the great shift that France needs, and drive with joy our country into the third millennium. Long live the republic! Long live France!

    AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon placed third with about 22% of the vote. He urged his supporters to not give a single vote to Marine Le Pen in the runoff.

    For more, we go to Paris to speak with Rokhaya Diallo, French journalist, writer, filmmaker, contributing writer to The Washington Post, her latest piece headlined “France has a chance to choose progressive ideals over hate and division.”

    Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Rokhaya. Explain the significance of this vote.

    ROKHAYA DIALLO: So, first of all, thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to be back on air on Democracy Now!

    The significance of that is that it’s something — the fact that Emmanuel Macron would face Marine Le Pen on the second round was something that was expected, but for the first time we’ve had two strong candidates from the far right, and there is also the fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as you just mentioned, is also now impersonating the leading voice on the left. So, his party, La France Insoumise, is like the most likely to challenge the right and the far right. And to me, what has happened yesterday just showed that now there are three — three oppose, if I can say, on the French political landscape, which is the far right, the liberal right and then the left, impersonated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party, La France Insoumise.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what actually took place and what the protest vote against Macron is all about. For example, most of his time recently he has been focused on Ukraine. Today he’s headed to the north, to Le Pen country. Talk about what Marine Le Pen represents, what she said she would do if she became the head of France.

    ROKHAYA DIALLO: So, Marine Le Pen is the leader of the National Rally, which is the party that was created from the National Front by her father in the early ’70s, so it’s a very far-right party that was created in early ’70s by former Nazis, French, from France, and which has been — which has taken a very strong stance against immigration and against — yeah, mostly against immigration and against immigrants, and on the idea that French citizens should be privileged in front of the people from other countries. So, Marine Le Pen has put her feet in the legacy of her father but has really tried to change the party in a way to — in a certain way to soften the package.

    So, now she has chosen, during that campaign, not to focus on immigration but on the cost of life and the fact that the French people, the French citizens, have lost much of their purchasing power. So, she has hidden, in a way, the real agenda of the National Rally, which is explicitly anti-immigrant, xenophobic and also sexist, to put herself in the shoes of a leader who would support French people who are facing challenges because of the rise of the prices. So that’s the reason why she’s been — she’s gained so much support. And Emmanuel Macron, who was elected in 2017, given the fact that he really supported policies that would have made the rich richer, have sparked much anger among the population. And that anger has found, in a way, some — its way to the National Rally, that is the party of Marine Le Pen.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about how Ukraine figured into this, and the relationship between Macron, the current president of France, with Putin, and the ad he put out with Marine Le Pen, rhyming “Le Pen” with “Putin,” and her close relationship with Putin?

    ROKHAYA DIALLO: The thing is that, yes, indeed, among the presidential candidates, Marine Le Pen was one of the ones who were saying that she had an admiration for Putin. So, after the war started in Ukraine, of course, what she said, the fact that she was someone — an admirer of Putin, didn’t look good. So Macron is using now the fact that she’s been supportive to Putin, also the fact that in 2017, in order to fund her campaign, she borrowed money from Russia. And this year, in 2022, she borrowed money from Hungary. So Macron is using that to say that she’s more likely to be in solidarity with Russia than him, because he says that he challenged Putin, and he was one of the people who went to visit him and who tried to stop the war in Ukraine.

    So, it’s true that Marine Le Pen is very ambiguous with Putin, but it’s not the only thing that she needs to be addressed about. And also, the thing is that Emmanuel Macron for the first time said that Marine Le Pen and her party, the National Rally, was racist, which he hasn’t done during his mandate during the five years. He was more, I would say, blurry about the line that he should have drawn between his party, his politics and the far right.

    AMY GOODMAN: What do you expect in this run-up to the final election on — what is it? — April 24th?

    ROKHAYA DIALLO: So, for now, Emmanuel Macron is the most likely to win. But if he wins, he will not win in the same way as he won in 2017, because in 2017 he was the face of a renewal of the revolution, which was the name of his book, and he was claiming that he was neither from the right nor from the left. But we can tell now, after five years of his presidency, that he was definitely from the right and that he was supporting a neoliberal agenda. So, now it will be very difficult for him to be appealing to the voters from the left, who are likely not to vote at all. So the challenge now is to make sure that the far right doesn’t come into power, but at the same time not to give — to make Macron under the impression that he has the support of the whole population.

    And whether Marine Le Pen wins or not, she will have won in the way that she has been able to anchor herself and her party into the political landscape and to make sure that her ideas have been widespread over the whole political landscape. And we can tell that in the fact that Emmanuel Macron, as a president, really supported the hard line regarding immigration and regarding minorities. So, to me, she has won in a way that she has changed the French mentality, and she has had a very important influence over the voters, who now, if we addition her votes to the votes of the other far-right parties, makes the far right over 30%, which is much.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Rokhaya Diallo, French journalist, writer, filmmaker, contributing writer for The Washington Post. We’ll link to your latest piece.

    Next up, we’re going to go down to Texas, where a prosecutor arrested a woman for murder after accusing her of causing a “self-induced abortion.” After massive public outcry, he says he will drop the charges. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • John Mullen shares his initial analysis of the French presidential election results.

  • A strike by Amazon workers in France resumed in earnest on Tuesday, April 5, and extended to all Amazon sites across the country. “Management offered us a 3 percent increase, but we want at least 5 percent,” Antoine Delorme of the CGT Amazon trade union at Châlons-sur-Saône told Révolution Permanente.

    This is happening in the context of compulsory annual negotiations (NAO) under France’s Labor Code. Management’s proposal of a wage increase that is less than inflation has provoked an unprecedented strike movement at every Amazon France facility.

    The post Amazon Workers In France Wage Unprecedented Strike For Wage Increases appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In the second of a two-part series leading up to the April 10 French election, John Mullen shares his analysis of the politics of Jean-Luc Melenchon and La France Insoumise.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • TechCrunch of 5 April 2022 reports that Investigators say they have found evidence that a Jordanian journalist and human rights defender’s iPhone was hacked with the Pegasus spyware just weeks after Apple sued the spyware’s maker NSO Group to stop it from targeting Apple’s customers.

    Award-winning journalist Suhair Jaradat’s phone was hacked with the notorious spyware as recently as December 5, 2021, according to an analysis of her phone by Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab that was shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication. Jaradat was sent a WhatsApp message from someone impersonating a popular anti-government critic with links to the Pegasus spyware, compromising her phone. According to the forensic analysis, Jaradat’s iPhone was hacked several times in the preceding months and as far back as February 2021.

    Apple had filed a lawsuit against Israeli spyware maker NSO Group in November 2021, seeking a court-issued injunction aimed at banning NSO from using Apple’s products and services to develop and deploy hacks against its customers. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/07/21/nsos-pegasus-spyware-now-really-in-the-firing-line/…But so far the case has gotten off to a slow start after the first judge assigned to the case recused herself, with no decision on the case likely to be made any time before June.

    Jaradat is one of several Jordanians, including human rights defenders, lawyers and fellow journalists whose phones were compromised likely by agencies of the Jordanian government, according to Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab’s findings out Tuesday.

    Among the others targeted include Malik Abu Orabi, a human rights lawyer whose work has included defending the teachers’ union, which in 2019 led the longest public sector strike in the country’s history. Abu Orabi’s phone was targeted as early as August 2019 until June 2021. Also, the phone of Ahmed Al-Neimat, a human rights defender and anti-corruption activist, was targeted by the ForcedEntry exploit in February 2021. The researchers said the hacking of Al-Neimat’s phone is believed to be the earliest suspected use of ForcedEntry.

    Another Jordanian journalist and human rights defender’s phone was targeted, according to the researchers, but who asked for her identity not to be disclosed.

    Meanwhile, on 5 April 2022, AFP reported that Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri, who is in Israeli detention, filed a complaint in France Tuesday against surveillance firm NSO Group for having “illegally infiltrated” his mobile phone with the spyware Pegasus.

    Hamouri, who also holds French citizenship, is serving a four-month term of administrative detention ordered by an Israeli military court in March on the claim he is a “threat to security”.

    He is one of several Palestinian activists whose phones were hacked using the Pegasus malware made by the Israeli company NSO, according to a report in November by human rights groups. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/11/10/palestinian-ngos-dubbed-terrorist-were-hacked-with-pegasus-spyware/

    On Tuesday, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Human Rights League (LDH) and Hamouri filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor.  It accused NSO of “having illegally infiltrated the telephone of rights defender Salah Hamouri,” they said in a statement sent to the AFP bureau in Jerusalem. 

    Obviously, this is an operation that is part of a largely political framework given the harassment Hamouri has been subjected to for years and the attacks on human rights defenders in Israel,” attorney Patrick Baudouin, honorary president of the FIDH, told AFP.

    https://www.securityweek.com/palestinian-lawyer-sues-pegasus-spyware-maker-france

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Panos Petrou from the Rproject, Greece speaks with French anti-capitalist activist and commentator John Mullen about the upcoming French election.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The murder of Corsican nationalist hero Yvan Colonna has sparked huge demonstrations on the island and renewed calls for self-determination, reports Dick Nichols.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • For more than 14 months, Libre Flot has been incarcerated in a French prison. He languishes in solitary confinement; a political prisoner who hasn’t even faced trial yet.

    For the last month, he has been on hunger strike. A few days ago, he was hospitalised for a second time after suffering from chest pressure and sharp pain in his heart. He is getting weaker and weaker, and is finding it difficult to move.

    So, what is Libre Flot accused of, and why is he imprisoned?

    Fighting ISIS

    Flot is one of many internationalists who travelled to North and East Syria (commonly known as Rojava) to join the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the fight against Daesh (ISIS), and to defend the anti-capitalist revolution in the region. After returning to France, he was one of seven people who was arrested in December 2020 and accused of being part of “a criminal association planning a terrorist attack”. He says that he has been framed because of his links to the YPG, and that he was spied upon by the French state including being:

    followed, traced, bugged 24 hours a day in my vehicle, my home, spied on even in my bed.

    The six others were released, but Flot remains in prison, in what he describes as “hellish and permanent solitude”.  He says:

    it is my political opinions and my participation in the Kurdish YPG forces in the fight against Daesh that they are trying to criminalize. It has been more than 14 months that 7 people who do not know each other are accused of being part of a criminal association.

    Flot argues that the investigation against him is biased, and that the state “investigates only for the prosecution and never for the defense.”  He continues:

    [The investigating judge] allows himself [to give me] the most unacceptable insult by referring to the barbarians of the Islamic State as my “friends from Daesh”. Although verbal, this remains an unfathomable act of violence. It is inadmissible that this judge grants himself the right to insult me to the highest degree, tries to smear me, and thus spits on the memory of my Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, Turkmen, Armenian, Turkish and international friends and comrades who have fallen in the struggle against this organization. I am still outraged by this.

    European states criminalising revolutionaries

    Flot isn’t the only international who has found themselves behind bars after joining the revolution in North and East Syria. The UK has also charged and prosecuted a number of its citizens. There’s 18-year-old Londoner Silhan Ozcelik, who was imprisoned in 2015 after she attempted to go and fight against Daesh in Rojava. There’s Jim Matthews, who was charged with terrorism offences for fighting in the YPG in 2018. The charges were finally dropped against him. And then there’s Aidan James, who was sentenced to prison for terrorism in 2019. He also fought in the YPG against Daesh. Like Flot, James was remanded in prison for a number of months before his trial even began. Then, in July 2020, terrorism charges against three British men were also dropped after an “extraordinarily misplaced prosecution”. Those who were charged included Paul Newey, a 49-year-old father from Solihull, who sent £150 to his son Dan, a volunteer with the YPG. Another of those charged, Daniel Burke, spent eight months in prison on remand before the charges were dropped.

    But it’s not just YPG volunteers who are targeted by European states. Matt Broomfield, a professional journalist from the UK, was detained while on holiday in Greece, thrown into a Greek detention centre, and imprisoned for two months. He was subsequently banned from the 26 countries that make up the Schengen Area for ten years. Broomfield hasn’t actually been told what his crime is, but he is certain it is because he volunteered as a journalist in Rojava. Others who have volunteered in North and East Syria have faced similar Schengen bans.

