Environment

Mayotte: The essential solidarity and the necessary anti-colonial policy

Monday 13 January 2025, by Idriss Mohamed, Valentin Pantin

Cyclone Chido ravaged Mayotte on December 14, 2024. This island in the Comoros archipelago was established as the 101st French department on March 31, 2001.

What strikes you first is the poverty-stricken state of Mayotte, its extreme vulnerability, which made it a field of ruins after the passage of Chido. This is a French department whose official figures, provided by INSEE (the official French statistical institute) are eloquent in themselves: 77 per cent of the population live below the poverty line, 66 per cent live in shanty towns, the unemployment rate is 37 per cent, 42% per cent have a monthly income of less than 160 euros.

This is the situation reserved for Mayotte by the French state. A situation which has worsened over the course of racist operations like Wuambushu [1].

Colonial management of the disaster

When Mayotte is struck, it is France that is struck, intones the French government. All hands on deck, large-scale media campaign, procession in Mayotte of ministers and the head of state. It is also the omnipresent spectacle of France, at the bedside of its department in distress.

It was not the Bayrou government that was going to change the situation, with the contempt it displayed during its tenure. Nor Marine Le Pen, making a fool of herself with her insipid demagogy about the Frenchness of Mayotte, a French Muslim island 10,000 km from Paris.

What is revolting is that this "national solidarity" has been strongly marked by the colonial treatment of "overseas". We must add to this the coherent policy aiming to break the unity of the Comoros archipelago in order to "anchor Mayotte" in the French Republic. Against the immediate interests of the population, who especially need help.

The priority is to prevent Comorian solidarity in order to cut the umbilical cord to the islands of the Archipelago. Just think! Mayotte is no longer presented as one of the islands of the Comoros, but as an archipelago in itself, with the perfidious objective of removing it from its natural whole. Geography is therefore misused to obey the wishes of the French leaders.

Solidarity and reconstruction in the Comoros

In the face of disaster, solidarity must as always play a full role Unfortunately, this is not what drives the government. Faced with the vital water problem that arose in the aftermath of Chido, the Ssate blocked Anjouan, preferring to transit via Reunion, more than 1,500 km away. Worse still, Minister of the Interior Retailleau and his ilk are brandishing their magic weapon: illegal immigration, as if it were responsible for the natural disaster and should therefore be the compass for reconstruction.

The fact remains that the solidarity of Comorians is in full swing, in the Comoros as well as in the diaspora in France. They even use the fragile boats called "kwassa kwassa" to supply Mayotte with water and other basic necessities, while in France, they have set up dedicated funds of solidarity such as "SOS Chido”. This is a significant fundraiser, because with nearly 400,000 Comorians living in France, mainly in Marseille, Paris and Lyon, a solidarity campaign is possible.

Finally, on this 50th anniversary of the independence of the Comoros, we must ensure that Mayotte does not remain isolated, and certainly not from the rest of the Comoros!

Any reconstruction of Mayotte that does not integrate it into its natural environment will inevitably be doomed to failure, and yet this is the path followed by Macron and his ephemeral governments.

Published in the weekly l’Anticapitaliste, issue736, January 9 2025.

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Attached documents

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Footnotes

[1] Operation Wuambushu was launched in February 2023. Its aims were to combat criminality, destroy shanty towns and hunt down illegal migrants. It seems to have been a failure on all counts.

• Valentin Pantin

• Idriss Mohamed

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

Targeting Climate Change Protests

Binoy Kampmark

 January 13, 2025

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Photograph Source: John Englart – CC BY-SA 2.0

Climate change, like any crisis afflicting earth and humanity, is bound to bring out the best and the worst of a species that soils its nest, salts the earth, and poisons its nourishing rivers.  For those benefiting from plunder and bounty, change is a hard thing to accept.  Kleptocrats and the extractive industries, renters of land, and those wishing to make off with the earth’s booty take poorly to dissidents keen to point out this fact.

For that reason, climate change protestors have come to be seen as part of a verminous brood that global alliances of plundering fossil-fuel lobbies and corrupt, weak officials, elected or otherwise, wish to be rid of.  Protesting against this old order of acquisitiveness and accumulation is seen, even now, as aberration and monstrosity, if you believe that profits of market enterprise come before the Cassandras of scientific concern.  Best, goes the view, to think of ways of getting rid of these nuisances before they eat into company budgets and government treasuries.

The nature of that ridding comes in various forms: silencing and intimidation, the extensive application of oppressive laws limiting protest, the use of the dumb arm of those laws (police, prosecutors, courts) and, should that all fail, plain old disappearance and murder.  It’s remarkable to think that individuals whose only weapons are words and whose actions are limited, whose only means of suasion are vocal arguments and non-violent physical disruption, are given such forbidding properties.  So forbidding, in fact, that they are worthy of criminalisation.

This is despite the presence of legal provisions that protect, as Michel Forst, UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention puts it, those “taking action to defend their human right, and the human right of future generations, to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as recognized by the United Nations General Assembly.”  Given the urgency posed by the threat of climate change, and the “inadequate response from governments”, the peaceful protest has found expression in various ways, including various actions that may “cause disruption in the public space”.

This makes the 2024 study by researchers based at the University of Bristol, with the self-evident title Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protest, all the more pertinent.  It addresses the patterns of criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest around the world and the various laws and powers that have been introduced and used.  For reasons of focus, 14 countries are examined in greater depth.

The report, using data from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) and Global Witness, elucidates a tendency that has become all too common.  In the first instance, this punitive policy shifts the focus away from taking action against climate change and instead punishing those who oppose inertia and inactivity in the face of it.  In the second instance, these policies are authoritarian in nature, inconsistent “with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies.”

