Haiti's future remains 'hanging in the balance' 15 years after earthquake

Remembrance of the catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 comes as the country faces major challenges, including gang violence and extreme poverty.


Issued on: 12/01/2025 - RFI

Debris and devastation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on 12 January, 2010. 

By: Melissa Chemam

"I remember the day the earthquake happened very, very well. That year, I was 19 years old, I was in my final year of high school. I lived in a two-storey house. I was working on a maths assignment with my cousin, it was about 4:45pm, when suddenly the earth started shaking. I had no idea what was happening and I started running."

Claudine St Fleur will never forget the day the earthquake struck Haiti. It claimed the life of her aunt, who was her only caregiver. "She was everything to me," Claudine told RFI, speaking from Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, via a poor connection.

She and her cousin lived in a tent for weeks, and only found refuge thanks to an uncle months later. An American friend of her aunt, who used to live in the same house as them, later helped her to pursue her studies.

But despite her resilience after the devastation, Claudine is unemployed now – thanks to a new set of challenges Haiti is facing. "I lost my job because of the gangs and violence," she says.


Reconstruction controversy

The earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7, took place on 12 January, 2010, killing at least 200,000 people and displacing 1.5 to 2 million more.

Within 30 seconds Port-au-Prince was turned upside down, families torn apart and tens of thousands of people put at risk of starvation.

Fifteen year later, the scars remain visible in the city.

Various countries and international groups raised almost $10 billion (€9.7 billion) for Haiti, pledging to rebuild the island and support its people.

But Antonal Mortimé, who was at the time executive secretary of the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organisations (POHDH), told Haitian media that the funds were not in fact invested in the reconstruction plan after the earthquake.

"Everything would have been different if the allocated funds had actually been invested," he said.

Like him, many Haitians blame the international community and the United Nations for their slow response. They claim there was a focus on Western staff in the immediate searches.

They also blame the UN for the cholera crisis which broke out a few months after the earthquake and claimed yet more victims. It was reported that the outbreak was due to UN troops from Nepal improperly setting up waste disposal in their camp at Meille, a small village north of Port-au-Prince.

The UN admitted some responsibility in 2016, with deputy spokesman for the secretary-general, Farhan Haq, saying: "Over the past year, the UN has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera."

A history of violence: Haiti's revolution, collapse and descent into anarchy

'Futures slipping away'

A generation of children is bearing the scars of Haiti’s earthquake, according to the charity Save the Children, their futures shaped by repeated displacements, ongoing crises and persistent disruption to their education over the past 15 years.

"While Haiti has made some strides in recovery, ongoing violence from armed groups has crippled progress, leaving children’s futures hanging in the balance," the charity said in a statement issued on Wednesday, 8 January.

Chantal Sylvie Imbeault, Save the Children’s country director for Haiti, said: “Life has been a series of crises for many children in Haiti. From hurricanes to earthquakes to the rampant violence we’re seeing today, many families we’ve spoken to have been displaced eight, nine, 10 times in the past 15 years."

Referring to the situation in the country today, she added: "Armed groups have turned Port-au-Prince into an open-air prison for children. Nowhere in the city is safe. They can’t safely go to school, play outside or leave their neighbourhoods. These children’s futures are slipping away.”

One of those children, 17-year-old Cassandra, told Save the Children that her education is on hold. "I have lost two school years – one because of the earthquake, and another because of the violence. It is painful. I don’t know when I will return to school."

Political instability

The Haitian capital has witnessed a spike in gang-related violence over the past two years, despite the deployment of a multinational security mission, led by Kenya, since 2024.

These armed gangs are accused of widespread murder, kidnapping and sexual violence. The United Nations says gangs control around 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, and regularly attack civilians.

President Jovenel Moise's 2021 assassination exacerbated the instability, and the consequences of several natural disasters, including the 2010 earthquake, have worsened the crisis.

Almost half the population now lives in hunger and extreme poverty, according to the International Rescue Committee, who put Haiti on its list of "10 crises the world can’t ignore in 2025".

But Haiti has suffered from political violence for decades, due to political instability and years of dictatorship followed by poor governance, US interventions and the consequences of the enormous debt inflicted by its former colonial ruler, France, since Haiti's independence in 1804.

Haitians had paid more than 112 million francs to France (around €547 million) by 2022, according to research by the New York Times and academic centres.

Mozambique opposition leader calls for national strike, demos

STALINIST FRELIMO WON ELECTION

Mozambican opposition leader Venancio Mondlane, whose return from exile last week sparked confrontations between supporters and police in the capital Maputo, has called for three days of protests this week.


Issued on: 12/01/2025 - RFI

Mozambican presidential candidate Venancio Mondlane addresses people on the streets of Maputo upon his return from exile, Mozambique, 09 January 2025. 

© LUSA - LUISA NHANTUMBO

Mondlane insists he was robbed of victory in last October's elections, which saw the Frelimo party officially awarded a crushing win to extend half a century of rule.

In a Facebook post late Saturday, Mondlane urged a "national strike" as the new parliament prepares to sit from Monday, with Frelimo's Daniel Chapo due to be invested as president on Wednesday.

Chapo, a 48-year-old former governor with no state experience, will succeed outgoing President Filipe Nyusi.

"These three days are important to decide what future the people want," Mondlane said in his post.

"We must declare a national strike... paralyse activities during these three days," he said.

Thousands welcome Mozambique opposition leader as he returns from exile

Will of the people

Urging supporters to "demonstrate our refusal" of the official election result, he called for a "peaceful mobilisation," adding that "if the Assembly takes the oath, it is a betrayal of the will of the people".

Mozambique's highest court confirmed the parliamentary seat allocation from the election just before Christmas, with Frelimo obtaining 171 and Podemos, a small party that has become the main opposition grouping, winning 43.

Renamo, a historic opposition party resulting from the civil war, earned 28 seats while the opposition MDM group took eight.

"Let us demonstrate against the inauguration of those who betrayed the will of the people on Monday and against those who stole the will of the people on Wednesday," Mondlane said.

(with AFP)

French-led investors sign deal to build desalination plant in Jordan

Jordan, one of the world's driest countries, signed an agreement on Sunday with French-led investors to build one of the world's largest desalination plants.


Issued on: 12/01/2025 - RFI

An example of a desalination plant. Seen here in the Omani port city of Sur, south of the capital Muscat, this plant services some 600,000 people. 

Jordan's official Petra news agency called it the country's biggest-ever infrastructure project, which Prime Minister Jafar Hassan has told Parliament is valued at more than $5 billion (€4.7 billion).

French infrastructure specialists Meridiam lead the project in partnership with SUEZ, Orascom Construction and VINCI Construction Grands Projets.

On its website, Meridiam said the project would supply more than 300 million cubic metres of drinking water to Amman and Aqaba, serving in excess of three million people.

"This project will increase the total annual available domestic water supply by almost 60 percent" for households, and will also include about 445 kilometres of pipelines to transport the desalinated water from the Red Sea, Meridiam said.

© Wikimedia Commons

Transformative potential

Jordan's Water and Irrigation Minister Raed Abu al-Saud emphasised the project's "transformative potential", noting it would "mark a significant shift in Jordan's water security landscape", according to Petra.

The project will take about four years to complete, the prime minister said last month.

It follows Jordan's pullout from a plan that would have linked the Dead Sea and Red Sea by pipes in Jordan.

Desalination: no silver bullet

Quality of world's freshwater worsens as data gaps mask extent of crisis

In 2013, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians signed a memorandum of understanding on that project, which included plans to build a desalination plant at the Red Sea.

