An interview with Collectif Golem, a left-wing Jewish group in France fighting antisemitism and the far right.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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On Monday evening, France became the first country in the world to explicitly guarantee the right to an abortion within its constitution. Lawmakers were summoned by President Emmanuel Macron to the Palace of Versailles, the former royal palace that is oftentimes used for the passage of monumental laws instead of the Palais Bourbon in Paris, where the National Assembly usually meets.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This February, France’s Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin unveiled plans for a large-scale military operation against migrants in Mayotte. The island chain hosts a major French naval base in the Indian Ocean. Since France converted Mayotte from a “territorial collectivity” to an overseas department in 2011, authorities have deported thousands of undocumented residents. Most come from the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Kia Ora Gaza
The head of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), Bulent Yildirim, has announced that the organisation will head a naval fleet to Gaza to break Israel’s siege of the bombarded Palestinian enclave.
Speaking at a huge public rally in Istanbul last week, Yildirim said: “The time for talking is over. We will go down to the sea, we will reach Gaza, and we will break the siege.”
Yildirim participated in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010. The boat he was on was boarded by Israeli troops and nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed at the time.
Turkish NGO plans to send naval fleet toward Gaza to break siege. Video: Middle East EyeHe is hopeful that this new fleet will be successful in breaking the siege as part of Istael’s genocidal war against Palestinians and helping bring some relief to many Gazans who are starving.
Kia Ora Gaza is a member of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
“We hope to include Kiwis on the upcoming flotillas to break the siege of Gaza,” said Roger Fowler, a founder and facilitator of Kia Ora Gaza, who was at the planning meeting in Istanbul.
He appealed for donations to this mission through Kia Ora Gaza.
In September 2016, Kia Ora Gaza facilitated Green MP Marama Davidson in joining the Women’s Boat to Gaza peace flotilla, and in 2018 veteran human rights campaigner and union leader Mike Treen represented New Zealand.
The recent Freedom Flotilla Coalition meeting in Istanbul to plan the humanitarian voyage to Gaza. Kia Ora Gaza’s Roger Fowler of Aotearoa New Zealand is on the left. Image: Kia Ora Gaza Jordan airdrops aid to Gaza
Meanwhile, the Royal Jordanian Air Force has carried out airdrops of aid off the coast of the Gaza Strip — the biggest airdrop operation so far to deliver much-needed aid to millions of Palestinians amid restrictions by Israeli authorities on aid entering the territory by road.The aid was dropped at 11 sites along the Gaza coast from its northern edge to the south for civilians to collect, and one French Air Force plane was also involved.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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The military governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have announced their exit from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), claiming the regional bloc has become a tool for foreign powers, posing a threat to member states.
The decision was made public on Sunday in a joint statement by the coup leaders, who have faced increasing pressure from ECOWAS to transition to democratic rule.
Following the overthrow of Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum last July, the latest coup in the West African region, the bloc threatened to use force to restore democratic rule after multiple attempts to persuade military rulers to reverse the coup failed. Both Mali and Burkina Faso have warned against the France-backed military action in Niger, claiming that any such move would be interpreted as an act of war against their countries.
The 15-nation economic group has sanctioned Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, including suspending them in response to the takeovers. The alliance has said it does not recognize the military-led regimes, and has vowed to no longer tolerate power grabs in the region, which has also witnessed a successful coup in Guinea and a recently attempted one in Guinea-Bissau.
However, Ouagadougou, Bamako, and Niamey have unified against ECOWAS, repeatedly accusing it of acting under Western influence. Late last year, the military rulers of the three former French colonies signed a charter that formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), committing to help each other, individually or collectively, in the event of an external attack or internal threats to their sovereignty. All three have also severed military ties with France, citing meddling and the failure of French troops to defeat Islamic insurgencies in the Sahel region, despite more than a decade of involvement.
On Sunday, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger denounced ECOWAS for failing to support them in fighting the region’s decade-long jihadist violence.
“When these states decided to take their destiny into their own hands, it [ECOWAS] adopted an irrational and unacceptable posture by imposing illegal, illegitimate, inhumane, and irresponsible sanctions in violation of its own principles,” the military leaders stated.
“After 49 years of existence, the valiant people of Burkina, Mali, and Niger note with great regret, bitterness, and great disappointment” in ECOWAS and have “decided in complete sovereignty on the immediate withdrawal” from the bloc, according to the statement.
In a response on Sunday, ECOWAS said it had yet to receive formal notification from the military authorities regarding their withdrawal.
Andrei Maslov, head of the Center for African Studies at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, told RT: “ECOWAS’ desire to make money from donor programs and cooperation with the EU and other Western institutions prevented the organization from pursuing policies in the interests of member states.”
ECOWAS has failed to capture its full potential and become a genuinely independent regional organization, Maslov claimed.
Maslov believes that the exit of the three countries from the bloc would provide them with more decision-making freedom.
The post Three West African States Quit Regional Bloc first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific French Pacific desk correspondent
French President Emmanuel Macron has defended his Indo-Pacific vision during the traditional New Year’s good wishes ceremony to the French Armed Forces in Paris.Macron said tensions in the Indo-Pacific zone were a matter for concern because France was an integral part of the Indo-Pacific — both in the Indian and the Pacific oceans.
He recalled the French version of the Indo-Pacific had been masterminded in 2018 and had since been developed in partnership with such key allies as India, Australia, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
“But we have also consolidated it and, may I say entrenched it, in our own (overseas) territories,” he said, citing New Caledonia as an example of French army presence to defend France’s sovereignty and “the capacity for our air force to deploy (from mainland France) to Oceania within 48 hours”.
He also praised the recent South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting held in Nouméa last month when “France was the inviting power”.
He said Paris was able to strike “strategic partnerships” with neighbouring armed forces.
“The year 2024 will see us maintain without fail the protection of our overseas territories,” he told the troops.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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Dr. Hassan Diab was wrongfully extradited from Canada to France in 2014, for alleged involvement in a bombing outside a Paris synagogue in 1980. He spent more than three years in a French prison before investigative judges determined that there was no evidence linking him to the crime, and ordered his immediate and unconditional release.
Hassan’s release was a moment of pure joy which we share with you in the videos below. Sadly, the joy did not last long. The French prosecutor appealed the release decision for political reasons and Hassan remains under the threat of being extradited once again to France for a crime he did not commit.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must honour his words on June 20, 2018, when he acknowledged that “this is something that obviously was an extremely difficult situation to go through for himself [Hassan], for his family” and promised to “make sure that it never happens again”.
The post Six Years On, Hassan Diab Recounts His Release from a French Prison in January 2018 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Ban comes as jailed Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi begins new hunger strike before award ceremony
Iran has banned Mahsa Amini’s family from travelling to France to receive the EU’s top human rights prize on her behalf, as the family of the imprisoned Nobel peace prize winner Narges Mohammadi said she had begun a new hunger strike before Sunday’s award ceremony in Oslo.
In Mohammadi’s absence, her 17-year-old twin children Ali and Kiani, will instead collect the award on her behalf, reading out a speech their mother smuggled out of her cell.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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As the genocide in Gaza resumes, it becomes ever more clear that the Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”, launched by the Palestinian Resistance on October 7, and the events that followed, have not only destroyed the prestige of the Israeli army: they completely unmasked the hypocrisy of the West, who is not only silent but accomplice of the unprecedented massacres perpetrated against a defenseless and trapped civilian population, as well as the duplicity of most of the so-called Western “friends” of Palestine, be they political forces, media, Unions or associations.
On the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, all the factions of the Palestinian Resistance launched a spectacular air, land and sea offensive that succeeded in breaking the siege of Gaza, seizing numerous enemy bases and liberating, albeit temporarily, localities occupied in 1948 —a first in the history of the conflict. In just a few hours, hundreds of occupation soldiers were killed, and thousands of panic-stricken settlers fled (many on foot into the desert), shattering forever the myth of the so-called “most powerful army in the Middle East” and its supposedly infallible intelligence services: the Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman had not even imagined, neither in their most improbable scenarios nor in their worst nightmares, that such an operation was possible on the part of Hamas. Israel had only prepared for it in the north against Hezbollah, which certainly passed on its expertise to the Palestinian fighters. To date, Israel admits to having suffered 1,200 dead, thousands of wounded and over 200 prisoners. This is already the worst humiliation in the history of the “Zionist entity”, inflicted not by a coalition of national armies but by a militia besieged and suffocated for 16 years in a tiny piece of land, the most heavily guarded territory in the world.
But it’s not just Israel’s illusion of invincibility that has been shattered: Israel’s allies, namely the leaders and elites of Western countries, have revealed to the world the full extent of their racism, cruelty and hypocrisy, giving their unconditional support to the occupier and its preposterous claim of self-defense (a right denied to the Palestinians, while, according to international law, this right can only be invoked against a State, in this case Israel, and not against a colonized people) and by blaming Hamas for the escalation and all the casualties, including Palestinian deaths, echoing the rhetoric of the Israeli army. Neither the inflammatory statements by Israeli ministers about Palestinian “human animals” or “There are no innocents in Gaza” (not even the million children, a legitimate target for the occupier), nor the white phosphorus, nor the war crimes of depriving over 2 million Palestinians of water, electricity, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid, nor the deliberate targeting of hospitals, ordering staff and patients to evacuate in record time or be killed, nor the massive and deliberate bombardment of residential buildings, which has razed entire neighborhoods to the ground and caused over 20,000 deaths, almost half of them children, and tens of thousands of injuries, nor, to cap it all, the ultimatum given to over a million inhabitants of North Gaza to take refuge in South Gaza within 24 hours (with, in the background, efforts to deport the entire population of Gaza to the Egyptian Sinai), an injunction that amounts to State terrorism, materially impossible to carry out (especially with fuel shortages and devastated roads) and which constitutes a crime against humanity, none of this has moved the “civilized West”, which refuses to condemn the occupier and continues to give it its full political, media and military support, vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council. Europe has even restricted, repressed and upright banned demonstrations in support of Palestine, with France going so far as to ban them altogether and consider it an anti-Semitic act to raise a Palestinian flag. After the first moral decay revealed by the war in Ukraine, where the West shamelessly explained that, unlike those of NATO’s wars in the Middle East, the Ukrainian victims were worthy and should move us because they were “like us” (blond with blue eyes), the last fig leaf covering the hideous, truly satanic face of the West has fallen, and is revealed to the whole world in all its abjectness, giving its blessing to the daily butchery of Palestinian men, women and children in the macabre tune of “We stand with Israel”. Behind the cloak of freedom, democracy, human rights and international law, behind the fine suits, perfume and pretensions of refinement, behind the calls to protect civilians and respect humanitarian international law, the rulers of Western countries revealed the full extent of their barbarity, indifferent if not hilarious in the face of the bloodbath, the bodies of shredded toddlers and suffocated premature babies in Gaza.
However, one of the most disgusting aspects of this great unveiling is the reaction of the so-called defenders of the Palestinian cause, who, with very rare exceptions, have allowed themselves to be crushed by pro-Israeli propaganda, whether through weakness, cowardice, fear of political-media vindictiveness or a latent racism that only truly sanctifies Jewish lives, deeming the massive killing of Arabs something normal, if not praiseworthy. Ever since October 7, the media, personalities and organizations considered, or even claiming, to be pro-Palestinian competed with zeal in their communiqués condemning the “terrorist attack” by Hamas and its alleged “atrocities” and “war crimes”, presenting Israel de facto in the position of a victim who would only defend itself (admittedly in a “disproportionate” manner, but fundamentally legitimate), without any shred of evidence (it has been revealed that a great many Israeli civilians were killed by their own troops), and in defiance of the most basic facts of the conflict: Gaza has been the victim for at least 16 years of the supreme crime according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, that is the crime of aggression (blockade is an act of war), not to mention regular assassinations, the colonization of the West Bank, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque, all casus belli against which Hamas, the legitimate representative of the people of Gaza, has the legal and moral right to retaliate. The vast majority of the so-called “friends of Palestine” demonstrated their lack of humanity and regard for international law, which enshrines the right of occupied peoples to liberate themselves by all means, including armed struggle.
Here is a small selection of the shameful and ignominious political, media and trade union statements that have provided unforgivable support and even encouragement for the ongoing massacre in Gaza. All the examples below are taken from France, the self-appointed “Cradle of Human Rights” and allegedly less subservient to Israel’s interest than the US or UK, but the same bias (and much worse) can be found everywhere in the “enlightened West”.
La France Insoumise
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “La France Insoumise”, or LFI, is France’s main left-wing opposition party, presenting itself as a champion of the rights of minorities (especially Muslims) inside, and of the oppressed peoples outside (especially Palestine). LFI’s initial communiqué on October 7, which caused such a stir in France, was extremely timid. It did not take sides and seemed to consider Israel and Gaza equally to blame: “The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes against a backdrop of intensifying Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian deaths. Our thoughts are with all the victims. The current escalation risks leading to a hellish cycle of violence. France, the European Union and the international community must act without delay to prevent this escalation.” LFI merely called for a “ceasefire” and “the protection of the population”, a “return to the negotiating table” and an active implementation of “UN resolutions”. This statement caused an uproar because it did not explicitly condemn Hamas or use the term “terrorist”, but it must be stressed that it did not condemn Israel either. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s reaction on Twitter was in the same vein (“All the violence unleashed against Israel and Gaza proves only one thing: violence only produces and reproduces itself. Horrified, our thoughts and compassion go out to all the distraught victims of all this”), simply repeating outdated truisms about the “two-state solution” (it is dead and buried, and no power in the world could resurrect it).
But just as Mélenchon wimped out with the war in Ukraine, condemning Russia as solely responsible for unprovoked aggression and aligning himself totally with NATO, which he had claimed France would leave if he was elected President, LFI quickly gave in to the pack, “condemning the Hamas attack on Israel”, as well as the “massacres”, “abominable acts” and acts of “barbarism” allegedly perpetrated by the Palestinian Resistance (with only the Israeli army’s statements as evidence) and denounced “with the utmost force” its “war crimes aimed at terrorizing civilian populations”, boasting to use the very same words as Israel’s ambassador to the UN. “If our support must be total to the Israeli population, it cannot be unconditional to the Israeli government”, assures Manuel Bompard, coordinator of La France Insoumise. But why would anyone support a largely racist and supremacist people, who have always massively supported the massacres in Gaza? Why should anyone support Netanyahu’s far-right and even fascist government, be it conditionally, instead of just condemning it? Manuel Bompard recognizes Israel’s alleged “right to self-defense” but asks it to be “proportionate”: don’t the Palestinians also have the right to defend themselves, and much more so than the occupier? Hasn’t Hamas, which has caused far fewer Israeli casualties in its whole history than the number of Palestinians regularly massacred by Israel in a matter of days, acted in a “proportionate” manner? This can only be denied if we consider that a Palestinian life is worth less (and x times less) than an Israeli life. And are Hamas’s actions “Resistance”, asks a presenter? LFI bursts into indignation: “Nobody used that expression. It’s a flagrant act of outrageous manipulation, part of the polemics fabricated against LFI.” The NUPES parliamentary group, led by LFI, cowardly joined the minute’s silence for Israeli victims at the National Assembly: LFI claims to have asked for the inclusion of international and Palestinian victims, to no avail, but nevertheless took part in this scandalously one-sided tribute to the “worthy victims”.
Mélenchon crowned this betrayal of Palestine & Palestinians with a statement condemning Hamas not only for its attack (while admitting that there was as yet no evidence of massacres in the kibbutz, and pretending to ignore the fact that Israeli settlers are notoriously over-armed), but also for its very identity as a politico-religious movement, even though Hamas was elected in democratic elections (Jimmy Carter himself was there and testified to it), and its armed resistance against Israel is overwhelmingly supported by Palestinians and Arab-Muslim populations in general. In recalling his hatred of all theocracies, Mélenchon didn’t even notice the contradiction of not including Israel, a State founded on an amalgam between politics and religion, with a ruling coalition comprising fanatical Talmudists. Mélenchon also stressed that his refusal to use the term “terrorism” was purely from a legal perspective, and because “war crime” is worse than “terrorism”, and would allow Palestine to be dragged to the ICC (sic): “Hamas has unleashed a war operation against Israel. If we want war crimes to be tried and prosecuted, we have to call them by their name. This is possible at the International Criminal Court.” This, then, is LFI’s priority: not to erect a Palestinian state, but to drag the Palestinian Resistance (along with Israeli leaders, as if any White was ever condemned at the ICC) before the courts.
In short, La France Insoumise has abjectly submitted to the dictates of the pro-Israeli doxa, and has even outbid it, while presenting itself as sensitive to the Palestinian cause, in order to eat at all the racks. LFI only claims a position of dissidence to “keep the votes of the bearded” (and veiled) Muslims, as the odious Dupond-Maserati, Macron’s Justice Minister, put it. LFI’s deep-rooted racist and Islamophobic reflexes are further demonstrated by the disgusting fate it bestowed upon Taha Bouhafs, mercilessly defamed and crushed by the Party because he was an Arab true to his roots.
