WHILE IN MOROCCO EVENTS SEEM TO HAVE CALMED DOWN FOR NOW, THE SITUATION IN MADAGASCAR APPEARS CLEARLY REVOLUTIONARY ~ from Lundi Matin ~ During a trip to northern Morocco last week, I had the chance to meet two supporters of the GenZ212 movement that has been shaking the country for several weeks. I also met a participant in the Malagasy movement of the same name, except for the telephone code. I report their words here, adding a few comments (admittedly too hastily; the errors and inaccuracies are solely my own) in an attempt to take stock of the situation. Let’s quickly set the scene: I am writing here as a member of lundimatin, from the African diaspora, convinced that the struggles here need to connect with the global wave of uprisings that we are witnessing from afar. In saying this, I am well aware, on the one hand, that I am not inventing new ground and, on the other hand, that the question of the positioning and possibilities of the struggles within the Western powers is different and remains unresolved. A more in-depth study would have required also to situate the people who informed me—I thank them warmly (it is their words that will be read here when quotes are introduced)—but this is only an incomplete progress report and perhaps useless for those already informed of recent and current events. This is the question that every uprising raises: what is the basis for the transition from routine order to the fire of insurrection? Currently, the problem seems to me to be posed as follows: how does this fire spread from one country to another, even though the technologies of surveillance and repression have never been so effective? And what forms does it take? Regarding Morocco, it seems that we must first get rid of the idea that the uprisings came out of nowhere: they are part of what I has been described to me as a powder keg, a long history of anger and struggle that will continue and resurface, even if the current movement runs out of steam (which seems to be the case since last Wednesday). When we talk about the “Arab Spring,” we rarely refer to Morocco, even though the February 20 movement was powerful. We can also mention the Rif Hirak of 2016, which spread to other cities in the country. Since then, “the tree has continued to grow.” People are directly opposed to the logic of the “makhzen,” a term linked to a complex and ancient history and which refers to the police system. The movement we are talking about began at the end of September following the death in August of eight women in a hospital in the south of the country (Agadir), while they had come to give birth by caesarean section. It was there, therefore, that the first demonstrations took place, which subsequently spread to the rest of the country. – I ask how? – one element to take into account, among many others, is a reel that went viral, in which we see a high-ranking member of the government addressing the demonstrators disdainfully and telling them roughly: “let them go continue their shit in Rabat”. This gentleman was taken at his word. Sociologically speaking, the category of “Gen Z” seemed imprecise to me. I ask for clarification: it was first students who took to the streets—hence this designation borrowed from the Nepalese movement, hence the organisational means from the world of gamers: Discord forums for example, which allow in particular to confuse the police by creating multiple discussion channels so that they no longer know where to turn. The students were quickly joined by a large-scale popular wave. In particular, in the south, where the situation has become truly insurrectional (city of Lqliâa), there are many agricultural workers (people grow tomatoes and avocados there, on empty stomachs, for Europeans) and also a lot of unemployment. “They hit straight away”: the level of violence of the repression seems to have surprised, it was of a brutality above normal. Two people were murdered by the police, another was seriously injured. They were targeted while dancing on police cars, having worn uniforms recovered in the crush; the riot was attacking the gendarmerie. Subsequently, helicopters were dispatched as soon as someone was injured, so as not to add fuel to the fire; these are highly sophisticated drones that allow the repressive forces to circulate information. “The engineering of maintaining order,” my friend tells me, is overdeveloped. I think directly of Mathieu Rigouste’s latest book, The Global War Against the People, whose critical relevance to current events seems to me more necessary every day. It is indeed here that we must come to talk about Israel, which we will find again with Madagascar, and which – it is a well-known fact – trained the Moroccan state in maintaining order and provided it with new repressive technologies. It has been repeated often enough: Gaza serves as a laboratory for repression on a global scale. It is not a question of intentionality, but of effects, the interests of the military-industrial economic complex come to perpetuate themselves. In response to the protests, the government handed out heavy prison sentences: three years, four years, or even fifteen years for a protester… the repression is atrocious. One of the challenges is to restore order by the start of the African Cup of Nations, which is scheduled to take place in December, and which represents a major structural investment. Last Wednesday, the word spread about taking a break, no doubt first to heal the wounds of the repression, but also, it seems, in anticipation of a promised speech by King Mohammed VI. It is difficult to know what the rioters think of the royal institution, but it is certain that this refers to issues very different