But against the backdrop of popular anger in Jordan due to stagnation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, then-water minister Mohammad al-Najjar in June 2021 said the Red Sea-Dead Sea project was "now a thing of the past".

(with AFP)

Cyclone Dikeledi moves away from Mayotte, leaves three dead in Madagascar

Cyclone Dikeledi was moving away from the French territory of Mayotte on Sunday but the archipelago will remain under red alert until Monday evening. The storm however caused flash floods in the neighbouring Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, where at least three people were killed.


Issued on: 12/01/2025 - RFI

This aerial view shows destroyed shelters and houses in the town of Vahibe, on the outskirts of Mamoudzou, on the French Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte, on December 24, 2024, a week after the cyclone Chido's passage over the archipelago. Mayotte was placed on orange cyclone alert on 10 January, 2025 ahead of the passage of Dikeledi around this archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the prefecture of Mayotte announced.

 AFP - PATRICK MEINHARDT

Dikeledi hit the northern coast of Madagascar as a cyclone on Saturday evening before weakening into a severe tropical storm.

"In terms of impact, Antsiranana province in Madagascar has sustained the most intense conditions in recent hours," Météo-France said, referring to the island's northern tip.

Three people died in the torrential rains that battered northern Madagascar, the National Office for Risk and Disaster Management (BNGRC) said on Sunday. More than 900 people were also affected.

At its closest, Dikeledi passed around 100 kilometres south of Mayotte early on Sunday morning.

"It is now moving away from the island," national weather service Météo-France said.

On Saturday night, Mayotte was placed on red alert in anticipation of the storm's passage. It is to remain as such until Monday, local police said.

Dikeledi came less than a month after the most devastating cyclone to hit France's poorest department in 90 years caused colossal damage in mid-December, killing at least 39 people and injuring more than 5,600.

This satellite handout image from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Colorado State University-CIRA (CSU/CIRA) taken and released on 11 January, 2025 shows the Cyclone Dikeledi approaching Mayotte (C-L), West of Madagascar and East of Mozambique.

 © Agence spatiale européenne (ESA) et Colorado State University-CIRA (CSU/CIRA) / Via AFP

Heavy rain in Madagascar

Rain and wind intensified in Mayotte on Sunday morning, hitting up to 80-90 kilometres per hour particularly in the southern part of the island.

Mayotte's population stands officially at 320,000, but there are an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 more undocumented residents living in shanty towns.

People clean the debris around the destroyed houses in the aftermath of Cyclone Chido, in Mamoudzou, Mayotte, France 20 December 2024. 

REUTERS - Gonzalo Fuentes

Locals earlier said that they were concerned about the new storm's potential impact, given the devastation wrought by the Cyclone Chido in December.

"We're very worried, given what happened the first time," said Ali Ahmed, a resident of Mamoudzou, which is located on Grande-Terre, the main island of Mayotte.

The floods were reported in the south of the archipelago, devastating the village of Mbouini – one of the few localities to have been spared from Chido.

French PM Bayrou promises 'concrete' aid and two-year reconstruction of Mayotte

Torrential rain was reported in Pamandzi, in the south of the island of Petite-Terre.

Some locals were seen braving the red alert to shore up their roofs weakened by the rain.

Confined to their homes from Saturday night, inhabitants of Mayotte have been banned from moving around until further notice.
4,000 officials mobilised

The archipelago was placed on red alert from 1900 GMT on Saturday. During the alert, all travel is banned except for rescue services and other authorised personnel.

But in Mamoudzou, locals were seen out on the streets, with some taking advantage of the rain to wash their vehicles.

More than 4,000 people have been mobilised in Mayotte, including members of the police and the military, France's interior ministry said.

Cyclone-hit Mayotte struggles to recover amid food and water shortages

Eighty accommodation centres have been set up to host some 14,500 people, the overseas territories ministry told French news agency AFP, saying that the situation was "calm".

The storm was expected to be reclassified as a cyclone again on Monday.

Over the next few hours, Dikeledi "will continue to intensify, possibly reaching the stage of an intense tropical cyclone as it turns southwards and then south-eastwards early next week", according to Météo-France.

In the Comoros, heavy rain was expected during the day, while in Mozambique in southeastern Africa, Dikeledi could approach the coast of Nampula province on Monday.

Japan PM tells Biden 'strong' concerns over steel deal

Tokyo (AFP) – Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told US President Joe Biden that his blocking of Nippon Steel's takeover of US Steel raised "strong" concerns in both countries, local media reported Monday.


Issued on: 13/01/2025 

US President Joe Biden scrapped Nippon Steel's $14.9 billion acquisition of US Steel, citing national security concerns

 © Richard A. Brooks / AFP/File

The comments came in a three-way call with the president of the Philippines that according to the White House also touched on China's "dangerous and unlawful" behaviour in the region.

Citing national security concerns, Biden nixed Nippon Steel's $14.9 billion acquisition of US Steel earlier this month, irking close ally Japan where the United States has some 54,000 military personnel.

"I said that strong voices of concerns are being raised not just in Japan but also in the US business community, and I urged (Biden) to dispel these feelings," Ishiba told reporters after the call on Monday.

Blocking a takeover by a Japanese firm is highly unusual and both firms have launched legal action, accusing the outgoing US president of "illegal interference".

Nippon Steel had touted the acquisition as a lifeline for its struggling US rival, but opponents warned the Japanese group would slash jobs despite its assurances to the contrary.

The takeover, which was announced in 2023, came in the run-up to last year's US presidential election and proved a political flashpoint.

US Steel is based in the swing state of Pennsylvania and both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris opposed the transaction.
'Big picture'

Japanese firms invested almost $800 billion in the United States in 2023, more than any other country, and 14.3 percent of the total, according to official US data.

US firms are also the biggest outside investors in Japan.

Japan is also a close strategic ally for Washington as it seeks to counter China asserting its presence in contested areas of the South China Sea.

Both steel companies said Sunday that US authorities have extended the deadline for unwinding the acquisition until June 18.

Japan's Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya, who will attend Trump's inauguration as US president on January 20, said it was important not to undermine the "big picture" of bilateral ties.

Iwaya also said that while in Washington he would seek talks with Marco Rubio, slated to be Trump's Secretary of State, and to lay the groundwork for a meeting between Ishiba and Trump.

Kyodo News cited government sources as saying that this could take place before mid-February.

During Trump's first term, he and Japan's then-prime minister Shinzo Abe, enjoyed warm relations. In December, Trump met Abe's widow at Mar-a-Lago.
US allies

In recent years, with an eye on China, Washington has sought to improve strategic relations with both Japan and the Philippines as well as with South Korea.

Biden, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and with Ishiba's predecessor Fumio Kishida held talks at the White House last April.

In another first, in 2023 Biden hosted Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol -- who briefly imposed martial law last month -- at Camp David.

Last year the Philippines ratified a key defence pact with Japan, which allows them to deploy troops on each other's soil.

On Monday Biden, Marcos and Ishiba "discussed trilateral maritime security and economic cooperation, as well as the People's Republic of China's dangerous and unlawful behaviour in the South China Sea," the White House said.

"The three Leaders agreed on the importance of continued coordination to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific," said a statement, which made no mention of the steel deal.

Marcos's office said that the call was to "reaffirm their commitment to strengthening cooperation in areas such as economic growth, emerging technologies, climate action, clean energy and regional security".

Biden also "highlighted the 'historic progress' made, particularly in maritime security, economic security and technological collaboration" between the three countries, the Philippines statement said.