Mediapart
“The images are unbearable”. So begins an article on the front page of the October 10 issue of Mediapart, France’s main online “independent” & opposition media who unveiled so many scandals of Macron’s government. This edition was neither devoted to the Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip, the destruction of hospitals and residential buildings, the use of white phosphorus against densely populated civilian areas (a war crime), nor to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis announced by the deprivation of drinking water, electricity, medicine, gas and fuel imposed on over two million Gazans trapped and with nowhere safe to take refuge, in order to force their deportation to Egypt (a crime against humanity). God forbid. Mediapart was talking about these infamous “Hamas war crimes”. And the “unbearable” images in question were not those of decapitated Palestinian babies, the bodies of infants and children pulled from the rubble of Gaza, the heart-rending farewells of a father, mother or child to loved ones killed in the bombardments, of Palestinians burned (dead or alive) in Gaza and the West Bank, of their lifeless bodies desecrated by acts of mutilation or settlers who completely undress the corpses of Palestinians and film themselves urinating on them, but simply of an Israeli woman captured by Hamas. The article, entitled “Civilian hostages at the hands of Hamas: ‘Unheard of in Israel’s history’”, continues: “In a video shared on the social network X and filmed on Saturday October 7 shortly after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, a woman, displayed like a trophy, lies face down, inert and almost naked, in the back of a pick-up truck. A Palestinian militiaman pulls her hair, another spits on her. Her name is Shani Louk. Her family recognized her by her hair and tattoos.”
Mediapart clearly adopts the Israeli point of view, speaking of an “Israeli 9/11” and a “bloodbath”, based solely on statements by the Israeli army (even though images showed that Israeli policemen were firing from the Nova rave party, which contradicts the idea of a gratuitous massacre in favor of that of civilians “caught in the crossfire”, not mentioning the reports about Israeli civilians butchered by their own troops from Apache helicopters in the implementation of a “mass Hannibal” directive). And Mediapart spoke of “unbearable images” when the only thing truly “unbearable”, for the Israeli society, is the end of the myth of the Israeli army’s ability to protect its settlers. Moreover, Mediapart insidiously peddles the widely-propagated idea that Shani Louk was raped and executed, 3 days after the images went viral. However, she was already scantily clad during the rave party in the Negev desert, and her family had claimed to have received proof that she was still alive. Still, Mediapart made the choice to echo the rhetoric of the Israeli government by speaking of a “terrorist” attack (a term never used for Israeli crimes, of a much bigger magnitude), propagates the trope of Arabs raping white women and grossly lies by saying that a Hamas fighter spat on her (it’s quite clear from the video in question that it’s a child doing it, which is regrettable, but very different from what is said). Significantly, far-right Marine Le Pen made exactly the same statements in the French National Assembly, and this worthy daughter of her father (Jean-Marie Le Pen was notoriously involved in torture in French Algeria) also retains only this striking image of the “colonist” as prisoner of the “natives”: Mediapart, media of Edwy Plenel (whom Mitterrand described as an agent of the United States), thus followed the footsteps of the French and Israeli far right, giving full credit to the occupation army’s version of events despite the absence of proof and huge record of lies broadcasted by the IDF, and highlighting images that are completely insignificant when compared to the daily life of Palestinians under occupation, with its series of executions, torture, well-documented rapes of Palestinian women prisoners, etc., at a time when Israel is committing its greatest massacre of civilians in Gaza ever. Much later in the article, without any strong epithet or condemnation, it will be mentioned coldly that “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” will be allowed in the Gaza enclave, and that the Israeli Defense Minister has stated “We are fighting animals and we act accordingly”. On this subject, Mediapart refrained from emotionally-charged comments such as those used on the Israeli side (“unbearable”, “Plunged into dread since that fateful Shabbat day”, “traumatic as these are”), showing clearly on which side its heart beats (on the side of “humans”, not “animals”) and where its priorities lie.
Worse still, Mediapart has also published an article entitled “Massacres in two kibbutzes: ‘They murdered children and the elderly in cold blood’”, presenting as if it were a proven fact the worst atrocities attributed to Hamas, once again based solely on statements by the Israeli army. The following IDF figures are quoted without questioning their statements: “an Israeli army official” (“It’s something more like a pogrom from our grandparents’ time”), “Major General Itai Virov” (“It’s not a war or a battlefield, it’s a massacre”), “Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli army spokesman” (“What’s happening now in Israel is the discovery of the atrocity of massacres committed over two days by Hamas Islamist terrorists, including the carnage at Bee’ri kibbutz. Hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered, torn to pieces and decapitated by men mad with hatred. This was repeated in dozens of places in Israel”), “Yossi Landau, Zaka commander” (“It’s incredible the number of victims we saw, what was done to these families, these children. I’ve been doing this job for thirty-three years and I’ve never seen anything like this”), along with “Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant” (“All those who came to behead, to murder women and Holocaust survivors will be annihilated at the height of our strength and without compromise. What we saw in the cities was a massacre”) and the Israeli (I24News) and Western (CNN) journalists selected by the army for its propaganda, who meekly peddled (then retracted) the story of the 40 beheaded babies (“They shot everyone, they murdered children, babies, old people, everyone, in cold blood.”).
The conclusion of this article is in the same vein. At the end of the last section, entitled “Pure Evil” (sic), we read:
“From the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the atrocities committed by Hamas in communities around Gaza, speaking of ‘pure evil’. ‘The brutality of bloodthirsty Hamas reminds us of the most horrific acts of ISIS, he said. This is terrorism which, unfortunately, is not new to the Jewish people. This attack evokes painful memories, the scars of a thousand years of anti-Semitism and genocide’.”
Never mind that there are no images or videos to back up these assertions, reminiscent of the worst Nazi diatribes. And there is absolutely no mention of the crucial fact that in Israel, relentless military censorship filters out the slightest publication in the media, even in times of “peace”. No doubt is expressed either as to the veracity of these claims, even though the first sentence of the article did indeed state that the kibbutz had been liberated after bitter fighting (“It was only on Monday, after two and a half days of fighting, that Israeli troops were able to regain control of the kibbutz in the locality of Kfar Azza”), without ever mentioning the possibility that some Israelis may have been killed in the exchange of fire or in the Israeli strikes. Many Israeli survivors did claim that their own forces were responsible for the deaths of many settlers, and the Hannibal Doctrine, according to which Israel would rather kill its own citizens than let them fall alive into the hands of Hamas, is well known, and was mentioned in the Mediapart article quoted above (it was referring to the potential targeting by the IDF of Israeli hostages kept in Gaza, not to the October 7 massacres). Thus, trampling on journalistic ethics and disregarding the enormous responsibility placed on the media at such a critical time, Mediapart had no qualms about acting as the spokesperson for the Israeli army as it was preparing to commit an unprecedented massacre in Gaza, peddling lies such as the one about the beheaded babies, which can only contribute to public acceptance of Israel’s “reprisals” against the “pure evil” that needs to be rooted out of Gaza. This hoax was endorsed by Biden in the above speech (he claimed to have seen pictures), but has since been retracted by the White House, which has clarified that no proof was provided, and that Biden had simply repeated the Israeli army’s statements (as he did again for the deadly strike against the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians, attributed by the occupier to an Islamic Jihad rocket, as if the Resistance in Gaza had missiles able to cause such a huge level of destruction). Incidentally, the names of Israeli victims published by Haaretz do not include any babies, but the damage was done. And to this day, Mediapart doesn’t consider it necessary to publish a retraction (any more than it ever repented its despicable slander against Julian Assange). Mediapart has even gone so far as to censor comments questioning the reality of the facts alleged in the article and the irresponsibility of a newspaper to publish them without any verification in such a context, deleting them by the dozen without even taking responsibility for this censorship, which is attributed to the authors of the said comments (the only mention is “This comment has been unpublished by its author”).
The icing on the cake: these two articles were written by a certain… Rachida El Azzouzi. And to think that some people say that France is racist and that Arabs can’t succeed while staying true to themselves…
CGT
The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) is a national trade union center. It is the first of the five major French confederations of trade unions, and is deeply rooted in France’s history of social struggles and international solidarity. Here is how the CGT reacted to the events of October 7:
“On Saturday October 7, Hamas unleashed an offensive of unprecedented violence, attacking a large number of civilian targets. The CGT condemns this escalation, which bereaves and targets millions of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike, and does a disservice to the Palestinian cause.”
These are the first words of the communiqué issued by the CGT on October 9, entitled “For a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine!” It is a veritable concentrate of cowardice, lies and ignominy.
“Unprecedented violence”? But everything Hamas has done, even taking into account the crimes attributed to it without any proof, Israel has been doing far worse for decades! Do Israeli lives count for more than Palestinian lives? Why speak of “unprecedented violence” or “a milestone crossed”, when Palestine is, in the worst case scenario, merely reproducing in a homemade way what the occupation has been doing to it on an industrial scale since 1948?
So it’s “Hamas escalation” that targets “millions of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike”. Israeli civilians come first, of course, given the highly unequal exchange rate between Jewish and Arab lives, but even the Palestinian victims would not be targeted by the occupation’s aviation and artillery, but by Hamas itself?! It is pure Israeli rhetoric to state so bluntly that Hamas is responsible for all the deaths in Gaza, be it via the myth of “self-defense”, “human shields” or other such outrageous lies.
Finally, from the comfort of its offices in the Paris region, the CGT has the unheard-of arrogance to decree what serves or “does a disservice to the Palestinian cause”, demonstrating a mentality imbued with colonial smugness and haughtiness.
The final paragraph of the CGT’s confederal communiqué restates a few facts that should have been the starting (and only) point:
“The Israeli government, dominated by the far right, openly conducts a policy of apartheid and inexorably pursues the colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in defiance of all international decisions, closing the door more and more to any peace process, while Benyamin Netanyahu calls for the razing of the cities of Gaza.
The CGT recalls that the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, in a report published on Tuesday June 7, clearly condemns Israel’s policy on the situation: ‘The conclusions and recommendations related to the root causes of this conflict point overwhelmingly to Israel, which we analyze as an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying another’.”
The CGT, which blamed Hamas for this “escalation” and its consequences throughout its communiqué, is therefore in total contradiction. But it’s not the demand for coherence, or morality, that takes precedence, but rather the demand to “howl with the wolves” and condemn Hamas.
On October 18, the CGT issued a new communiqué entitled “Stop the bloodbath in Gaza immediately”. Despite this encouraging title, its content is just as distressing as that of the previous communiqué, if not more so. It begins as follows:
“For the past 10 days, the people of Gaza have been subjected to terrible strikes in retaliation [sic] for the acts of terror perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. The CGT has unambiguously condemned this policy of making things worse, which does a disservice to the Palestinian cause. It is not surprising that Hamas should make this type of choice, as it has been violating women’s rights and multiplying arbitrary arrests for almost 20 years in Gaza, imposing a double penalty on the enclave, which has been held under an outrageous blockade by Israel since 2007.”
While the population of Gaza had been pounded and genocided for over 10 days, with thousands dead, tens of thousands wounded and hundreds of thousands displaced, the CGT devoted its entire opening tirade to condemning Hamas, with only the word “outrageous” condemning Israel for its blockade at the very end of the paragraph. The same accusatory inversion is at work, via a reversal of chronology that places Gaza in the position of aggressor rather than victim (in a way legitimizing reprisals), with “terrible strikes” on one side and “acts of terror” on the other (accusing Israel of terrorism is out of the question, even when they threaten 1 million inhabitants with annihilation if they don’t evacuate northern Gaza at once). The “policy of making things worse” is not that of Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has left the Palestinian population with no other choice but armed struggle, but that of Hamas, which moreover “violates women’s rights”: is this a reference to the wearing of the veil, a notorious sign of backwardness for the CGTists, even when it is freely worn? All that’s missing is a reference to the rights of the non-existent LGBTI+ community in Gaza to complete the picture (on November 8, the CGT did choose a LGBT flag to call for a demonstration for a ceasefire in Gaza…). And we find once again this major concern of the CGT for what serves and disserves the Palestinian cause, which is one of the priorities of their Montreuil offices: as we read at the end of the communiqué, “The CGT is currently working to build the widest possible arc of forces in favor of an immediate ceasefire and a just and lasting peace for this region of the world.” Under such conditions, the people of Gaza are truly ungrateful for having launched the October 7 offensive, which threatens to scupper the plans for a just and lasting peace skilfully matured, between two packs of beer, by the CGT Union’s experts. All the Palestinians had to do was wait a few more decades and the job was done, what the hell…
But the worst is yet to come. A few paragraphs later, we read:
“The CGT demands that France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, immediately mobilize the resources of its diplomacy to obtain an immediate ceasefire and prevent the announced annihilation of northern Gaza by a large-scale land, sea and air offensive. The CGT also demands that everything possible be done to help the civilian population. The generosity and exceptional measures (including temporary protection) rightly implemented to help Ukrainians fleeing the war must also be extended to the Palestinians!”
Not only is there no explicit condemnation of this crime against humanity in the making, namely the deportation of the population of Gaza to the south and then to the Egyptian Sinai desert, but after a timid request that France should “prevent” it, the CGT calls for this deportation to be facilitated by the reception of the expelled Palestinian populations, in the same way that the Ukrainian populations were massively welcomed in Western countries following Russia’s intervention.
The CGT, which yesterday supported the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) —at a time where the risk was not an indictment for “apology for terrorism”, but indeed “terrorism” and “high treason”, with the death penalty not been abolished yet—, has changed: today, its General Secretary Sophie Binet denounces Hamas as “terrorist” (she had also supported the banning of the abaya dress in schools…). These positions demonstrate once again that, despite cosmetic differences, the CGT is aligned with NATO policy and that of Western capitals, a position that has only been confirmed since it left the World Federation of Trade Unions (composed of Southern countries) in 1995.
To put the finishing touches to this sad picture of solidarity with Palestine in France, it should be pointed out that French associations, even Muslim and pro-Palestinian ones such as the AFPS (France Palestine Solidarity Association, whose first press release was very respectable), also threw stones at Hamas. The UJFP (French Jewish Union for Peace) at first issued some very good statements, but eventually gave in to the anti-Hamas mob. Many rallies where only calling for a ceasefire, with the majority of speakers competing in their zeal to condemn “Hamas atrocities” as if it all started from there.
Why did this happen?
Over and above the overtly Zionist political and media pressure and its unbearable bludgeoning of the Israeli narrative, as well as the very real judicial threats of charges of apology for terrorism (the New Anticapitalist Party has been indicted for “apology of terror” because of its initial exemplary press release, later retracted, along with two CGT members for their local communiqués or tweets), which may explain the blindness and/or cowardice of all these voices, we must remember that the issues at work in occupied Palestine largely overlap with those of the history of colonialism. In particular, we need to remember the ambiguous position of so-called left-wing or progressive Western forces in the face of national liberation struggles against their own countries. An extract from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the earth, dedicated to the Algerian War, expresses all that needs to be said about the “support” of LFI, Mediapart, the CGT and so many others for the Palestinian cause:
“The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But, all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left scolds them: ‘You’re going too far; we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them, the French Leftists might as well shove it up their a**es. Once their war began, they saw this hard truth: that every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out of them; they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant favoured treatment to no one.
There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power. The more far-seeing among us will be, in the last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot help seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that these less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of humanity. Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest Western souls are racist. (…)
This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters; have no fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge.”
Yes, this half-hearted support for Palestine of the Western Left is all about racism (and even Islamophobia). The martyrdom of the Palestinian population, which has been going on for decades, has never moved “our worthiest Western souls” as much as the Gaza uprising against the soldiers and settlers, even though the violence of Hamas and the number of Israeli victims are far less than what the occupier regularly inflicts on the Arab population. The West shed more tears on the fake story of 40 decapitated Israeli babies than on tens of premature Palestinian infants suffocated to death by Israel in Al-Shifa Hospital: the mere illusion of a Jewish death is worse, so much worse than the real, actual and horrendous death of thousands of Palestinian children, as if they were meant to die before they come of age. As for “taking the plunge” and supporting the Palestinian Resistance, it’s likely that our “worthiest souls” will never do so, given our indifference to the massacre of almost ten thousand children, a single strike against a hospital resulting in over 500 civilian casualties, the assault on hospitals, the imminent risk of death hanging over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trapped and deprived of drinking water, food, electricity, fuel and medicine, and the specter of a mass exodus, which have not shaken our conviction that any declaration of “support” for Palestine must begin with a condemnation of the “war crimes” of Hamas, the “terrorist” organization that is “holding hostage” the people of Gaza (no matter how much this contradicts the facts, it gives a clear conscience).
Norman Finkelstein, son of Auschwitz and Warsaw Ghetto survivors and a world authority on the Palestinian question, contextualized and commented on these positions, and affirmed genuine support for the Palestinian struggle. Such a courageous stance is so rare that it is worth quoting at length:
“My parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto up until the uprising in April 1943. The uprising in the ghetto is normally regarded as a heroic chapter, or the only heroic chapter during the Nazi extermination. And when the anniversary came around, probably around 20 or 30 years ago, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, she interviewed my mother about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And my mother was very – let’s just put it this way – she was very skeptical of all the praise that was being heaped on it. She said, number one, we were all destined to die, so there’s no great heroism in trying to resist when there was no other option available, we were going to be deported and exterminated. Number two, she said that the resistance was vastly exaggerated, which in fact was true. It was a very minuscule resistance to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw at the time. And so I saw that Amy Goodman, her face began to drop because my mother was diminishing what was supposed to be a heroic chapter or the only heroic chapter during that horrific sequence of events. So my mother said, excuse me, Amy asked her, “was there anything positive from what happened?” And I remember my mother commenting, first she talked about the ingenuity, the ingenuity of the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. And she described how they had no implements. They developed this very complex catacombs – what were called “bunkers” in the ghetto – using their bare hands. And I remember her use of that word ingenuity. And then when I saw or witnessed or read about the ingenuity of the people of Hamas, the most surveilled place on God’s earth. Every nook and cranny of Gaza is under 10,000 different Israeli surveillance technologies. And yet they managed, amidst all this, to block all of the surveillance and conduct this operation — I pay tribute to that ingenuity! I pay tribute to the resistance of a people with literally, or almost literally, their having figured out a way to resist this concentration camp imposed on them or overcome it…
And I have the same sense of wonderment – I am still totally baffled – that Hamas figured out a way to tribute the human ingenuity and that spirit of resistance, and all the powers that each individual can summon forth in that struggle for resistance to defeat a very formidable or impose a defeat, even if it turns out not to be longstanding, to impose a momentary defeat on those racist supremacists and Übermenschen who just don’t believe the Arabs are clever enough, smart enough, have enough ingenuity to prevail.