The most severe manifestation of this attack on environmental defenders is evidenced by the chilling policy of murder and disappearance.  The non-government organisation Global Witness reports that 2,106 killings of such protestors took place between 2012 and 2023.  The Global South, notably Latin America, is particularly notable in this regard.  The dishonourable list includes Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Honduras.

In wealthier states, the climate change protester may be safer, but hardly immune from state violence.  Countries that either openly or ostensibly accept freedom of assembly protections and the right to protest – in this case the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia – have been enthusiastically enacting laws that increase sentences for non-violent protest and negligible acts of sabotage. (The report points to the damage inflicted on a statue as an example.)  Arrests of such protestors in both Australia and the UK are above the international average: 20% and 17% respectively.

The authors also write about the “secondary” criminalisation of climate and environmental protests, which involves that nasty trend of applying, sometimes inventively, laws that are already on the books.  A popular choice in this regard is the evoking of anti-terrorism powers and the declaration of states of emergency to enable the extraction industries to continue their work unimpeded.

On the issue of oppressive laws, Australia has become something of a leader.  Novel pieces of legislation that chip away and smother civil liberties is something of a specialty down under, encouraged by the glaring absence of a federal bill of rights.  Since 2019, the states of Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia have all passed legislation in this criminalisation frenzy.

Australia’s Environmental Defenders Office (EDO), in collaboration with the Human Rights Law Centre and Greenpeace, affirms the tendency in its 2021 report, further noting the prioritisation of deterrence and denunciation in sentencing practices in courts “particularly when climate defenders do not express remorse or contrition for their activism.”

Broadly speaking, the emergence of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) has become a weapon of choice in government and corporate litigation.  Environmental groups have also been the subject of extensive surveillance and infiltration by government agencies and corporations friendly to the extraction agenda.

In arguments about the role played by environmental defenders, their slandering by the publicity machines of governments in league with private interests conforms to a familiar pattern.  They are pictured as privileged, pampered rabble rousers, ungrateful for what the earth’s plunder has done for them and, even more galling, the saintly role of mining magnates.  Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest extractor, is the paragon of such views.  “My question to the short-sighted is this: Do you really think we could survive without mining?”

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres sees it differently.  “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals,” he stated in a video message in April 2022.  “But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”  And how radical they continue to be in hiding the true cost of the extraction market.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Dutch police detain hundreds at climate protest

THE GREAT AMERIKAN WEST

Beware ‘Unleashing Freedom’ to Plunder and Pollute

George Ochenski

 January 13, 2025
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Photograph Source: USDA Rural Development – Public Domain

In his recent inaugural speech, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte spoke about how we have what the rest of the nation wants, saying: “The American dream lives in Montana and it’s here where we are proving what is possible when the government gets out of the way and empowers the people.”

If anything, his words reflect a relative newcomer’s poor understanding of Montana history — and what can happen when you “get government out of the way.”  But long-time Montanans remember.  We lived through and still suffer from the era when government was indeed “out of the way” and the rapacious appetites of the railroad, cattle, timber and mining barons ran rampant, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

The record is clear, and while many scars yet remain, the benefits of regulating formerly unrestricted greed and destruction are evident all across this vast state.

Anyone who knew those who lived in Montana 100 years ago can easily recall their stories of hunters basically wiping out the wildlife populations.  The most distinct example of human-caused destruction of wildlife was the decimation of the buffalo that once wandered our plains in the millions.

But the slaughter was stopped — not by individuals, but by the government.  While buffalo continue to recover, Montana now boasts healthy populations of deer, elk, antelope and moose — all of which would have been hunted to extirpation were it not for the institution of regulations to prevent their demise.

Hunting seasons were established to protect the time when existing wildlife carried the next generation to replenish the herds.  Regulatory limits on how many animals one individual could kill were instituted not to crush freedom, as the governor insinuated government has done, but to provide continuing opportunities for Montanans and generations yet to come.

While our clean rivers and abundant fisheries are the envy of the nation, that’s not by accident.  Plenty of Montanans still remember when the Clark Fork was a dead river that ran red with mining and smelting wastes, which we will continue to wrestle with for decades to come.

The timber barons ran huge rafts of logs down the Blackfoot, destroying the banks and scouring the riverbed on their way to the mills and leaving behind clearcuts leaching sediment into once-healthy tributaries.  Half a century later, the Blackfoot was again decimated when the Mike Horse mine tailings pond failed, flooding the river with toxic metals that wiped out the fishery.

And of course not all that long ago there was no such thing as the catch-and-release fishing ethic pioneered and promoted by iconic conservationists like Bud Lilly, who would willingly tell friends that in his youth it was “catch and release in bacon grease.”

While the governor lauds “unleashing freedom,” the undeniable reality of Montana’s past is that there must be sidebars on that “freedom” because there are those who will pillage the state’s wealth to get it while they can with no concern for the consequences.

The legislature’s GOP leaders, echoing the governor, have the regulatory laws that restored past damages and now protect Montanans and their environment in their crosshairs.  But laws such as the Montana Environmental Policy Act protect all Montanans — and rest assured Republicans need clean air, water, and soil, too, as well as healthy populations of fish and wildlife.

Montanans continue to suffer from past deregulatory mistakes, which took our electricity rates from the lowest in the region to the highest.  The lesson?  Beware “unleashing freedom” if the result is actually unleashing rapacious corporations to once again plunder and pollute this great state.

George Ochenski is a columnist for the Daily Montanan, where this essay originally appeared.