© 2025 AFP

TURKIYE'S IMPERIALIST INVASION

Turkey sidelines France in favour of US partnership in northeast Syria


Turkey's chief diplomat has ruled out French military support in Syria after accusing France of ignoring Ankara’s security needs, saying it preferred partnering with the United States to diffuse Kurdish tensions in the country’s northeast.


Issued on: 10/01/2025 -
FRANCE24
By:NEWS WIRES

Last month, Syrian Kurds had to flee an onslaught by Ankara-backed groups. © Delil Souleiman, AFP


Turkey's top diplomat on Friday ruled out a role for French troops in Syria, saying it was only negotiating with the United States which has sought to head off Turkish military action against Kurdish fighters there.

Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan accused Paris of turning a blind eye to Turkey's security concerns, and called on France to take back French jihadist militants jailed in Syria.

International efforts have been made to dissuade NATO member Turkey from escalating an offensive against the Kurdish-led SDF, which helped US forces to defeat the Islamic State jihadist group in 2019.

The SDF is seen by many in the West as crucial to keeping the jihadists at bay. Turkey however sees it as a security threat over its ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil.

Fidan accused Paris of turning a blind eye to Turkey's security concerns.

 © Ozan Kose, AFP

Asked about the possible deployment of US and French troops in northern Syria to ease tensions with the Kurds, Fidan dismissed any role for France.

"The US is our only interlocutor," he told journalists in Istanbul. "Frankly we don't take into account countries that try to advance their own interests in Syria by hiding behind the US.

Watch more'We cannot characterise what happened in Syria as Turkey's doing': Turkish FM Fidan

"We have said it many times: there is no chance we can live with such a threat (from Kurdish groups). Either someone else will take the step or we will," he added.

Fidan and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have made threats this week to launch an offensive in Syria.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told the French television channel LCI that he had called Fidan to highlight that Turkey and France need "a stable, sovereign and unified Syria".

SDF: crucial bulwark or jihadist jailer?

SDF forces control dozens of prisons and camps in northeastern Syria where thousands of jihadists and their families are being held.

Among them are several dozen French nationals alongside other foreign extremists whose home nations are deeply concerned about having to take them back.

Despite Western insistence on the crucial role played by the SDF in holding back jihadists, Turkey has dismissed it as little more than a glorified jailer.

"What France should do is take back its own citizens, bring them to its own prisons and judge them," Fidan said.

"It is wrong to ask the YPG, another terrorist organisation, to keep these prisoners in exchange for support," he said, referring to the Kurdish group that makes up the bulk of the SDF.

France was ignoring Turkey's security concerns by not repatriating its jihadists, he said. Turkey's only aim was to ensure "stability" in Syria, he insisted.

"They always put forward their own demands and don't take any steps about our concerns," he added, pledging that Turkey would deal with the problem in its own way.

Barrot said the foreign militant fighters should be "kept where they committed their crime under the surveillance of the Kurds". He added that France would try to bring back the French children of militant fighters.

Last month, Fidan said Western support for the SDF was little more than payback for ensuring their own jihadist nationals did not return home.

(AFP)

PATRIARCHY IS FEMICIDE

Domestic violence

Emergency fund supports thousands of French women fleeing domestic violence

France has given emergency financial aid to more than 36,000 women fleeing domestic violence in the past year, as part of a nationwide drive to protect abuse victims.


Issued on: 13/01/2025 - RFI

Family, friends and elected officials pay tribute to Isabelle Mortaigne, killed by her husband on New Year's Eve, during a tribute in Haumont, northern France, on 8 January 2025. 

AFP - FRANCOIS LO PRESTI

The initiative provides financial support within three to five days, covering urgent expenses for those fleeing abuse.

It has been granted to 36,115 women since its implementation on 1 December, 2023, Minister for Gender Equality Aurore Bergé said in an interview with newspaper La Voix du Nord.

The average aid amount paid, she added, was €877.

First femicide of 2025

Bergé announced the figures during a visit to the northern town of Haumont, where France's first femicide of 2025 was recorded.

Isabelle Mortaigne, a 52-year-old homemaker, was killed early on New Year’s Day. Her husband has been charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Bergé joined family members and hundreds of local residents who placed white roses at the town hall, where a banner reading "In memory of Isabelle Mortaigne" hung from the facade.

Bergé said that 1,889 aid packages had been granted in the Nord department, where Haumont is located, in 2024.

Victims of domestic abuse in France to receive emergency aid
Ongoing challenge

While financial support aims to help victims leave abusive households, statistics indicate the scale of the challenge.

Official figures show 93 women were killed at the hands of their partner or former partner in 2023. While that's down on the year before, cases of domestic violence are on the rise.

The latest report from the Interior Ministry (SSMSI) published in November showed that security forces recorded some 271,000 victims of domestic violence in 2023, with women making up the vast majority of cases.

This figure marked a doubling of reported incidents since 2016.

(with newswires)

POST VICHY FRENCH FASCISM

‘Thunderclap’: The day Jean-Marie Le Pen staged the biggest upset in French election history
France

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the rabble-rousing far-right leader who died on Tuesday aged 96, was a political outcast on April 21, 2002, when he stormed into the second round of France’s presidential election, confounding pollsters’ predictions and knocking out the Socialist frontrunner in a political earthquake that would forever change French politics.

Issued on: 07/01/2025 - 
FRANCE24

By: Tracy MCNICOLLFollow

Jean-Marie Le Pen celebrates after qualifying for France's presidential runoff in a stunning election upset on April 21, 2002. © Pierre Verdy, AFP file photo

An earlier version of this article was published under a different title on April 17, 2022, marking two decades since Jean-Marie Le Pen’s famous upset.

Just four days before the first round of the 2002 French presidential election, the then-Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, relaxed and smiling, sat down with a mischievous reporter keen for a game of political science fiction.

At the time – just four days before a fateful first-round vote – it was unthinkable for a sitting prime minister (or indeed anyone else) to imagine far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen advancing to a presidential final. Just alien. After all, Le Pen was the diabolical ex-paratrooper who had once downplayed Nazi gas chambers as "a detail" of World War II history. A marginal figure. One that voters would marginalise, surely. And yet a history-shaping cataclysm was to come.

As prime minister for the five years dating back to 1997, the popular Jospin had pushed through socially progressive measures like France's 35-hour workweek. During a period social scientists would later pinpoint as the happiest the French had experienced, Jospin had led a left-wing coalition government while his old rival, the conservative Jacques Chirac, held the Élysée Palace as president. In April 2002, all conventional wisdom, not to mention the polls, saw Jospin advancing to the second round, strolling leisurely towards a run-off duel against Chirac, a rematch of the pair's 1995 clash.

"Imagine, just one moment, Mr. Prime Minister – Mr. Candidate – that you aren't in the second round?" a journalist, John Paul Lepers, asked the Socialist on April 17, 2002. "Who would you vote for?"

Incredulous, Jospin threw back his white-mopped head and laughed heartily. He had to pause to catch his breath before replying. "No, I have an imagination like anyone else, but, still, tempered by reason," he smiled. "So..."

"It's impossible?" the candidate is asked.

"Let's not say that, but it doesn't seem very likely to me, huh? Right. So maybe we can skip to the next question?" Jospin asked blithely, stifling a grin.