As to the question of the civilians and the civilian deaths, I don’t know what happened. I’ll patiently listen and I will as fairly as I can parse the evidence as it becomes available. I’m not gonna put a “but,” I’m not gonna put a “however,” I’m just gonna state the facts. Number one, I was rereading the other day Karl Marx’s Civil War in France, and that describes the period when the Parisian workers come to power in Paris, form a commune, and the government, the official government, was assassinating prisoners of war, hostages. and it became so brutal that the Communards, as they were called, they took about 50 or 60 hostages. The government wouldn’t relent, it wouldn’t relent, and the Communards killed the hostages.
Karl Marx defended it. He defended it. He said “it was a matter of… They were being treated with such contempt, the Communards.” The Communards were begging for a way to peacefully resolve this. They asked for one of their leaders, Blanqui, to be returned to them, and the government wouldn’t. You know, John Brown, he didn’t have a clean record. When he was in a battle in Kansas over a place called Osawatome, he killed hostages. He did. And when he was hung, it was very hard to find a person to defend him. Actually, I recently learned from reading something by Cornel West, one of the few people who spoke on his behalf was Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, which I wasn’t aware of. But he killed hostages, and he was hung and very few rose to his defense, but before you knew it, the Civil War came along. And, one of the marching songs in the Civil War was “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” History’s judgment can be very different than the momentary judgment.
It is so appalling, it’s not just the despiriting, it’s so appalling, the reaction of all of these cowards and careerists and scum who use their microphones called Twitter to just denounce the Hamas attack. Most of the Hamas militants, probably the ones who broke through the fence, it’s their first time out of Gaza because you assume they’re mostly in their 20s. The blockade has gone on now for 18 years. They grew up in a concentration camp. They want to be free. One of the natures of the current technology is they get to see on the screen all these people walking free. They want to be free. They joined Hamas, they volunteered. Yes, by international law, they constitute combatants. Do I think they’re legitimate targets because they’re combatants? You’ll never convince me. You will never convince me.
I know what the law says. I know what I’m legally obliged to say. I know what as a scholar or reported scholar I’m supposed to say. But, are you going to convince me a person who grew up in a concentration camp and wants to breathe free air, is – to use the language of international law – a legitimate target, I can’t do it. I cannot. Now, people are going to say, “you’re a hypocrite, you say you uphold international law, you know the fundamental principle of international law is the principle of distinction. Now you’re contradicting yourself.” Yeah, I’ll admit it. I don’t think legal formulas can capture every situation. And I don’t believe a child who was born into a concentration camp is a legitimate target. If he, in this case, it is he, if he wants to be free. I can’t see it.
Now, how far are they allowed to go in order to break out of that camp? How far are they allowed to go? I think that’s a legitimate question. But here I’ll give you an example. In 1996, the International Court of Justice was asked to deliver what’s called an advisory opinion. The question put to the court was this, is the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal under international law? Is the use or the threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal under international law? Now, as all of you know, the fundamental principle of the laws of war is the distinction between civilians and combatants, between civilian sites, a military base, and so forth. So insofar as nuclear weapons by their inherent nature are unable to distinguish between civilians and combatants, civilian sites and military sites, insofar as they inherently can’t do that, the question obviously arises, are they legal under international law?
So there was a huge Supreme Court I.C.J. deliberation on this question, and their conclusion was that under almost all circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons was illegal under international law for the reasons just stated. However, the court said there’s one area where we can’t decide. And the area where we can’t decide, the court said, was what if the survival of a state was at stake? Namely, what if a country faced the prospect that an attack would come at the price of the disintegration of the state? And the I.C.J. said, well, maybe if a state, its survival was at stake, maybe the use of nuclear weapons might be justified. Now bear in mind, the I.C.J. did not deliberate on the survival of a people. It deliberated on the survival of a state. And so I say, if the International Court of Justice – the highest judicial body in the world – couldn’t decide whether you have the right to use nuclear weapons to defend the survival of your state, then I would say you clearly have the right to use armed force in order to protect the survival of your people. So, by current international law standards, I find it very hard to condemn the Palestinians, whatever they did. I find it very hard.
When I see the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Ilhan Omars, the Bernie Sanders, when they “condemn” the revolt of the inmates in the concentration camp. “Israel has the right to defend itself when the inmates breach the walls of the camp.” I spit on them. They nauseate me. But unfortunately, you can count on the fingers of one hand – and even less than the fingers in one hand – the number of people who showed any heart, any soul, any compassion for the God-forsaken people of Gaza.”
It is interesting to note that all these betrayals of the Palestinian cause are taking place at a time when, in the eyes of Western opinion, steeped in centuries of prejudice about the “superiority of the White man” and decades of Hollywood propaganda about the presumed supremacy of American armies and their allies, Gaza is about to be annihilated, its population about to undergo a mass and definitive deportation, and the Palestinian cause is about to breathe its last. We can only imagine the chorus of howls, cries and vociferations that will emanate from the capitals of the “civilized West” on the day when the forces of the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah…) enter the stage for the Great War of the Liberation of Palestine, which will inevitably end with the exodus of 6 million Zionist settlers to Europe and America, on the model of the end of French Algeria. On that day, which is much closer than most people imagine, the deafening silence in the face of the imminent total ethnic cleansing of the more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and the completion of that of the three million Palestinians in the West Bank, will be replaced by a thunder of enraged and impotent recriminations, threats of war and perhaps Armageddon if Israel is not saved. But at the end, when Palestine and its allies are victorious and settlers are forced to leave, all the hate speech about immigrants and the need to “remigrate” them whence they came from will turn into a bitter rivalry to welcome Jewish “refugees” expelled from the former State of Israel, as we saw during the war in Ukraine.
In a way, this situation is to be welcomed. It’s just as well that the masks are coming off. The Palestinian cause is too sacred for cowards, opportunists and hypocrites to claim to be among its defenders during the struggle, and to pretend to have worked for it, after the destruction of Israel, with their declarations of “support”. It is necessary that impostors be expunged from the ranks of the true defenders of the Palestinian cause, and that only its sincere supporters remain. This is perhaps the last condition for its Liberation.
The post Gaza: The Masks are off first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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New evidence has emerged on the devastating human rights impact of French fossil fuel giant TotalEnergies’ destructive oil and gas pipeline project in Uganda. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Ugandan authorities of harassing, arresting and beating activists and demonstrators protesting the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).
The news comes amidst a global crackdown on climate activists, and the while fossil fuel major announced another quarter of killer profits.
Activists and non-profits fight the EACOP project
TotalEnergies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation are joint venture partners on the $10-billion project to develop oilfields in Uganda.
The project involves fossil fuel companies drilling around 400 oil wells in Murchison Falls National Park. Notably, this is the largest protected area in Uganda. The companies will then transport the crude along the 1,445-kilometre (900-mile) EACOP to the Tanzanian port of Tanga.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has hailed the project as an economic boon. However, environmental and human rights organisations and activists have been fiercely opposing the project. The Canary has documented a number of these actions.
In February for instance, after the Tanzanian government greenlit the project, campaigners hosted a global day of action against it. Activists from the #StopEACOP movement targeted financial institutions linked to the project.
Then, in June we reported on the coalition of nonprofits taking the fossil fuel giant to court in Paris.
Moreover, activists have continued to keep up the heat. In August, campaigners from multiple organisations staged protests outside the offices of a number of the project’s potential insurers.
Ultimately, the numerous actions have called out EACOP’s shocking environmental and human rights impacts. As the Canary‘s Tracy Keeling has detailed, the project threatens nearly 2,000km² of biodiverse protected wildlife habitats.
Moreover, the Parliament of the European Union has estimated that the project could displace over 100,000 people.
To make matters worse, the Canary highlighted a Business and Human Rights Resource Centre report which singled out TotalEnergies for the impacts of EACOP on environmental defenders. In particular, attacks on rights defenders associated with the project placed TotalEnergies within the top five worst companies for these types of human rights violations.
Now, HRW’s new findings has built on this picture.
Crackdown against EACOP opponents
Its new report is entitled ‘Working On Oil is Forbidden’: Crackdown Against Environmental Defenders in Uganda. In it, HRW have documented the Ugandan government’s crackdown on freedoms of expression, association, and assembly. Moreover, the non-profit identified the repeated harassment, arbitrary arrests, and unlawful detention that authorities have subjected environmental defenders to for opposing the project.
HRW interviewed 31 people across Uganda and Tanzania between March and September 2023. This included 21 activists fighting the project from Uganda.
John Kaheero Mugisa is the former head of the Oil and Gas Human Rights Defenders Association, which is pushing for fair compensation for those displaced. Mugisa told HRW he was arrested several times and his health had deteriorated after seven months in prison.
Meanwhile, activists working in Uganda’s capital Kampala as well as Buliisa and Hoima – the two towns closest to the oilfields – said police raided their offices in 2021.
One activist told HRW:
Most of us limit our work because of pressure and threats from our local officials. We fear arrest and losing our livelihood
Moreover, police have issued threats against community members speaking out against their displacement for the project. Jealousy Mugisha travelled to France for a court hearing and said he was detained and interrogated for hours after returning to Uganda.
He told HRW that government security agents at the airport warned him:
You are not supposed to witness in France again. If you go again, you will lose your life.
A ‘chilling environment’ on human rights
Additionally, HRW also interviewed students police had arrested at demonstrations.
One of those HRW interviewed said security detained him during a protest in June at Uganda’s parliament. He explained to HRW that uniformed parliamentary security officials and others used:
batons, gun butts, and… their boots to step on our heads.
Senior environment researcher at HRW Felix Horne said of the findings that:
This crackdown has created a chilling environment that stifles free expression about one of the most controversial fossil fuel projects in the world. The government of Uganda should immediately end arbitrary arrests of anti-oil pipeline activists and protect their right to exercise freedom of expression, in accordance with international human rights norms
Of course, the repression of environmental defenders against the project reflects a global trend. In May, the French police suppressed protestors blocking the entrance to the fossil fuel major’s annual general meeting (AGM). As the Canary‘s Glen Black reported, the police curtailed the protest aggressively by:
firing teargas into the crowd. Videos on social media also appeared to show officers using pepper spray and physically assaulting people
Moreover, the London’s Met police used the UK’s new draconian anti-protest legislation on Just Stop Oil activists on Monday 30 October. The Guardian reported that:
Pictures and video circulated by the campaign showed officers kneeling on and handcuffing protesters, and carrying them into waiting police vans.
The activists were protesting the UK’s latest announcement of new offshore oil and gas licences, which it also announced on Monday. The government awarded TotalEnergies three of the 64 newly licensed blocks.
The fight continues against profiteering fossil fuel companies
Of course, HRW’s new damning report has arrived a week on from TotalEnergies third quarter profits announcement. On 26 October, the French fossil fuel giant posted $6.5bn in profits. The results took its shareholder pay-outs for 2023 to $11.9bn.
So, activists from across the world are keeping up the fight against the climate-wrecking profiteer – and in solidarity with communities and environmental defenders fighting the project.
On Friday 3 November, campaigners from a new coalition will begin a series of over 200 actions across multiple continents. Led by 350.org, the ‘Power Up’ coalition are demanding that governments make big polluter pay up to finance a just energy transition to renewables.
Kicking off the campaign in multiple cities across Europe, activists plan to stage a neon-lit parade on bicycles, roller skates and skateboards from TotalEnergies’ headquarters to the French Parliament district. Youth climate activist Pascal Mirindi from the Democratic Republic of Congo will speak on the devastating impacts of the EACOP project on communities in Africa.
Feature image via Reuters/Youtube screengrab.
Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse.
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This fall, the military junta in Niger compelled France to agree to withdraw its ambassador and 1,500 soldiers from the country. The decision followed an ultimatum from Nigerien authorities and a wave of protests demanding their expulsion, as well as a tense standoff at the French embassy. At the height of the crisis, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the junta had taken Ambassador…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As of Oct 23, France completed its military withdrawal from Niger following months of local protests. From 2013 to 2022, France deployed over 3,000 troops to the countries of the G5 Sahel (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) as part of a counterterrorism mission known as Operation Barkhane. After coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and now Niger, all three countries have expelled the French presence.
While coverage in western media has fixed on the coups themselves, the story on the ground is more complicated. The actions of the coup governments are backed by broad social movements and popular opposition to France’s relationship to the region, which extends far beyond Operation Barkhane. 14 countries in West and Central Africa have their currencies under the control of France in the form of the CFA Franc. 1 in 3 lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium mined from Niger, yet more than 80 percent of Nigeriens lack access to electricity. France’s influence in the region, though waning, is also backed up by the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), which has some 29 bases across the region, including the world’s largest drone base in Niger. These and other challenges are among those the new coup governments of the Sahel will have to overcome as they attempt to chart new paths forward for their countries.
Inemessit Richardson of the Thomas Sankara Center for Liberation and African Unity in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, speaks with The Real News about the anticolonial movement reshaping the Sahel, and what challenges lie ahead for the region as a new chapter dawns. Inemessit Richardson is President of the Thomas Sankara Center for Liberation and African Unity, a political education center and community library in Burkina Faso.
Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded on Sept. 26, 2023. France began its withdrawal from Niger on Oct. 10.
Additional links/info:
- Support the Thomas Sankara Center for Liberation and African Unity on Patreon or by making a donation on Cashapp.
- Follow the Thomas Sankara Center for Liberation and African Unity on Instagram.
- GoFundMe to support the Thomas Sankara Center’s Pan-African community library.
Studio Production: Adam Coley
Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Welcome to The Real News. My name is Ju-Hyun Park, engagement editor at The Real News. Today we’ll be talking about recent developments in the Sahel region of Africa, particularly the recent announcement by France that it is withdrawing militarily from its former colony of Niger. We’ll also discuss the three coup governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger that have arisen in the past couple of years to challenge French Neocolonialism in the region.
Before I begin, I’d like to remind our viewers that The Real News is a completely independent and not-for-profit news organization. We pride ourselves in telling the stories that corporate media won’t and we can tell those stories, because we don’t run advertisements or depend on corporate donors to keep the lights on. We’re powered by supporters such as yourself. So if you can, please take a moment to like, comment, and subscribe, and consider making a small donation to keep our reporting funded.
The Sahel region has undergone a major and rapid transformation in the past two years. From 2014 to 2022, France militarily occupied five nations in the region, all of them former colonies: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, where permanent French military bases were established as well as in Mauritania. The pretext for French occupation was a counter-terrorism mission known as Operation Barkhane, intended to enhance regional security. To be clear, the presence of armed militant groups throughout the Sahel is a major problem, one that goes back to the Libyan civil war when the US slash NATO destruction of the Libyan state and economy created the condition for many such militant organizations to proliferate throughout the region.
At its height, operation Barkhane saw 5,500 French troops deployed across the Sahel. Yet despite almost a decade of intervention, France failed to meaningfully curb violence in the region and stoked the anger of local populations through attacks on civilians such as an airstrike on a wedding in Mali in 2021, which killed 22 people. The fortunes of the French have turned with the rise of new coup governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, opposed to their continued presence. It ought to be noted that in the case of Mali and Burkina Faso, the governments of Assimi Goita and Ibrahim Traore, replaced prior military juntas that were friendly to the French and not the target of international sanctions.
The rise of these new governments has begun a rollback of French power, with France withdrawing from Mali in August 2022, and Burkina Faso ordering France to leave in January of this year. On July 26, Aku and Niger under the leadership of Abdur Haman Tchiani ousted former president Mohamed Bazoum. Since coming into power, the Tchiani government has set its sights on cutting Niger free of France for good. This has not only entailed ending military cooperation and demanding France withdraw its troops; Niger is also the second-largest supplier of uranium to the EU and French multinationals hold important stakes in the mining companies that own and exploit Niger’s mineral resources. Tchiani’s push to expel France militarily and economically has been backed up by social movements which have staged two months of nationwide protests demanding France’s departure. On September 22, France finally relented and announced the withdrawal of its troops and its diplomats.
So what lies ahead for the Sahel and how do we understand these recent events? Joining me today to help situate these developments, is an important guest for the Thomas Sakara Center for Liberation and African Unity in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The Thomas Sankara Center is a lending library and political education center in the Cissin neighborhood of Ouagadougou that has operated for two years. It provides political education courses and access to a library of anti-colonial and revolutionary texts that most Burkina Bay families would be otherwise unable to afford or access on their own. Inemesit Richardson is president of the Thomas Sankara Center and a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Inemesit, thank you for joining us.