from those of the old European states. The king seemed to me to represent for some, among many other things, a sort of counter-power to oppose the government (he is reputed to be more progressive). This is very far, however, from having been able to stifle popular assertion, which does not appear to have fully awakened since last Wednesday. Is this the effect of the violence of the repression, or a temporary lull? “Everything will be decided now.” My third interviewee is talking about Madagascar, and the situation there really seems even more decisive than in Morocco: President Rajoelina, overwhelmed by the scale of the insurrection, has been extracted by France to Réunion Island. This is unheard of. Part of the army has turned, refusing to suppress the movement, sometimes joining it. The gendarmerie, which is a very strong institution in the state, is not doing the same, however. We also find “GenZ” there, Discord, the skull and straw hat flag from the manga One Piece. On September 25, two or three days before the Agadir demonstrations, students from the Ankatso Polytechnic School spontaneously took to the streets, quickly joined by other groups of students. Living conditions at the school were unbearable: no electricity, no water. The energy issue was a truly structuring one, both for the ongoing revolution and for the power that was in place (which is certainly not much in place any more). The year 1960 and Madagascar’s independence did not ensure energy autonomy for the country. Power plants, fuelled by oil—and also operating the pumps needed to circulate water—were at the centre of a set of corrupt practices, in a context of shortages. Frequent “load shedding” consisted of regularly shutting down power plants (and therefore, water supplies) in order to save money. In Madagascar, the coloniality of power is glaringly obvious. The French Empire, however senile it may be, still owns the so-called Scattered Islands territory off the coast of the country, which it is keen to hold onto (stakes: potential energy resources, strategic presence in the Indian Ocean, etc.). President Rajoelina, who has dual nationality, is close to Macron (perhaps he will succeed Lecornu?). France has managed to offload an EDF hydroelectric power plant to replace the depleted national company, Jirama. Jirama’s CEO is none other than Ron Weiss, former head of Israel Electric Group. The State of Israel has several partnerships with Madagascar. One suspects that the business of death, control, and repression is part of this, but there is also, besides the Predator spyware, the dystopia of “modern farms.” As in Morocco, the movement is part of a long history of popular revolts, which can be traced back at least to 1947. The big difference, however, with most previous movements (at least the most recent ones), is that this one was not hijacked by a political leader. In 2009, Rajoelina managed to exploit the uprising to rise to power. Today, the only protagonist is “GenZ Madagascar,” not a proper name, nor a party. While some are currently trying to impose a structure on the movement, nothing is yet set in stone. Just like in Morocco, GenZ is not limited to a group of students (I have the impression that the signifier is floating, and is added to a host of other sociological determinations – perhaps we can even hope that it goes so far as to reconfigure them). The movement has a great social amplitude. Very poor classes are participating in the riots and looting in Antananarivo. Obviously, the government has tried to instrumentalise the looting to discredit the movement (in the past, it has allowed looting to take place for this purpose, by paying people and retaining the police). But this time, there is nothing to be done. Within the first 24 hours of the mobilisation, the government was dismissed and an army general was appointed Prime Minister. Huge bonuses were paid to the police to compensate for the delays in sales, followed by calls for a sort of reverse boycott: shopkeepers were asked to systematically refuse to sell their products to police officers, gendarmes, and their families. Without presuming what will happen and without neglecting that the power vacuum risks “opening the door to all appetites” (fear of the arrival of yet another tyrant), a notable fact has been the collective and continued attack, since the beginning of the movement, on Ravatomanga, the richest man in the country, a filthy capitalist linked to the corruption of the oil and electricity business, introduced into the upper echelons of power for about fifteen years, possessing “a right of life and death over the Malagasy economy.” Remember that it was in a private plane of one of Ravatomanga’s companies that Carlos Ghosn was exfiltrated from Japan (!). “Voldemort of protest ,” Ravatomanga had not been targeted during the last movements: we knew that his name “was not pronounced with impunity.” But now, he has also packed his belongings and gone into hiding in Mauritius. Three main demands crystallised during the popular uprising that, at least temporarily, defeated a government closely supported by the greatest Western powers: the resignation of the government, the arrest of Ravatomanga so that he can be brought to justice, and the dismantling of the “independent” national electoral commission (because it is not). Would a positive response to these demands from the government—or, if it fails to return, from the African Union, which had already governed between 2014 and 2019—be enough to put an end to the movement? What is certain, it seems to me, is that if we want to hope that the various GenZ movements, whose current exploits are exemplary, will come to permanently worry the colonial and global roots of “modern” state powers, they will have to become even more transnational, even reaching the imperial centres of power: they are just waiting for us. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation The post GenZ revolts in Morocco and Madagascar appeared first on Freedom News.