The rest is history. Four short days later, Le Pen, the rabble-rousing leader of the National Front, scored 16.86 percent to bring the far right into the final round of a presidential election for the first time. On his fourth bid for the presidency, Le Pen would be challenging the vote-topping incumbent Chirac (19.88 percent) for France's top job two weeks later, not Jospin. The Socialist finished third with 16.18 percent, fewer than 200,000 votes short of the run-off.

With historically low turnout (28.4 percent abstained) and a record number of candidates (16) on the ballot, the bar to entry for the 2002 presidential duel was uncommonly low. And a glut of left-wing candidates had split the vote, their voters just as casually confident as Jospin and untroubled by the far-right threat.
A 'thunderclap', an 'earthquake', a 'bomb'

The surprise result shook France to its core. Not to mention Jospin. Stern and ashen-faced, the prime minister waited no longer than his concession speech to quit politics for good, eliciting screams from supporters overcome with emotion. Likening the result to "a thunderclap", the disgraced Socialist called the far-right foray "a very worrying sign for France and for our democracy".

Lionel Jospin concludes his concession speech after the Socialist prime minister was eliminated from the presidential election in the first round on April 21, 2002.

 © Jack Guez, AFP/File

That same night, young people poured into the streets in spontaneous protest. The next morning's front pages blared seismic headlines: “The Le Pen Bomb” (France Soir), “The Shock” (Le Parisien), “The Earthquake” (the right-leaning daily Le Figaro), “France does not deserve this” (the communist daily L’Humanité) or succinctly, “No” (the left-leaning daily Libération). Apart from one of two Trotskyists on the first-round ballot, every losing left-wing candidate called on their supporters to (hold their noses and) vote for Chirac in the run-off to keep the far right from power. Anti-Le Pen demonstrations built to a crescendo on May Day, five days before the decisive vote, with some 1.3 million protesters taking to the streets – a record at the time that stretched back to France's liberation from Nazi occupation at the close of World War II. On banners and placards across the country, the message was clear: Not this time and never again.

When push came to shove in the May 5 run-off, that vast consensus was redeemed. The all-hands-on-deck front that parties and voters put up to keep the far right from power – dubbed the "Front Républicain" – handed Chirac a landslide victory: 82.2 percent to Le Pen's 17.8. A banana republic score levied in the name of republican democracy. Disaster averted. At least for a while.
Epilogue: undeterred, a far-right machine rumbles to life

The vast majority of French voters, not to mention France's allies abroad, weren't alone in their relief at seeing off the prospect of a President Le Pen in 2002. The far-right demagogue himself would later admit that he, too, had worried about actually winning France's highest office because his National Front at the time lacked the "machinery of power" needed to actually govern the country.

After the 2002 race, the anti-immigrant hardliner would take one final kick at the Élysée can, waging a fifth presidential bid in 2007 at the age of 78. But a more mainstream conservative presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, had by then figured out how to siphon votes from the National Front with striking effect. Le Pen finished fourth in his farewell campaign, eliminated in the first round with 10.44 percent of the vote. Sarkozy topped the 2007 first round with 31 percent of the vote, triple Le Pen's score, before winning the presidency handily. The grizzled old hardliner wouldn't reproduce the earth-shattering impact of his notorious 2002 run – at least not directly.

Read moreFrench far-right figurehead Jean-Marie Le Pen dies at 96

But far from putting an end to the far right's dalliance with French presidential politics, it turned out 2002 was only the beginning. The long journey to normalising the National Front – rendering it "banal", in the French parlance – began virtually the next day, more or less inadvertently. Starting with Sarkozy, mainstream politicians sought to neutralise the far right's vote-getting power by folding its supporters' concerns into their own policymaking. On the other hand, the extremist outfit would seek to soften its own image in a bid to build up the machinery it needed for governing.

The scrappy Sarkozy's rise to power had begun in earnest after the 2002 vote. Crime fears were seen to have contributed to Le Pen's success and the re-elected Chirac named Sarkozy as his interior minister. From there, Sarkozy made his name as France's top cop, showily waging war on crime and putting undocumented migrants on notice before parlaying his tough talk into a successful bid for the Élysée Palace. As president from 2007, Sarkozy made national priorities of hardline issues like banning the burqa and deporting Roma.

French President Sarkozy Sarkozy speaks after losing his re-election bid on May 6, 2012. © Eric Feferberg, AFP

But Sarkozy's appeal to National Front voters soon faded, making good on Le Pen's contention that "people prefer the original to the copy" when he couldn't meet hardline expectations. When Sarkozy stumped for re-election in 2012 blasting "uncontrolled waves of immigration", no one could ignore that he had shaped migration policy himself for a full decade.

Sarkozy lost the 2012 presidential race to Socialist François Hollande. But the National Front was back on the rise. Its candidate, one Marine Le Pen, scored 17.9 percent in the 2012's first round, a party record, after taking up the torch from her father. She then topped the vote in 2014 European Parliament elections, successively adding elected officials to her machinery of power. In 2017 she bettered her dad's 2002 performance, making it to the final and closing the gap on her opponent, Emmanuel Macron. Running as a centrist, Macron beat Marine Le Pen in the 2017 run-off with 66.1 percent to her 33.9. Five years on, the pair square off in a rematch that was tighter still.
Crossing the Rubicon

Ahead of the 2022 presidential election, the left-leaning Fondation Jean Jaurès think tank argued that the so-called "cordon sanitaire" – the barrier that rival political parties agreed to quarantine the National Front off from the levers of power – began "to erode" after Sarkozy's presidency. In 2012, down the stretch of his doomed bid for re-election, Sarkozy crossed the Rubicon when he deemed Marine Le Pen "compatible with the republic". In 2015, his party crossed another line when it officially green-lighted reneging on the republican front in a legislative by-election that pit a leftist candidate against the National Front. After the first presidential round in 2017, far-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon declined to explicitly call on his supporters to vote for Macron against Le Pen in the final; he did the same for the 2022 run-off. So, too, did the conservative Les Républicains in deciding not to back a vote for either Macron or Le Pen.

Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen at the National Front party congress in Fréjus, France, on September 7, 2014. Valéry Hache, AFP

Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, spent a decade giving the family business a makeover. After taking over in 2011, she set out to "de-demonise" the party her father founded, showing the door to those she deemed "anti-Semites, extremists and extreme-right guys" and rebranding the party the "National Rally". She got a boost for the 2022 race when far-right newcomer Éric Zemmour appeared like a bull in a china shop, deflecting attention and effectively accelerating Le Pen's charm offensive. While Zemmour hogged the limelight with hardline histrionics, Le Pen was free to focus on voters' purchasing power concerns – pledging to slash fuel prices and nix income tax for those under 30. Anyone interested in checking that her hard-right credentials were still intact (banning the hijab, ending birthright citizenship, stripping benefits for foreign nationals) could consult the brochure.

Observers note that traditional far-right concerns have gradually shifted from marginal issues in the public debate to central ones, effectively normalising topics once considered beyond the pale and far-right parties.

Back in 2002, Chirac showily refused to take part in a TV debate against fellow presidential finalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. "In the face of intolerance and hatred, no transaction, no compromise of principles, no debate is possible," Chirac explained at the time.

In stark contrast, two decades later, Macron's then Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin squared off against Marine Le Pen on primetime television. They sparred over a bill Macron's party was tabling in parliament meant to ward against "Islamist separatism". Indeed, Darmanin had just published a book of that name and Le Pen praised it. "I read your book very carefully," she told Darmanin, a one-time Sarkozy protégé. "And, apart from a few inconsistencies, I could have put my name on it," Le Pen said. Darmanin, for his part, accused Le Pen for "going soft" with "her strategy of de-demonisation". He quipped, "You should take some vitamins; I don't find you tough enough."