Inemesit Richardson:
Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate talking to you.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Appreciate having you here. Now we’re certainly looking at a really momentous occasion today. It’s been two months of constant protests from Nigerians demanding the withdrawal of France. Could you start by helping us better understand the situation on the ground? What are the social movements and sectors of society that have mobilized in the last few months and what is driving them?
Inemesit Richardson:
Okay, well, we first need to understand that the Sahel region of Africa has been increasing in an anti-imperialist consciousness for many years. So what we’re seeing right now is the buildup of many years of mobilizing getting bigger and bigger and bigger, to the point that now we have heads of states who are representing these popular movements that are emerging from the cause of the masses of people. So if we look back to around 2018- 2019 or so, we see an eruption of mobilizing against the CFA Frank currency. And then very close to this time period we start to see mass-mobilizing protests growing to the point where it’s starting in the hundreds, growing to the thousands, to the tens of thousands in Mali against the French military operation. At one point Mali was really the base in the center.
They called their operation, Operation Barkhane, and it was based out of Mali primarily, but really across the Sahel. There was an alliance called the G5 Sahel Group with Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Mauretania. So all of those countries had some form of French military occupation. And so the movement, which at one point was very focused on the CFA Frank currency, and still is, became also a movement that was very much against military forms of imperialism. And Mali became at one point the center of that. And then once we see Mali has a coup and the coup leads to this progressive anti-imperialist government of Assimi Goita, we see an absolute explosion of mobilization and anti-imperialist consciousness at an all time high all across the Sahel region, including in Burkina Faso and in Niger.
And so well before the coup in Niger happened, there was the coup first in Mali. Then there was two coups in Burkina actually, the second one bringing about an anti-imperialist leader who took a similar move against France like Mali did. Then it became a question where, among the people it was almost like a matter of time when would Niger be the next one to go in this direction? The people were ready. There was a lot of false flag alerts coming from regular Niger citizens saying, okay, the coup’s going to happen soon, the coup’s happening. Until it finally did.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you so much for that background. It’s very important that you mentioned that in the case of both Mali and Burkina Faso, these were governments that were headed up by military juntas prior to the most recent coups. But it was only after these most recent coups took a stance against French intervention in the military sense as well as France’s economic neo-colonial control of the region, that these governments began to experience consequences from France and from neighboring states as well. To bring us into understanding the roots of these popular uprisings a little further, could you describe a little bit and explain some of what exactly the CFA Frank is for those of us who may be unfamiliar? What exactly, historically, is it coming from and what are its impacts on the actual societies which are subjected to it?
Inemesit Richardson:
Okay. The CFA Frank is a colonial currency. Now we can say it’s a neo-colonial currency. It’s a pretty unique currency in the sense that there aren’t very many currencies in the world, or really any that operate just like it, except for the Comorian Franc which is pretty much the same thing under a different name. So there are 14 countries in Africa that use this currency, plus Comoros, which has the same thing, like I said, but under a different name. It’s divided into two regions, one in West Africa and one in Central Africa, and they operate in the same way. Countries that use this currency have to hold about 50% of their national reserves in the French Treasury out in Paris. That number has changed in the past but if I’m not mistaken, it’s around 50% right now. The currency is anchored to the Euro, it’s pegged to the Euro.
The value of the currency does not reflect anything to do with any local economies existing within Africa. If the Euro increases in value, so does the CFA, if the Euro falls in value, so does the CFA. It’s really a fixed exchange rate that’s based on whatever rate is going to be favorable towards the EU and accessing raw materials at a favorable rate and also having a market to export their goods. It gives France voting and veto power in the two regional banks. There’s a regional bank in West Africa and there’s another regional bank that oversees the CFA in Central Africa. France has enormous power within those banks to pretty much determine certain financial agreements and economic trade agreements for the African countries that are in those regions and that use this currency.
And even though as I mentioned, both the currencies in West and Central Africa are the same, they’re like the same system, they have the same name, they operate in the same way, West and Central African currencies actually cannot trade directly with each other through the CFA Frank currency. They have to convert it to the Euro first and then transfer that back into the West African currency has to be transferred into the Euro and then converted into the Central African one and vice versa. I’m not necessarily the expert on the economics and monetary policy but I can say that there’s a great book that’s written about this, I believe it’s called Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Frank Story. I’m more familiar with the title in French, but it’s by Ndongo Samba Sylla and I believe Fanny Pigeaud, if I’m not mistaken. So I recommend that for people who are curious about how this currency operates.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah, thank you so much for that really insightful overview of the CFA. I feel like what you’re describing there is really an intentional system of dependency that’s being foisted onto nations in Western Central Africa, where a certain amount of their wealth is always going to be cycled back into France in the form of these reserves. And at the same time, because there are rules in terms of the ability to exchange one form of CFA for another, you have these two regional blocks that are economically being divided in a very artificial and unnatural way that is really only to the benefit of outsiders.
Pivoting a little bit to better understand the everyday ins and outs of Operation Barkhane, you’re speaking to us today from Burkina Faso. I’m wondering if you can share a little bit from your vantage what the experience of Operation Barkhane has been for everyday people in Burkina Faso? How have the last several years of civil conflict and French intervention really impacted people on the ground? And since you’ve also seen the rise of the Traoré government most recently, what has this new government meant for people in a material sense?
Inemesit Richardson:
Okay, so I’ll start by saying that Burkina Faso is a country that I admire a lot for its dignity. It’s a country that has a lot of dignity and that time and time again has really been on the forefront of defending its own sovereignty. And so I really admire that about this country in particular. But it is true that over the past several years now, the country has been in some ways, very much destabilized by these paramilitary terrorist organizations. A lot of this is blow back from the NATO invasion of Libya which led to a power vacuum in the Libyan state. And certain groups are able to access Libyan arms from the fallen state and bring those into the Sahel. And there’s been immense crisis ever since.
Ouagadougou, since I’ve been here, is an area of the country that sees less of this violence directly. Most of the violence is towards the Malian border and the Nigerian border areas but we feel a lot of the impact of what it means to be in a state that’s currently waging war against these paramilitary groups. And so we understand this is the state, as much as I don’t want to paint a picture of crisis within Ouagadougou, where on a day-to-day basis here in the capital, things are relatively safe. At the same time, there are internally displaced people, people who have fleed from those northern regions that have had to abandon their agriculture, which has had an impact on the country’s economy. It’s destroyed the tourist economy. Burkina Faso hosts the largest film festival on the African continent, FESPACO, and it’s been severely impacted by these attacks.
And then there’s a level of fear living in a context where there are these groups that are operating and we see that it’s had a massive impact on people’s lives. One of the ways it’s impacted Ouagadougou, it’s increased general poverty and hardship across the country as a whole. Like I said, there’s places where people would have agriculture and have farms where they can’t anymore. There’s less people who are coming in. Also, the people-to-people relationships in the Sahel are so strong. There’s so many people who have family members who are in Mali or in Niger and those border areas are generally pretty fluid with people constantly going back and forth. But it is extremely dangerous right now to take common routes to Niger or to Mali and even certain villages that are people’s villages that they’ve fled from. They can no longer go back right now because a lot of these villages are in a situation of crisis and warfare.
A lot of sections of the country there’s a huge migration out of those regions and they’ve been a little bit siphoned off from the rest. People don’t go there anymore and people aren’t able to have those people to people connections, visit their family members who live on the Malian side of the border or the Nigerian side of the border. So it’s been pretty devastating these past few years for the country as a whole. And pretty much every day there’s people who are talking about how do we come up with a solution towards this violence? And people have realized that the best solution is one that is not relying on Western military intervention, to say there’s no trust at all between ordinary people and these western militaries, the French military, the US, and Germany.
The movement started off very specifically calling out France and then more and more I’m hearing NATO being evoked and people starting to realize more and more that it’s not a question of France but this whole NATO camp. And the average, I say average person, it’s a very widespread question right now is asking where are these groups getting their arms? We don’t have weapons that are manufactured in this region. How are they so well armed? Where are they getting these supplies from? There’s a lot of distrust, a lot of people who are saying, is it really in the interest of these western governments to be fighting terrorism? Or is it not more in their interest to prolong this situation, so that they can stay here longer where they have access to the resources that they want to have, the partnerships that they wanted to have, at least with the heads of states prior to the current ones.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you so much for that really expansive overview of what we’re dealing with here. Too often it is easy to forget that these stories of big geopolitical shifts really concern the lives of millions of people, people who are dealing with, as you’re saying, poverty with insecurity. From what it sounds like, also separation from loved ones, from their homes, from their families. So it really is in the interests of the majority of people to find a solution to the crisis that has gripped the region in the last several years. And that seems to be something that is very important for us to have a grounding in as we look to what’s been going on more at the state level, that we have to understand that there are popular demands and there is a popular will that’s backing up the agendas that we’re seeing from these new governments.
Shifting gears a little bit, you mentioned the role of the US or rather NATO, and I was wondering if we could get into that a little bit. Because a lot of the activities that we’ve been seeing from the outside seem to be focused on expelling the French but they aren’t the only foreign military presence in the region. They’re not the only international player that’s involved in the Sahel. The US is also a major player. It has the largest drone base in the world located in Agadez, in Nige. Also as we know USAFRICOM, which stands for African Command, has a massive and growing presence throughout the continent that is involved with multiple governments either at the level of direct military occupations, at the level of military trainings and consultations with various countries.
So can you help us better understand the role of the US military and NATO in conjunction with the French? And it seems that you’re mentioning that NATO is becoming more of a target but if you could comment a little bit on the status of that and what people are seeing as a priority on the ground at the moment.
Inemesit Richardson:
Okay. I’ll say when I first came here, I almost never heard people speaking as critically about the US. People understood the US was there and still to some extent right now, the US is treated more like a minor player, at least within the context of Burkina Faso. The US and France have done imperialism a little bit differently in the past few years and it’s led to a different outcome; France has been a little bit more forward and visible, especially with things like the CFA Frank and also with some of the companies that operate on the ground here. We have Orange for our telecommunications company which is a primarily French based, though multinational, company. We have companies like Total that are everywhere. So there’s more visibility on France’s end but increasingly, people are understanding that NATO is really an alliance. Which means that these countries are working together and at the end of the day, they represent the same interests.
They might sometimes have little competition between them but they really represent the same interests and the same status quo. So people are increasingly critical of the West as a whole. Especially in the context of Niger, like you said, Agadez is one of the largest AFRICOM drone bases. It’s between Agadez and Lemunje in Djibouti that are the massive US military presences. And people don’t know this as much but the CIA has their own drone base in Niger. It’s located in the village of Druku, which is near the Libyan border but it’s on the Niger side. There’s been a massive US military presence in Niger. I mentioned earlier that France has concentrated in recent years on Mali before they were expelled and then they moved even more into Niger.
They were always everywhere but Mali was like the French headquarters. Niger was really like the US headquarters in terms of the US’ strategic military interest. Not to say that they aren’t all everywhere but the base was biggest for the US within Niger. I’ve seen, especially on the Nigerian side of things, there is a little bit less of this exclusive French focus. There have been mobilizations that have been very clearly saying we need the US to get out. We need AFRICOM to get out. And people recognize it’s increasingly… It’s a question of the West, a question of NATO, seeing that at the end of the day, their interests tend to always align.
people are very clear that the countries they want to work with are not at all in that camp. They want to leave that… The US, France, and Germany are also present in the Sahel. They want to leave all those players behind. They recognize this history of exploitation. People know about the history of the CIA in Africa and they’re really looking to partner with countries that for once can actually be a partnership. Not a neo-colonial relationship but countries that are willing to work in a way that’s mutually beneficial and talks of technology transfers that US or France never ever put on the table.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah, that point you raised about technology transfers is really important. As we’ve been saying, Niger as well as Burkina Faso and Mali are really important sources of minerals and other primary commodities to the global economy. I believe that Niger is something like the second-largest provider of uranium to the EU and most of the… There are French multinationals that hold very important stakes in a lot of the mining companies that own and exploit the mineral resources of Niger. So I’m wondering, looking ahead to questions beyond the immediate moment, beyond the struggle to expel the French, beyond the struggle to expand people’s political understanding, beyond the French military presence, what future is being charted by the three governments that we’ve seen in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger? Is there a common vision that’s being strove towards and implemented? And what are the real prospects of seeing progress on that in the next few years?
Inemesit Richardson:
That’s a good question. So on the grassroots level, what the people have called for is Pan-Africanism and that’s being taken up now and it’s actually being taken quite seriously by some of these heads of state. I really think especially here in Burkina Faso, the Traoré administration, Prime Minister Kyélem de Tambèla, they seem to be taking this question of Pan-Africanism quite seriously. And what do people mean by that? A lot of people right now are turning to this vision of people like Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure and Modibo Keita. Modibo Keita was a Pan-African leader out of Mali. The three of those leaders, they signed an agreement saying that they would start the creation of a United States of Africa. They call it the Union of African States: the Ghana, Guinea, Mali Alliance. And there’s a long history of this call for a totally unified Africa and people are interested more and more in this history of Pan-Africanism and then more and more exploring what it could have looked like.
Thomas Sankara of course, is a huge inspiration across Burkina, the Sahel, and the African continent as a whole. He’s also evoked as a Pan-African leader who stood up for African Unity. Cheikh Anta Diop is lesser known maybe outside of this region, but he’s talked about a lot. He has some great books that he’s written about Pan-Africanism that I see more and more people are interested in. There have been calls for and mobilizations for this totally unified Africa, this United States of Africa vision. There’s also been… Some of this has translated into what’s talked about federation and there’s questions about what a federation could look like. But I know on the people to people level, the idea of the federation is inspired by the Mali Federation, which was a federation that existed between what is now Senegal, Mali at Burkina Faso — At the time it was upper Volta and then Benin, at Daomem — Were invited to join though it never really concretized.
But this again was this idea of a federal government linking together several African states that were divided through this colonial history and process. So people really want this unified Africa. Muammar Gaddafi’s also talked about a lot as somebody who called for this, who confronted the currency question head on, so that Africa needs a universal currency. And so people really want to live in an Africa where there is a shared currency, where there’s shared citizenship, freedom of movement, there’s transportation to get around and navigate a shared passport. Everything that we would understand a federal government to look like and encompass: shared foreign policy, et cetera, militarily even that’s a big question. Why is it that we have countries like… Nigeria has had problems with Boko Haram for how many years now? Then Mali is fighting against these terrorist paramilitary organizations and then we have hyper-militarism and intervention in the Horn of Africa. And the way we operate is like every African for himself or herself.
And so this is really being called into question, why are we operating in this way? And then we see NATO for example, they have a shared military unit and even though we disagree with their politics and their analysis and where they present themselves, at least the idea of NATO is this touch one, touch all idea. It’s like if the people who are exploiting Africa have that mentality, it’s only normal that Africa moves more and more and more towards the closest forms of unity that we can arrive at.
Ju-Hyun Park:
That’s a really excellent and cogent point that you’re offering there: If the world is going to be shaped by the Pan-Europeanism that’s embodied within NATO, why should there not also be a Pan-Africanism that is in opposition to that operating for the purpose of achieving real independence, sovereignty, and truly wellbeing for African people within the continent and arguably around the world? You’ve raised a lot of really important points. It’s a really beautiful and significant thing that there are people looking back to the very recent revolutionary history of the continent for inspiration in terms of a chart to path forward. And we’re already seeing some of those foundations being laid. Last week, The Alliance of Sahel States, the AES, was announced between Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Guinea. I’m wondering if you can provide our audience with a little bit of context as to what this new security and mutual assistance alliance really is, where it’s coming from, and what goals it’s intending to accomplish?
Inemesit Richardson:
Okay. Burkina Faso and Mali we’re the first states to begin to disentangle themselves from France, beginning militarily. And I believe the currency question is really what’s on the table in the immediate future. And very early on once Burkina Faso started to follow in this direction that Mali charted, immediately the prime ministers and the heads of states got together to begin talking about this federation. It’s so popular that people walked on foot from Bamako to Ouagadougou. I don’t want to get this wrong but it’s something like 800 kilometers to arrive from Bamako to Ouagadougou. So that’s how strongly people feel. There was another delegation that I believe set off from Mali near the border of Mauritania. I don’t know how long that route was but people really were walking on foot to express how deeply they believed in this cause of African unity in the creation of a federation that would unite African people.
And the heads of state did take this up. The prime ministers took this up. There was a meeting earlier in the year between the prime ministers of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea, where they first announced that they were working on this question of creating a federation and that any African country that wants to join is welcome to join it. Again, at the Russia-Africa summit that happened in July of this year, president Ibrahim Traore revoked this and said we are still working on this federation and we want to unify with Mali. Then, more recently, as you mentioned, there’s this new alliance of Sahelian states, which I believe is really following in the same direction. If you read what the charter said, it has actually exactly what I was referring to with this touch one, touch all mentality.
It says that any attack on the sovereignty of any one of the states that is in this alliance will be considered an attack on all of the states. They really started to form into this block and people are going to keep encouraging the states to push further and further and further until we can get as close as possible. Like I said, it’s a devastating time where people who have families on different sides of the borders cannot even cross those borders to see their loved ones. This is the context of a part of the world where these borders were drawn so arbitrarily, really competition between European states largely, especially with the Ghana Burkina border but within the French border.