    So why are these people such targets? It’s because they have volunteered in a region of the world where revolution has succeeded, against all odds; a region that is anti-capitalist, attempting to give power to the grassroots. And it is a society that centres on women’s liberation, religious tolerance, and minority protection as key. This is, of course, a very real and direct threat to the world’s powerful, particularly those who rule under a thinly-veiled guise of ‘democracy’.

    International day of action

    Activists have called for an international day of action in solidarity with Flot. They say:

    The 4th of April will be his 36th day of hunger strike.

    The 4th of April is also his birthday.

    On this day, we call for an international day of solidarity. We call upon all comrades and every decent human being with a sense of justice to protest outside French embassies, consulates or institutes, or to find any other way to voice their objection to this blatant injustice.

    For radicals around the world, the prosecution of those who have risked their lives in Rojava should continue to be of massive concern. As capitalist states begin to see their rule threatened, they will come for more of us. Whether it is the fighters in the YPG or the activists who defended themselves against the police in Bristol, more and more of us will begin to see our freedoms being taken away.

    Featured image via Xavier Malafosse / Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons 1.0 license, resized to 770 x 403px

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Building Europe to have peace. Such is the just and fine ambition that one must pursue relentlessly. Nevertheless, it is necessary to define ‘Europe’ and to specify the conditions for the peace that is desirable on our continent.

    For Europe is a continent. Only de Gaulle had envisaged Europe as a geopolitical ensemble composed of all the states participating in balance. François Mitterrand took up the idea in the form of a European confederation, but he too quickly abandoned it.

    Since 1945, what is presented as ‘Europe’, in the West of the continent, is only a subset of countries incapable by themselves of ensuring peace. One regularly hides its powerlessness behind proud slogans. Such is the case with that which affirms ‘Europe means Peace’. As a historical reality and as promise it is false.

    During the Cold War, it is not the organs of the Common Market, of the European Economic Community then of the European Union which have assured peace in Europe. It is well known that the equilibrium between the great powers has been maintained by nuclear dissuasion and, more precisely, by the potential for massive destruction possessed by the US, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France.

    NATO forces under American command offered Western Europe a fragile umbrella, since the US would not have put their very existence in jeopardy to prevent a very improbable land-based offensive by the Soviet Army. Ready for all possibilities but not prepared to pay the price of a classic confrontation, France, having left the integrated command of NATO in 1966, considered the territory of West Germany as a buffer zone for its Pluton nuclear-armed missiles.

    The collapse of the Soviet Union has pushed into the background the debates on nuclear dissuasion, but it is still not possible to glorify a ‘Europe’ pacific and peace-making. For thirty years we have seen the «peace of cemeteries» established on our periphery, and under the responsibility of certain members states of the European Union.

    The principal states of the EU carry an overwhelming responsibility in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Germany, supported by the Vatican, unilaterally recognises Slovenia and Croatia on 23 December 1991, which pushes the then “Twelve” to follow this lethal route. France could have opposed this decision. It gives up this option because, on 15 December in Council, François Mitterrand reaffirms his conviction: it is more important to preserve the promises of Maastricht than to attempt to impose the French position on Yugoslavia. In other words, Yugoslavia has been deliberately sacrificed on the altar of “Franco-German friendship“, when one could already see that Berlin lied, manoeuvred and imposed its will. The German ambition was to support Croatia, including by the delivery of arms, in a war that would be pursued with a comparable cruelty by all the camps.

    The recognition of Slovenia and Croatia embroiled Bosnia-Herzegovina and provoked the extension of the conflict, then its internationalisation. Tears would be shed for Sarajevo while forgetting Mostar. Some Parisian intellectuals would demand, in the name of ‘Europe’, an attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then comprising Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro. Their wish was granted in 1999 when NATO, under American commandment, bombed Yugoslav territory for 78 days, killing thousands of civilians. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium … participated in this military operation, in contempt of the UN Charter and of NATO statutes, an alliance theoretically defensive …

    Let no one pretend that the principal member states of the EU were waging humanitarian wars and wanted to assure economic development and democracy. ‘Europe’ has protested against ethnic cleansing by Serbs but has left the Croats to force out 200,000 Serbs from Krajina. ‘Europe’ waxes indignant about massacres in Kosovo but it has supported extremist ethnic Albanians of the Kosovo Liberation Army who have committed multiple atrocities before and after their arrival to power in Pristina.

    These Balkan wars occurred in the previous Century, but it is not ancient history. The countries devastated by war suffer henceforth the indifference of the powerful. In Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, one lives poorly, very poorly, if one is not involved in illegal business networks. Then one seeks work elsewhere, preferably in Germany, if one is not too old.

    After having mistreated, pillaged then abandoned its peripheries, ‘peaceful’ Europe then goes to serve as an auxiliary force in American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is true that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron were in the forefront in the bombardment of Libya, but the outcome is as disastrous as in the Middle East and Central Asia – graveyards, chaos, the hate of the West and, at Kabul, the return of the Taliban.

    This brief review of the deadly inconsistencies of European pacificism cannot ignore Ukraine. The European Commission itself has encouraged the Ukrainian government in its quest for integration in the EU, before proposing a simple accord of association. The Ukrainian government, having declined to sign this accord, the pro-European groups allied to the ultranationalists have descended into the street in November 2013 with the support of Germany, Poland and the US. The Maidan movement, the eviction of President Yanukovych and the war of the Donbass have led, after the Minsk accords and a stalemate in the conflict to the situation that we have before our eyes in early January – the US and Russia discuss directly the Ukrainian crisis without the ‘Europe of peace’ being admitted to the negotiating table. The EU has totally subjugated itself to NATO and does not envisage leaving it.

    It is therefore possible to note, once again, the vacuity of the discourse on the ‘European power’ and on ‘European sovereignty’. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we should acknowledge all the opportunities lost. After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, France could have demanded the withdrawal of American forces installed in Europe and proposed a collective security treaty for the entirety of the continent, while pursuing its project for a European Confederation. From Right to Left, our governments have preferred to cultivate the myth of the “Franco-German friendship”, leave the US to pursue its agenda after the upheaval of 2003, and then return to the integrated command of NATO.

    They offer us not peace but submission to war-making forces that they have given up trying to control.

    *****

    • Translated by Evan Jones (a francophile and retired political economist at University of Sydney) and is published here with permission from author.

    The post A Peculiar European “Peace” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Who is Jean-Luc Mélenchon and can his party La France Insoumise harness the anger of working people to bring about a radical change of government in next month’s elections? John Mullen shares his analysis.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • RNZ Pacific

    Two parties of New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) movement have restated their intention to attain the territory’s decolonisation from France after last December’s referendum – mostly boycotted by the indigenous Kanak population — in which a majority of voters opted to stay with France.

    The two parties, Palika and the Caledonian Union, held their first key meetings since the plebiscite over the weekend after the covid-19 outbreak forced the cancellation of their planned gatherings in January.

    They restated that they did not recognise the referendum result, which showed 96.5 percent voted against independence.

    Pro-independence parties boycotted the vote after France refused to defer the third and final referendum under the Noumea Accord, rejecting concerns about the impact of the pandemic on the indigenous Kanak population.

    Consequently, turnout plummeted to below 44 percent, in contrast to the second referendum in 2020 when turnout was more than 85 percent.

    The Kanak said already before the last vote that the result would be invalid because it excluded the voice of the colonised people.

    Rejecting the outcome of the plebiscite, the pro-independence parties mounted a court challenge in France, and plan to campaign internationally for its annulment.

    New independence referendum by 2024
    At the weekend Palika Congress, spokesperson Charles Washetine suggested holding another independence referendum by 2024 to complete the decolonisation process — this time with the participation of the Kanak people.

    Washetine added that it should be run by the United Nations.

    In December, the pro-independence side also said it would not enter any negotiations with Paris until after the French presidential election in April.

    Political parties have been asked to submit suggestions of what the new statute of a New Caledonia with France should look like.

    The plan is to include civil society in its preparation and have a document ready by June next year for New Caledonians to vote on.

    The pro-independence side has so far rejected any co-operation in any such project, insisting that its talks with Paris will only be about ways of winning independence.

    The vote in December ended the 1998 Noumea Accord, but its provisions leave the current institutions in place until a post-accord arrangement has been adopted.

    Head of the Caledonian Union Daniel Goa
    Caledonian Union leader Daniel Goa … changing the roll would be a “serious political mistake”. Image: RNZ/AFP

    Restrictions in the electoral roll to indigenous people and long-term residents remain, but the anti-independence side would like the voter eligibility widened to include the about 40,000 French citizens currently excluded from referendums and provincial elections.

    The Caledonian Union leader, Daniel Goa, told the weekend party meeting that changing the roll would be a serious political mistake.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Tony Smith of Stuff

    The tiny Pacific territory of Wallis and Futuna can, per capita, surely lay claim to be test rugby’s hottest talent nursery.

    Three players who trace their heritage to Wallis and Futuna — a French “overseas collectivity” located north-west of Fiji and west of Samoa — are in France’s Six Nations squad.

    Hooker Peato Mauvaka — a two-try hero in France’s 40-25 win over the All Blacks last November and lock Romain Taofifénua have been joined in Fabien Galthie’s squad by young centre Yoram Moefana, Taofifénua’s second cousin.

    Both Mauvaka and Moefana played in France’s hard-won 13-9 victory over Wales in Cardiff last night – a victory that keeps alive their hopes of a first grand slam and Six Nations title in a decade.

    Lock Taofifénua would probably also have played if he had not contracted covid-19.

    When Mauvaka and Taofifénua came off the bench to join Moefana in the recent win over Ireland, Wallis and Futuna effectively supplied 20 per cent of the France XV. This was repeated in the victory over Scotland.

    Wallisians and Futunans have the right to live anywhere in France, so automatically qualify for French national sporting teams.

    Born in New Caledonia
    The list of French rugby internationals includes some players born in France to parents from Wallis and Futuna, or born and raised in New Caledonia where around 30,000 Wallisians and Futunans live.

    Outside back Yann David, who still plays for Top 14 club Bayonne, had four tests in 2008. He was born in Lyon in mainland France, but his mother, Monika Fiafialoto, a former French javelin champion, is Wallisian.

    Towering Noumea-born lock Sébastien Vahaamahina had 46 test caps between 2012 and 2019. Vahaamahina, who scored his first try in the 2019 Rugby World Cup quarterfinal, retired from test rugby after getting sent off for elbowing a Welsh rival in the head in that 2019 defeat.

    Still only 30, he continues to play in the Top 14 for Clermont.

    Vahaamahina was often joined in France’s second row engine room by Romain Taofifénua, whose father, Willy was one of the first players from Wallis and Futuna to make a mark on the French club scene.

    Romain — born in Mont-de-Marsan in France and raised in Limoges — made his test debut in 2012. The 31-year-old has since garnered 32 caps.

    Brother Sébastien, 30, propped France’s scrum in two tests in 2017. The Taofifénua twosome, and their cousin Vahaamahina played together in a 23-23 draw with Japan that year.

    Rugby World Cup squad
    Vahaamahina and Mauvaka were joined in France’s 2019 Rugby World Cup squad by another player with Wallis and Futuna heritage, Toulon hooker Christopher Tolofua, another cousin of the Taofifénuas, who has seven caps since his debut at 18 in 2012.

    Tolofua’s younger brother, Selevasio, a No 8, has won European Champions Cup and French Top 14 honours with Toulouse, alongside Mauvaka and ex-All Blacks great Jerome Kaino. He won his first and so far only test cap at No 8 in the 2020 Autumn Nations Cup final defeat to England at Twickenham, playing with Mauvaka and Yoram Moefana.

    So fielding players with Wallis and Futuna lineage is nothing new for Les Bleus, but Moefana’s emergence has served to heighten the link.

    The 21-year-old — who has played little more than 30 Top 14 games for Bordeaux-Bègles – has beaten the more experienced Fiji-born Virimi Vakatawa for the berth in midfield alongside the talented Gaël Fickou. In the last two games, against Scotland and Wales, he ha played on the wing.

    Moefana was reportedly born on Futuna but moved to France at 13 to live in Limoges with a professional rugby career as his goal. He lived in France’s porcelain industry capital with his uncle, Tapu Falatea, 33, now a prop for Agen in France’s second tier.

    Young Moefana was soon recruited by the Colomiers academy and made his Pro D2 debut with the club in 2018.

    After just six games, he was signed in 2019 by Bordeaux-Bègles, where he plays alongside test teammates Cameron Woki, Matthieu Jalibert and Maxime Lucu and Tonga’s former Chiefs prop Ben Tamiefuna.

    Represented France Under-20s
    Moefana represented France at under-20 level before becoming the nation’s first test player born in the 21st century when he made his debut, aged 20, against Italy in November 2020.

    Judging by his assured display against Ireland’s highly-rated midfielders Bundee Aki and Garry Ringrose, Moefana could be in for a long stay in the blue jersey.

    Galthie told French media before the start of the Six Nations that Moefana had been on his radar since February 2020 while “he was with the U20s, and he worked with us at senior training camps.

    “We’ve seen him progress with Bordeaux and when we had to enlarge the group for the [2020] Autumn Nations Cup, we didn’t hesitate to start him because he was already impressive in training. His potential was obvious then, and he performed well in the final against England.”

    Moefana was supposed to tour Australia in 2021, but got injured and spent a long spell on the sidelines.

    Galthie had no hesitation hurling the youngster into the Six Nations, saying: “Technically, physically and psychologically, without forgetting his talent, he is ready to meet all the requirements of this game.”

    Bordeaux-Bègles coach Christophe Urios has praised Moefana as “an easy player to manage” and “always reliable”, saying the young Christian is “as reserved, even shy, in life as he is aggressive on the field”.

    ‘Not an ambassador yet’
    A modest Moefana told French media that while it was “always nice to find guys who come from New Caledonia, Wallis or Futuna in the French team” he did not see himself as “an ambassador yet”.

    “I think more of Romain [Taofifénua] because he’s been there for a long time. For young people, I think of Peato [Mauvaka] with his club and selection experience. I find out.”

    Moefana’s father, Taofifenua Falatea, had earlier ventured to France to play for Niort, but injury stalled his career. Today, he is president of the Union Rugby Club de Dumbéa (URCD) club in Dumbéa, near Noumea, which is formally linked to the Toulouse club.

    Mauvaka, is the URCD club’s most famous product, playing in Toulouse’s winning titles-winning team last season before his brace against the All Blacks.

    “I’m not going to hide it from you, we tend to support the All Blacks and his dad has always been a fan of the All Blacks,” Falatea told France’s La Croix newspaper last December. “Playing the All Blacks is already something for him, but scoring tries for [France] and being man of the match is great. Frankly, I think he made history.”

    Mauvaka — first spotted by Toulouse as a 14-year-old centre — made his test debut in 2019 and now has 12 caps. He has carved a niche as an impact player off the bench, replacing clubmate Julien Marchand at hooker.

    Moefana, Mauvaka and Taofifénua — all in line now to play for France against England in the championship decider Paris next weekend — may not be the last proud Wallisians and Futunans to line up at Stade de France to the strains of La Marseillaise.

    Donovan Taofifénua, Romain’s 22-year-old cousin and an Under-20 World Cup winner with France, plays in Paris for Racing 92 and has already been called up to France senior squads.

    According to the La Croix article, people of Wallis and Futuna heritage comprise 10 percent of New Caledonia’s population, but represent 80 percent of the Union Rugby Club de Dumbéa membership.

    The production line should roll on.

    A traditional kava ceremony in Wallis and Futuna.
    A traditional kava ceremony in Wallis and Futuna. Image: Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes

    Wallis and Futuna at a glance

    • Wallis and Futuna is a French overseas collectivity known, officially, as the Territory of the Islands of Wallis and Futuna, or Territoire des îles Wallis-et-Futuna.
    • Located in the Pacific Ocean, 280km north-west of Fiji and 370km east of Samoa.
    • Has three main islands (Wallis, Futuna and Alofi) and 20 small islets.
    • The resident population is around 12,000, with another 30,000 people of Wallis and Futuna descent living in New Caledonia.
    • Its people are Polynesian, but, as French citizens, have an automatic right to live anywhere in France.

    Tony Smith is a journalist for Stuff. Sources for this article include La Croix, Rugby World, Sud-Ouest newspaper, Wikipedia and New Zealand and Australian government websites. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Let us begin a conversation in response to what currently qualifies as the most profound question, the one that needs most urgently to be addressed if we are to have any chance of understanding what we conveniently refer to as the “Ukraine crisis.” This is, more accurately, a planetary crisis—close in magnitude to the near-certainty of species extinction within the next century, but in some ways ahead of secondary catastrophes such as the obscene, raging inequality between peoples and nations unleashed by President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, and the global conglomerations of immense corporate and plutocratic power.

    Why is it, then, that the three most important power alliances of the Western and Eurasian worlds—North America, led by the United States alongside its “Trudeauesque” poodle and with the problematic connivance of Mexico’s López Obrador; the European Union and post-Brexit UK; and the Russian Federation, in wobbly alliance with China—consider it worthwhile to suffer intensification of the risks of nuclear annihilation? This, in the face of an abundance of routes available for peaceful settlement, given a minimum of goodwill and genuine humanitarian concern?

    In the case of Russia, we know very well what these reasons are because Russia has told us—clearly, consistently, loudly, and transparently—for more than 15 years. First and foremost, Russia resents the West’s violation of its unmistakable and supremely important pledge to President Gorbachev in 1990 that the power of NATO would not move one further inch eastward. Secretary of State James Baker gave this commitment at least three times on February 9 that year. This was in return for Russian acquiescence to the tragic error of German reunification, paving the way for an accelerating renaissance of an aggressively militarized and potentially neo-Nazi European hegemon.

    President George H. W. Bush (left) with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (right) in 1989. (Credit: theguardian.com)

    Yet in place of the 16 members of NATO that existed in 1990, we today have 30, and Ukraine is more and more desperately knocking on the door, conceivably to be followed by Georgia, Finland and Sweden. Current U.S. President Joe Biden, whose son enjoyed a senior place on the board of Ukraine energy giant Burisma, played a key role in that process of enlargement. The U.S. and Russia possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, around 4,000 each.

    But the United States has deployed its weapons far closer to Russia than Russia has deployed weapons close to the U.S. (each power also has fleets of nuclear submarines: in 2018 the U.S. had 14, against Russia’s 12). The United States has positioned nuclear defense/offense capabilities close to Russian borders in countries such as Poland and Romania. There are between 160 and 240 U.S. atomic bombs in NATO countries, of which 50 to 90 are stored in Turkey, a NATO member. Britain (225) and France (300) have their own sizeable nuclear arsenals.

    (Source: atlanticcouncil.org)

    Although it is commonly presumed that a nuclear exchange would quickly move from incremental (if there is any moderation at all) to massive, assessments as to how a nuclear war would actually pan out are extremely complicated for both technological and geopolitical reasons. It is not beyond comprehension that a conflict might be confined to so-called low-yield nuclear bombs or mini-nukes. Nor is it at all certain that nuclear weapons will all work as they are supposed to (in fact, it is reasonable to presume they will not). Many uncertainties attend the newest generation of hypersonic missiles. And the functionality of so-called missile defense systems is perhaps most of all in question.

    In addition, there is the issue of the weaponization of nuclear reactors, which is to say their conversion into weapons by missile or other form of strike, whether intentional or otherwise. There are 15 reactors in Ukraine, and another 123 in Europe. The U.S. has 93, Russia 38. Not least is the danger of nuclear accident, which almost certainly increases in the context of accelerating tensions between countries at least one of which possesses nuclear weapons or countries that can strike the nuclear facilities or reactors of other countries. There have been at least a dozen or so near misses since the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

    Although their deliberate use by the United States that year is the only time that nuclear weapons have actually been fired in conflict, there have been many instances in which the use of nuclear weapons has been seriously considered. Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone, in their book The Untold History of the United States, relate several instances in which U.S. presidents have given serious consideration to their use. This featured in Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, formulated within weeks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It contemplated a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia.

    The Pentagon developed at least nine such first-strike nuclear war plans before the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Fortunately, the U.S. did not have sufficient weaponry for the purpose at that time.

    (Source: express.co.uk)

    In the United States and its allies, Russia confronts an adversary which is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons on another, although this made little concrete difference to the outcome of the Second World War. This is also an adversary which has many times since considered using nuclear weapons again, which tolerates the acquisition of nuclear weapons by its closest allies (e.g., Britain, France, Israel) and bitterly opposes even the faintest possibility of their acquisition by its opponents (e.g., North Korea and Iran).

    It is an adversary which fails to keep even its most important promises (e.g., about not allowing NATO to expand), a country which abrogates important treaties (as did Bush in abrogating the ABM treaty in 2002), and which has crowned itself as the rightful hegemon, entitled to crush any power, global or regional, that would dare challenge its hegemonic status (as in the “Wolfowitz doctrine” 1992, progenitor of the Bush doctrine in 2002 by which the U.S. entitles itself to preemptive war).

    Paul Wolfowitz (Source: geopoliticsca.ru)

    The U.S.’s credibility in international relations is profoundly undermined by: a long history of invasions and occupations of other powers—most egregiously, perhaps, in the case of Afghanistan 2001-2021, or that of Iraq (2003-2021), which can be counted along with many dozens of other instances since World War Two; overt and covert military interventions, with or without the consent of legitimate authorities, often reckless and cruel; fomenting of regime-change “color revolutions” as in Ukraine 2004 and 2014; and universal meddling with elections and political processes as in the activities of organizations such as Cambridge Analytica, and its parent Strategic Communications Limited, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

    Not least is its equally long-established history of lying, just about everything, but particularly in matters of war. The Pentagon Papers, exposed by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 with respect to the Vietnam War, or the so-called Afghanistan Papers, gathered into book form by Craig Whitlock in 2021, should be sufficient cause for considerable alarm in this respect.

    There is a context here of a profound U.S.-led, multi-media and multi-targeted anti-Russia propaganda campaign that dates to the accession to the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin in 1999-2000. It builds on previous relentless Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union (which had us all thinking this titanic struggle was all about capitalism versus communism when it was really just about who could steal the most from the developing world), and on an even more distant anti-Russian campaign stretching back at least as far as the Crimean War of 1853-56—all chronicled by Gerald Sussmann, among others, in 2020.

    (Source: Russia-now.com)

    To this must now be added recent unfounded or presumptive anti-Russian harassment regarding an incessant and unlikely litany of all manner of accusations. These include the shooting down of MH17 in 2014; the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018; purported collusion with Syrian President Assad over the use of chemical weapons; and, the most dramatic fable of all, alleged Russian hacking of DNC/DCCC servers and interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

    Russia has had every reason for deep distrust of the United States and its NATO and European allies. In addition, as I have chronicled elsewhere, we must take account of US/EU/NATO abetment to the illegal Euromaidan coup d’état of 2014 that was staged against a democratically elected president in 2014, just months away from scheduled elections, and whose muscle was provided by long-established Ukrainian neo-Nazi movements implicated in the assassinations of hundreds of protestors in Kiev and Odessa. To secure “legitimacy” and to stuff the coup legislature with their own people, the new leaders were obliged to ban the country’s major political parties, including the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party.

    Scene from the 2014 Euromaidan coup. (Source: inquiriesjournal.com)

    Terrified by the anti-Russian threats of the coup leaders, the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea (including Sebastopol, Russia’s major Black Sea port, held on long-lease from Ukraine and where Russia was entitled to maintain thousands of soldiers) voted to secede from Ukraine and to seek annexation by Russia.

    In the significantly pro-Russian Donbass, citizens established the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kiev has never deigned to negotiate directly with the republics, with its own citizens, but has instead, having lost the initial war, violently subjected residents to extensive shelling (with most of the casualties taking place in the republics) and spitefully withdrawn all social security protections.

    Workers bury the dead in Slovyansk in Eastern Ukraine where mass graves were found (Source: hrw.org)

    The republics did not seek annexation by Russia, nor did Russia entertain annexation. Instead, Russia negotiated the Minsk agreements through the “Normandy Round” in 2015-2016. This sought and agreed to greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. Unwilling or unable to combat its neo-Nazi extremists, Kiev proved unable to implement Minsk, nor did the international community, other than Russia, exert pressure on Kiev to make it happen.

    It would have taken unusual credulity and naivety on the part of Russian leaders not to have concluded by 2022 that the U.S. and, with some exceptions, its NATO and EU allies, were resolutely and unforgivingly hostile to Russia.

    Russia, having explored the possibility of accession to NATO in the 1990s and been rejected, resigned to the provocative continuation of NATO not just beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union—the very reason for NATO’s existence—but even beyond the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It has been targeted close to its borders by U.S./NATO nuclear weapons that are mockingly and ludicrously described as defenses against Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear missiles, and routinely humiliated and threatened by massive annual NATO military exercises along its borders and the Black Sea.

    Members of the U.S. Marine Corps perform military exercise in (now Russian-occupied) Kherson on July 28, 2021 (Source: reuters.com)

    Further, it has to listen to Ukrainian President and former clown Volodymyr Zelensky plead for speedier access of Ukraine to NATO membership (extending just days ago to a demand for the placement of nuclear weapons in Ukraine) and for a no-fly zone.

    As such it could have had no reasonable hope ever to be freed of the scourge of U.S./EU/NATO salivation for the break-up of the Russian Federation and unregulated freedom for Western capital, as prelude to the Western world’s ultimate confrontation with China.

    Whether Russian military exercises on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine from the end of 2021 were intended from the beginning as a platform for invasion is not clear. The invasion may have been provoked by the intensification of Ukrainian army assaults against the Donbass.

    Incessant, even hysterical, U.S. warnings of a Russian invasion may themselves have provoked exactly that outcome if it seemed to Russia that the United States was determined to stage any kind of provocation that would have made it impossible for Russia to resist.

    Presuming, surely correctly, that the U.S./NATO has long expected and salivated for a conflict that would provide sufficient pretext for the extermination of the Russian Federation, Russia decided on a measure of preemptive advantage at a singular moment when Russia possibly enjoys nuclear superiority over the West because of its further advance (at budgets a small fraction of those enjoyed by its adversary, whose military procurement practices are rife with corruption) of hypersonic missiles and a developing alliance with China.

    Putin has indicated willingness to keep moving until Russia conquers the entire territory of Ukraine. The more he can acquire, the more he can negotiate with. At the time of writing the areas under control resemble the buffer zone created by Turkey along its border with northwestern Syria and by the U.S. along Syria’s northeastern border. This seizure of the land of a sovereign nation to add to Turkish security from what it regards as the Kurdish threat, and which it is using to hold the most extremist jihadist groups that the West and others have exploited in their efforts to destabilize the Syrian government, did not occasion the squeals of indignation from Western media that we now hear from them with regard to Ukraine.

    Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine as of March 1, 2022 (Source: bbc.com)

    Nor did the U.S. grab for Syria’s oil fields, and for its most fertile agricultural land, under proxy Kurdish control. And when the refugees from the U.S. wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Libya reached the gates of Europe they were inhumanely humiliated and turned away (even allowing for a surprising measure of German generosity). Unlike whiter refugees from Ukraine into Poland and other neighbors. The oozing hypocrisy of Western self-righteousness is merely par for the course.

    These considerations therefore help us to understand Russian preparedness to risk nuclear conflict. Indeed, it is possible that for Russia there is now no going back on the path to potential Armageddon. The decision to avert catastrophe has been thrown resolutely into the Western court. But what about the U.S. and its European allies? They are not in too great a hurry for the ultimate wet dream of Russian dissolution, although sooner would likely be more gratifying than later. For the moment, the conflict is well worth it, for as long as it is only Ukrainians who pay the ultimate price. Zelensky’s greatest folly has been to recklessly offer his country and its people as ground zero for World War Three.

    Volodymyr Zelensky (Source: marca.com)

    Short-term benefits for the West include a potential fillip to Joe Biden’s otherwise steep decline in domestic popularity. War has been the eternal answer to internal instability. It is too soon to say that the Ukraine crisis will help bridge the gulf between Democrats and Republicans, but there is a chance of some measure of healing, perhaps just enough to weaken the hold of the pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party.

    This in turn could be deeply reassuring to the military-industrial complex (or, as Ray McGovern calls it, the MICIMATT—the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academic-think tank complex) whose distrust for Trump’s wavering on Putin provided fertile ground for the success of the Clinton campaign’s fabrication of the Russiagate saga.

    Although Biden followed up on a shockingly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—alongside signs of a final exit from Iraq and from Syria—with a multi-billion dollar increase in the military budget, he has since advocated a further increase of 8% in 2022-2023.

    Since this is close to the rate of inflation, the weapons lobby will doubtless require another 4% or so, if they are being modest (unlikely), and a sharp increase in European tension will not only boost their cause for a further budget increase but will greatly incentivize the demand for weapons for years to come.

    The bloated U.S. 17-agency Intelligence community and its underworld of private contractors will be delighted that, for the first time in a generation, their intelligence (on the Russian invasion, at least) has been perceived by many to be correct, and that, for the first time in a generation, it is not a U.S. war of choice that must be lied about. Such a glorious moment of self-righteousness will go far in the propaganda business. So long as Intelligence can manipulate and coopt corporate, plutocratic, mainstream media, the extent and depth of previous U.S. evils need never prove an obstacle to beating the drums for perpetual war. The mainstream media can be relied upon to foreshorten the narrative, pull in the context, focus on only one side, demonize and personalize. Intelligence will always help with fabrication of what counts as “real.”

    The Ukraine crisis upends the energy markets in a way that puts even broader smiles on the faces of fossil-fuel bosses. The forced closure of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to the rest of Europe will create an involuntary European appetite for (more expensive) U.S. LNG exports.

    (Source: nationalworld.com)

    The brunt of energy price increases will be suffered more by Europe than by the United States. Combined with growing European dependence on the U.S., the impoverishment of Europe is to the U.S.’s advantage, under the scope of the Wolfowitz doctrine, and sustains the buffer between Russia and the continental U.S. Pressure on the U.S. to return to a policy of self-sufficiency in energy will reinvigorate public tolerance for fracking and drilling, for pipelines and spills and fires (if the world is going to end in any case.).

    On the downside, from a U.S. perspective, higher energy prices will boost the Russian economy and sustain its servicing of Chinese and other Asian markets, provided they can work around U.S. sanctions (they will).

    Ukraine is a test of Chinese resolve in its move toward Russia, reminding it of the economic threats to Chinese interests from U.S. sanctions in countries of the Belt and Road initiative. But this will not be sufficient to shift China from what must surely be its conclusion that the United States is irredeemably wedded to the vision of a perpetually unipolar U.S. world.

    In Europe, the crisis will help Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson escape decapitation over the embarrassment of the “Partygate” scandal. It has already enhanced President Macron’s bid to appear statesmanlike in the face of upcoming elections in April, and his ability to ward off threats from the extreme right. But mainly, the crisis will benefit Germany which, in recent years, has broken free of its punitive post-war chains not only to burnish its long-established economic primacy but to rebuild and modernize its military, and to send arms to Ukraine. The sleazy proto-fascist governments of several new East European and former Soviet Union governments will feel similarly enabled and justified.

    But all these short-term outcomes notwithstanding, nobody should discount the possibility, short of a robust peace agreement, of nuclear war. If not a nuclear war, then prepare for a protracted global recession, if not depression.

    The sorrowful-but-gritty public faces of Europe’s equivalent to MICIMATT—Europe’s financial, plutocratic, military and intelligence elites—are President of the European Union Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Along with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron, it will be their faces we need to first scrutinize for a heads-up as to whether, finally, there is to be a public climb-down in the face of Russia’s nuclear checkmate. For that, indeed, is what it appears to be.

    • First published in CovertAction Magazine

    The post The Crisis in Ukraine is a Planetary Crisis Provoked by the U.S. that Threatens Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Demonstrators gathered in cities across Europe, the US and South America to demand an end to Russia’s invasion

    Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in cities including Santiago, Vancouver Paris and New York in support of Ukraine, demanding an end to Russia’s invasion.

    The protesters rallied on Saturday against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack, which began on 24 February and appeared to be entering a new phase with escalating bombardment.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Finally, France will be leaving Mali, nearly a decade after the original military intervention in 2013. The repercussions of this decision will hardly be confined to this West African nation, but will likely spread to the entirety of the Sahel Region; in fact, the whole of Africa.

    France’s decision to end its military presence in Mali – carried out in two major military operations, Operation Serval and Operation Barkhane – was communicated by French President, Emmanuel Macron. “Victory against terror is not possible if it’s not supported by the state itself,” Macron said on February 16.

    The French President called the Malian leadership “out of control” and rationalized his decision as a necessary move, since “European, French and international forces are seeing measures that are restricting them.”

    “Given the situation, given the rupture in the political and military frameworks, we cannot continue like this,” Macron added.

    Macron is not fooling anyone. The French military intervention in Mali was justified at the time as part of France’s efforts to defeat ‘Jihadists’ and ‘terrorists’, who had taken over much of the country’s northern region. Indeed, northern militants, protesting what they have described as government negligence and marginalization, had then seized major cities, including Kidal and Timbuktu. But the story, as is often the case with France’s former African colonies, was more complex.

    In a recent article, the New York Times said that France’s “diplomatic power” is predicated on three pillars: “its influence in its former African colonies, along with its nuclear arms and its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.”

    Mali is one of these ‘former French colonies’, largely located in what used to be called ‘French West Africa.’ Once a great kingdom, known as the Mandinka Empire, Mali was colonized by France in 1892. It was then renamed French Sudan. Though it gained its independence in 1958, Mali remained a French vassal state.

    To appreciate French influence over Mali and other West African states long after their independence, consider that fourteen African countries, including Niger and Senegal, continue to use the West African CFA franc, a French monetary invention in 1945, which ensured the struggling African economies continued to be tied to the French currency. This has allowed Paris to wield tremendous influence over various African economies, whose resources were provided to their former colonizers at competitive prices.

    Unsurprisingly, France took the leadership in ‘liberating’ Mali in 2013. Hence, France was able to reconfigure the region’s militaries and politics to remain under the direct control of France, which presented itself as West Africa’s savior in the face of terrorism. Chad, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Togo, all participated in the French-led operation, which also involved the United Nations and several Western powers.

    The arrival of French soldiers to the Sahel region was meant to underscore the importance, if not indispensability, of France to Africa’s security, especially at a time that Africa was, once again, a contested space that attracted the continent’s old colonial powers and new political players, as well: Russia, China, Germany, Turkey, among others.

    However, for the people of Mali, the intervention merely prolonged their misery. “Operation Serval”, meant to last a few weeks, carried on for years, amid political strife in Bamako, worsening security throughout the country, rising corruption and deepening poverty. Though initially welcomed, at least publicly by some in the south of the country, the French military quickly became a burden, associated with Mali’s corrupt politicians, who happily leased the country’s resources in exchange for French support.

    The honeymoon is now over. On January 31, the Malian government ordered the French Ambassador to leave the country.

    Though Macron pledged that his military withdrawal will be phased out based on France’s own outline, the Malian leadership, on February 17, demanded  an immediate and unconditional French withdrawal. Paris continues to insist that its Mali decision is not a defeat, and that it cannot be compared to the US chaotic retreat from Afghanistan last August, all indications point that France is, indeed, being expunged from one of its most prized ‘spheres of influence’. Considering that a similar scenario is currently underway in the Central African Republic (C.A.R.), France’s geopolitical concessions in Africa can aptly be described as unprecedented.

    While Western countries, along with a few African governments, are warning that the security vacuum created by the French withdrawal will be exploited by Mali’s militants, Bamako claims such concerns are unfounded, arguing that the French military presence has exasperated – as opposed to improving – the country’s insecurity.

    The particular parallel between Mali and C.A.R. becomes even more interesting when we consider media and official reports suggesting that the two African nations are substituting French with Russian soldiers, further accentuating the rapid geopolitical shift in the continent.

    Though Macron continues to argue that the shift is induced mostly by his country’s own strategic priorities, neither evidence on the ground, nor France’s own media seem to believe such claims. “It is an inglorious end to an armed intervention that began in euphoria and which ends, nine years later, against a backdrop of crisis,” wrote Le Monde on February 17.

    The truth is that an earth-shattering development is under way in Mali and the whole of West Africa, ushering in, as argued in the NY Times, the “closing chapters of ‘la Françafrique’,” the centuries-long French dominance over its ‘sphere of influence’ in the resource-rich Africa.

    Though ‘la Françafrique’ is possibly coming to an end, the geopolitical tussle in Africa is merely heating up. While some powers will benefit and others will lose, the West African populations are unlikely to reap many benefits from the ‘scramble’ over the region’s resources. Caught between corrupt elites and greedy global powers, African nations will not be enjoying real security or economic prosperity any time soon.

    The post As ‘La Françafrique’ Comes to an End, Russia is Ready To Replace France in West Africa  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The 49th session of the UN Human Rights Council, from 28 February – 1 April 2022, will consider issues including the protection of human rights defenders, freedom of religion or belief, protection and promotion of human rights while countering terrorism, the right to food and adequate housing, among others. It will also present an opportunity to address grave human rights situations in States including Nicaragua, Venezuela, China, Syria, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, among many others. Here’s an overview of some of the key issues on the agenda. The ISHR has issued again its excellent Guide to the upcoming session and I have extracted from it the issues most directly related to human rights defenders:

    Protection of human rights defenders

    On 11 March 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur will present her report on the work of human rights defenders to address corruption. At the 49th session of the HRC, Norway will present a thematic resolution on human rights defenders in conflict and post-conflict situations. A group of NGOs have produced a list of 25 recommendations related to key concerns that should be addressed in the resolution. These include recommendations related to the removal of legislation that impinges upon the ability of defenders to do their work, including counter-terrorism legislation; the development of protection measures that take into account the specific needs of particular groups of defenders and the precarious nature of their situation in conflict and post-conflict contexts, and specific measures to support human rights defenders in such contexts, including in regard to the provision of cloud-based solutions for storage of documentation, flexible and reliable funding and swift responses in the case of the need for relocation of human rights defenders and their families. ISHR joins these calls and to impress upon the Council the need for a strong commitment to acknowledging and taking action to protect human rights defenders working in such contexts.  In addition, we call on all UN members to monitor and report on their implementation of the resolution in a comprehensive way, sharing updates on challenges faced and progress made during relevant UN dialogues and debates.   

    Reprisals

    Reports of cases of intimidation and reprisal against those cooperating or seeking to cooperate with the UN not only continue, but grow. Intimidation and reprisals violate the rights of the individuals concerned, they constitute violations of international human rights law and undermine the UN human rights system.

    The UN has taken some action towards addressing this critical issue including:

    • an annual report by the Secretary General;
    • a dedicated dialogue under item 5 to take place every September;
    • The appointment of the UN Assistant Secretary General on Human Rights as the Senior Official on addressing reprisals.

    Despite this, ISHR remains deeply concerned about reprisals against civil society actors who try to engage with UN mechanisms, and consistent in its calls for all States and the Council to do more to address the situation. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/reprisals/

    During the 48th session, the Council adopted a resolution on reprisals. The text was adopted by consensus for the first time since 2009 and invites the UN Secretary General to submit his annual report on reprisals and intimidation to the UN General Assembly. Once again the resolution listed key trends including that acts of intimidation and reprisals can signal patterns, increasing self-censorship, and the use of national security arguments and counter-terrorism strategies by States as justification for blocking access to the UN. The resolution also acknowledged the specific risks to individuals in vulnerable situations or belonging to marginalised groups, and called on the UN to implement gender-responsive policies to end reprisals. The Council called on States to combat impunity by conducting prompt, impartial and independent investigations and ensuring accountability for all acts of intimidation or reprisal, both online and offline, by condemning all such acts publicly, providing access to effective remedies for victims, and preventing any recurrence.

    Item 5 of the Human Rights Council’s agenda provides a key opportunity for States to raise concerns about specific cases of reprisals, and for governments involved in existing cases to provide an update to the Council on any investigation or action taken toward accountability to be carried out. The President should also update the Council on actions taken by the President and Bureau to follow up on cases and promote accountability under this item.

    Other thematic debates

    At this 49th session, the Council will discuss a range of topics in depth through dedicated debates with mandate holders. The debates with mandate holders include: 

    • The Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights 
    • The Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief
    • The Special Rapporteur on torture
    • The Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy

    In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on the rights of specific groups including the Special Rapporteur on minority issues

    In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on interrelation of human rights and human rights thematic issues including:

    • The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism
    • The Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment

    Country-specific developments

    China: High Commissioner Bachelet has still not released her Office’s report on grave human rights violations in the Uyghur region, six months after announcing its upcoming publication, and three months since her spokesperson indicated it would only be a matter of ‘weeks’. Further delays risk entrenching the Chinese government’s sense of impunity, and will harm the credibility of, and confidence in her Office’s capacity to address grave violations, some of which could amount to atrocity crimes. States should urge the High Commissioner to promptly publish her report, and present it to the Human Rights Council as a matter of utmost priority.  This includes ensuring sustained pressure around China’s abuse of national security in discourse and law, and on the widespread and systematic use of enforced disappearance under ‘Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location’ (RSDL). See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/02/05/chinas-residential-surveillance-at-a-designated-location-needs-to-disappear/

    Burundi: The Commission of Inquiry on Burundi (CoI) concluded its work at the 48th HRC session in October 2021 while a new resolution establishing a mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on Burundi was adopted, resolution 48/16. The resolution tasks the mandate with monitoring the human rights situation in the country, making recommendations for its imp­ro­ve­ment, and re­por­ting to the Human Rights Council. While the Spe­cial Rapporteur will be unable to continue the entirety of the investigative work carried out by the CoI, they will “collect, examine and assess” information on human rights deve­lop­ments. Ahead of HRC48 more than 40 organisations, including ISHR, urged the Council to continue its scrutiny and further work towards justice and accountability in Burundi. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/07/03/germain-rukuki-burundi-human-rights-defender-out-of-jail/

    The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) will ensure that evidence col­lec­ted by the CoI is “consolidated, preserved, accessible and usable in support of ongoing and future accountability efforts” including efforts to hold Bu­rundian officials responsible for atrocities in front of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Burundian government should resume its engagement with the Council and grant the Special Rap­porteur, who will be appointed in March 2022, access to the country for an official visit.

    France: Following an urgent call by ISHR and the Comité Adama, UN experts sent two communications to the French government on 15 and 26 November 2021 asking for measures to ensure that human rights defenders, including people of African descent, enjoy a safe environment in which to carry out their legitimate work for human rights and justice. The lack of investigation in the case of Adama Traoré’s death and the judicial harassment against his sister Assa Traoré for her activism is a sign of broader systemic racism against Black people in policing and criminal justice in France. 

    ISHR urges the HRC to continue its scrutiny and calls on France to ensure a prompt, transparent, and impartial investigation into the case of Adama Traoré; end the judicial harassment of Assa Traoré for her activism; accept the requests of the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism and the Working Group on People of African Descent to visit the country; end impunity for police violence; and ensure truly free and impartial investigations into the death or injury of anyone at the hands of the police, especially people of African descent.

    Egypt: The joint statement delivered by States in March 2021 at the 46th session of the HRC played a critical role in securing the conditional release of several human rights defenders and journalists arbitrarily detained throughout 2021 and 2022. Regrettably, these releases do not reflect any significant change in Egypt’s systematic attacks on civic space and human rights defenders, including arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and criminalisation of the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly or public participation. On 3 February 2022, 175 parliamentarians from across Europe urged the HRC to establish a “long overdue monitoring and reporting mechanism on Egypt”. ISHR joined more than 100 NGOs from around the world in urging the HRC to create a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the ever-deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt. Continued, sustained and coordinated action on Egypt at the HRC is more necessary than ever. The HRC should follow up on the 2021 State joint statement and heed the calls of civil society and parliamentarians. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/01/11/the-arabic-network-for-human-rights-information-has-shut-down/

    Nicaragua: A year after Council resolution 46/2, civil society reporting indicates no meaningful action has been taken by Nicaragua to implement any of the Council’s recommendations to the government. Instead, it has deepened its crackdown on human rights defenders and any form of dissent, and further closed civil society space ahead of the November 2021 electoral process. The government’s absolute disregard for cooperation with international and regional mechanisms, including the treaty bodies, is an additional sign that the government does not intend to revert course on the country’s human rights crisis. ISHR, jointly with the Colectivo 18/2, urges the Human Rights Council to establish an independent mechanism to investigate grave human rights violations since April 2018 in Nicaragua, as well as their root causes. The mechanism should verify alleged grave violations, identify perpetrators, and preserve evidence, with a view to long-term accountability processesSee also my post of today: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/02/21/nicaragua-death-in-detention-and-sham-trial/

    Saudi Arabia: According to ALQST’s 2021 annual report, for a short time in early 2021, intense global pressure on Saudi Arabia’s leaders to improve their dismal human rights record resulted in some minor reforms and concessions, yet, when the pressure eased, the Saudi authorities resumed their habitual pattern of abuses with renewed intensity. A number of high-profile women human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience were conditionally released, but they remain under severe restrictions which means that while they are released, they are not yet free. Saudi authorities continue to crackdown on freedom of expression and hand down lengthy prison sentences to human rights defenders. Saudi Arabia is sensitive regarding its reputation and susceptible to international pressure.

    Sudan: On 5 November 2021, the Human Rights Council held a special session to address the ongoing situation in the Republic of Sudan and mandated an Expert on human rights in Sudan to monitor and report on the situation until the restoration of its civilian-led Government. The HRC must extend the reporting mandate of the Expert as the human rights situation is deteriorating. The military is closing the civic space for women’s rights groups and women human rights defenders, including by stigmatising women’s rights groups as terrorists or drug abusers. The recent arrests of women human rights defenders are part of a systemic attack against WHRDs in Sudan. The military and security forces are using social media and traditional media to defame women protesters. Women’s rights groups and WHRDs are facing a new wave of attacks that include framing charges to prolong the detention of WHRDs and defame the women’s rights movement. The military reinstated the authorities of the former regime’s security forces in December 2021 in the emergency order number 3. The new emergency order gave Sudanese security complete impunity and protection from accountability for any form of violations on duty.  Sudanese security forces have a well-documented history of sexual abuse and torture of women detainees. WHRDs in detention are at risk of maltreatment, torture, and sexual violence. 

    Venezuela is back under the microscope with updates from the Office of the High Commissioner and from the Council’s fact-finding mission on the country both scheduled for 17th March. Attention on the human rights situation in the country follows hot on the heels of the Universal Periodic Review of Venezuela that took place at the end of January.  The Council session is taking place at a time that Venezuelan civil society continues facing restrictions and attacks on their work. The head of human rights organisation, Fundaredes, has now been arbitrarily detained for 224 days. The Council session is an opportunity for States to express concern about the restrictions on civil society, and to enquire about the implementation of prior recommendations made to Venezuela by both OHCHR and the Mission. Despite being a Council member, Venezuela has yet to allow the Council’s own fact-finding mission access to the country, something the Council as a whole should denounce. 

    The High Commissioner will provide an oral update to the Council on 7 March. The Council will consider updates, reports on and is expected to consider resolutions addressing a range of country situations, in some instances involving the renewal of the relevant expert mandates. These include:

    • Oral update and interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Eritrea
    • Oral update and interactive dialogue with the High Commissioner on the Tigray region of Ethiopia 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s written update on Sri Lanka
    • Interactive dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on  Nicaragua
    • Interactive dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on Afghanistan
    • Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on ensuring accountability and justice in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem
    • Oral updates and interactive dialogues with the High Commissioner and fact-finding mission on Venezuela 
    • Oral update bv the High Commissioner and interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
    • Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on the OHCHR’s report on Belarus
    • Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report, enhanced interactive dialogue on the Secretary-General’s report, and interactive dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on Myanmar
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on Iran
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Commission of Inquiry’s report on Syria 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
    • Interactive Dialogues on the High Commissioner’s report and Commission on Human Rights’ report on South Sudan
    • Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on Ukraine
    • High-level Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on Central African Republic
    • Oral updates and enhanced interactive dialogue with the High Commissioner and the team of international experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo
    • Oral update by the Special Rapporteur on Cambodia 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the Independent Expert’s report on Mali 
    • Interactive Dialogue on the fact-finding mission’s report on Libya

    Appointment of mandate holders

    The President of the Human Rights Council will propose candidates for the following mandates: 

    1. Three members of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (one from the Pacific, one from Central and South America and the Caribbean, and one from Central and Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation, Central Asia and Transcaucasia); 
    2. The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change; 
    3. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan; 
    4. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burundi; 
    5. The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; 
    6. A member of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, from Western European and other States; 
    7. A member of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, from Asia-Pacific States; 
    8. A member of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, from Asia-Pacific States;
    9. A member of the Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination, from Latin American and Caribbean States (an unforeseen vacancy that has arisen due to a resignation).

    Resolutions to be presented to the Council’s 49th session

    At the organisational meeting on 14 February the following resolutions were announced (States leading the resolution in brackets):

    1. Human rights of persons belonging to minorities (Austria, Mexico, Slovenia)
    2. Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief (Pakistan on behalf of the OIC) 
    3. Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the obligation to ensure accountability and justice (Pakistan on behalf of the OIC) 
    4. Cultural rights (Cuba)
    5. The negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights (Azerbaijan on behalf of NAM)
    6. Right to work (Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania)
    7.  Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran – mandate renewal (Iceland, Moldova, North Macedonia, UK) 
    8. Rights of the child (GRULAC and EU)
    9. Human rights defenders (Norway)
    10. Adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to non-discrimination in this context (Germany, Brazil, Finland, Namibia)
    11. Situation of human rights in the Syrian Arab Republic – mandate renewal (France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Netherlands, Qatar, Turkey, UK, USA)
    12. Situation of human rights in South Sudan – mandate renewal (Albania, Norway, USA, UK)
    13. Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism – mandate renewal (Mexico)
    14. Prevention of genocide (Armenia)
    15. Situation of human rights in Belarus – mandate renewal (EU)
    16. Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)- mandate renewal (EU) 
    17. Situation of human rights in Myanmar – mandate renewal (EU)
    18. Freedom of religion or belief (EU)
    19. Technical assistance and capacity-building for Mali in the field of human rights (Africa Group)
    20. Technical assistance and capacity-building for South Sudan (Africa Group) 
    21. Role of states in countering the negative impact of disinformation on human rights (Ukraine)

    During this session, the Council will adopt the UPR working group reports on Myanmar, Greece, Suriname, Samoa, Hungary, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, United Republic of Tanzania, Eswatini, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand and Ireland.

    During each Council session, panel discussions are held to provide member States and NGOs with opportunities to hear from subject-matter experts and raise questions. 7 panel discussions and 1 thematic meeting are scheduled for this upcoming session:

    To stay up-to-date: Follow @ISHRglobal and #HRC49 on Twitter, and look out for our Human Rights Council Monitor.

    See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/10/19/48th-session-of-the-human-rights-council-outcomes/

    https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/hrc49-key-issues-on-agenda-of-march-2022-session/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • When in opposition, Alexander Downer, destined to become Australia’s longest serving foreign minister in the conservative government of John Howard, was easy to savage.  The Australian Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating was particularly keen to skewer an establishment individual prone to donning fishnet stockings and affecting a plummy disposition.  Never, he suggested, had there been a more conceited piece of fairy floss ever put on a stick.

    During the Howard years, Downer served in the role of a position that has become all but irrelevant, outsourced as it is to the US State Department and the fossil fuel lobby.  It was during that time that Australia supercharged its draconian approach to refugees and border security, repelling naval arrivals and creating a network of concentration camps that has since been marketed to the world.  The UK Home Affairs Minister Priti Patel is positively potty for it but has only managed to adopt aspects of the “Australian model”, including the relocation of arrivals to offshore facilities and co-opting the Royal Navy in an intercepting role.

    Efforts to use third countries to process asylum claims have been frustrated, though Patel has opted for a legislative route in stymieing the process and limiting the settlement rights of unwanted migrants.  While she has authorised the use of push backs on paper, these have yet to take place and are the subject of a legal challenge by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and charity, Care4Calais.

    The government of Boris Johnson has made something of a habit in mining the old quarry of Australian conservative politics.  Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was approved for a role as trade advisor for Global Britain, an appointment which did not sit well with critics worried that a reactionary dinosaur had been brought into the fold.  With Abbott offering advice, Global Britain risked becoming a Nostalgic Britannia of pink gins and wallahs, Union Jack flying high.

    Downer, for his part, has settled into the soft furnishings of British public life, occupying the role of High Commissioner for some years, becoming a presence around Australia House and King’s College, London as founding chairman of the international school of government.  Evidently, he is regarded as very clubbable, a member of the Royal Over-Seas League and chairman of trustees at the right wing think tank, Policy Exchange.

    Of late, he has been tapped to undertake a review of Britain’s border forces, a task he is likely to relish.  In this field, reform can only mean a few things: harsher policies, hardened feelings, and the tweaking, if not total circumvention, of international law.  The number of migrants attempting to make the crossing from France in 2021 was estimated to be 28,431.  In 2020, it was 8,417.  There are fears in the Home Office that the number could reach 65,000.  A siege mentality has well and truly seeded.

    A statement from the Home Office noted Patel’s commissioning of “a wide-ranging, independent review of our Border Force to assess its structure, powers, funding and priorities to ensure it can keep pace with rapidly evolving threats and continue to protect the border, maintain security and prevent illegal migration.”

    Patel doesn’t stoop to considering the right to asylum, or the safety and welfare of those making the crossing.  It’s all security and border protection.  “Since Border Force was set up in 2011, its remit has grown to meet the changing border threats we face, and in recent years has supported delivery of the government’s Brexit commitments and COVID-19 measures.”

    According to statements from the UK government, Downer was “delighted” to be leading the review, one mislabelled as independent.  “As an independent reviewer, I plan to lead a review that is robust, evidence-based and outcome-orientated.”

    Downer is unlikely to be troubled by the evidence.  For him, the outcomes are already determined and bound to offer Patel comfort.  The clue was in a piece written for the Daily Mail last September openly praising Patel’s efforts.  Despite the Home Secretary being “widely ridiculed on both sides of the Channel … I know that a ‘push-back’ policy can work.”  Never one for the finer details, the Australian suggested a sly approach verging on deception.  “My advice to Ms Patel would be to introduce a ‘push-back’ policy without fanfare, and to keep the French informed on a need-to-know basis only”.

    The views of those at the Policy Exchange think tank are also shot through with such presumption. In a report released on February 16, the authors consider the need for a “Plan B” which would involve removing people attempting to enter the UK on small craft “to a location outside the UK – whether the Channel Islands, Sovereign Bases in Cyprus or Ascension Island – where their asylum claims would be considered.”  Ideally, “Plan A” would involve the French shouldering the responsibility of preventing the arrivals in the first place.

    Downer’s anti-refugee resume is long, though he seems to have been overly credited with the copyright of the original Pacific Solution implemented by the Howard government from 2001.  The same goes for the general policy of turning vessels laden with asylum seekers and refugees back to Indonesia and potential watery graves.  That said, he was an important figure in leading negotiations with countries such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea, both becoming indispensably bribed in aiding Canberra’s sadistic solution.

    This is enough to have the PCS worried.  One spokesperson noted Downer’s role as “a prime architect of Australia’s inhumane immigration policy” claiming that his recent support for the push back solution made “him a wholly inappropriate choice to lead this review”.  General Secretary Mark Serwotka has also expressed his opposition to any push back policy “on moral and humanitarian grounds, and we will not rule out industrial action to prevent it being carried out.”

    The one saving grace in this needless review with pre-determined findings is the difficulty Britain faces in implementing any turn-back policy that does not violate international law.  French officials are incessant in reminding their British counterparts about that fact.  And without French cooperation in this endeavour, any proposed harshness will be mitigated.

    The post Tapping Fortress Australia: Priti Patel’s Border Force Review first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Move against Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi made by lawyer for human rights defender jailed in UAE

    A lawyer representing a jailed human rights defender in the United Arab Emirates has filed a torture complaint against the new president of Interpol, Maj Gen Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi, as the official made his first visit to the international police agency’s headquarters in the French city of Lyon.

    William Bourdon, a lawyer for the Emirati human rights defender and blogger Ahmed Mansour, said he filed the complaint against al-Raisi in a Paris court under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Mansour is serving a 10-year sentence in the UAE for charges of “insulting the status and prestige of the UAE” and its leaders in social media posts.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • By Ella Stewart, RNZ News reporter

    New Zealanders living overseas say covid-19 is now part of everyday life as cases of the highly-infectious omicron variant steadily grow around the globe.

    More than 307 million covid-19 cases have been confirmed since the pandemic began, with countries now breaking records for daily case numbers as leaders struggle to keep the new variant at bay.

    Cantabrian Savannah Winter has been working as an au pair in Paris for about six months.

    France is currently reporting around 300,000 cases each day, and while she is double vaccinated and has had her booster shot, she still caught covid-19 three months ago.

    “Everyone I know, knows someone that has it and the kids I look after are constantly not at school because people in their class are getting it, so I’m thinking, ‘Oh am I going to get it again?’, we are just waiting and seeing if our kids test positive,” Winter said.

    As omicron spread, the situation became overwhelming and there was a shortage of rapid-antigen testing, she said.

    “All of the pharmacies are just inundated with people needing to get tested. I went to the gym this morning and I walked past a few pharmacies and there is just a line at 8am in the morning going around the street of people just lining up to get a test.”

    About 10 percent effective
    A study from the UK Health Security Agency found the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were only about 10 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection from omicron, 20 weeks after the second dose.

    But two doses of those vaccines still provide good protection against severe illness, hospitalisation and death.

    The study also found that boosters are up to 75 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection.

    In the US, the booster programme is well underway, but cases are still skyrocketing.

    Ben Fitchett, 22, moved to Los Angeles in December.

    “On my second night here, I caught it from a friend and over the period of that weekend until the week leading up to Christmas cases just exploded,” said Fitchett.

    “Everyone seems to know someone that has it. Everyone is basically dropping like flies.”

    WHO says not categorised as ‘mild’
    Last week the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that while studies suggested omicron was less likely to make people seriously ill compared to previous variants, it should not be categorised as mild.

    Fitchett said despite the high case numbers, people in Los Angeles were going about life as normal.

    “It is a deadly virus. Some people will get it and it does react differently within people, but people don’t seem to be too worried about it here. Obviously, if you are immunocompromised, you are, but people are just living life as normal and then if you get it, you get it, and you just have to stay away from everyone else.”

    In Australia, case numbers have also been rising exponentially, with the state of Victoria recording more than 40,000 cases yesterday.

    Heather Jameson and her family are in a self-imposed lockdown in Melbourne to ensure they do not catch the virus before their family holiday.

    “I personally hate the idea that I would be spreading something to immunocompromised people without my knowledge … so our own self imposed lockdown, while we are well, is purely to make sure that we don’t get it, and then risk passing it on should we have symptoms when we go away.”

    Her children would almost certainly catch covid-19 once they returned to school next month, she said.

    Case numbers blowing up
    “Case numbers are just blowing up every day, to be honest it gives me a pretty high sense of anxiety when I’m looking at the actual numbers.

    “We just have the sense that it is literally everywhere. A lot of work mates have had it, our direct neighbours have got it right now. It’s pretty panic inducing. We feel like we’re still in lockdown.”

    New Zealanders should look after each other to ensure covid-19’s spread in Aotearoa remained contained, Jameson said.

    To date, there have been 196 omicron cases detected at the border since December 1.

    The Ministry of Health says there are also 217 border cases that have been caught still undergoing genome sequencing. Most are expected to be omicron.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The deaths of at least 27 people who drowned as they tried to cross the Channel in an inflatable dinghy in search of asylum have quickly been overshadowed by a diplomatic row engulfing Britain and France.

    As European states struggle to shut their borders to refugees, the two countries are in a war of words over who is responsible for stopping the growing number of small boats trying to reach British shores. Britain has demanded the right to patrol French waters and station border police on French territory, suggesting that France is not up to the job. The French government, meanwhile, has blamed the UK for serving as a magnet for illegal workers by failing to regulate its labour market.

    European leaders are desperate for quick answers. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of regional leaders a week ago to address the “migration” crisis, though Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, was disinvited.

    Britain’s post-Brexit government is readier to act unilaterally. It has been intensifying its “hostile environment” policy towards asylum seekers. That includes plans to drive back small boats crossing the Channel, in violation of maritime and international law, and to “offshore” refugees in remote detention camps in places such as Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. UK legislation is also being drafted to help deport refugees and prosecute those who aid them, in breach of its commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

    Not surprisingly, anti-immigration parties are on the rise across Europe, as governments question the legitimacy of most of those arriving in the region, calling them variously “illegal immigrants”, “invaders” and “economic migrants”.

    The terminology is not only meant to dehumanise those seeking refuge. It is also designed to obscure the West’s responsibility for creating the very conditions that have driven these people from their homes and on to a perilous journey towards a new life.

    Power projection

    In recent years, more than 20,000 refugees are estimated to have died crossing the Mediterranean in small boats to reach Europe, including at least 1,300 so far this year. Only a few of these deaths have been given a face – most notably Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose body washed up on the Turkish coast in 2015 after he and others in his family drowned on a small boat trying to get to Europe.

    The numbers trying to reach the UK across the Channel, though smaller, are rising too – as are the deaths. The 27 people who drowned two weeks ago were the single largest loss of life from a Channel crossing since agencies began keeping records seven years ago. Barely noted by the media was the fact that the only two survivors separately said British and French coastguards ignored their phone calls for help as their boat began to sink.

    But no European leader appears ready to address the deeper reasons for the waves of refugees arriving on Europe’s shores – or the West’s role in causing the “migration crisis”.

    The 17 men, seven women, including one who was pregnant, and three children who died were reportedly mostly from Iraq. Others trying to reach Europe are predominantly from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and parts of North Africa.

    That is not accidental. There is probably nowhere the legacy of western meddling – directly and indirectly – has been felt more acutely than the resource-rich Middle East.

    The roots of this can be traced back more than a century, when Britain, France and other European powers carved up, ruled and plundered the region as part of a colonial project to enrich themselves, especially through the control of oil.

    They pursued strategies of divide and rule to accentuate ethnic tensions and delay local pressure for nation-building and independence. The colonisers also intentionally starved Middle Eastern states of the institutions needed to govern after independence.

    The truth is, however, that Europe never really left the region, and was soon joined by the United States, the new global superpower, to keep rivals such as the Soviet Union and China at bay. They propped up corrupt dictators and intervened to make sure favoured allies stayed put. Oil was too rich a prize to be abandoned to local control.

    Brutal policies

    After the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the Middle East was once again torn apart by western interference – this time masquerading as “humanitarianism”.

    The US has led sanctions regimes, “shock and awe” air strikes, invasions and occupations that devastated states independent of western control, such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. They may have been held together by dictators, but these states – until they were broken apart – provided some of the best education, healthcare and welfare services in the region.

    The brutality of western policies, even before the region’s strongmen were toppled, was trumpeted by figures such as Madeleine Albright, former US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state. In 1996, when asked about economic sanctions that by then were estimated to have killed half a million Iraqi children in a failed bid to remove Saddam Hussein, she responded: “We think the price is worth it.”

    Groups such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State quickly moved in to fill the void that was left after the West laid waste to the economic and social infrastructure associated with these authoritarian governments. They brought their own kind of occupation, fragmenting, oppressing and weakening these societies, and providing additional pretexts for meddling, either directly by the West or through local clients, such as Saudi Arabia.

    States in the region that so far have managed to withstand this western “slash and burn” policy, or have ousted their occupiers – such as Iran and Afghanistan – continue to suffer from crippling, punitive sanctions imposed by the US and Europe. Notably, Afghanistan has emerged from its two-decade, US-led occupation in even poorer shape than when it was invaded.

    Elsewhere, Britain and others have aided Saudi Arabia in its prolonged, near-genocidal bombing campaigns and blockade against Yemen. Recent reports have suggested that as many as 300 Yemeni children are dying each day as a result. And yet, after decades of waging economic warfare on these Middle Eastern countries, western states have the gall to decry those fleeing the collapse of their societies as “economic migrants”.

    Climate crisis

    The fallout from western interference has turned millions across the region into refugees, forced from their homes by escalating ethnic discord, continued fighting, the loss of vital infrastructure, and lands contaminated with ordnance. Today, most are languishing in tent encampments in the region, subsisting on food handouts and little else. The West’s goal is local reintegration: settling these refugees back into a life close to where they formerly lived.

    But the destabilisation caused by western actions throughout the Middle East is being compounded by a second blow, for which the West must also take the lion’s share of the blame.

    Societies destroyed and divided by western-fuelled wars and economic sanctions have been in no position to withstand rising temperatures and ever-longer droughts, which are afflicting the Middle East as the climate crisis takes hold. Chronic water shortages and repeated crop failures – compounded by weak governments unable to assist – are driving people off their lands, in search of better lives elsewhere.

    In recent years, some 1.2 million Afghans were reportedly forced from their homes by a mix of droughts and floods. In August, aid groups warned that more than 12 million Syrians and Iraqis had lost access to water, food and electricity. “The total collapse of water and food production for millions of Syrians and Iraqis is imminent,” said Carsten Hansen, the regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

    According to recent research, “Iran is experiencing unprecedented climate-related problems such as drying of lakes and rivers, dust storms, record-breaking temperatures, droughts, and floods.” In October, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted that climate change was wreaking havoc in Yemen too, with extreme flooding and an increased risk of waterborne diseases.

    Western states cannot evade their responsibility for this. Those same countries that asset-stripped the Middle East over the past century also exploited the resulting fossil-fuel bonanza to intensify the industrialisation and modernisation of their own economies. The US and Australia had the highest rates of fossil fuel consumption per capita in 2019, followed by Germany and the UK. China also ranks high, but much of its oil consumption is expended on producing cheap goods for western markets.

    The planet is heating up because of oil-hungry western lifestyles. And now, the early victims of the climate crisis – those in the Middle East whose lands provided that oil – are being denied access to Europe by the very same states that caused their lands to become increasingly uninhabitable.

    Impregnable borders

    Europe is preparing to make its borders impregnable to the victims of its colonial interference, its wars and the climate crisis that its consumption-driven economies have generated. Countries such as Britain are not just worried about the tens of thousands of applications they receive each year for asylum from those who have risked everything for a new life.

    They are looking to the future. Refugee camps are already under severe strain across the Middle East, testing the capacities of their host countries – Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq – to cope.

    Western states know the effects of climate change are only going to worsen, even as they pay lip service to tackling the crisis with a Green New Deal. Millions, rather than the current thousands, will be hammering on Europe’s doors in decades to come.

    Rather than aiding those seeking asylum in the West, the 1951 Refugee Convention may prove to be one of the biggest obstacles they face. It excludes those displaced by climate change, and western states are in no hurry to broaden its provisions. It serves instead as their insurance policy.

    Last month, immediately after the 27 refugees drowned in the Channel, Patel told fellow legislators that it was time “to send a clear message that crossing the Channel in this lethal way, in a small boat, is not the way to come to our country.”

    But the truth is that, if the British government and other European states get their way, there will be no legitimate route to enter for those from the Middle East whose lives and homelands have been destroyed by the West.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Britain helped create the refugees it now wants to keep out first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charter by definition means contract, a legally binding agreement between two or more parties to do or not do something within a specified period of time. Typically, contracts also enshrine a set of rewards and punishments.

    Contracts are the quintessential market category. They govern how relations work in the marketplace and ensure exchange relations occupy center-stage in contemporary capitalist societies. Contracts are a key mechanism used often to outsource and privatize public services, programs, and enterprises. Contracting, especially in the neoliberal period, is a way to expand the claims of private interests on public funds, assets, and authority while restricting the claims of the public to public funds, assets, and authority.

    Charter schools are contract schools. They are outsourced privatized schools that use public money that belongs to public schools.1  Charter schools are not public schools in the proper sense of the word. In the U.S., for example, charter schools differ dramatically from public schools. Among other things, charter schools are run by unelected individuals, cannot levy taxes, are not state agencies, oppose unions, frequently hire many uncertified teachers, spend a lot on advertising, are exempt from numerous public laws, and are often run openly as for-profit entities. They also have a very high failure rate: five thousand charter schools have closed since their inception in 1991.2 Financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance are the three most common reasons nonprofit and for-profit charter schools close regularly in the U.S., leaving many minority families out in the cold.

    The relentless pressure of the law of the falling rate of profit is forcing major owners of capital in more countries to use the state to establish and expand privately-operated charter schools as a way to counteract the inescapable decline in the rate and mass of profit. Owners of capital see the public education budget as a large pool of money they can seize in the context of a continually failing economy.

    Presently, the U.S. is home to the largest number of charter schools in the world, with about 7,400 privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools strewn across the country. Only about half a dozen other countries have privately-operated charter schools and none have close to the number of charter schools found in the U.S.

    France, a major European country, is now considering establishing privately-operated charter schools. Unlike the U.S., France has long enshrined the claim to public education in its constitution. Unlike many constitutions, the U.S. constitution does not even contain the word education in it. For 60 years, however, France has also funneled enormous sums of public money to private Catholic schools so long as these schools hire state-certified teachers and use the national curriculum. “About 15 percent of France’s primary and secondary schools fall into this category,” says the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.

    Valérie Pécresse is presently the candidate of the Republicans for France’s presidential election in April 2022. She is described as the first woman nominated by the Republicans as a presidential candidate. The New York Times reports that Pécresse, 54, is “the current leader of the Paris region and a former national minister of the budget and then higher education, has risen to second place behind Mr. Macron in the polls among likely voters in the election”

    Among other things, Pécresse is described as a right-winger who proudly and publicly declares that she is inspired by Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Britain who vigorously promoted a neoliberal outlook and agenda at home and abroad.

    Recently, Pécresse proposed establishing charter schools in France. According to a November 30, 2021, article in the French newspaper LeMonde:

    In outlining the educational platform for her presidential candidacy in a speech in Venoy (Yonne) on October 12, Valérie Pécresse proposed transforming 10 percent of the nation’s public schools into “a new kind of public school under contract, inspired by ‘charter schools’ found in England and Sweden.” These schools, which would be primarily located in marginalized neighborhoods, would benefit, Pécresse declared, from the managerial autonomy currently exercised in France by private schools under contract, which account for 15 percent of the nation’s 60,000 primary and secondary schools. In these charter schools, “enrollment will depend on parents and students abiding by a charter of commitment.

    To add insult to injury, Pécresse seems to favor the infamous and heavily-criticized “no-excuses” charter school model found in the U.S. These schools are so authoritarian that they have had to rebrand themselves to project a “softer” and more humane public image.

    While Pécresse is often described as a right-winger, this may make very little difference in the scheme of things because the ruling elite are comfortable using politicians of all stripes to advance the neoliberal antisocial offensive. In the U.S., for example, both Democrats and Republicans have been long-time supporters of privately-operated charter schools that siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools. The main point is that the idea of privately-operated charter schools is now out there and the door has been opened to introducing them in the future.

    France would do well to learn from the negative experience of other countries with “autonomous” charter schools, especially the U.S. and New Zealand. Privately-operated charter schools not only possess the non-public features listed above, they also intensify segregation, reduce accountability, and increase corruption. In addition, they leave public schools and the public sector with less money to function and excel. They also reinforce the ideologies of consumerism, competition, and individualism. Charter school advocates and operators treat parents and students as consumers, not humans or citizens. They promote the illusion that education is a business, not a social responsibility that society must guarantee for all for free. Treating a social responsibility like education as a business opportunity has been a disaster for people nationally and internationally.

    The new year should be a time for all forces in all countries to renew and step up their demands for an end to the commodification of education. Governments around the world must take up their social responsibility to provide people’s rights, including the right to an education, with a guarantee in practice. No one should have to fend for themselves when it comes to securing a high quality education in the 21st century.

    1. Workers (along with nature) are the only source of wealth. All funds used to run public enterprises and the entire society come from the labor-time of workers. Wealth is not produced by owners of capital.
    2. See “5,000 Charter Schools Closed in 30 Years” (2021) here.
    The post Will Charter Schools Improve Education in France? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • RNZ Pacific

    A committee has been set up in New Caledonia to support the re-election of French President Emmanuel Macron although he is yet to announce whether he will again seek office next April.

    The committee is headed by the mayor of Noumea Sonia Lagarde, who said Macron’s support for New Caledonia had been “flawless”.

    More than 96 percent voted against independence in last Sunday’s vote, which was boycotted by the pro-independence camp because of the impact of the pandemic.

    She said that if New Caledonians voted in three referendums to stay with France, it was due to Macron’s commitment.

    However, in both the previous referendums in 2018 and 2020 contested by the pro-independence supporters, the defeat in the plebiscites was narrow, with only 10,000 votes separating the two sides last year.

    In 2017, in the decisive second round of the last presidential election, Macron secured 53 percent of New Caledonia’s votes against 47 percent for Marine Le Pen of the National Rally.

    In the mainly anti-independence Southern Province, only 46 percent voted for Macron.

    In the first round, he came a distant third behind Francois Fillon and Le Pen, with just 13 percent support.

    French military vehicle vandalised
    A French military truck has been destroyed in an arson attack in the north of New Caledonia.

    Prosecutors say two individuals carrying a canister of petrol entered a parking area in Poindimie and set the truck alight.

    Another vehicle had been doused with petrol but the two were chased away by an officer on guard before they could set it on fire.

    He used an extinguisher to prevent the rest of vehicle park catching fire.

    Prosecutors say investigators are being sent from Noumea to track down the two suspects.

    If caught and convicted, they risk jail terms of up to 10 years.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • France is introducing tougher rules for travellers from the UK in an attempt to counter the spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus.

    From midnight on Friday, people arriving from Britain will be required to show a negative Covid test that is less than 24 hours old, to test again upon arrival and self-isolate for seven days, although that can be reduced to 48 hours if the second test is negative.

    Asked not to visit the UK

    Tourism and business trips will be limited and French travellers are being dissuaded from visiting the UK. In a statement, the office of French prime minister Jean Castex said:

    In the face of the extremely rapid spread of the Omicron variant in the United Kingdom, the Government has chosen to reinstate compelling reasons for travel to and from the United Kingdom, and to strengthen the requirement for testing on departure and arrival.

    In the UK Government’s own words, the UK will face a ‘tidal wave’ linked to the Omicron variant in the coming days.

    Travellers will need a “compelling reason” to travel to or from the UK, though that does not apply to French nationals and their spouses and children, the statement says. It continues:

    These compelling reasons do not include tourism or business reasons,

    Vaccinated people must present a negative test (PCR or TAG) of less than 24 hours, which is in line with the rules already in place for unvaccinated people.

    Controls in place

    Travellers from the UK must “register, prior to their trip, on a digital platform and provide the address of their stay in France”. They must then “isolate in a place of their choosing”, and the “quarantine may be lifted after 48 hours, subject to proof of a negative test”.

    The statement adds:

    Controls will be organised to ensure the proper implementation of these measures.

    The Government also calls on travellers who had planned to visit the United Kingdom to postpone their travel.

    Coronavirus travel rules
    France is tightening restrictions on travel from the UK to curb the spread of the Omicron variant (Yui Mok/PA)

    The new measures will apply to everyone regardless of vaccination status. French government spokesman Gabriel Attal earlier told BFM television:

    We will put in place a system of controls drastically tighter than the one we have today.

    We will reduce the validity of the test to come to France from 48 hours to 24 hours.

    We will limit the reasons for coming to France from the UK – it will be limited to French nationals and residents and their families.

    Tourism or business trips for people who do not have French or European nationality or are residents will be limited.

    People will have to register on an app… and will have to self-isolate in a place of their choosing for seven days – controlled by the security forces – but this can be shortened to 48 hours if a negative test is carried out in France.

    Slowing down the spread

    Attal said the rules are aimed at slowing down the arrival of Omicron cases in France and allowing the country’s booster campaign to advance. Amid questions over how the new policy will affect cross-Channel trade, UK transport secretary Grant Shapps said hauliers will be exempt.

    He tweeted:

    To confirm I have liaised with my French counterpart (Jean-Baptiste Djebbari) and hauliers will remain exempt.

    A spokesman for ferry operator Brittany Ferries said:

    These new measures are a hammer blow to our Christmas season.

    In the context of an Omicron variant that is passing through the French population as it is in the UK, further border controls seem as unnecessary as they are unwelcome.

    UK health minister Gillian Keegan said she has had to cancel a skiing trip to France over Christmas due to the rising threat of Omicron. Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme for her reaction to the French travel restrictions, she said:

    My first thought is ‘I’m glad that I cancelled my trip to France’, because that’s where I was supposed to go for Christmas.

    But, of course, every government is dealing with Omicron, every government has to make their decisions and has their response to it. It is obviously going to alter people’s plans, which is very unfortunate.

    The new French measures come as concerns are mounting over the Omicron variant, which is surging in the UK, with daily confirmed Covid-19 cases reaching a record high of 78,610 new cases on Wednesday.

    Featured image via – Pixabay – geralt

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • RNZ Pacific

    Voting is under way in New Caledonia today in the last of three referendums on independence from France.

    The pro-independence parties said they will not take part in today’s vote and will not recognise its result because Paris repeatedly refused to postpone the plebiscite to next year.

    They argued that the pandemic with its lockdown and continuing restrictions did not allow them to conduct a fair campaign and therefore they asked their supporters not to vote.

    New Caledonia referendum
    NEW CALEDONIA REFERENDUM 2021

    In last year’s second referendum, just over 53 percent voted against independence while turnout was almost 86 percent.

    Irrespective of the outcome of today’s vote, France is keen to work towards a new statute for New Caledonia, with the French Overseas Minister Sébastien Lecornu at hand in Noumea in the days ahead, but pro-independence parties said the visit is unwelcome and just another “provocation”.

    While the minister said he would outline details of the 18-month transition phase following the vote in upcoming talks, the pro-independence parties ruled out meeting him and said any negotiations would have to wait until after the French presidential election in April.

    The customary Kanak Senate, which is a forum of traditional leaders, has now declared today as a day of mourning for the victims of the pandemic and called on Kanaks not to vote.

    Its president Yvon Kona also appealed for calm so as there is no trouble on polling day.

    An extra 2000 police and military personnel were flown in from France to provide security across the territory.

    Complaint that Lecornu flouted covid-19 rules
    A small pro-independence party lodged a formal complaint against Lecornu in France after reports that the minister flouted covid-19 restrictions during his previous New Caledonia visit in October.

    The news site Mediapart reported that Lecornu went for drinks at a meeting with New Caledonian politicians.

    The complaint alleges that by breaking the rules he endangered the health of others.

    The ministry said the event was a work-related multilateral exchange.

    It said in turn it intends to lodge a complaint against the party for defamation.

    France without New Caledonia ‘less beautiful’, says Macron
    French President Emmanuel Macron said that whatever the outcome of today’s referendum, there would be a life together.

    He said the day after the referendum, they would be together to build the aftermath, in particular given the geopolitical reality of the region.

    Macron said the role of the French government was not to be in either camp.

    However, he said a France without New Caledonia would be “less beautiful”.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • By Stefan Armbruster of SBS World News

    Kanaky New Caledonia is holding a final referendum on independence from France today. But not everyone wants to see the vote go ahead

    The third and final independence referendum in the French Pacific territory has descended into controversy, with Indigenous Kanak leaders and Pacific Island nations calling for a delay or boycott.

    France says the vote is legitimate and can go ahead today, despite a year-long mourning period for the dead from covid-19 and restrictions impacting campaigning.

    It is the culmination of a 30-year peace process in the territory, which is 17,000km from Paris but only 1500km from Australia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A Brussels-imposed deadline for solving a post-Brexit fishing row has passed without the UK announcing an agreement.

    There had been suggestions on Friday 10 December that negotiations over fishing licences for small French boats in British waters could reach a resolution. But sources said there was no announcement expected from the UK government as the midnight deadline came and went.

    France had threatened to push the European Union for legal action and trade restrictions against Britain if there was no “sign of goodwill” from Britain by Friday. However, far from showing goodwill, Downing Street had said on Thursday 9 December that it did not recognise the cut-off point.

    “France will never give up its rights”
    France’s maritime minister, Annick Girardin, said on Thursday that if the deadlock remained by Friday night, France would request a meeting of the partnership council to “note the UK’s failure to respect its signature”. The council oversees the implementation of the Brexit agreement. Girardin told a senatorial committee:

    If that is not satisfactory, we ask that litigation proceedings be opened by the European Commission

    She said the proceedings could take “many months”, but “France will never give up its rights”.

    When asked about the negotiations over fishing licences, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs referred to a written statement from Victoria Prentis, a minister at the department. The statement said that trilateral talks with EU and Norway on jointly managed stocks were fruitful, but failed to refer to the France fishing row specifically.

    The European Commission had said it expected the dispute to be resolved by 12am on Friday.

    Punishment

    As a punishment for failing to grant more small fishing boat permits to French boats, French ministers suggested the EU could tell Britain that some of its products could no longer be sold in the bloc.

    The row centres on licences to fish in UK and Channel Islands waters under the terms of Britain’s post-Brexit trade deal with the EU – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

    The main source of contention is the number of licences to fish in waters around the British coastline for smaller French vessels that can prove they operated there before Brexit.

    France says Britain has not handed out enough licences to its fishermen. Meanwhile the UK government claims applications have been granted to those who have the correct documentation.

    There are thought to be roughly 100 outstanding fishing licences, from Paris’s perspective.

    Legal proceedings on the horizon

    On Friday, France’s European affairs minister, Clement Beaune, echoed earlier threats to ask the European Commission to start legal proceedings against the UK if it failed to grant more licences to French fishermen.

    But he also suggested the talks could be extended past the deadline as long as the UK shows goodwill by offering “a few dozen extra licences”.

    Speaking to France Info radio Beaune said:

    We won’t get all the licences that we have a right to by tonight.

    If the British say today ‘we’ll give you – and this isn’t a scientific number – a few dozen extra licences as a gesture of good faith to show that the dialogue is bearing fruit and we’re interested in continuing,’ we’ll take that into account and make an evaluation with the European Commission and perhaps we’ll continue.

    But it’s clear now that the UK made no such offer for additional licenses. Discussing the legal action he envisaged, Beaune added:

    A legal procedure does not just involve papers and courts, it’s also measures, for example customs measures, that Europe can take collectively to tell the British in certain sectors ‘since you do not respect the agreement, some of your products are not recognised’.

    Beaune also accused the prime minister of trying to isolate France in the row.

    He said:

    (Boris Johnson) told himself he could isolate the French and divide the Europeans. He didn’t manage and we have re-mobilised.

    Brussels said the dispute must be settled by Friday – but Downing Street said on Thursday it did not recognise the cut-off point

    Beaune said the UK Government’s comment was “surprising”, adding: “It’s not really a sign of trust.”

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.