Read moreHow France’s far right changed the debate on immigration

That February 2021 encounter was telling. "They spent two hours discussing the place of Muslims in French society at a time when we are living through both a health crisis and an economic crisis," sociologist Ugo Palheta told FRANCE 24 at the time. "The government is trying to reclaim the population's trust by adopting much of the vocabulary and proposals of the far right in a blatant attempt to win votes," the expert argued, noting previous administrations had done the same. "This is what Macron is doing today with a strategy that starts from the principle that the working classes are concerned above all with identity issues, when they are mainly suffering from their socioeconomic situation. The problem is that, the further you extend into far-right terrain, the more the far right progresses," Palheta said.

AMERIKA

Where Urban Fault Lines Run Deep, Solidarity Cities Take Root

In divided cities profoundly shaped by racial capitalism, solidarity economies are redrawing urban space.

By Maliha Safri , Marianna Pavlovskaya , Stephen Healy , Craig Borowiak , UniversityofMinnesotaPress/Truthout

January 12, 2025

Mural entitled "Jazz women" pictured on September 10, 2013, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Frédéric Soltan / Corbis via Getty Images

Contemporary debates about capitalism and its alternatives often fall into two traps: either portraying economic life as so fully saturated by (racial) capitalism that alternatives are rendered insignificant, or idealizing these alternatives to the point of overlooking racial and economic divisions within social movement spaces. The new book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation (University of Minnesota Press, January 2025) seeks to navigate both pitfalls. Drawing on detailed geographic analysis of New York City, Philadelphia and Worcester, Massachusetts, the book argues that solidarity economies — often invisible in mainstream economic narratives — permeate urban landscapes. These economies have enabled many urban communities, particularly in historically Black and Brown neighborhoods, to endure the oppression wrought by racial capitalism, including the devastating impacts of redlining. By building urban life with economic solidarity, these communities have made place differently from racial capitalist logics. In the process, they have built what we call Solidarity Cities. The book abounds with examples illustrating how people actively build these Solidarity Cities, bridging racial and class fault lines, creating spatial imaginaries and placing solidarity economies at the forefront of urban life. This adapted excerpt is taken from the book’s introduction.

Two large, painted signs sit at the entrance to the César Andreu Iglesias Community Garden, a large community garden roughly the size of a city block located in North Philadelphia. “Welcome. bienvenidos. grow share gather,” reads the first in lavender and green. Beside it, in yellow and red, a second sign declares, “este terreno no esta en venta” (this land is not for sale). A raised fist — the universal symbol of solidarity — is painted beneath the text. Together, the two signs convey complementary messages about the garden. The first conveys an openness to others, a welcoming of neighbors and visitors into the garden space and into community. The second sign declares the community’s commitment to defending garden land from market forces. The signs are a welcome, a warning, and an invocation of communal intentions.

Positioned along the racially diverse western edge of the Norris Square neighborhood in North Philadelphia, where predominantly Latinx areas transition abruptly into predominantly Black ones, the garden is a hub of intercultural solidarity and intermingling. Formed in 2012 as a collaboration between the Philly Socialists and local residents, the garden is named after the playwright, journalist, labor organizer, and Communist political activist César Iglesias. Over time, Iglesias Garden has become a multigenerational prism of low-income, Latinx, Indigenous, and Black struggles for land rights, food justice, and community belonging, both in the neighborhood and citywide.

Despite its cultural riches, the Norris Square neighborhood is also a space that powerfully exemplifies the dialectics of urban abandonment. In the 1970s, at the height of deindustrialization, unemployment and abandoned properties and factories plagued Norris Square. A key part of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican barrio, Norris Square has long been one of the lowest-income neighborhoods in the city. In the 1980s and early 1990s, media outlets branded the area as “needle park” and the “badlands,” justifying a carceral crackdown as police waged their war on drugs in the community.

Back then, a different community garden project (today part of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project) located a few blocks northeast of Iglesias Garden’s current location provided a key rallying site of resistance and cultural affirmation. Community members were continuously lost to drugs, hospitals, and prison. In the face of such forces, a group of Puerto Rican women known as Grupo Motivos successfully mobilized around community gardening as a way to repurpose abandoned land so as to drive out drug markets, make the neighborhood safer for children, and educate the community about their Latinx and Afro-Caribbean heritage while providing food and beautiful gathering spaces for gardeners and the community as a whole.

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Community gardens in and around the Norris Square neighborhood provided a bulwark against drugs, violence, and policing in the past. Today, gardens in the neighborhood have become a site of communal defense against gentrification and displacement. Like many other gardens, the Iglesias Garden struggles with land tenure insecurity. In recent years, it has lost land parcels to predatory developers who, unbeknownst to the gardeners, acquired land titles through municipal auctions of tax-delinquent land called sheriff’s sales. Hundreds of other gardens face similar risks. With Iglesias Garden in the lead, the city’s urban agriculture community has rallied around these land-precarious gardens, securing wins from the city as they resist gentrifying pressures that would push out the very communities that have tended the land and stabilized neighborhoods in the first place.

Taken together, the stories of the Iglesias Garden and other North Philadelphian gardens destabilize what can often seem like a template of uneven urban development under racial capitalism that produces polarized urban space in many U.S. cities and cities around the world. Within this space, we find areas catering to the economic and cultural elite. The world’s wealth is increasingly concentrated in their hands. These are parts of the city where life is good; where climate-controlled corporate offices alternate with luxury condominiums, and where boutique coffee shops seem to occupy every other corner, intermixed with upscale restaurants, theaters, and art galleries. Within the same cities, we find neighborhoods where poverty affects high proportions of residents, most often people of color, who struggle to meet their daily needs. A product of decades of disinvestment and organized abandonment, such neighborhoods are frequently defined by what they lack—e.g., jobs, decent housing, good schools, finance, safety, green space, fresh produce—and their struggles with poverty, police violence, and crime. Between these paired logics of what might be familiar to readers as the Gentrified City and the Disinvested City, North Philadelphia’s community gardens reveal a third dimension of city life that organizes urban space in a different way, one rooted in the ethics of economic cooperation, inclusion, mutuality, and democracy and in community struggles for racial and economic justice. We call this third dimension the “Solidarity City.”

We introduce the idea of the Solidarity City to evoke an alternative spatial imaginary highlighting solidarity relations as definitional features of urban life. In general terms, solidarity names a sense of collective responsibility and shared purpose that connects an individual to a group or community. To be in solidarity entails both feeling a sense of common purpose with others and being willing to make sacrifices. For us, the Solidarity City names something that exists in the present (a diverse economy of cooperation) and can be found in the past (though traveling under other names). It also names an aspirational horizon for realizing more solidarist urban futures. The Solidarity City is thus a concept that harbors past, present, and future tenses. It also extends across multiple social domains and scales of urban life: from caring for others, volunteering, and single community projects to initiatives undertaken at the level of the neighborhood or of the entire city.

Although we have opened with a story of gardens set in Philadelphia, Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation deals with far more than urban agriculture in one city. It examines in depth the different aspects of solidarity economies in three U.S. urban areas: New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester, Massachusetts, our long-term research sites. But the truth is that elements of the Solidarity City exist the world over, in cities both small and large, from Cochabamba in Bolivia, to Cape Town in South Africa.