France has reconstituted these small sub-regional administrative units so many times and one of the conditions for achieving independence was that states could not unify that independence and decide to overcome these colonial divisions. It was one of the conditions that they respect these boundaries. I know so many people who their villages are practically cutting across these borders. It’s like the people in the eastern side of Burkina Faso, the western side of Burkina Faso, they speak the same language as the majority of people in Mali.
It’s really like this all over every border area you get to. So people really feel strongly about the position these heads of states are taking in favor of having a greater and greater unity.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you so much for that overview. And a really important element in pushing these four nations to come together has also been the level of backlash that they’ve experienced, not only from France and the US but also from the Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS, which quite significantly was threatening an invasion of Niger and up to, I believe, an expiration date of August 6. But there still continued to be some discussion around that. And of course there’s been all manner of sanctions, particularly harsh against Niger, which I believe has had 70% of its electricity production cutoff from neighboring Nigeria.
I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what you believe might be the future development of these threats against the AES, particularly given that now France is announcing its withdrawal, does this mean that from here on out things are going to improve? Is there a possibility that there could be even more pressure applied from within ECOWAS to either stage some military intervention or to increase sanctions and other coercive measures against these countries?
Inemesit Richardson:
It’s amazing that France is retreating from Niger. They’ve really been forced out. They’ve been pushed out. They have no choice that people of Niger don’t want them there. I also think there’s going to be consequences and backlash that we are anticipating and the people know there’s going to be backlash and there’s a mentality here that we’re preparing for what that will look like on the ground across these states. Like you mentioned, the sanctions in Niger are already quite severe and have already impacted a lot of regular working people. The prices of a lot of basic goods have increased overnight and that’s the result of ECOWAS sanctions. The problem with the ECOWAS dynamic within the Sahel is that it’s so unpopular already within the other ECOWAS states, we’ve seen protests in Benin, we’ve seen protests in Nigeria, we’ve seen protests in Senegal.
These are some of the main countries that are spearheading these threats against Niger. From what I understand, there was a French warship that pulled up to the shores of Benin; At least people believed that that was what the vehicle was, that was in Benin’s waters, and that led to even more mobilizations in Benin. It’s the same dynamic with mentioning across the African continent with some of these border areas, so like the north of Nigeria and much of the south of Niger, these are the same people who have been families on both sides of the border and are changing forever. And so there’s massive backlash and it makes the situation a little tricky for ECOWAS. These are already very unpopular leaders. Tinubu of Nigeria has already been called into question by a lot of Nigerians in regards to the election and whether or not that was legitimate.
Macky Sall in Senegal, my gosh. There’s been mobilizations and the streets of Dakar have been lit on fire in mobilizations against Macky Sall. So these are massively unpopular leaders which puts them in a tricky situation. But what we are seeing outside of these sanctions — And I don’t know if they’ll continue, what that’ll look like, and for how long — But what we are seeing is that western countries are sanctioning the Sahel. So the US and the EU now have stations on Mali, claiming that Mali is working with Wagner, the Russian group, which the Malian government has never confirmed. They’ve always said that they haven’t. I strongly believe that African countries can work with whoever they want and that has nothing to do with the West. Their sanctions are illegal. There’s no legal process… That should be in place. We are supposed to legalize sanctions. So there’s illegal sanctions that are imposed on Mali. Germany has actually been at the forefront of pushing the EU towards sanctioning Niger.
This is something that personally I anticipate, and I’m waiting to see, will Niger be sanctioned? Burkina Faso doesn’t have those Western sanctions on it yet but that’s another thing. I am waiting to see it and holding my breath anticipating that these sanctions are going to come, especially since they’ve already come and they’ve already been placed on Mali. This economic warfare will be a strategy towards repressing these states.
And to add real quick, these are landlocked countries. Imposing sanctions on landlocked countries is exponentially more severe because we don’t have access to the water to be able to easily connect with countries that would otherwise be open to trading with us or being friendly. There is a level of dependence where we would need ECOWAS to support in solidarity or some coastal state. We’re lucky that we have Guinea-Conakry right now who has taken a position in defense of Mali, Burkina, and Niger, but it’s really, really hard imposing sanctions on alignment countries. Very devastating.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Absolutely, and we see how these sanctions are also extremely political in the sense of trying to enforce a certain agenda upon these countries. We mentioned before that in the case of Mali and Burkina, there were already junta governments in power before the current coups happened. And these governments were not under sanctions because they were complying with an agenda that was amenable to the US and to the EU. But now that there are governments in power that are trying to put forward a more sovereign and more independent development path and way of relating to their neighbors and to the wider world, suddenly the hammer is coming down. Suddenly there is so much concern over the internal democracy and the state of the politics within these countries,which of course is really a smokescreen for these other agendas that have a lot more to do with the interests of multinationals within the Sahel at large.
The picture that we’re establishing is that this is really momentous that France is being forced from Niger, but the struggle is not over yet. There’s still a lot of possibility for increased repression, a lot of possibility for increased blow back, but there are also other currents and other trends that we should be looking at. You mentioned the protests that are taking place in Senegal, that have taken place in Nigeria and in Benin as well, and even from the standpoint of really uprooting the French presence in the Sahel, there’s more to be done. There’s still the permanent military base in Chad. There continues to be, as we mentioned before, French control of the CFA Frank. So I’m wondering what opportunities you see going ahead? Is there a possibility for increased resistance in any one of these countries in particular? Is this a regional situation that we need to keep an eye on in multiple places, or are there particular hotspots that could be next to sort of breakthrough the current moment?
Inemesit Richardson:
That’s a great question. Because for me — At least from my standpoint — I felt that the coup in Niger was very predictable and from the position that I’m in, a lot of people talked about and anticipated a coup in Niger for a very long time. But it’s a little harder to see where to go from here. We do see, like I mentioned, mass mobilizations against French imperialism in Senegal, but Senegal is also a country that has a very different relationship with its military. It’s one of the few West African countries that’s never had a coup before. It’s sometimes treated like a bragging point where there’s a UA dynamic sometimes with the Senegalese protests. They’re anti [inaudible 00:39:55] but also pro-democracy, defining democracy in a narrow, I would say bourgeois, sometimes electoral list way. It’s fine if there’s a progressive outcome but long story short, it’s a different relationship with the military.
So it’s hard to say whether or not there’d be a coup in a place like Senegal. Patrice Talon is very unpopular in Benin. I don’t know. Again, it’s a different context a little bit because they don’t have as much of the boots on the ground French military-style invasion in Benin, but he’s very unpopular. So if he was overthrown somehow, I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised. There’s this context of Chad that you mentioned. It’s a good example of a coup government that the West has supported. Mohammed Dewji took power from his father, Idris Dewji, who ruled over the country for decades, in a coup.
And that coup was not denounced and Chad was not sanctioned in this way, and there was no we’re going to invade Chad. It was pretty much like all, cool, we know this family. This is the Dewjis, they’ve allied with us for a long time. And so it’s a country that has a lot of potential to follow this trend. The problem is that Mohammed Dewji has proved himself to be very, very, what’s the word? It’s a dangerous situation to mobilize in and that makes it harder.
Protestors came out on the streets last year and they were gunned down. It’s a very repressive situation but it’s still a situation where there’s a lot of potential, especially because it’s really in this same region that’s having these massive uprisings and people are fed up with France and are fed up with the Western countries. We’re seeing coups in Central Africa now. I would say that so far the one that happened in Gabon is a very different character than the ones that have happened in the Sahel. Unfortunately, it seems like the new administration in Gabon is one that was closely allied with the Bongo leaders in that history of we call Françafrique. But the fact that it happened is very interesting.
It remains to see will he be able to hold onto power? What’s going to happen? Burkina Faso had a more reactionary coup before we got the progressive one. It’s a little bit difficult, different in Central Africa but again, people are seeing what’s happening across the pond in the West Africa region and maybe there is potential for that to erupt into a bigger anti-imperialist movement that could be calling into question France’s role. And then hopefully it’s happening, this expanding into a question of AFRICOM and NATO as well.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Excellent. Thank you so much for that overview. What we’re clearly seeing is that there are bright spots, there are opportunities, there is some hope to be seen in these other situations, but of course the situation is very complex and the challenges are very real. The repression you mentioned in Chad is something that really has gone uncommented on. I was reading recently, I believe more than a 100 people were killed at that protest that you mentioned last year, and up to a 1,000 people have also been arrested in the crackdown that followed.
So there is a real danger that people are facing on the ground but of course we want to lend all our support for the bravery that they’re demonstrating and for their continued struggle. I do want to be respectful of your time. You’ve given so much of it. I also wanted to ask one final question, particularly given your specific background. You’ve come to Burkina Faso from the US. You are a member of the AAPRP, which is a party that operates internationally for a Pan-Africanist horizon. So I was wondering, as you’ve been in the context of Burkina Faso during this really historically transformative experience, what inspiration and lessons do you think African people beyond the Sahel and even beyond the contenant, can take from these struggles?
Inemesit Richardson:
One of the things that Burkina Faso taught me is that sovereignty is possible and that Pan-Africanism is possible. Sometimes I talk to African people who live in various parts of the world and it seems like this is such a far off thing. It’s such a huge ambitious goal but is it really realistic? And if there’s something that’s so fulfilling and inspirational to be on the ground somewhere where people really believe in the unity of African people worldwide, believe that we can be sovereign, believe that we can overthrow neocolonialism and all forms of imperialism, and that Africa can really defend itself and represent something on the world stage in a dignified way. It’s hard to live in the context of after the slave trade ends, then there’s the colonial period, and then after the colonial period it’s like neocolonialism.
It’s been hundreds and hundreds of years of various iterations of exploitation so I understand why a lot of people feel like, okay, this is it, and we’re not getting off the plantation, as some people would say. But being here, I really, really feel like it’s possible. And not even possible, it’s inevitable. I witnessed… And to say Burkina Faso is a context where it’s like I am around people who are 16, 17, 18 years old saying, I would give my life to defend Africa. There’s such a heightened level of consciousness among people who are so young and there’s this mentality of we have everything, we have nothing to lose, and we have everything to gain.
So being on the ground here, it’s really transformative. I really encourage African people and all oppressed and colonized people worldwide, to get involved with organizations that are fighting for liberation, to stand up to the empire. And African people, like I said, we should all be in Pan-African organizations. We should all join organizations, Pan-Africanism is possible, and it’s not something that was happening in the ’60s and is over. It’s something that people are willing to live and die for on the ground in multiple parts of the African continent and around the world.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Well, that’s incredible. And Inemesit, thank you so much for your time. This has been in Inemesit Richardson from the Thomas Sankara Center for Liberation and African Unity here on The Real News. We’ll be signing off now but are looking forward to staying up to date with developments on the ground in the Sahel and with the broader vision towards a United Socialist Pan-African State. Thank you so much.
Inemesit Richardson:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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France’s new Education Minister, Gabriel Attal, launched the 2023 school year with a thunderous announcement: “I decided it will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school,” he said, in the name of a preposterous conception of secularism (or laïcité) adopted by President Emmanuel Macron.
This “abaya ban” is a serious violation of the fundamental rights of presumed Muslim (i.e., racialized) pupils, who are unfairly stigmatized and discriminated against.
Though he is the youngest Minister of the Fifth Republic, 34-year-old Attal used the oldest and dirtiest trick in the book, namely the politics of scapegoating an oppressed, defenseless minority. Just like his predecessors, who were fond of such nauseating polemics that obscure the real and glaring problems of the French educational system.
Aminata, Assma, Yasmine, Alicia, Hassina, sent home for “non-compliant outfits”
What is an abaya?
The term “abaya” refers to a variety of dresses of varying lengths, which are in no way religion-specific garments, but simple fashion items with a cultural connotation at most. Major brands such as Zara, H & M and Dolce & Gabbana have been making their own for a long time.
As proof of this, when Sonia Backès, the French Secretary of State in charge of Citizenship, was shown several types of dresses on TV and asked to identify if they were abayas and whether they should be accepted or forbidden in schools, she hesitated, stammered and side-stepped the question, replying that “it depends on the context.”
Thus, in a quasi-official manner, the criteria for acceptance or rejection depend not on the garment itself, but on the pupil wearing it and their supposed religion, something that has only been based on their skin color and/or name. At the height of hypocrisy, Attal justified this blatant discrimination by saying that “you shouldn’t be able to distinguish, to identify the religion of pupils by looking at them.”
A traumatic start to the school year
Yet this is exactly what has been happening since the start of the school year, with hundreds, if not thousands, of middle- and high- school girls being scrutinized, hounded, stigmatized and humiliated, even blackmailed, and ordered to partially undress or be sent home for wearing outfits as neutral as a tunic, skirt or kimono, deemed too loose or too covering, as if the suspected modesty was a crime of lese-laicity. This obsession with controlling women’s bodies is reminiscent of the colonial period.
“Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!” Propaganda poster distributed in 1957 by the Fifth Bureau of Psychological Action of the French Colonial Army in Algeria, urging Muslim women to take off their Islamic scarf.
Ironically, such a step places France alongside retrograde countries such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that have instituted a “morality police” enforcing a strict dress code, with the notable distinction that French bans do not apply to everyone, but only to pupils presumed to be Muslim.
One can only be outraged by the criminalization of teenage girls through traumatizing interrogations and expulsions, which take place outside any legal framework and could only be justified by a proper disciplinary procedure. Attal’s office counted the cases of pupils wearing abayas to the nearest unit (unlike the number of missing teachers, a plague touching half the secondary schools, as a Teacher’s Union found out).
Attal even sent journalists a list of the middle schools and high schools concerned, inviting them to cover the start of the new school year there. This showed no regard for the serenity and safety of staff and pupils, sacrificed to the media hype surrounding this new witch-hunt.
This amounts to real institutional harassment, sponsored by the same person who claims to find it “unbearable that a pupil should go to school with a lump in his stomach because he is harassed” and to make this issue a priority (notably through “empathy courses,” a quality this government clearly lacks). It is another eloquent example of Macron’s famous “at the same time” (advocating one thing and doing the opposite).
Laicity or “laicism”?
The abaya ban has nothing to do with secularism, which is even flouted by this political attempt to unilaterally extend the domain of what is religious. Rather, it is the very thing that the candidate Emmanuel Macron himself denounced in 2016-2017 as “laicism,” this “radical and extreme version of secularism that feeds on contemporary fears”, and which targets Islam exclusively, turning millions of our fellow Muslims into “enemies of the Republic”.
By considering the wearing of simple clothing as a deliberate attack on secularism, a concerted offensive “in an attempt to challenge the republican system,” or even a reminder of the 2015 terrorist attacks and the murder of the teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded for showing his pupils derogatory “Charlie Hebdo” cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam, Macron and his ministers unmask themselves, adopting a discourse that was reserved for the most hateful right-wingers.
By putting tens of thousands of teenagers under suspicion – behind their qamis and abayas – of being “enemies from within,” united to bring down republican values and even of being potential terrorists and by urging us to be “relentless” against these migrants, they are descending into a kind of State conspiracy-mongering that is as absurd as it is abject.
This insidious logic of stigmatization and exclusion was already at work in the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools, opposed by teacher unions such as the CGT Éduc’action as it only really targeted the Islamic veil, described as “proselytizing” and “ostentatious” in a grotesque abuse of language that heralded current and future excesses.
Far from turning schools into a protected “sanctuary,” these politically driven measures are spreading racism, sexism and hatred and turning them into a veritable battleground. This alleged desire for emancipation through coercion to impose an arbitrarily defined “republican dress code” on suspicious middle- and high-school girls flouts the concept of equal treatment of pupils and the inalienable right of some of them to choose their clothing style, driving them to angst and failure at school. Will we have to wait for a tragedy to put an end to this “shame”?
Worse still, these vexatious measures may give rise to a whole generation of teenagers — an age that is particularly sensitive to injustice — who have a legitimate distrust and resentment of the institution and its staff, who are transformed into the zealous auxiliaries of a kind of “dress police,” coupled with a “police of intentions” summoned to track down alleged Islamist overtones (which would be both conspicuous and concealed — a very French oxymoron) behind inoffensive fabrics.
The “communitarianism” and “separatism” that are supposedly fought against can only emerge stronger, just like the far-right, which is closer to power than ever thanks to the institutional backing given to its prejudices, rhetoric and fallacious battles, adopted by a dubious “republican arc,” which reaches as far as the French Communist Party.
The real priorities
This umpteenth polemic, validated by docile and irresponsible media echo chambers, and by part of the left, conveniently eclipses from the headlines all the glaring problems from which public education, its staff and users are suffering: shortage of teachers and assistants for pupils with special needs; job cuts and class closures; incessant budget cuts; lack of attractiveness of our underpaid professions; difficult working conditions; overcrowded and overheated classrooms due to under-resourcing of establishments and inadequacy of equipment and premises; international downgrading in terms of achievements; inflation; impoverishment of the population, with nearly 2,000 children on the street and tens of thousands out of schools; and so on.
Instead of tackling these fundamental problems, the government prefers to continue its authoritarian headlong rush and its policy of deliberately destroying public services for the benefit of the private sector. Moreover, this same government will have no trouble presenting the General National Service [a monthly session in military facilities for high school pupils] and the uniform — symbols of its reactionary vision of schooling currently being tested — as a panacea for problems fully of its own creation, with measures which tend only to bring young people into line and divide society even further.