UNDER MOROCCAN OCCUPATION, RENEWABLES PROJECTS ARE BEING USED TO REINFORCE DOMINANCE ~ Tommaso Marconi ~ While renewable energy is seen as part of the solution to many environmental issues we are facing, it is also used as a pretext by capitalist lobbies and occupying states to overcome territorial sovereignty and implement privatisation. The case of Western Sahara is clear: two-thirds of the territory has been occupied by the Moroccan army since 1975, and now Morocco’s main tool to continue the occupation has become the green transition. The invasion of the former Spanish colonial territories started in November 1975. The Moroccan army used napalm and a devastating amount of violence to gain those territories and forced thousands of Saharawi to flee and become refugees in Algeria and then Europe. In February 1976 the Saharawi liberation movement Frente Polisario declared an independent Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic.  (SADR); in the same month the King of Morocco signed a treaty with Spain and Mauritania where they divided the territory. When Mauritania retreated its army, Morocco entered the zone and occupied it to control the coast until Guerguerat, just north of the Mauritanian border.  In the 1980s, the Moroccan army started building a huge sand wall (the Berm) to stabilise the frontline with the area in which Frente Polisario was active. Today, that wall is the longest in the world, measuring over 2,700 km and surrounded by mined zones. To meet the enormous cost of maintaining and defending the wall, the Kingdom of Morocco exploits and exports Saharawi resources — fish and phosphates. CORRUPTION Various rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have resulted in difficulties for European corporations to enter the trade in Saharawi resources. A treaty on free trade of fish and sand with European corporations was ruled illegal by the European Court in 2015; for the UK that meant the total exit of British enterprises from Western Sahara until 2021. In response, Morocco has resorted to more aggressive diplomacy in Europe and other international spaces.   In November 2022 a huge scandal was disclosed in the European parliament: the Qatargate (also known as Moroccogate). It was proven that Moroccan agents had been corrupting Members of European Parliament (MEP) using an Italian politician, Antonio Panzeri, as a middleman. Some results that Morocco gained from this strategy were: the denial of the Sakharov human rights prize to two Saharawi activists; the passing of resolutions against Algeria, which has been favouring Polisario and hosting Saharawi refugees; the modification of a European report about violence and human rights to erase the Moroccan cases; and an attempt to reverse the rulings against a fishing treaty, which banned EU companies from fishing off the Laayoune shores.  The Abraham Accords signed in 2020 between the USA, Israel, Bahrain, the UAE and Morocco, included complicit recognition of the occupations of Palestine by Israel and Western Sahara by Morocco. Israel has since increased its trade with Morocco, including new drones Morocco has used in the war against Frente Polisario. Crops at Growing Hope cooperative farm in Laayoune refugee camp. Photo: Darya Rustamova The Moroccan army and its colonial administration of Western Sahara’s occupied territories are actively hiding information and data about the exploitation of natural resources. The Western Sahara Resources Watch monitors the exploitation and produces detailed reports on it, but we do not actually know the size of resources that are being extracted and seized by Morocco and sold off in the global market. The biggest phosphate mine in Western Sahara is the Phosboucraa, but Moroccan institutions do not publish the amount of phosphate extracted there. Instead, they greatly publicise the renewable energy used for extracting and processing the phosphates. The Kingdom’s priority in its green transition is to provide stable energy to its biggest asset, the phosphate mining industry. Thus, the mine receives 90% of the electricity consumption from solar and wind power plants.   RENEWABLE ENERGY Since 2017, the Moroccan Kingdom has rapidly been investing in the green energy sector, after realising that it lacks fossil fuel reserves, and it needs more energy. At international meetings of states who are parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it craftily depicted itself as the most proactive country in renewables in Africa: Marrakech hosted two such meetings, lately in 2017. Since then, renewable energy projects have multiplied, and many more renewable energy power plants have been built. Morocco exploits land, air and sea in Western Sahara despite having no sovereignty over it. Western Sahara is connected to the Moroccan grid via the capital Laayoune. A new 400kV power connection is planned between Laayoune and Dakhla, and to Mauritania.  Through this power-line, Morocco plans to export renewable energy to West Africa. Exports to the EU will occur via existing and planned submarine connections with Spain, Portugal and with the UK. The UK project would see a 3.6GW submarine high-voltage direct current interconnector between the UK and the Occupied Territories, which would generate energy to meet 6% of the UK’s demand. All these plans are particularly focused on cutting the energy trade of Morocco’s first competitor and geopolitical enemy in the Mediterranean region, Algeria. Morocco’s strategy underlines the place of energy in realising the Kingdom’s diplomatic efforts in securing support for its occupation in traditionally pro-Saharawi independence, pro-Polisario, sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria). The final purpose of this strategy is to strengthen economic relations with African countries in return for recognition of its illegal occupation.  The implications for the Saharawi right to self-determination are huge. These planned energy exports would make the European and West African energy markets partially dependent on energy generated in occupied Western Sahara. The Saharawi people are 500,000: around 30-40,000 live under the Moroccan military occupation and the rest live in the Tindouf refugee camp (the capital of the exiled SADR) in Algeria and some dozen thousands are refugees in Europe. One form of oppression by the Moroccan army against the Saharawi remaining in the Occupied Territories, is by threatening to cut off the electricity in the neighbourhood of Laayoune where most Saharawi live, to make it impossible for them to record violence against the community.  Morocco is quite successful in attracting international cooperation projects in the field of renewable energy. The EU sees the country as a supposedly reliable partner in North Africa, not least because of its alleged role in the fight against international terrorism and in insulating the EU from migratory movements. Demonstration at the Berm wall, 2014. Photo: Darya Rustamova There are hundreds of foreign businesses involved in the exploitation of occupied Western Sahara’s natural resources. One of the most active is Siemens Gamesa, because it is involved in all wind power fields in occupied Western Sahara. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (Siemens Gamesa) is the result of a merger, in 2017, of the Spanish Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica and Grupo Auxiliar Metalúrgico, inc. in 1976, and the German Siemens Wind Power, their “green” division. The renewable energy company develops, produces, installs and maintains onshore and offshore wind turbines in more than 90 countries; but the most critical is its participation in 5 wind farms in the Occupied Territories, one of which provides 99% of the energy required to operate the phosphate extraction and export mine of Phosboucraa.  The European Union continues to promote the sector and create alliances with Siemens Gamesa regardless of being aware that the company operates in occupied territory and therefore violating international law. According to the position of the German government, as well as that of the European Union and the United Nations, the situation in occupied Western Sahara is not resolved. Siemens Gamesa’s actions in the occupied territory, like those of other companies, contribute to the consolidation of the Moroccan occupation of the territory. Business activity in the occupied Saharawi territory has been addressed by multiple UN resolutions on the right to self-determination of occupied Western Sahara and the right of its citizens to dispose of its resources.  On the ground, it is almost exclusively an outside elite that benefits from the projects: the operator of the energy parks in Western Sahara and direct business partner of Siemens Energy and ENEL is the company Nareva (owned by the king). The Saharawi themselves have no access to projects on their legitimate territory, especially those living in refugee camps in Algeria since they fled the Moroccan invasion. Instead, Saharawi who continue to live under occupation in Western Sahara face massive human rights violations by the occupying power.  Saharawi living in the occupied territory are aware that energy infrastructure—its ownership, its management, its reach, the terms of its access, the political and diplomatic work it does—mediates the power of the Moroccan occupation and its corporate partners. The Moroccan occupation enters, and shapes the possibilities of, daily life in the Saharawi home through (the lack of) electricity cables. Saharawi understand power cuts as a method through which the occupying regime punishes them as a community, fosters ignorance of Moroccan military manoeuvres, combats celebrations of Saharawi national identity, enforces a media blockade so that news from Western Sahara does not reach “the outside world” and creates regular dangers in their family home. They also acknowledge that renewables are not the problem per se but are a tool for the colonialist kingdom to advance the colonisation in a new form and with news legitimisations from foreign countries. The new projects are being built so fast that the local opposition to them is ineffective. The Saharawi decolonial struggle is deeper, the final goal is liberation and self-determination; they acknowledge that the renewable power plants will be good when managed for the goodwill of the Saharawi in a free SADR. As a fisherman from Laayoune said in an interview about the offshore windmills: “They do not represent anything but a scene of the wind of your land being illegally exploited by the invaders with no benefits for the people”.  People interviewed: Khaled, activist of Juventud Activa Saharaui, El Machi, Saharawi activist, Ahmedna, activist of Juventud Activa Saharaui, former member of Red Ecosocial Saharaui, Youssef, local Saharawi from Laayoune, Ayoub, youth activist from Laayoune injured by police, Khattab, Saharawi journalist (interviewed with Ayoub), Asria Mohamed, Saharawi podcaster based in Sweden. The post Green colonialism in Western Sahara appeared first on Freedom News.