The interest in solidarity-based alternatives to capitalism has indeed been fast growing. In our own experiences as community-engaged researchers, we have witnessed remarkable grassroots ingenuity as communities innovate with economic initiatives that prioritize ethical considerations over profit maximization and inclusive well-being over individual wealth. Over the past decade, experiments with community gardens, cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, community finance, and the like have proliferated, as has interest in economic democracy (or nonhierarchical workplaces) more generally.

Some of these practices and initiatives are older, while others have developed more recently in response to the cascade of economic, ecological, and geopolitical crises sweeping the world — crises that have left populations feeling more economically precarious, more vulnerable to climate emergency, more skeptical about capitalist institutions, and more open to alternatives. New or old, many tap into long cross-cultural traditions of mutual aid that have sustained communities in the face of many forms of systemic economic, racial, gender, and heteronormative oppression.

As important as such initiatives are for many communities, they nevertheless typically fall out of mainstream studies of the economy, which focus instead on for-profit enterprises, capitalist markets, and state budgets. Moreover, to the extent that such initiatives are studied, they have generally been treated in isolation from one another. Thus, consumer cooperatives are studied independently from worker cooperatives, which are studied separately from community gardens, credit unions, and so forth. This piecemeal approach reinforces what J. K. Gibson-Graham term a capitalocentric worldview, which a priori asserts capitalism as the dominant form of economy, while alternatives are presumed to occupy only small niches in society and are accordingly pushed to the periphery, to the extent they are acknowledged at all. For those looking for a way beyond capitalism, possibilities become difficult to imagine under such a worldview.

We counteract these limiting habits of thought by exploring the geographies that emerge when diverse initiatives are brought out of their silos and conceived together as facets of a shared solidarity economy capable of transforming cities and ways of urban living.

What if we could learn to see the examples all around us not as scattered exceptions but as constitutive elements of the vital networks of human solidarity that support urban life? What if, amid the towering trees of capitalist structures that seem to dominate our horizons, we could sense an expanding solidarity ecosystem growing in the understory and composing the Solidarity City?

We would see a robust life in the forest—many other trees, as well as bushes, ferns, mushrooms, etc.—that might be considered noncapitalist forms nurtured by the underground root systems and the fungi symbiotically connecting trees. Visible above ground are the more formally organized parts of the Solidarity City — housing and worker cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens, and more.

Below ground, the undercurrents of solidarity spread through the soil, nurturing informal economies and social practices, while sustaining what lies above through the continual extension of goodwill, reciprocity, and care. Learning to see the solidarity already operating within economies is a crucial step toward envisioning what solidarity cities have been and might become.

At the same time as our research elevates aspirational elements of the solidarity economy, we are also wary of certain forms of advocacy that cast noncapitalist alternatives in an optimistic glow while ignoring where and when they fall short of movement ideals. Working within activist spaces has sensitized us to the adversity that grassroots initiatives often face when familiar forms of exclusion and marginalization — along lines of race, poverty, gender, sexuality, ability, and other differences — feature in movement spaces as they do in broader society. For proponents striving to establish the credibility of progressive initiatives, choosing to highlight challenges can feel counterproductive, especially when there is a prevailing skepticism about the viability of economic alternatives. But not acknowledging challenges is also a problem.

In these lights, three central contentions organize our thinking. Our first contention is that the scale of the solidarity economy is bigger than commonly thought (see Map 1).

Second, we argue that many of the race and income divisions that underlie modern urban life in the United States are also manifest within the geographies of the solidarity economy.

Third, following from this observation, we contend that solidarity economy initiatives and the movement at large, while being affected by these racial and economic divisions, themselves possess many of the normative and practical resources for confronting and ultimately transforming these fractured landscapes. And indeed, the cities we study provide abundant examples of noncapitalist initiatives working toward racial and economic justice by means of trial and error, experimentation, failure, setback, and persistence. These offer a practical toolbox of beautiful experiments capable of spreading justice rather than toxicity from one place to the next.


This article is an adapted excerpt from the introduction of "Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation" by Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2024 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Used by permission.

Maliha Safrii is professor of economics at Drew University and has written for publications such as Antipode, Signs and Environmental Policy and Governance.

Marianna Pavlovskaya is professor of geography at Hunter College and coeditor of Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime.

Stephen Healy is associate professor of geography at Western Sydney University and coauthor of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities.

Craig Borowiak is professor of political science at Haverford College and author of Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control.

I’m a Trans Teen in Texas — Politicians and Anti-Trans Bigots Cannot Erase Me

Anti-trans conspiracies driven by right-wing activists and lawmakers broke up my family, but they can’t destroy me.

By Marcos , 

Truthout

January 12, 2025

Op-Ed |

Ayo Walker / Truthout


Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.

As I write this, it has been about a week since my 17th birthday. It feels weird to me. Six years ago, I came out as transgender, and four years ago I thought my life was over. Back then, I never dreamed of making it this far, of reaching my dream — accessing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), finally feeling excited for my future and the person I’m going to be. Now I’m almost an adult, and I’m about five months on testosterone. I still feel 13.

My gender story feels less typical than the ones I hear from other trans men, about how they’ve always felt like they were born in the wrong body, always preferred “male” toys, always hung out with other boys. I never felt like a boy as a child. I never felt like a girl either. I didn’t know what I was, but I also didn’t care. I had the privilege of being raised by left-leaning parents who didn’t push anything gendered on me. It wasn’t until school started that I began to feel different from my peers.

Before I figured it out, I assumed this feeling of discomfort meant I was gay. I came out, I tried to like girls, but it wasn’t me. I thought the reason I didn’t want to date men was because I was a lesbian, when I think really the reason was that I didn’t want to be a girlfriend.

Puberty was the last straw, and after connecting the dots, I socially transitioned in 6th grade. I changed my name and my pronouns, and it felt so great. I hadn’t felt that way about myself before — so certain about who I was and so proud of who I was. But it was 2019. Shortly afterwards, the COVID pandemic ramped up and we were all out of school, on our computers all day. It was a strange few years to be newly transitioned.

During online school, dysphoria had less of a grip on me, but going back to in-person learning in 8th grade was rough. The people at my school had known me for years as a girl — the weirdo lesbian artist freak. I just wanted to be seen as a boy. But no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work. I became depressed. I didn’t like going out or going to the community pool, making new friends or even speaking out loud.

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At age 14, I brought up testosterone to my parents for the first time. It was something I had wanted since the beginning of my transition. I would spend hours online watching “transition timelines,” snapshots of someone’s life from coming out to starting T and getting surgery. I saw the happiness that transition brought people. It felt so far off in the future, but close enough for me to wait for it. These trans adults gave me hope that one day I could be comfortable as myself.

But the atmosphere was different when we came back from quarantine. Yes, I had a sense from years prior that people didn’t understand me, but I had already made peace with that. It didn’t scare me. Post-COVID, though, there was a new hostility I could feel from people who knew I was trans, or found out or suspected. People I didn’t know felt comfortable telling me that they “liked my old name better.” They felt fine making horrible degrading jokes about me (or my transgender sisters, brothers, and others) to my face. But even with this growing hostility, accessing HRT felt like it was going fairly quickly. The question had been so scary to ask, but neither of my parents were upset at me. We went to my pediatrician and got more information about it. I was so hopeful for my future.

Then my mother started to express concerns about my father’s views on HRT. He was stalling, asking for more and more information, more and more meetings with doctors and therapists. This was tolerable. We had known about his medical anxieties, and this seemed no different from the times where he’d get scared about a procedure and bring a notepad to the doctor’s office to take notes. But unlike those times, his anxiety and need for control continued to grow. He didn’t stop asking and pressing and deliberating. He began to argue with my mom about HRT and detransition rates. He’d email videos and studies from anti-trans websites run by “concerned parents” who wanted to keep their “daughters” healthy. I didn’t know this would last as long as it has. Once he got sucked into anti-trans conspiracy, he never got better.

As our relationship became strained, I began to lose hope. It felt like the world had gotten tired of me and decided to take away the family support I had been lucky to have. Though initially he’d gendered me correctly, my dad began insisting on misgendering and deadnaming me. I felt so disgusting every time he tried to have a “discussion” with me about testosterone and he’d bring up fertility or vaginal atrophy as a talking point every time he’d assert to me that I am female, not male. I learned to shut up about the way I felt and came to terms with the reality of my situation: I was not going on testosterone.

My father’s ways of thinking didn’t even just affect our relationship — they also started to affect his relationship with my mom, which before this was relatively peaceful. I had always told friends my biological parents were “just like best friends,” but as he delved deeper into conspiracy, I saw the gap between them grow larger and larger. My mom tried so hard for me, deflecting pointed questions about my identity or mental health, reading the bullshit articles he’d email her constantly, trying so hard to come to an understanding with him, but nothing worked. In his head, he was trying to save me from my “crazy” mother, trying to keep me healthy and far away from doctors and even therapists, from “Big Pharma.” It was an intensely stressful time, but in the end I was able to access what I needed to care for myself, things I had only dreamed of having — therapy, medication, HRT. After everything that had happened, I also started choosing to stay with my dad less, which both excited me and saddened me. I miss the way my dad was, before I came out. Within the past year, I went from staying with him half the time, to seeing him once a week. And the thing is, it didn’t have to be that way.

Then lawmakers in our state began restricting health care too, based on the same propaganda that had done so much damage in my family. I got news of these things from my dad a lot of the time. He’d come to me and tell me about the new laws they were passing against me. If not, I’d hear about it on the radio in the car constantly. There was always something new happening to us. There was always a new death.

I still hear this crushing news all the time — it never stops. Right now, it’s the efforts by Republicans to bar Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, from using the women’s bathroom at the Capitol. Would they prefer her in the men’s bathroom? Obviously not. It’s not about restrooms. They don’t want us anywhere.

I get more angry than scared, though, because lawmakers and anti-trans activists use bullshit reasons to attack us, claiming they’re protecting women’s spaces. With that angle, they not only demean and exclude trans women, they erase trans men completely. I, like many trans people, have experienced my own version of what McBride is facing right now.

The restroom issue is such a small problem with an easy fix, and it isn’t just gender-neutral bathrooms. At school, people notice when you use a teacher’s restroom or a gender-neutral option, just like people noticed at my middle school — kids who then went on to harass me, teachers who used this as an excuse to pick on me. Gender-neutral bathrooms are not a sufficient accommodation. They’re a white flag, an “OK, whatever, take this.” The real fix is to actually address the bullying in the environment at school — or in Congress.

The day after the election, I was so dissociated all day. I felt defeated, utterly baffled that so much hope in the nation had been lost over the span of a single night. Amid all this, I would see a friend and ask, “How do you feel?” And they would answer, “About what?”

I realize now there is a whole other side of this country that hasn’t even felt a change from before the election to after. They feel safe, and I’m so envious.

My family situation has recently changed, which allowed me to start T. My dad knows and, thankfully, he can’t do anything about it. I can’t ever get back the years I lost to depression, to dysphoria, to anxiety. I can never take back the hospital stays, or the brain cells I probably lost drinking and smoking, or the scars. I can’t get rid of the anger either, and until this world is a safe one for me and other trans children, teens and adults — I won’t be able to. It’s okay to be angry, to show it and to utilize it.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.


Marcos is a trans teen in Texas who loves anything to do with film. He spends his time listening to The Smiths and coming up with characters in his head.

MLA Members for Palestine Protest Denial of BDS Vote at National Assembly

"We feel that it is our responsibility as the largest North American organization of scholars of literature and language to protest and stand with our colleagues who are being murdered for their existence," said one organizer.


MLA Members for Justice in Palestine lead a die-in during the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly in New Orleans on January 11, 2025.
(Photo: MLA Members for Justice in Palestine)

Brett Wilkins, Olivia Rosane

COMMON DREAMS
Jan 12, 2025

"The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be!"

That was the message that protesters at the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly in New Orleans wanted to send Saturday after the executive council of the MLA—the preeminent U.S. professional group for scholars of language and literature—blocked them from holding a member vote on a resolution endorsing the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.

Like the resolution recently passed by the American Historical Association, the declaration issued by MLA Members for Justice in Palestine accuses Israel of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where—in addition to killing over 46,000 Palestinians, wounding nearly 110,000 others, and displacing around 2 million more—15 months of relentless Israeli onslaught has obliterated the embattled enclave's education infrastructure.

The MLA resolution—which supports the initial 2005 BDS call issued by Palestinian civil society groups—also acknowledges that international law experts accuse Israel of genocide and that the International Court of Justice, which is weighing a genocide case against Israel, has "determined that Israel is maintaining a system of apartheid."

"The MLA's commitment to 'justice throughout the humanities ecosystem' requires ending institutional complicity with genocide and supporting Palestinian colleagues," the statement asserts. "Therefore, be it resolved that we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call."

Karim Mattar, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, took part in Saturday's demonstration, during which supporters of the resolution staged a die-in and walkout, chanted slogans, and held a banner that read, "MLA Is Complicit in Genocide."

"I consider the executive council's decision to be a cowardly one," Mattar told Common Dreams. "The MLA is a humanities advocacy organization, and by repressing a membership vote, a democratic process to deliberate on the necessity of institutional divestment with companies that profit from genocide, it's actively contributing to the problem."

"I think it's a fundamental contradiction in the MLA's values between these stated values and principles of advocacy for the humanities and the blocking of a mechanism by which such advocacy might be facilitated," he added.



Mattar—who is Palestinian American and whose relatives were among the more than 750,000 Arabs ethnically cleansed from Palestine during the Nakba, or "catastrophe" that was the creation of the modern state of Israel—said Saturday's protest brought tears to his eyes.

"To see this protest, this movement emerging at the MLA, to see this national and international movement of solidarity with Palestine to emerge in the last year, has been incredibly moving for me," he said.

Protest co-organizer Neelofer Qadir, an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, told Common Dreams that protesters "really wanted to draw attention to how institutions are being destroyed, like universities, like libraries, like archives, which makes certain that there is a deep commitment to genocide and why scholasticide is part of genocide because the Israeli government intends to destroy all possible evidence of Palestinian life, past, present, and therefore no longer in the future."

"And we feel that it is our responsibility as the largest North American organization of scholars of literature and language to protest and stand with our colleagues who are being murdered for their existence," she added.

Last month, the MLA executive council explained that while it is "appalled by the continued attack on Gaza," it believed that "supporting a BDS resolution was not a possible way forward for the association to address the crisis" due to "legal and fiduciary reasons."



Qadir dismissed the council's excuse, saying she believes the MLA is "engaged in a formal program of organized abandonment that is part and parcel of fascist and neoliberal governance that's happening in the U.S., Canada, and across the world."

St. John's University associate English professor Raj Chetty, who also organized Saturday's action, told Common Dreams that "whatever the MLA has said about the 'fiduciary concerns' about this, we're like, you're going to find out some other fiduciary concerns as you notice that both intellectual work and membership dues are going to start evaporating."

As part of their effort, MLA Members for Justice in Palestine are urging supporters to not renew their MLA membership "until there's a meaningful substantial change in position," as Chetty put it.

"This [protest] is a real call to humanity, a real call to justice, a real call against complicity, and a real call to support Palestinian life and rail against Israeli actions that are ending Palestinian life in all the ways that Neelofer talked about," he said.

From Arrests to Invasions, Israel Targets West Bank Universities

Palestinian universities, powerful resistance sites, are forced to contend with settler violence and segregation walls.

By Ashjan Ajour ,

Truthout

PublishedJanuary 12, 2025

Students protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza during a demonstration at Birzeit University.

The Birzeit University Public Relations Office

Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.

Israel’s long-standing assault on Palestine’s education sector is so severe that it has earned a label: scholasticide. In Gaza, the devastation has been catastrophic: Israel destroyed 80 percent of schools in the Strip and bombed all 12 universities. Among the victims killed are approximately 130 professors, academics, scientists and university presidents (along with members of their families), as well as more than 12,000 students, highlighting the targeting of Palestine’s intellectual and academic community.

Amid its genocide in Gaza, Israel has intensified its assaults on education in the West Bank, revealing additional layers of systematic repression. This has included the arrest and detention of Palestinian students, depriving them of their fundamental rights to education. The Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University in the West Bank, which documents attacks on education and provides legal support to arrested students, has documented over 110 cases of students being arrested during the 2023-2024 academic year alone.

Israel deliberately targets education because it serves as a powerful tool of resistance for Palestinians. Education enables Palestinians to counter the colonial narrative, safeguard their heritage and identity and equip future generations with knowledge and agency. This targeting is embedded within a wider colonial agenda that seeks to dismantle the physical structures of education and to suppress the intellectual development of the entire Palestinian community.

Israeli Violence Disrupts Palestinian Students’ Life on Campus

“Students and academics are being detained at military checkpoints on their way to university, often being held for hours and subjected to assaults, making it increasingly difficult for them to reach campus,” Sundos Hammad, the Right to Education campaign’s coordinator, told Truthout. “Moreover, students fear settlers’ attacks on their way to university, particularly those traveling from the south or northwest of the West Bank.” This climate of fear, Hammad says, forced Birzeit University to shift to remote education for several months. Now the university is operating under a hybrid system, with classes online some days and face to face on others.

Birzeit University is not the only West Bank institution that has had to shift to online teaching. Al Quds University, for example, has been severely impacted by Israel’s segregation wall, built in 2002 under the pretext of “security concerns.” The wall divides the campus, isolating students from half of their university and disrupting their access to education. This has compelled the university to adopt remote learning to mitigate the barriers created by the wall and its associated checkpoints, which further restrict movement and exacerbate educational challenges.

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Palestine Technical University – Kadoorie has likewise made use of online education, as it can’t ensure the safety of its students due to Israel’s occupation. A military checkpoint on its campus leads to daily confrontations between students and Israeli soldiers.

The situation is also challenging to An-Najah National University in Nablus, as settlements in nearby villages, checkpoints and settlers’ attacks make it difficult for students to reach the campus.

In front of the Palestinian flag, students protest Israeli crimes committed under occupation.

The Birzeit University Public Relations Office

Such restricted mobility has fragmented Palestinian communities into isolated cantons, deeply affecting access to education.

“There is no longer geographical diversity among students at Birzeit University,” Hammad says. “Students from Gaza have been unable to enroll in universities in the West Bank due to a blockade lasting over 15 years.” Hammad says that most of Birzeit’s students come from the Ramallah area where the university is located. “The number of students from Jerusalem, the 48 areas and other West Bank cities has significantly decreased due to movement restrictions, leaving only a limited presence from these areas.”

“The student movement is a pillar for Palestinian national struggle. Israel perceives any student as a potential threat and targets them accordingly.”

Moreover, she says, academics with foreign passports — especially Palestinians in diaspora who don’t possess Palestinian identity cards — face challenges obtaining visas, making it increasingly difficult for them to teach at Birzeit. Hammad further emphasized that the occupation not only restricts students’ physical access to universities, but also limits their academic choices. “Students are forced to select courses and universities based on what they can physically reach,” she said.

The assault on Palestinian education extends beyond controlling students’ academic choices and movement to the outright killing of students.

“One of our university students, Aysar Safi (20 years old), was killed while participating in a peaceful protest to commemorate the Nakba anniversary. He was shot by an Israeli sniper. His father and brother, who are imprisoned in Israeli jails, were unable to say goodbye or even learn about his death at the time,” Hammad shared.
Criminalizing Students to Suppress Palestinian Resistance

The criminalization of student activism is a central component of suppressing Palestinian resistance, with students being arrested as their political rights and freedom of expression are denied. This systematic targeting disrupts their educational journey, and incarceration serves as a violent tool to punish those who speak out against Israeli colonization.

Hammad says the Israeli military has invaded Birzeit University multiple times since October 2023. “During these raids,” she says, “students’ belongings and devices are confiscated.”

Arrest and detention severely disrupt students’ education, often forcing them to spend considerable time regaining their academic footing after their release. The Right to Education campaign provides support to help students resume their studies. Hammad also notes that the campaign supports students while they are incarcerated. This includes information about how to cope with arrest and endure potential torture during interrogations, as well as providing legal assistance and helping students maintain communication with their families

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The funeral of martyr Aysar Safi at Birzeit University. Safi was shot while participating in a protest commemorating the Nakba in 2024.

The Birzeit University Public Relations Office

While most arrested students are males, there has been a marked increase in the targeting of female students during the war. Birzeit University says that nine of its female students and staff members are held in Israeli prisons. Among them is Khalida Jarrar, a scholar and researcher at Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at Birzeit University. Jarrar, who was working on a research project on the prisoners’ movement, was arrested on December 26 as part of mass arrests by Israeli forces during the genocide. She is now being held under administrative detention — without charge — under extremely harsh conditions, including solitary confinement where she endures inhumane treatment and isolation.

Jarrar is one of the more than 11,000 Palestinians whom Israel swept up in its mass arrests in the West Bank after October 7. Fairuz Salama, a student at Birzeit University, is another. She was arrested in November 2023, one month after the Israeli war on Gaza began, and was released as part of prisoner exchange deal on November 29, 2023. Reflecting on her release, she told Truthout, “Our freedom is not complete without an end to the war on Gaza.”

In prison, Salama said she was subjected to interrogation under extremely cruel conditions. But, she says, “My experience is humble compared to others who steadfastly endured long years in prisons or those facing genocide in Gaza. We are facing a colonizer that targets all of us as Palestinians.”

She said students need time to rebuild their lives after being arrested, and that “arrest is an ongoing process — many students who are released are later rearrested again.”

“Student movements are targeted because they serve as the heartbeat of Palestine society and can mobilize the people. That’s why they are subjected to arrest, killing and assaults,” Salama said. “The student movement is a pillar for Palestinian national struggle. Israel perceives any student as a potential threat and targets them accordingly.”

Indeed, Palestinian universities serve as vital spaces for shaping collective national identity and facilitating the production of knowledge that sustains the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. These institutions not only preserve the narratives of Palestinian history and resistance, but also empower the future generations to challenge colonial oppression. This is why Israel aims to control and dismantle these spaces, to suppress the production of laboratory knowledge and silence Palestinian stories. The deliberate destruction of education is therefore a direct assault on a powerful tool of Palestinian resistance.

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Ashjan Ajour is a Palestinian scholar currently residing in the United Kingdom and the author of Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body.