Every individual has the fundamental right to choose their clothing without being subjected to discriminatory restrictions. The abaya ban is an unacceptable intrusion into pupils’ privacy and constitutes an attack on their freedom and personal identity, trampling underfoot the ideas of inclusion, living-together and acceptance of differences that are officially advocated.
The lack of response from teachers’ unions and the civil society to this iniquitous law, which scorns the vocation of educational staff and tarnishes the image of France abroad, speaks volumes about the normalization of Islamophobia in the so-called “Cradle of Human Rights” and the oppression and helplessness of its millions-strong Muslim community.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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France’s new Education Minister, Gabriel Attal, launched the 2023 school year with a thunderous announcement: “I decided it will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school,” he said, in the name of a preposterous conception of secularism (or laïcité) adopted by President Emmanuel Macron.
This “abaya ban” is a serious violation of the fundamental rights of presumed Muslim (i.e., racialized) pupils, who are unfairly stigmatized and discriminated against.
Though he is the youngest Minister of the Fifth Republic, 34-year-old Attal used the oldest and dirtiest trick in the book, namely the politics of scapegoating an oppressed, defenseless minority. Just like his predecessors, who were fond of such nauseating polemics that obscure the real and glaring problems of the French educational system.
Aminata, Assma, Yasmine, Alicia, Hassina, sent home for “non-compliant outfits”
What is an abaya?
The term “abaya” refers to a variety of dresses of varying lengths, which are in no way religion-specific garments, but simple fashion items with a cultural connotation at most. Major brands such as Zara, H & M and Dolce & Gabbana have been making their own for a long time.
As proof of this, when Sonia Backès, the French Secretary of State in charge of Citizenship, was shown several types of dresses on TV and asked to identify if they were abayas and whether they should be accepted or forbidden in schools, she hesitated, stammered and side-stepped the question, replying that “it depends on the context.”
Thus, in a quasi-official manner, the criteria for acceptance or rejection depend not on the garment itself, but on the pupil wearing it and their supposed religion, something that has only been based on their skin color and/or name. At the height of hypocrisy, Attal justified this blatant discrimination by saying that “you shouldn’t be able to distinguish, to identify the religion of pupils by looking at them.”
A traumatic start to the school year
Yet this is exactly what has been happening since the start of the school year, with hundreds, if not thousands, of middle- and high- school girls being scrutinized, hounded, stigmatized and humiliated, even blackmailed, and ordered to partially undress or be sent home for wearing outfits as neutral as a tunic, skirt or kimono, deemed too loose or too covering, as if the suspected modesty was a crime of lese-laicity. This obsession with controlling women’s bodies is reminiscent of the colonial period.
“Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!” Propaganda poster distributed in 1957 by the Fifth Bureau of Psychological Action of the French Colonial Army in Algeria, urging Muslim women to take off their Islamic scarf.
Ironically, such a step places France alongside retrograde countries such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that have instituted a “morality police” enforcing a strict dress code, with the notable distinction that French bans do not apply to everyone, but only to pupils presumed to be Muslim.
One can only be outraged by the criminalization of teenage girls through traumatizing interrogations and expulsions, which take place outside any legal framework and could only be justified by a proper disciplinary procedure. Attal’s office counted the cases of pupils wearing abayas to the nearest unit (unlike the number of missing teachers, a plague touching half the secondary schools, as a Teacher’s Union found out).
Attal even sent journalists a list of the middle schools and high schools concerned, inviting them to cover the start of the new school year there. This showed no regard for the serenity and safety of staff and pupils, sacrificed to the media hype surrounding this new witch-hunt.
This amounts to real institutional harassment, sponsored by the same person who claims to find it “unbearable that a pupil should go to school with a lump in his stomach because he is harassed” and to make this issue a priority (notably through “empathy courses,” a quality this government clearly lacks). It is another eloquent example of Macron’s famous “at the same time” (advocating one thing and doing the opposite).
Laicity or “laicism”?
The abaya ban has nothing to do with secularism, which is even flouted by this political attempt to unilaterally extend the domain of what is religious. Rather, it is the very thing that the candidate Emmanuel Macron himself denounced in 2016-2017 as “laicism,” this “radical and extreme version of secularism that feeds on contemporary fears”, and which targets Islam exclusively, turning millions of our fellow Muslims into “enemies of the Republic”.
By considering the wearing of simple clothing as a deliberate attack on secularism, a concerted offensive “in an attempt to challenge the republican system,” or even a reminder of the 2015 terrorist attacks and the murder of the teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded for showing his pupils derogatory “Charlie Hebdo” cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam, Macron and his ministers unmask themselves, adopting a discourse that was reserved for the most hateful right-wingers.
By putting tens of thousands of teenagers under suspicion – behind their qamis and abayas – of being “enemies from within,” united to bring down republican values and even of being potential terrorists and by urging us to be “relentless” against these migrants, they are descending into a kind of State conspiracy-mongering that is as absurd as it is abject.
This insidious logic of stigmatization and exclusion was already at work in the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools, opposed by teacher unions such as the CGT Éduc’action as it only really targeted the Islamic veil, described as “proselytizing” and “ostentatious” in a grotesque abuse of language that heralded current and future excesses.
Far from turning schools into a protected “sanctuary,” these politically driven measures are spreading racism, sexism and hatred and turning them into a veritable battleground. This alleged desire for emancipation through coercion to impose an arbitrarily defined “republican dress code” on suspicious middle- and high-school girls flouts the concept of equal treatment of pupils and the inalienable right of some of them to choose their clothing style, driving them to angst and failure at school. Will we have to wait for a tragedy to put an end to this “shame”?
Worse still, these vexatious measures may give rise to a whole generation of teenagers — an age that is particularly sensitive to injustice — who have a legitimate distrust and resentment of the institution and its staff, who are transformed into the zealous auxiliaries of a kind of “dress police,” coupled with a “police of intentions” summoned to track down alleged Islamist overtones (which would be both conspicuous and concealed — a very French oxymoron) behind inoffensive fabrics.
The “communitarianism” and “separatism” that are supposedly fought against can only emerge stronger, just like the far-right, which is closer to power than ever thanks to the institutional backing given to its prejudices, rhetoric and fallacious battles, adopted by a dubious “republican arc,” which reaches as far as the French Communist Party.
The real priorities
This umpteenth polemic, validated by docile and irresponsible media echo chambers, and by part of the left, conveniently eclipses from the headlines all the glaring problems from which public education, its staff and users are suffering: shortage of teachers and assistants for pupils with special needs; job cuts and class closures; incessant budget cuts; lack of attractiveness of our underpaid professions; difficult working conditions; overcrowded and overheated classrooms due to under-resourcing of establishments and inadequacy of equipment and premises; international downgrading in terms of achievements; inflation; impoverishment of the population, with nearly 2,000 children on the street and tens of thousands out of schools; and so on.
Instead of tackling these fundamental problems, the government prefers to continue its authoritarian headlong rush and its policy of deliberately destroying public services for the benefit of the private sector. Moreover, this same government will have no trouble presenting the General National Service [a monthly session in military facilities for high school pupils] and the uniform — symbols of its reactionary vision of schooling currently being tested — as a panacea for problems fully of its own creation, with measures which tend only to bring young people into line and divide society even further.
Every individual has the fundamental right to choose their clothing without being subjected to discriminatory restrictions. The abaya ban is an unacceptable intrusion into pupils’ privacy and constitutes an attack on their freedom and personal identity, trampling underfoot the ideas of inclusion, living-together and acceptance of differences that are officially advocated.
The lack of response from teachers’ unions and the civil society to this iniquitous law, which scorns the vocation of educational staff and tarnishes the image of France abroad, speaks volumes about the normalization of Islamophobia in the so-called “Cradle of Human Rights” and the oppression and helplessness of its millions-strong Muslim community.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Students in Kampala have been beaten and arrested for marching against a 900-mile pipeline co-owned by a French company
In mid-September, four dozen university students marched through Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, to deliver a petition to parliament calling on the government to end fossil fuel investments and scrap the 900-mile east Africa crude oil pipeline (Eacop).
The young climate activists were led by 29-year-old Abduh Twaib Magambo, an environmental science student, who carried the two-page typewritten petition that said: “As students and young people of this country, we are the direct and major victims of [the] climate crisis living in a country that is among the most affected by climate change yet one of the least prepared to respond and tackle its effects.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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UK has led the way, with countries across the continent making mass arrests, passing draconian new laws and labelling activists as eco-terrorists
Human rights experts and campaigners have warned against an intensifying crackdown on climate protests across Europe, as Guardian research found countries across the continent using repressive measures to silence activists.
In Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK, authorities have responded to climate protests with mass arrests, the passing of draconian new laws, the imposing of severe sentences for non-violent protests and the labelling of activists as hooligans, saboteurs or eco-terrorists.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Practice ruled to be discriminatory, but Conseil d’État says it does not have power to force change in policy
France’s highest administrative court has recognised discriminatory police identity checks based on racial profiling exist in France and are not isolated cases, but said it could not change political policy on the issue.
In a class action against the French state, six French and international organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Justice Initiative had asked for French authorities to be found at fault for failing to prevent the widespread use of racial profiling.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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By Rodney Duthie of The Fiji Times
Flying Fijians head coach Simon Raiwalui says facing England in the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals will be different from when they met last month in Twickenham.
The match in London saw Fiji topple the tier one nation 30-22 for the first time, two weeks away from the World Cup and was described as one of the lowest moments in English rugby history.
The two sides will face-off at Stade de Marseille in a week’s time at 3am.
- READ MORE: Fiji scrapes through to Rugby World Cup quarterfinal despite loss to Portugal
- Other Rugby World Cup reports
“They [England] play rugby to win. They’re very talented. They’ll put a lot of pressure on us at set-piece time as well,” Raiwalui said.
“Tactically, they’ll look to take advantage of some of the things we’ve been doing, so they’re a very good team. It’s going to be a big challenge.”
He said he expected England to change their game a little bit.
“It’s a totally different match [to when Fiji beat England in August], playing a different team. There will be aspects of how they play that are similar but they will bring new stuff as well.
“It’s about us being efficient and doing the things we do well and giving ourselves the best chance to compete.
“We’ve played the team, the boys are comfortable. It’s not the first time, so I think it will be a good match.”
Pacific RWC results
Fiji just scraped into the quarter-finals losing to Portugal 24-23 in their final and deciding pool match in Toulouse on Monday morning.Other quarter-finals will see Wales battle Argentina in Marseille on Sunday morning, before Ireland and New Zealand clash in Saint Denis the same day.
The fourth semi-final will be between France and South Africa in Saint Denis on Monday morning.
Samoa are out of the World Cup after Sunday’s 18-17 defeat to England and Tonga also had an early exit after ‘Ikale Tahi scored seven tries for a bonus point 45-24 win in Lille to record their only cup win.
Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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By Rodney Duthie of The Fiji Times
Flying Fijians head coach Simon Raiwalui says facing England in the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals will be different from when they met last month in Twickenham.
The match in London saw Fiji topple the tier one nation 30-22 for the first time, two weeks away from the World Cup and was described as one of the lowest moments in English rugby history.
The two sides will face-off at Stade de Marseille in a week’s time at 3am.
- READ MORE: Fiji scrapes through to Rugby World Cup quarterfinal despite loss to Portugal
- Other Rugby World Cup reports
“They [England] play rugby to win. They’re very talented. They’ll put a lot of pressure on us at set-piece time as well,” Raiwalui said.
“Tactically, they’ll look to take advantage of some of the things we’ve been doing, so they’re a very good team. It’s going to be a big challenge.”
He said he expected England to change their game a little bit.
“It’s a totally different match [to when Fiji beat England in August], playing a different team. There will be aspects of how they play that are similar but they will bring new stuff as well.
“It’s about us being efficient and doing the things we do well and giving ourselves the best chance to compete.
“We’ve played the team, the boys are comfortable. It’s not the first time, so I think it will be a good match.”
Pacific RWC results
Fiji just scraped into the quarter-finals losing to Portugal 24-23 in their final and deciding pool match in Toulouse on Monday morning.Other quarter-finals will see Wales battle Argentina in Marseille on Sunday morning, before Ireland and New Zealand clash in Saint Denis the same day.
The fourth semi-final will be between France and South Africa in Saint Denis on Monday morning.
Samoa are out of the World Cup after Sunday’s 18-17 defeat to England and Tonga also had an early exit after ‘Ikale Tahi scored seven tries for a bonus point 45-24 win in Lille to record their only cup win.
Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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Dumile Feni (South Africa), Figure Studies, 1970.
At its fifteenth summit in August 2023, the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-
South Africa) group adopted the Johannesburg II Declaration, which, amongst other issues, raised the question of reforming the United Nations, particularly its security council. To make the UN Security Council (UNSC) ‘more democratic, representative, effective, and efficient, and to increase the representation of developing countries’, BRICS urged the expansion of the council’s membership to include countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The declaration specifically noted that three countries – Brazil, India, and South Africa – should be included if the UNSC’s permanent members are expanded. For at least the past twenty years, these three countries (all founding BRICS members) have sought entry into the UNSC as permanent members with veto power. Over the decades, their aspirations have been thwarted, spurring them on first to create the IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) group in 2003 and then the BRICS group in 2009. The composition of the security council and the question of which states have veto power as permanent members have been central issues for the UN since its founding. In 1944, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, the main Allied powers (Britain, China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United States) gathered to discuss how to shape the UN and its main institutions. These states – also known as the ‘Big Four’ – decided that they would have permanent seats in the UNSC and, after much deliberation, agreed that they would have the power to exercise a veto over UNSC decisions. Though the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not keen to bring France into their ranks because the French government had colluded with the Nazis from 1940 to 1944, the United States insisted on France joining the group, which would in turn become known as the ‘Big Five’. The UN Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, established in Article 23 that the council would consist of these five countries as permanent members (also known as the ‘P5’), along with six other non-permanent members who would be elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms.
Pamela Singh (India), Treasure Map 006, 2014–15.
In July 2005, a group of countries known as the G4 (Brazil, Germany, Japan, and India) brought a resolution forward at the UN General Assembly that raised the issue of reforming the UNSC. Brazil’s ambassador to the UN, Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg, told the assembly that ‘accumulated experience acquired since the founding of the United Nations demonstrated that the realities of power of 1945 had long been superseded. The security structure then established was now glaringly outdated’. The G4 proposed that the UNSC be enlarged from fifteen to twenty-five members, with the addition of six permanent and four non-permanent members. Most of the members who spoke at the debate pointed to the fact that no countries from Africa or Latin America had permanent seats in the UNSC, which remains true today. To remedy this would itself be a substantial act of equity for the world. To make this change, the UN Charter required approval from two-thirds of the General Assembly members and ratification by their legislatures – a process that has only happened once before, in 1965, when the council was enlarged from eleven to fifteen members. The 2005 resolution was not brought to a vote and has since languished, despite the passing of a resolution in 2009 on the ‘question of equitable representation and increase in the membership of the Security Council and related matters’. Nonetheless, these efforts opened a long-term dialogue that continues to this day.
The G4 countries have not been able gather sufficient support for their proposal because the current permanent members of the UNSC (Britain, China, Russia, the US, and France) cannot agree on who amongst their allies should be granted these seats. Even in 2005, a divide opened amongst the P5 countries, with the United States and its G7 allies (Britain and France) operating as one bloc against both China and Russia. The US has been willing to expand the permanent seats on the council, but only if it means bringing in more of its close allies (Germany and Japan), which would allow the UNSC to effectively remain dominated by five of the seven members of the G7. This, of course, would not be acceptable to either China or Russia.
Today, as the question of comprehensive UN reform is gathering momentum, the US government is once again trying to co-opt the issue, calling for the expansion of the UNSC in order to counter Chinese and Russian influence. US President Joe Biden’s high officials have openly said that they favour bringing in their allies to tilt the balance of debate and discussion in the UNSC. This attitude towards UN reform does not address the fundamental questions raised by the Global South about international democracy and equitable geographical representation, particularly the call to add a permanent member from Africa and from Latin America.
Omar Ba (Senegal), Promenade masquée 2 (‘Masked Walk 2’), 2016.
In 2005, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote a report entitled In Larger Freedom in which he called for the expansion of the UNSC from fifteen to twenty-four members. This expansion, he said, must be done on a regional basis, rather than allocating permanent seats along historical axes of power (as with the Big Five). One of the models that Annan proposed would provide two permanent seats for Africa, two for Asia and the Pacific, one for Europe, and one for the Americas. This allocation would more closely represent the regional distribution of the global population, with the UNSC’s centre of gravity moving towards the more populous continents of Africa (population 1.4 billion) and Asia (population 4.7 billion) and away from Europe (742 million) and the Americas (1 billion).
Meanwhile, Britain and France, two permanent members of the UNSC, currently have minuscule populations of 67 million and 64 million respectively. It is puzzling that these two European countries – neither of them the most powerful country in Europe (which in economic terms is Germany) – have retained veto power despite their dramatically declining role in the world. The recent setbacks for France’s colonial ambitions in Africa, as well as France’s inability to lead a European agenda for peace in Ukraine, show how increasingly irrelevant this European country has become for world affairs.
Equally, Britain’s declining position in the world after Brexit and its failure to provide a vision for a Global Britain suggest that, despite Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s anger at the use of the term, it is correct to consider it a ‘midsize country’ with an inflated sense of itself.
Britain and France’s permanent seats in the UNSC illustrate the anachronism of the council’s architecture since neither country inspires confidence when it comes to providing leadership for security and development in the world.
Nicolas Moufarrege (Egypt/Lebanon), The Fifth Day, 1980.
‘The present is an innocent lie’, Samih al-Qasim (1939–2014) wrote in the poem ‘After the Apocalypse’. ‘To see the future, you must consult the past’, he noted, thinking of his native Palestine and its occupation by Israel. The colonial past sits heavily on the present. The colonisers’ power remains intact, with the Banque de France and the Bank of England remaining repositories of the wealth stolen from the colonies. What gives these old colonial powers, Britain and France, permission to remain overlords of the present, even when their basis for this position has long eroded? (It is worth noting that, in addition to being nuclear powers, these countries are also among the world’s major arms exporters.) The power that these and other colonial powers have seized in the past remains a barrier to the needs of the present.
The United States, which has lost its place as the most powerful country in the world, seeks to hold onto inherited advantages (such as having close allies in the UNSC) and to spend overwhelming amounts of money on war (as evidenced by the fact that it accounts for half of the global arms expenditure, for instance). Rather than allow for a more democratic and robust United Nations, the US continues to try to neuter this global institution either by dominating its forums or by violating its charter whenever it pleases. At the recently concluded 78th UN General Assembly session, US President Joe Biden spoke of the importance of ‘sovereignty, territorial integrity, [and] human rights’ – all three routinely violated by the United States through war, sanctions, and its prison at Guantanamo Bay. Absent moral authority, the United States uses its muscle to block the advance of democracy in institutions such as the United Nations.
Thus far, many proposals hailing from all sides of the political spectrum have called for the expansion of the UNSC, which requires votes in the General Assembly and the legislatures of the member states. It is far easier to create equity in the council if two of the members withdraw themselves from the horseshoe table and turn their seats over to countries in Africa and Latin America, which remain unrepresented amongst the permanent members.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Australia and France have signed a pact to work more closely on critical minerals supply chains, as the European Union looks to reduce its dependency on China for lithium and other heavy rare earths. Resources minister Madeleine King signed the Bilateral Dialogue on Critical Minerals agreement with France’s Minister for the Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher…
The post Australia-France sign pact on critical minerals supply chains appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Drown on Dry Land, 2019.Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has been ‘exposed to whipping and bombing, and then it was enclosed by a wall that had no door, leaving it shrouded in fear and depression’. Then, Storm Daniel picked up off the Mediterranean coast, dragged itself into Libya, and broke the dams. CCTV camera footage in the city’s Maghar neighbourhood showed the rapid advance of the floodwaters, powerful enough to destroy buildings and crush lives. A reported 70% of infrastructure and 95% of educational institutions have been damaged in the flood-affected areas. As of Wednesday 20 September, an estimated 4,000 to 11,000 people have died in the flood – among them the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, whose warnings over the years went unheeded – and another 10,000 are missing.
Hisham Chkiouat, the aviation minister of Libya’s Government of National Stability (based in Sirte), visited Derna in the wake of the flood and told the BBC, ‘I was shocked by what I saw. It’s like a tsunami. A massive neighbourhood has been destroyed. There is a large number of victims, which is increasing each hour’. The Mediterranean Sea ate up this ancient city with roots in the Hellenistic period (326 BCE to 30 BCE). Hussein Swaydan, head of Derna’s Roads and Bridges Authority, said that the total area with ‘severe damage’ amounts to three million square metres. ‘The situation in this city’, he said, ‘is more than catastrophic’. Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that the flood was of ‘epic proportions’. ‘There’s not been a storm like this in the region in living memory’, she said, ‘so it’s a great shock’.
Howls of anguish across Libya morphed into anger at the devastation, which are now developing into demands for an investigation. But who will conduct this investigation: the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and officially recognised by the United Nations (UN), or the Government of National Stability, headed by Prime Minister Osama Hamada in Sirte? These two rival governments – which have been at war with each other for many years – have paralysed the politics of the country, whose state institutions were fatally damaged by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombardment in 2011.
Soad Abdel Rassoul (Egypt), My Last Meal, 2019.The divided state and its damaged institutions have been unable to properly provide for Libya’s population of nearly seven million in the oil-rich but now totally devastated country. Before the recent tragedy, the UN was already providing humanitarian aid for at least 300,000 Libyans, but, as a consequence of the floods, they estimate that at least 884,000 more people will require assistance. This number is certain to rise to at least 1.8 million. The WHO’s Dr Harris reports that some hospitals have been ‘wiped out’ and that vital medical supplies, including trauma kits and body bags, are needed. ‘The humanitarian needs are huge and much more beyond the abilities of the Libyan Red Crescent, and even beyond the abilities of the Government’, said Tamar Ramadan, head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya.
The emphasis on the state’s limitations is not to be minimised. Similarly, the World Meteorological Organisation’s Secretary-General Petteri Taalas pointed out that although there was an unprecedented level of rainfall (414.1 mm in 24 hours, as recorded by one station), the collapse of state institutions contributed to the catastrophe. Taalas observed that Libya’s National Meteorological Centre has ‘major gaps in its observing systems. Its IT systems are not functioning well and there are chronic staff shortages. The National Meteorological Centre is trying to function, but its ability to do so is limited. The entire chain of disaster management and governance is disrupted’. Furthermore, he said, ‘[t]he fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk’.
Faiza Ramadan (Libya), The Meeting, 2011.Abdel Moneim al-Arfi, a member of the Libyan Parliament (in the eastern section), joined his fellow lawmakers to call for an investigation into the causes of the disaster. In his statement, al-Arfi pointed to underlying problems with the post-2011 Libyan political class. In 2010, the year before the NATO war, the Libyan government had allocated money towards restoring the Wadi Derna dams (both built between 1973 and 1977). This project was supposed to be completed by a Turkish company, but the company left the country during the war. The project was never completed, and the money allocated for it vanished. According to al-Arfi, in 2020 engineers recommended that the dams be restored since they were no longer able to manage normal rainfall, but these recommendations were shelved. Money continued to disappear, and the work was simply not carried out.
Impunity has defined Libya since the overthrow of the regime led by Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011). In February–March 2011, newspapers from Gulf Arab states began to claim that the Libyan government’s forces were committing genocide against the people of Libya. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions: resolution 1970 (February 2011) to condemn the violence and establish an arms embargo on the country and resolution 1973 (March 2011) to allow member states to act ‘under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter’, which would enable armed forces to establish a ceasefire and find a solution to the crisis. Led by France and the United States, NATO prevented an African Union delegation from following up on these resolutions and holding peace talks with all the parties in Libya. Western countries also ignored the meeting with five African heads of state in Addis Ababa in March 2011 where al-Gaddafi agreed to the ceasefire, a proposal he repeated during an African Union delegation to Tripoli in April. This was an unnecessary war that Western and Gulf Arab states used to wreak vengeance upon al-Gaddafi. The ghastly conflict turned Libya, which was ranked 53rd out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index (the highest ranking on the African continent), into a country marked by poor indicators of human development that is now significantly lower on any such list.
Tewa Barnosa (Libya), War Love, 2016.Instead of allowing an African Union-led peace plan to take place, NATO began a bombardment of 9,600 strikes on Libyan targets, with special emphasis on state institutions. Later, when the UN asked NATO to account for the damage it had done, NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote that there was no need for an investigation, since ‘NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya’. There was no interest in the wilful destruction of crucial Libyan state infrastructure, which has never been rebuilt and whose absence is key to understanding the carnage in Derna.
NATO’s destruction of Libya set in motion a chain of events: the collapse of the Libyan state; the civil war, which continues to this day; the dispersal of Islamic radicals across northern Africa and into the Sahel region, whose decade-long destabilisation has resulted in a series of coups from Burkina Faso to Niger. This has subsequently created new migration routes toward Europe and led to the deaths of migrants in both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea as well as an unprecedented scale of human trafficking operations in the region. Add to this list of dangers not only the deaths in Derna, and certainly the deaths from Storm Daniel, but also casualties of a war from which the Libyan people have never recovered.
Najla Shawkat Fitouri (Libya), Sea Wounded, 2021.Just before the flood in Libya, an earthquake struck neighbouring Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, wiping out villages such as Tenzirt and killing about 3,000 people. ‘I won’t help the earthquake’, wrote the Moroccan poet Ahmad Barakat (1960–1994); ‘I will always carry in my mouth the dust that destroyed the world’. It is as if tragedy decided to take titanic steps along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea last week.
A tragic mood settled deep within the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi. On 10 September, before being swept away by the flood waves, he wrote, ‘[w]e have only one another in this difficult situation. Let’s stand together until we drown’. But that mood was intercut with other feelings: frustration with the ‘twin Libyan fabric’, in his words, with one government in Tripoli and the other in Sirte; the divided populace; and the political detritus of an ongoing war over the broken body of the Libyan state. ‘Who said that Libya is not one?’, Al-Trabelsi lamented. Writing as the waters rose, Al-Trabelsi left behind a poem that is being read by refugees from his city and Libyans across the country, reminding them that the tragedy is not everything, that the goodness of people who come to each other’s aid is the ‘promise of help’, the hope of the future.
The rain
Exposes the drenched streets,
the cheating contractor,
and the failed state.
It washes everything,
bird wings
and cats’ fur.
Reminds the poor
of their fragile roofs
and ragged clothes.
It awakens the valleys,
shakes off their yawning dust
and dry crusts.
The rain
a sign of goodness,
a promise of help,
an alarm bell.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When former French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that a total Ukrainian military victory was unlikely, the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen (8/27/23) charged that “the obstinacy of the French right’s emotional bond with Russia owes much to a recurrent Gallic great-power itch.”
It doesn’t take much in our media system to be labeled a “Putin apologist” or “pro-Russia.” In this New Cold War, even suggesting that the official enemy is not Hitlerian or completely irrational could earn ridicule and attack.
After the largely stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russian occupation, conditions on the front have hardened into what many observers describe as a “stalemate.” Like virtually all wars, the Russo-Ukrainian War will end with a negotiated settlement, and the quicker it happens, the quicker the bodies will stop piling up.
Despite this, anyone who advocates actually pursuing negotiations is immediately attacked. The New York Times (8/27/23) did this in an article about former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in an article that argued he “gives a voice to obstinate Russian sympathies.” The Times wrote:
In interviews coinciding with the publication of a memoir, Mr. Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, said that reversing Russia’s annexation of Crimea was “illusory,” ruled out Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO because it must remain “neutral,” and insisted that Russia and France “need each other.”
“People tell me Vladimir Putin isn’t the same man that I met. I don’t find that convincing. I’ve had tens of conversations with him. He is not irrational,” he told Le Figaro. “European interests aren’t aligned with American interests this time,” he added.
To Times writer Roger Cohen, Sarkozy’s remarks “underscored the strength of the lingering pockets of pro-Putin sympathy that persist in Europe,” which persist despite Europe’s “unified stand against Russia.” Cohen didn’t challenge or rebut anything the former president said—he merely quoted the words, labeled them “pro-Putin,” and moved on.
The New Cold War mentality has encouraged a new wave of McCarthyite attacks against anyone who dissents against the establishment status quo. Merely pointing out that Putin is “not irrational” flies in the face of the accepted conventional wisdom that Putin is a Hitler-like madman hell bent on conquering Eastern Europe. That conventional wisdom is what allows calls for negotiation to be dismissed without any serious discussion, and challenging that wisdom elicits harsh reactions from establishment voices.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post NYT’s Incredibly Low Bar for Labeling Someone ‘Pro-Putin’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
The reality of the West’s trademark current foreign policy – marketed for the past two decades under the principle of a “Responsibility to Protect” – is all too visible amid Libya’s flood wreckage.
Many thousands are dead or missing in the port of Derna after two dams protecting the city burst this week as they were battered by Storm Daniel. Vast swaths of housing in the region, including in Benghazi, west of Derna, lie in ruins.
The storm itself is seen as further proof of a mounting climate crisis, rapidly changing weather patterns across the globe and making disasters like Derna’s flooding more likely.
But the extent of the calamity cannot simply be ascribed to climate change. Though the media coverage studiously obscures this point, Britain’s actions 12 years ago – when it trumpeted its humanitarian concern for Libya – are intimately tied to Derna’s current suffering.
The failing dams and faltering relief efforts, observers correctly point out, are the result of a power vacuum in Libya. There is no central authority capable of governing the country.
But there are reasons Libya is so ill-equipped to deal with a catastrophe. And the West is deeply implicated.
Avoiding mention of those reasons, as Western coverage is doing, leaves audiences with a false and dangerous impression: that something lacking in Libyans, or maybe Arabs and Africans, makes them inherently incapable of properly running their own affairs.
Libya is indeed a mess, overrun by feuding militias, with two rival governments vying for power amid a general air of lawlessness. Even before this latest disaster, the country’s rival rulers struggled to cope with the day-to-day management of their citizens’ lives.
Or as Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, observed of the crisis, it has been “compounded by Libya’s dysfunctional politics, a country so rich in natural resources and yet so desperately lacking the security and stability that its people crave.”
Meanwhile, Quentin Sommerville, the corporation’s Middle East correspondent, opined that “there are many countries that could have handled flooding on this scale, but not one as troubled as Libya. It has had a long and painful decade: civil wars, local conflicts, and Derna itself was taken over by the Islamic State group – the city was bombed to remove them from there.”
According to Sommerville, experts had previously warned that the dams were in poor shape, adding: “Amid Libya’s chaos, those warnings went unheeded.”
“Dysfunction”, “chaos”, “troubled”, “unstable”, “fractured”. The BBC and the rest of Britain’s establishment media have been firing out these terms like bullets from a machine gun.
Libya is what analysts like to term a failed state. But what the BBC and the rest of the Western media have carefully avoided mentioning is why.
Regime change
More than decade ago, Libya had a strong, competent, if highly repressive, central government under dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The country’s oil revenues were used to provide free public education and health care. As a result, Libya had one of the highest literacy rates and average per capita incomes in Africa.
That all changed in 2011, when Nato sought to exploit the “Responsibility to Protect” principle, or R2P for short, to justify carrying out what amounted to an illegal regime-change operation off the back of an insurgency.
The supposed “humanitarian intervention” in Libya was a more sophisticated version of the West’s similarly illegal, “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq, eight years earlier.
Then, the US and Britain launched a war of aggression without United Nations authorisation, based on an entirely bogus story that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed hidden stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
In Libya’s case, by contrast, Britain and France, backed by the United States, were more successful in winning a UN security resolution, with a narrow remit to protect civilian populations from the threat of attack and impose a no-fly zone.
Armed with the resolution, the West manufactured a pretext to meddle directly in Libya. They claimed that Gaddafi was preparing a massacre of civilians in the rebel-stronghold of Benghazi. The lurid story even suggested that Gaddafi was arming troops with Viagra to encourage them to commit mass rape.
As with Iraq’s WMD, the claims were entirely unsubstantiated, as a report by the British parliament’s foreign affairs committee concluded five years later, in 2016. Its investigation found: “The proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.”
The report added: “Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.”
That, however, was not a view prime minister David Cameron or the media shared with the public when British MPs voted to back a war on Libya in March 2011. Only 13 legislators dissented.
Among them, notably, was Jeremy Corbyn, then a backbencher who four years later would be elected Labour opposition leader, triggering an extended smear campaign against him by the British establishment.
When Nato launched its “humanitarian intervention”, the death toll from Libya’s fighting was estimated by the UN at no more than 2,000. Six months later, it was assessed at nearer 50,000, with civilians comprising a significant proportion of the casualties.
Citing its R2P mission, Nato flagrantly exceeded the terms of the UN resolution, which specifically excluded “a foreign occupation force of any form”. Western troops, including British special forces, operated on the ground, coordinating the actions of rebel militias opposed to Gaddafi.
Meanwhile, Nato planes ran bombing campaigns that often killed the very civilians Nato claimed it was there to protect.
It was another illegal Western regime-overthrow operation – this one ending with the filming of Gaddafi being butchered on the street.
The self-congratulatory mood among Britain’s political and media class, burnishing the West’s “humanitarian” credentials, was evident across the media.
An Observer editorial declared: “An honourable intervention. A hopeful future.” In the Daily Telegraph, David Owen, a former British foreign secretary, wrote: “We have proved in Libya that intervention can still work.”
But had it worked?
Two years ago, even the arch-neoconservative Atlantic Council, the ultimate Washington insider think-tank, admitted: “Libyans are poorer, in greater peril, and experience as much or more political repression in parts of the country compared to Gaddafi’s rule.”
It added: “Libya remains divided politically and in a state of festering civil war. Frequent oil production halts while lack of oil fields maintenance has cost the country billions of dollars in lost revenues.”
The idea that Nato was ever really concerned about the welfare of Libyans was given the lie the moment Gaddafi was slaughtered. The West immediately abandoned Libya to its ensuing civil war, what President Obama colourfully called a “shitshow”, and the media that had been so insistent on the humanitarian goals behind the “intervention” lost all interest in post-Gaddafi developments.
Libya was soon overrun with warlords, becoming a country in which, as human rights groups warned, slave markets were once again flourishing.
As the BBC’s Sommerville noted in passing, the vacuum left behind in places like Derna soon sucked in more violent and extremist groups like the head-choppers of Islamic State.
But parallel to the void of authority in Libya that has exposed its citizens to such suffering is the remarkable void at the heart of the West’s media coverage of the current flooding.
No one wants to explain why Libya is so ill-prepared to deal with the disaster, why the country is so fractured and chaotic.
Just as no one wants to explain why the West’s invasion of Iraq on “humanitarian” grounds, and the disbanding of its army and police forces, led to more than a million Iraqis dead and millions more homeless and displaced.
Or why the West allied with its erstwhile opponents – the jihadists of Islamic State and al-Qaeda – against the Syrian government, again causing millions to be displaced and dividing the country.
Syria was as unprepared as Libya now is to deal with a large earthquake that hit its northern regions, along with southern Turkey, last February.
This pattern repeats because it serves a useful end for a West led from Washington that seeks complete global hegemony and control of resources, or what its policymakers call full-spectrum dominance.
Humanitarianism is the cover story – to keep Western publics docile – as the US and Nato allies target leaders of oil-rich states in the Middle East and North Africa that are viewed as unreliable or unpredictable, such as Libya’s Gadaffi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
WikiLeaks’ release of US diplomatic cables in late 2010 reveals a picture of Washington’s mercurial relationship with Gaddafi – a trait paradoxically the US ambassador to Tripoli is recorded attributing to the Libyan leader.
Publicly, US officials were keen to cosy up to Gaddafi, offering him close security coordination against the very rebel forces they would soon be assisting in their regime-overthrow operation.
But other cables reveal deeper concerns at Gaddafi’s waywardness, including his ambitions to build a United States of Africa to control the continent’s resources and develop an independent foreign policy.
Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa. And who has control over them, and profits from them, is centrally important to Western states.
The WikiLeaks cables recounted US, French, Spanish and Canadian oil firms being forced to renegotiate contracts on significantly less favourable terms, costing them many billions of dollars, while Russia and China were awarded new oil exploration options.
Still more worrying for US officials was the precedent Gaddafi had been setting, creating a “new paradigm for Libya that is playing out worldwide in a growing number of oil producing countries”.
That precedent has been decisively overturned since Gaddafi’s demise. As Declassified reported, after biding their time British oil giants BP and Shell returned to Libya’s oilfields last year.
In 2018, Britain’s then ambassador to Libya, Frank Baker, wrote enthusiastically about how the UK was “helping to create a more permissible environment for trade and investment, and to uncover opportunities for British expertise to help Libya’s reconstruction”.
That contrasts with Gaddafi’s earlier moves to cultivate closer military and economic ties with Russia and China, including granting access to the port of Benghazi for the Russian fleet. In one cable from 2008, he is noted to have “voiced his satisfaction that Russia’s increased strength can serve as a necessary counterbalance to US power”.
It was these factors that tipped the balance in Washington against Gaddafi’s continuing rule and encouraged the US to seize the opportunity to oust him by backing rebel forces.
The claim that Washington or Britain cared about the welfare of ordinary Libyans is disproved by a decade of indifference to their plight – culminating in the current suffering in Derna.
The West’s approach to Libya, as with Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, has been to prefer that it be sunk into a quagmire of division and instability than allow a strong leader to act defiantly, demand control over resources and establish alliances with enemy states – creating a precedent other states might follow.
Small states are left with a stark choice: submit or pay a heavy price.
Gaddafi was butchered in the street, the bloody images shared around the world. The suffering of ordinary Libyans over the past decade, in contrast, has taken place out of view.
Now with the disaster in Derna, their plight is in the spotlight. But with the help of Western media like the BBC, the reasons for their misery remain as murky as the flood waters.
• First published at Middle East Eye
This story originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch on Aug. 29, 2023. It is shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Niger’s military government reportedly cut off electricity and water supply to the French embassy in capital Niamey on Sunday, August 27, after the expiry of the 48-hours it gave the French ambassador, Sylvain Itte, to leave the country.
It has also instructed suppliers to stop providing the water, electricity and food supplies to the French military base, warning that anyone continuing to supply the base with goods and services will be treated as “enemies of the sovereign people.”
The 1,500 troops-strong military base in Niamey has become a site of frequent demonstrations, with people demanding that Niger’s former colonizer withdraw its troops. Thousands gathered outside this base on Sunday, demanding that its ambassador and troops leave the country, waving the national flag of Niger, reportedly alongside those of the BRICS countries and the DPRK.
A similar protest was also held on Friday, August 25, hours after the military government, the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Country (CNSP), ordered the French ambassador out of Niger. Protesters raised anti-French slogans, and threatened to invade the base if the troops did not leave Niger in a week.
Earlier this month, the CNSP ended Niger’s military agreements with France and ordered its troops to leave by September 2. With France refusing to withdraw on the grounds that it does not recognize the authority of the military government, protests are expected to intensify as this deadline approaches.
‘Niger doesn’t belong to France’
“Niger doesn’t belong to France. We told the French to leave, but they said ‘no’,” complained Aicha, a supporter of CNSP protesting outside the base. “As citizens we don’t want the French here. They can do whatever they want in France, but not here,” she told Al Jazeera.
The popular sentiment against the presence of French troops has manifested in several mass demonstrations, especially militant over the last two years. By cracking down on the anti-French movement and inviting into the country more French troops, ordered out of neighboring Mali by its military government, former Nigerien president Mohamed Bazoum had consolidated domestic perception of him being a puppet of France.
His removal from office on July 26 in a military coup led by the then head of the presidential guard, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani, has won popular support, with thousands repeatedly taking to streets to rally behind the CNSP, reiterating the demand for the withdrawal of French troops.
‘The fight will not stop until the day there are no longer any French soldiers in Niger’
“The fight will not stop until the day there are no longer any French soldiers in Niger,” CNSP member Colonel Obro Amadou said in his address to a crowd of around 20,000 supporters who had gathered in Niger’s largest stadium in Niamey on Saturday, August 26. “It’s you who are going to drive them out,” he added.
Insisting that “France must respect” the choice of Nigerien people, Ramatou Boubacar, a CNSP supporter in the stadium, complained about the continued control France maintained over successive Nigerien governments even after the end of colonial rule. “For sixty years, we have never been independent [until].. the day of the coup d’etat,” she told the AFP.
French President Emmanuel Macron has however remained obstinate. “[W]e do not recognize the putschists, we support a president [Bazoum] who has not resigned”, he said in his remarks on Monday, August 28, reiterating French support for a military invasion of Niger by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), “when it decides”.
Expressing its “full support” to France and reiterating that the European Union (EU) “does not recognize” the CNSP, its spokesperson for foreign affairs, Nabila Massrali, also raised the specter of war. “The decision of the putschists to expel the French ambassador,” she said, “is a new provocation which cannot in any way help to find a diplomatic solution to the current crisis.”
‘ECOWAS is determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts’
However, the current chair of ECOWAS, Nigeria’s president Bola Tinubu, said on Saturday, August 26: “We are deep in our attempts to peacefully settle the issue in Niger by leveraging on our diplomatic tools. I continue to hold ECOWAS back, despite its readiness for all options, in order to exhaust all other remedial mechanisms.”
Tinubu has toned down his initially aggressive and threatening rhetoric against Niger after facing anti-war protests and opposition domestically. On August 5, a day before the one-week deadline given by ECOWAS on July 30 to the CNSP to reinstate Bazoum was to expire, the senate of Nigeria refused to support military action.
Without the participation of Nigeria — which has Africa’s largest economy, amounting to about 67% of ECOWAS’ GDP, and the largest military in the sub-region — the bloc’s capability of undertaking a military action is drastically reduced.
This is especially the case because Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea — which are among the 15 countries in ECOWAS, but suspended and sanctioned after similar popularly-supported coups backed by the domestic anti-French movement — have extended support to Niger.
Mali and Burkina Faso, whose military governments have successfully ordered the French troops out of the country, have committed to mobilize their military in defense of Niger. Together, these four countries amount to nearly 60% of ECOWAS’ land area.
Nevertheless, the ECOWAS heads of state met again in Nigeria on August 10 and ordered their Chiefs of Defense Staffs “to immediately activate” the bloc’s stand-by force. The Chiefs of Defense Staffs of ECOWAS member states subsequently held a two-day meeting on August 17 and 18 in Ghana.
Ghana’s president is also facing domestic opposition and may be unlikely to be able to secure approval of the parliament where the main opposition party, opposed to military intervention, has the same number of seats as the ruling party.
Nevertheless, “We are ready to go any time the order is given,” Abdel-Fatau Musah, the ECOWAS Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, declared at the conclusion of this meeting, adding that an unspecified “D-day is also decided. We’ve already agreed and fine-tuned what will be required for the intervention.”
He introduced a caveat, however, that, “As we speak, we are still readying [a] mediation mission into the country, so we have not shut any door.”
A week later, on Friday, July 26, the ECOWAS said it was still “determined to bend backwards to accommodate diplomatic efforts.” ECOWAS commission president Omar Touray, former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Gambia told the media: “For the avoidance of doubt, let me state unequivocally that ECOWAS has neither declared war on the people of Niger, nor is there a plan, as is being rumored, to invade the country.”
Invading Niger will not be the walk in the park, warns CNSP President, Gen. Tchiani
Nevertheless, stating that “threats of aggression on the national territory are increasingly being felt,” Brigadier General Moussa Barmou placed the Nigerien military on “Maximum alert” on August 25, “in order to avoid a general surprise”.
Abdoulaye Diop and Olivia Rouamba, Foreign Ministers of Mali and Burkina Faso, visited Niamey on Thursday, August 24, reiterating their “rejection of an armed intervention against the people of Niger which will be considered as a declaration of war” on their own countries.
They also welcomed the two orders signed by the CNSP president Abdourahamane Tchiani that day, “authorizing the Defense and Security Forces of Burkina Faso and Mali to intervene on Nigerien territory in the event of an attack.”
“If an attack were to be undertaken against us,” Tchiani said in his televised address on Saturday, “it will not be the walk in the park some people seem to think.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Should he be deported from the U.K., Julian Assange, the Australian publisher of WikiLeaks, faces up to 175 years in a U.S. prison on charges related to his release of information that revealed U.S. war crimes and torture. His legal team has stated that they plan to appeal the extradition case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, arguing that the British litigation…
There were several military coups in West Africa lately. Mostly in former French colonies, and in many ways “neo-colonies” of France, that do arguably more harm to the Sahel countries than the more than 300 years of French “on-the-ground” colonies, or enslavement. Though, this latter crime is not to be discarded at all. It has been an across-Africa genocide of unimaginable proportions, that, so far went unpunished.
But the new crime, the financial and military strategic econo-political colonization, needs to be brought to the fore now.
Among the coup countries are Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, but also Nigeria – a former British colony.
Of all these “coups”, Niger gets by far the most attention, and seems to be at the center of the controversy.
At the outset it looked like the military staged a coup to get the France-friendly President Mohamed Bazoum, out of the way and to move away from the French monetary hegemony, the Franc CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine, or African Financial Community). See also this pm+
On second thought, however, another image emerged, especially after Madame Victoria Nuland’s, US Deputy Secretary of State, personal visit to Niamey, Niger, where she was purportedly denied access to the deposed President, and was apparently snubbed by the new military leader, General Abdourahmane Tchiani.
The latter is not very plausible, but is once more a “media coup” against the truth. Ever more evidence emerges that Niger’s coup was supported by the US. Washington has three military bases in Niger and at least between 3,000 and 4,000 military personnel stationed in Niger.
One of the US bases is a strategically important drone base, in the Agadez region, known as Niger Air Base 201. Following its permanent base in Djibouti, Niger Air Base 201 stands as the second-largest US base in Africa.
France still has at least 1,500 military stationed in Niger. This, even though French President Macron had promised to withdraw them, as soon as General Tchiani “requested” him to do so. Everything must be questioned now. Did Tchiani really request a withdrawal of French troops?
What appears (almost) sure is that the US were supporting the military coup, if not helping General Tchiani – who served as the chief of the Nigerien presidential guard (2011-2023) – to the military take-over. See also this important analysis by Professor Chossudovsky.
What’s at stake?
The deposed President Mohamed Bazoum had Macron’s support, not only because he allowed France’s shameless exploitation of Niger through the CFA Franc (for more details see here), but also because France exploits Niger’s rich uranium and high-purity petrol – and has access to Niger’s other mineral riches.
Besides, and maybe most importantly, Niger is a landlocked Sahel country, strategically located in the center of North Africa, between Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, Chad and Libya (see Google map, left).Being in control of Niger is, in a way, like being in control of Kosovo, the US engineered cut-out piece of land from Serbia, in the middle of former Yugoslavia, bombed to rubble by President Clinton, to divide and conquer – conquer the area.
That is what Niger may become if the US has its say. Washington does not want France involved anymore. Being in control of Niger is like being in control of at least northern West Africa, a resources-rich, but an extreme poverty-stricken territory – which Washington suspects may also interest Russia and possibly China.
It is not a well-kept secret that the private Russian Wagner army has had a foothold in this part of Africa of several thousand mercenaries for at least a couple of years, maybe longer – in Chad, Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, and maybe even Nigeria.
Now the plot – a purely speculative plot – goes even further. The leader of the Wagner private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was supposedly killed in a plane crash last Wednesday, on 23 August 2023, between Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, rumors go that he may not have been on the same plane with all his other military brass, a custom he had followed in the past. Therefore he may have escaped the crash.
Rumors say he had been seen after the plane “accident”, in the Central African Republic, where he has his African headquarters, and where he is a hero.
He had been “killed” before and reappeared. So, who knows, this may be his final death. But there is apparently a super-modern clinic with three German plastic surgeons, near his Central African headquarters.
A Russian mercenary army in North Africa that may still be fighting for Russia would be most uncomfortable for Madame Nuland and her hegemonic ilk in Washington.
What to do about it? – An immediate question posed by Washington.
The US attempt is to make sure that Niger, the country of strategy, a member of the US / NATO France supported ECOWAS, will not slip out into liberty from “independence” some 60 years ago.
Shortly after the Niger military coup, Mr. Putin has cautioned not to interfere in Niger’s internal affairs. He was referring precisely to ECOWAS which has “warned” of an ECOWAS military intervention, if the French aligned deposed President Bazoum, would not be returned immediately to the Presidency. In hindsight, and knowing what we know now, the ECOWAS warning too, was a media manufactured untruth by “design”.
ECOWAS is The Economic Community of West African States. It is one of 8 African regional political and economic unions. ECOWAS has 15 member countries located in Central and West Africa. But ECOWAS is divided within. Without the support of the US / NATO and France, it may fall apart. Therefore, a warning from ECOWAS has only meaning when an “arrangement” has been reached before.Niger’s main party, represented by General Tchiani, the Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP), roughly translated as “National Movement for the Defense of the Homeland”, has had Pentagon support, including military training, since its creation.
This means the US is well-established within Niger, and by association within central and West Africa – and they do not want to lose out on this highly strategic – and resources-rich – African position; not to the French, not to the Russians – and not to China.
But, then there is still the unconfirmed suspicion of a mercenary army roaming through Western Africa – and who knows – just in case – what their plans might be, and for whom they might fight.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By Kelvin Anthony, RNZ Pacific lead digital and social media journalist
The leaders of five Melanesian nations have agreed to write to French President Emmanuel Macron “expressing their strong opposition” to the results of the third New Caledonia referendum.
In December 2021, more than 96 percent of people voted against full sovereignty, but the pro-independence movement FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) has refused to recognise the result because of a boycott by the Kanak population over the impact of the covid pandemic on the referendum campaign.
Since then, the FLNKS has been seeking international support for its view that the referendum result was not a legitimate outcome.
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The Melanesian Spearhead Group leaders — Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the FLNKS — met in Port Vila last week for the 22nd edition of the Leader’s Summit, where they said “the MSG does not recognise the results of the third referendum on the basis of the PIF’s Observer Report”.
FLNKS spokesperson Victor Tutugoro told RNZ Pacific the pro-independence group had continued to protest against the outcome of the December 2021 referendum.
“We contest the referendum because it was held during the circumstances that was not healthy for us. For example, we went through covid, we lost many members of our families [because of the pandemic],” Tutugoro said.
“We will continue to protest at the ICJ (International Court of Justice) level and at the national level. We expect the MSG to help us fight to get the United Nations to debate the cause of the Kanaks.”
The leaders have agreed that “New Caledonia’s inclusion on the UN List of decolonisation territories is protected and maintained”.
The MSG leaders have also directed the UN permanent representative to “examine and provide advice” so they can seek an opinion from the ICJ “on the results of the third referendum conducted in December 2021”.
FLNKS spokesperson Victor Tutugoro at the 22nd Melanesian Spearhead Group Leaders’ Summit in Port Vila. . . . “We contest the referendum because it was held during the circumstances that was not healthy for us.” Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony They have also requested that the UN provide a report on the “credibility of the election process, and mandated the MSG UN permanent representatives, working with the MSG Secretariat and the FLNKS, “to pursue options on the legality of the 3rd referendum”.
Support for West Papua
New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS movement also said it would continue to back the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) to become a full member of the Melanesian Spearhead Group.Tutugoro told the 22nd MSG Leader’s Summit in Port Vila that FLNKS had always supported West Papua’s move to join the MSG family.
He said by becoming a full member of the sub-regional group, FLNKS was able to benefit from international support to counterbalance the weight of France in its struggle for self-determination.
He said the FLNKS hoped the ULMWP would have the same opportunity and in time it could be included on the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
United Liberation Movement for West Papua delegates at last week’s 22nd Melanesian Spearhead Group Leaders’ Summit in Port Vila, Vanuatu. Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony
