Anarchists and some Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) protesters promised to clash with police on the 2019 May Day demonstrations. And they did. The unions accused police of attacking some of their members, even though they were clearly identified.
Police fire teargas as the march draws to a close. Photo: Tony Cross
As usual, France’s trade unions failed to march together on May Day, the self-styled “reformist” unions marching in the morning, the more militant CGT, FO and other smaller organisations in the afternoon.
Neither the unions nor the Gilets Jaunes are satisfied with President Emmanuel Macron’s response to the social unrest in the country. He organised a national debate to try to head it off and, like so many people these days, heard what he wanted to hear. Along with several other far from revolutionary measures, he has promised tax cuts, ignoring calls to restore a wealth tax that he axed early in his term of office.
The big political question of the day was whether the CGT, which belatedly declared its support for the Gilets Jaunes, in their anti-inequality guise at least, would manage to seal a solidarity pact with the diverse and poorly defined movement.
There were plenty of high-vis jackets on the Paris demo, although the turnout was not as high as the early Yellow Vest protests in Paris.
Perhaps influenced by the fact that the government only paid serious attention to their protests after shop windows were shattered on the Champs Elyées, some Gilets Jaunes joined anarchist groups in threatening to turn Paris into the riot capital of the world, a declaration that was seized on with relish by France’s macho interior minister, Christophe Castaner.
Some 7,4000 cops were put on the city’s streets, armed with water cannon, teargas and the controversial flashballs. Metro stations along the route of the demonstration and at other potential hot spots were closed.
Riot police with water cannon block a side street. Photo: Tony Cross
Police weaponry has deprived 22 people of an eye on Gilets Jaunes demonstrations. Ten people died on their demos last year, some as a result of road accidents at roadblocks.
There has also been violence on both sides on trade union demonstrations, such as the protests against the last government’s changes to labour law.
The government has angrily dismissed charges by a UN committee that excessive force has been used against demonstrations. Patriotic media pundits were indignant that their country was treated as if it was Venezuela or Iran or somewhere.
The government has introduced a law extending the authorities’ powers to police demonstrations, although its key proposal – giving wider powers to ban individuals deemed a danger to public order from attending – was struck down by the Constitutional Council.
The French police reportedly don’t bother to go to European Union meetings on developing crowd control methods.
Even if organisers call for calm, the battle lines are drawn, so far as many demonstrators are concerned. “Everybody hates the police!” is a popular chant in some sections of the May Day demo.
Demonstrators are blocked by police. Photo: Tony Cross
Not many people were shouting “Commit suicide!” this time, though. A 49-year-old unemployed cook was recently given an eight-month suspended prison sentence, ordered to do 180 hours community service and to pay 500 euros to two cops who had filed a case against him for shouting that on a Gilets Jaunes demo last month.
With Gilets Jaunes protests every weekend, frequent union demos, and social unrest in deprived areas, the police are overstretched. There have been 28 suicides in their ranks this year, the continuation of an upward trend.
Some protesters come well-prepared. This man appears to be a street medic. Photo: Tony Cross
Independent journalist Gaspard Glanz, who specialises in covering police violence, also appeared in court recently for giving the finger to a police officer. It is an alleged breach of France’s a law against “outrage“, broadly translatable as insulting behaviour, against a police officer.
At first Glanz was banned from attending demonstrations until his trial several months away. After an outcry, another court overturned the ban but the case against him is still pending.
Many reporters now go to demos in body armour, helmets and gas masks. Journalists’ organisations have complained that both police and protesters abuse them and prevent them doing their jobs, the cops sometimes confiscating equipment.
A young protester lights a flare as the march approaches its end. Photo: Tony Cross
According to reports, there were clashes at the start of the CGT May Day march.
As it approaches its destination, Place d’Italie, groups of youths become agitated, some throwing objects at the police line.
That’s when it kicks off. Police respond with teargas. Groups of black-clad youths – real or aspiring members of the infamous Black Bloc – run towards the trouble.
Teargas fills the air near Place d’Italie. Photo: Tony Cross
A group of men set about a rubbish bin, tearing it off the ground, presumably with the intention of hurling at the police lines.
As the teargas thickens, coughing and spluttering protesters rush away from the scene. Self-appointed “street medics” spray water in our faces and help a person who has crouched on the ground.
Police stop the march. Photo: Tony Cross
Further down the boulevard, riot police stop another part of the demonstration from advancing towards the trouble. Young protesters ask, “Shall we force our way through?”
At the end of the day the government says 38 people have been injured, 14 of them police officers, 33 of them in Paris.
The government says 151,000 people demonstrated across France, the CGT says 310,000. There were 16,000 on the Paris demonstration, according to the government; 80,000, according to the CGT; 40,000, according to a study commissioned by several news media outlests. At the time of writing, there have been 380 arrests, 330 in Paris.
To read a short history of May Day, written a while ago, click here
The French authorities are not exactly slow to spot a terror attack but they have said there is no evidence that the Notre Dame fire was caused by one. That hasn’t stopped the far right from hatching conspiracy theories. They just can’t help themselves.
Notre Dame viewed from the south, 16 April 2019. Photo: Tony Cross
“More and
more people agree with me,” claimed the ageing gent on the banks of the Seine
on Tuesday afternoon. He was part of the crowd looking at the damage done to
Notre Dame Cathedral in the previous night’s fire.
Having
blamed immigrants for the lack of affordable housing, he went on to express
scepticism about the “theory” that the fire had started by accident.
Indeed, he
is not alone.
Officials
and experts say there is no evidence of arson or a terror attack. The conflagration
is most likely to have been set off by an accident, possibly connected to
restoration work being carried out in the cathedral, they say. But that hasn’t
stopped the conspiracy theorists soaping the ropes for a prospective pogrom.
With
sickening predictability, far-right websites, known as the “fachosphere” in
France, launched a desperate search for evidence that the disaster was the
result of an Islamist terror attack.
Here are
some of their claims:
The two fires theory: A tweet by Pierre Sautarel of fachosphere favourite Fdesouche.com claimed there were two fires and therefore that they must have been started deliberately. As evidence, it cited well-known newsreader David Pujadas, who in a live broadcast did point out that there were two lots of flames, but without implying they had been started separately. That did not prevent other far-right fantasists, in France and abroad, from spreading the rumour.
The mysterious imam/Yellow Vest: A Spanish tweet claimed that a figure filmed walking along the side of the cathedral was there when the building was supposed to have been empty and must have been an imam or, failing that, a Gilet Jaune. As Libérationnewspaper established, the report was broadcast live on Spanish TV after emergency services had arrived and the figure was wearing a high-visibility jacket and safety helmet because, well, you would in those circumstances, wouldn’t you?
Well, look, it just must have been terrorists: All France’s main parties, even the party previously known as the Front National (FN), have abstained from claiming the disaster was a terror attack. Not the Islamophobes posing as secularism-defenders at Ripostelaïque, however. They declared that “inevitably, we’re all thinking it might be an attack on France and all that she stands for … And if it’s an attack it can only be a Muslim attack.” Philippe Karsenty, a right-wing councillor from the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly, won the distinction of being fact-checked by Fox News when he told an interviewer that the “politically correct will tell you it was an accident”. Perennial presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignon, an anti-tax obsessive who backed the FN’s Marine Le Pen in the 2016 second round, demanded an official inquiry “to know if it was a terror attack or not”. And vehemently pro-Israel MP Meyer Habib managed to combine both the above items of fake news in one tweet that asked “Accident or criminal attack?”, following it with another that indignantly denounced government ministers who have condemned conspiracy theories.
In today’s digital world fake news spreads before the truth has the time to put its boots on, so inevitably these and other unfounded rumours found their way to dodgy sites from Australia to America. In the US Alex Jones’s Infowarsgave a headline to a tweet that was soon deleted by its author, who told BuzzFeed News “I never should have tweeted it.”
The hate-mongers have had a little help, however. Two members of the national committee of the left-wing students’ union Unef gave them just what they wanted when they sneered at “some cathedral woodwork burning”, people “crying over some bits of wood”, one declaring that she “couldn’t care less about the history of France” and that the outpouring of emotion was white people’s ravings.
Police cordon off Notre Dame on Tuesday afternoon. Photo: Tony Cros
Conspiracy
theories also put in a brief appearance on the Gilet Jaunes’ social networks. Some
contributors judged it suspicious that the fire led to the cancellation of the
president’s address to the nation on prime-time TV. Macron was due to outline
his response to the national debate he organised in the wake of the high-vis
protests.
It’s
difficult to imagine the president declaring “Shit! I haven’t finished my
speech. Somebody set fire to Notre Dame!” and, knowing what we do about the
man, we can be fairly sure he was convinced of the brilliance of his proposals.
Gilet Jaune moderators seem to have shut down
those debates, in any case. And Macron’s main proposals have been leaked.
Surprise, surprise, he leads with tax cuts, which the prime minister has
already explained will mean more cuts in services. Not really worth setting a
national monument on fire for.
To listen to me talking to KPFA radio’s Kris Welch about the Notre Dame fire (including the strange story of the kings’ entrails), click here
The Democratic Socialist Congresswoman’s answer to well-heeled Republicans who claim that environmental concerns are “elitist” was inspiring. But …
Dear
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes,
You
probably won’t read this, which is fair enough, given that I’m an OWM living in
France who has never set foot in the US.
What’s
more, not only do I have zero influence on American politics, my influence over
the politics of the country where I was born (the UK) and the one where I now
live is pretty much zero, too. But then I have that in common with most
citizens of those countries.
Nevertheless, as a lifelong left-winger, I would like to say how encouraging it is to see a professed socialist elected to the US Congress and how impressed I was by your takedown of Republican sneers that concern over climate change is “elitist”.
But – you
knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you? – I must take issue with your
statement that climate change “should not be a partisan issue”.
Of course
many US politicians, and practitioners of other equally respectable professions,
are “more concerned about helping oil companies than helping their own
families”. Not only are they corrupted by lobbies, as you showed so effectively
in another gone-viral speech, but defending the rich and powerful is actually what
their politics is about.
True, in the long term climate change will threaten all human civilisation but capitalism is all about the short-term. Increasingly so, as Thomas Piketty has shown, with companies frittering away their own future by paying out bigger and bigger dividends to shareholders.
Furthermore,
interests that will in the long-run endanger the whole kit and caboodle of
humanity have become so entrenched they can dictate current policy.
And, let’s
be honest, politics, like human consciousness, is formed by the past, which is
a handicap when it comes to planning for the future.
I was
tempted to describe Sean Duffy’s remarks as “stupid crap” but it’s not, it’s
cunning and disingenuous crap designed to convince middle-class and
working-class people that their interests converge with those of big business
and its political, legal and media courtesans.
That’s what
their politics is about.
So climate
change, like everything else of any importance, is a partisan issue, although
the partisan divide may also appear within the Democratic Party.
This may
seem like nitpicking but in France we have an illustration of why it is
important to be clear about what are left-wing values and what are right-wing
ones.
Yellow Vests campaign on a market near Paris. Photo: Tony Cross
Starting as a reaction to a decree from on high that adversely affects the vulnerable, the kind of action your Green New Deal warns against, it has become a mass protest that is diffuse and difficult to define but essentially against inequality.
That’s a left-wing concern, right? Fighting inequality and eventually establishing a classless society is what socialism is all about, isn’t it?
Unfortunately,
not for many Gilets Jaunes. As one young activist told me the other day, the
experience of France’s Socialist Party in government, carrying out a pro-business
programme that has increased inequality and left many feeling ignored or
despised, has emptied the idea of socialism of its meaning for a large number
of the people it is supposed to be fighting for.
So, at the
same time as that young man outlined what seems to me a very clear-sighted
analysis, an older woman was declaring that the fight against inequality is
“above politics”.
In France
today the chattering classes have a tendency to throw around the terms left and
right without any reference to actual policies, as if they were tribal
loyalties. The disillusionment with that sort of politics is such that both
candidates in the final round of the last presidential election – one a
far-right hate-monger, the other a social liberal with a right-wing economic
programme – declared themselves to be neither on the left or right. (They are
also both millionaires, by the way.)
We on the
radical left used to think that after attempts to reform capitalism had failed
the masses would turn to us. It’s proved a little more complicated than that. Various
experiences of “socialists” and “communists” in office, as well as the arrogance
and callous indifference of EU bureaucrats and traditional politicians, have
led to a kind of anti-political demagogy that exploits disillusion and has
allowed xenophobic, far-right movements to grow in several European countries.
So I don’t
think we should make any concessions to the idea that because something’s
important it is non-partisan or not political.
Socialist
politics are about serving the interests of the majority and protecting the
future of all humanity.
I imagine
that’s why you took up the political cudgels.
We owe it
to our adversaries to refrain from distorting what they stand for. But we owe
it to humanity not to give them credit where credit is not due.
The French Gilets Jaunes revolt is something of a magic mirror. Anyone looking at it sees whatever they want to see.
On the first Paris demonstration. Photo: Tony Cross
The left,
in France and abroad, has seen a popular uprising against President Emmanuel
Macron’s neoliberal economic policies; the right an explosion of discontent by
overburdened taxpayers; Macron’s ministers portray it as a lumpenproletarian
riot, inspired by conspiracy theories, manipulated by the far right and the far
left and, latterly, infected with anti-Semitism; and many journalists,
committed to their own versions of conspiracy theories, have searched
desperately for leaders, plotters and hidden agendas.
But how do
you find a coherent definition of a movement that anyone can join simply by
donning a high-visibility jacket and going on a protest or, for that matter,
taking to the battlefield on their keyboard?
You can’t. That seems pretty obvious but it hasn’t stopped the pundits, politicians and armchair activists from crowbarring the phenomenon into their own preconceived scenarios.
The lack of structure, a result of the movement’s online origins, means that anyone could be a Gilet Jaune – the casseur who smashes a shopfront on the Champs Elysées as much as the young mother camped out on a roundabout in the provinces – and anyone can declare themselves a spokesperson, as I found when trying to track down a Toulouse area representative for RFI.
At the
start, all we could be sure the protesters had in common was opposition to the
government’s green tax on fuel, although it soon became clear that they all
hated Macron.
As the
movement appears to be drawing to a close, the call for referendums on sufficiently
large demand has come to the fore.
So what
does characterise this movement, apart from those basic demands?
Here are a
few of my observations/hypotheses:
Solidarity and the internal combustion engine: As anyone who has ever sat behind a steering wheel has to admit, the automobile is an individualist, not to say egoist, form of transport – a strange basis on which to build solidarity. In its 100-odd years of existence, the internal combustion engine has radically restructured our lives and our attitudes. No more need to live within walking distance of your workplace, shops or other basic facilities. That has made many people regard a car as an essential part of their lives, if not a basic human right. Frankly, that can bring the worst out in people – just try living in a place with limited parking facilities, as I do. But the government’s decision to tax a form of transport people have come to rely on, while letting off big polluters like airlines and ships (taxing them would mean job losses, one minister, predictable, argued), drew attention to Macronism’s class bias. ” People see it as a class war, because it is,” as Naomi Klein pointed out in a tweet. As is now well-known, the Gilets Jaunes shock troops come from rural areas, small towns or the outskirts of larger ones, where public transport and other facilities are poor to non-existent. (That is likely to become worse, by the way, when the government has opened up the rail network to competition, in enthusiastic compliance with an EU directive, and neglected branch lines are found to be unprofitable). So the response has been collective and demands for better public transport and facilities have surfaced.
Taxes: Nobody actually likes paying taxes and, given the percentage of would-be fiscal freeloaders in the population, there are almost certainly a number in the ranks of the Gilets Jaunes. The right-wing Republicans tried to interpret the protests as a taxpayers’ revolt, something they, their voters and their friends in big business can identify with. That was the government’s spin, too, once TV footage of Paris in flames had convinced it that concessions had to be made. Ministers promised more tax cuts, a now time-honoured way to tie the less well-off to the agenda of the wealthy, accompanied by an it’s-all-your-fault rider that this would mean cuts in services. But all the Gilets Jaunes I asked insisted they were ready to pay what they regarded as fair taxation and a key demand has been for the reversal of Macron’s cut in the wealth tax. To nobody’s astonishment, the government has absolutely ruled out any such move.
Macron and elitism: With his declaration that you only have to cross the road to find a job, his lectures to a teenager on the appropriate way to address his august person, his apparent belief that those who have not “succeeded” are “nothing”, Macron, elected on a promise to break the French political mould, has personified the arrogance of the French elite once in power. “It’s the contempt he has for people,” Jean-Pierre, a middle-aged former Macron voter told me as teargas wafted around us on the first national demonstration in Paris in November. To sociologist Laurent Mucchielli, Macron is “a typical representative of that technocracy … someone who has never held elected office, has never had the experience of running a local council … not used to being in contact with either the voters or trade unionists or local councillors, all he’s used to is ministries, technocrats, top civil servants, MPs and journalists.” But it’s not just about style. Macron’s policies have been a continuation of previous governments’ applications of trickle-down theory, regardless of their failure to deliver on promises of a better life for all. To the government, and many media commentators, resentment of technocratic arrogance is populism, raising the spectre of “the white working class” and, with it, bigotry, xenophobia and anti-Semitism (although, confusingly, that seems to be coming from Salafists). There have been instances of these but such excesses seem to be an integral part of today’s world of online invective, rather than a specific property of the Gilets Jaunes. When Macron’s supporters, adopting the elegant soubriquet “the Red Scarves”, took to the streets and the keyboards, class hatred seemed to be pretty much the order of the day.
Left, right or apolitical? Impossible as it is to establish who can really speak for the Gilets Jaunes – some who’ve tried have received death threats for their pains – a list of 42 demands published after online consultation seems to be generally accepted as representative. The highest number, 22, featured in the programme of left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, while 21 featured in that of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Justification for the old platitude about the extremes meeting? Not really, if you factor in the relative importance given to the questions in these politicians’ rhetoric. Le Pen’s hobbyhorse of Islam is not raised and immigration hardly gets a mention in the list of demands, although there have been flurries of fake news and on the question and some sings of racism on Gilet Jaune social media networks. The key concern is inequality, with calls for progressive taxation, a rise in the minimum wage and pensions, a maximum wage and a reversal of tax handouts to the rich. A left-wing programme, one might say. But in January a group of researchers found that 60 percent of Gilets Jaunes declared themselves to be neither left-wing nor right-wing (as did both candidates in the final round of the 2017 presidential election – Emmanuel Macron and … Marine Le Pen). This should seriously worry the left. How is it that so many people no longer identify the core concern of socialism – the eradication of inequality – as a left-wing value, or even a political question?
Media: Many Gilets Jaunes might be surprised to know that their belief that the numbers on their demonstrations have been underreported and their activity misrepresented is common to practically all activists. Nobody is ever happy with how their cause is reported, leading the committed nowadays to seek consolation in the social media echo chamber, where there is distortion on demand. That said, the sensationalist reflex that leads to non-stop images of isolated cases of violence is automatic in certain media, and could be seen during the demonstrations against Macron’s labour law reform, for example. If you compare the official figures, or the organisers’ claims, those protests at their height mobilised higher numbers than the Gilets Jaunes but you wouldn’t guess it from the coverage, so maybe some of the sensationalism worked in the latter’s favour. Both movements were also on the receiving end of the attentions of law and order, which proved a great shock to many Gilets Jaunes. In both cases, establishment politicians’ cries of indignation about police injuries has obscured the fact that a greater number of demonstrators were injured.
Democracy, representation: “Be careful what you wish for,” is my own response to the call for referendums on demand. Whether you are in favour of Brexit or not, nobody in their right mind can claim that the debate preceding the UK referendum was balanced and well-informed. Social media have added to the capacity for disinformation that was already amply exploited by certain media moghuls and their outlets. It is not a coincidence that referendums are popular with dictators, who can manipulate the debate and engineer the required result. But the demand does highlight the fact that parliamentary democracy as it is currently practiced is not serving the interests of the majority. Paying MPs the average wage, one of the 42 demands as well as a lonsgstanding hard-left proposal, would surely inspire them with more empathy with their constituents. An interesting proposal for preparing legislation is the establishment of commissions of citizens, a kind of political jury service, that would draw up proposals after interviewing experts and interested parties, thus drawing informed conclusions.
Teargas on Paris streets on the first national demonstration. Photo: Tony Crosss
The massive drilling machine, in place and ready to dig Line 15 of the Greater Paris metro Photo: Tony Cross
Saturday, 3 February 2018
On a drizzly Saturday evening in February I joined a queue of hundreds to trudge through the mud of a building site. Not just any building site. The Grand Paris Express, which will bring the metro to millions of residents in the French capital’s famous banlieue, is apparently Europe’s biggest construction project. It will transform towns like mine, perhaps in unforeseen ways. And it will provide a boost to the French economy that will have more tangible effects than the supply-side dogma of this and previous governments.
The view from the queue Photo: Tony Cross
At 7.00pm, under arc lights and with a commentary broadcast across the site, a gigantic boring machine was lowered into place in a deep Piranesian pit that will be the starting point for drilling line 15 of the Paris metro, which – starting in our town, Champigny-sur-Marne – will eventually encircle the whole of Paris.
Still waiting … but there’s some pretty impressive kit Photo: Tony Cross
At least, I think that’s what happened. I was stuck outside with a couple of hundred other would-be spectators because too many damn other people had already gone in.
But we did hear the applause and were allowed in afterwards to see the beast in its lair, try the limited-production local wine – a pinot noir and not bad at all at 7.30pm on a chilly night – and eat gigot de bitume (more of that later).
Immigration and the banlieue
The crowd, in free fluorescent jackets created for the occasion, takes a look at Steffie-Orbival Photo: Tony Cross
It was all rather moving – parents showing their children a moment in history, civilians marvelling at a triumph of engineering that is dedicated to the common good, and a feeling of being part of a community that binds people of various origins together.
Although I would say there was perhaps less variety than at the regular festivals our Communist-led local council puts on during the course of the year. Fewer Turks, Maghrebins and Sub-Saharan Africans, I would say, but plenty of Portuguese.
The Portuguese presence is appropriate, poignant even, since the park out of which the pit has been gouged was the site of France’s second-biggest shanty town in the 1960s and it was populated by Portuguese immigrants – some refugees from the Salazar dictatorship, many more economic migrants, a category that had not then acquired the stigma President Emmanuel Macron is working so hard to give it these days.
Site workers with Steffie Photo: Tony Cross
Up the hill from where we were milling stands a recently constructed, and extremely kitsch, monument to Louis Talamoni, the Communist senator and mayor of Champigny who fought for the immigrants to be decently housed.
Down the hill is the industrial estate where two cops were beaten and one of them kicked outside an unauthorised New Year’s Eve party in a warehouse, leading some right-wing smart-arses to compare the good Portuguese immigrants of yore to the bad banlieusards of today, blacks and north Africans, according to the caricature, although one doubts if they had carried out a demographic survey of the assailants.
Happily, that prompted a group of people of Portuguese origin to publish an open letter in Le Monde newspaper, objecting to being exploited for racist ends and pointing out that their community had not actually been a docile bunch of grateful paupers.
Lamb baked in tar – great French tradition
The gigot comes out of the bitume Photo: Tony Cross
Anyway, back to Saturday’s soirée because I bet you’re all dying to know about the gigot de bitume.
… And handed to an assistant … Photo; Tony Cross
This is one of those only-in-France things. It’s known as the menu de Sainte Barbe in honour of Saint Barbara, who, even though she may well not have existed, is the patron saint of miners and other people who work with explosives. She bears this distinction because her father is said to have been struck dead by lightning after carrying out the pagans’ order to execute her (by decapitation, if you want to know).
… and cut out of its wrapping Photo: Tony Cross
French secularism notwithstanding, the menu de Sainte Barbe is apparently traditional when civil engineering projects finish. It consists of a leg of lamb, well-wrapped and plunged into hot tar to cook, fished out, dunked in cold water, cracked open and served to the horny-handed sons of toil.
… and passed on to the serving team Photo: Tony Cross
We, several hundred of us, ate it on paper plates, accompanied by small potatoes. What did it taste like? Delicious, although not quite as meltingly tender as I had expected.
… and served to the hungry masses Photo: Tony Cross
We partook of our rugged repast in the shadow of a huge piece of machinery, one of the cutters of the digger, if I’m not mistaken, named Steffie-Orbival after a female digger driver who has muscled her way into the masculine world of civil engineering – or am I out of date here? – and suspended – the machine part not the driver – from a gigantic crane, to the delight of selfie-takers.
Then, finally, we could mount a gantry and look down 20 metres at the beast itself, slumbering still but ready to rip into the soil, cutting what will become Line 15 all the way around the capital.
Some pretty impressive stats
Steffie the heavy machine operator about to be snapped by the press Photo: Tony Cross
I’m going to get a bit breathless here:
Thirty such machines will dig 170km of tunnels, the longest underground railway in Europe.
This one will dig up the equivalent of eight pyramids of Giza.
There will be 68 stations, the deepest of which, next door to us at Saint-Maur-Créteil, will be 52 metres beneath the earth.
The finished network will comprise 200km of line, as much as the actually existing metro.
Above all, the Greater Paris project will be a long-overdue recognition of reality – the reality that Paris is not just the increasingly socially cleansed city of 2,250,000 inhabitants within its now-notional walls but also the less aesthetically pleasing sprawl around it that is home to seven million people.
Travelling on a commuter train into the city, you catch a glimpse of a nightmare of overcentralisation and overcrowding.
At rush hour on the line I take to work, RER A, there is a train every five minutes. That’s on a line that splits in two at Vincennes and more trains come in on the other fork. It’s a tribute to the network’s staff and the technology that there aren’t collisions. To get to the station, I have already crossed a road – rue Louis Talamoni, as it happens – which will be jammed by 8.00am. Our train takes us over a motorway packed with cars coming from the east, which connects with another equally packed motorway coming from the north and the ring road, which is in a more or less permanent state of congestion.
So the new lines are essential to reduce that congestion and the plague of pollution that goes with it. The Greater Paris project, when the politicians have finished squabbling over how it will be put into practice, should begin to tackle the division between Paris and its outskirts. On the downside, it may get in the way of a serious effort to decentralise France and repopulate deserted rural and semi-rural areas, which should surely be possible in the digital age.
Changes – social and political
Workers attend to the machinery after it has been put in place Photo: Tony Cross
Meanwhile, we home-owners are obviously all wondering what it is going to do to house prices. Push them up, presumably, which is good news if you’ve bought but not if you’re thinking of buying, but by how much and when? And what will that mean for our towns?
Champigny has already seen some small demonstrations of anxious home-owners because property developers are buying plots on residential streets to build blocks of flats for future commuters. The householders say that will spoil the tranquil ambiance of their streets>. One suspects they also fear it will affect the value of their properties.
The local council has drawn up a very necessary plan to revamp the scruffy town centre, probably the only Place Lénine in France. But the Communist Party, struggling to keep one of the last major local councils it controls, may also be getting nervous at the prospect of an influx of yuppies, which may account for their eagerness to build more social housing. Although, with a recent opinion poll finding that 83% of under-40s think that capitalism is a system that doesn’t work well, maybe they should be optimistic about the prospect of an influx of younger voters, so long as they do a bit of work on their image.
Public spending v tax handouts
How the Grand Paris Express should look Map: Hektor/Wikimedia Commons
There has been a glitch.
Entirely predictably, the Grand Paris Express will cost more than predicted. Much more. The estimate has gone up from 19 billion euros to 38.4 billion, which has given France’s top financial authority palpitations, committed as it is to the EU’s austerity-inducing target of reducing public debt to 3.0% of GDP.
Fortunately, the government is going against its own economic doctrine and maintaining the project, particularly since some of the lines are needed for when Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics. But there may be some cuts in expenses and some lines may open later than planned. Not ours, fortunately.
And it’s all paid for from our taxes! Which is a good thing. Grand Paris Express will improve people’s lives, be good for the environment, create useful jobs and boost the economy. In fact, when the latest statistics showed that France experienced its highest growth for six years in 2017, there was no real evidence that it was due to tax cuts, labour reforms and the election of a president the bosses adore. But there was a confident prediction that the massive public investment in this project will ensure that the trend continues.
So it’s a worthwhile investment for our collective benefit. That is why the continuous propaganda against taxes, which offers bribes to the majority to go along with huge givebacks to the rich, is so dangerous. It is to the shame of mainstream social democrats that they have gone along with this ideological assault on collectivism and their own legacy.
The majority of French voters have rejected Marine Le Pen. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the elected president is a free-market fanatic whose programme inspired a record number of people to cast blank votes.
Election posters in Champigny-sur-Marne on 7 May 2017 Photo: Tony Cross
Had Le Pen won the presidency, another country would have succumbed to the revamped right-wing populism represented by Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Brexit – not fascism, in my view, but a new kind of majoritarian authoritarianism endorsed by popular mandate, fuelled by fear of the future and resentment of the establishment, finding its expression in xenophobia and prejudice.
Emmanuel Macron could hardly be styled a courageous defender of minorities but he did resist Le Pen’s racism in the campaign TV debates, which is more than can be said for the mainstream right candidate François Fillon and, for that matter, more than can be said for Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls while in office.
So we’ve escaped a national-level version of the discrimination, repression and racist rabble-rousing the far right has let loose on the towns it controls. And Le Pen’s National Front (FN) seems to have big problems ahead.
Crisis for National Front
The result, and Le Pen’s disastrous performance in the few days before the poll, appears to have plunged the FN into crisis.
In one sense, they don’t have so much to complain about. They achieved a record 10.6 million votes, nearly double their score when Marine’s dad, Jean-Marie, made it to the second round against Jacques Chirac 2002. That’s a lot of Islamophobes – or, at least, a lot of people prepared to go along with the FN’s hatred of Muslims, immigrants, Roma and other minorities to poke the “elite” in the eye, which should, but won’t, give the “elite” pause for thought.
But, and this is really worrying, they could have done even better.
Le Pen ran an effective campaign up until the last few days. Then she had the bright idea of picking a holocaust-doubter as her party’s interim president (he also thought that beating up commies was a good political education but that received less media attention) say that France was not responsible for the wartime rounding up of Jews, call Fillon and his party “shits” (the FN claims she just said they were in the shit) and, worst of all, behave just like her father’s daughter during the crucial final TV debate.
The debate performance – where she was caught out lying, blustered, bullied, slouched and grimaced like the chip off the old block she is – has probably destroyed the “dedemonisation” strategy that had been working pretty well for Marine and her pals.
The FN’s canal historique is already sharpening its knives. Its best-known representative, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, one of only two FN-affiliated MPs at the moment, said on Sunday evening that the party must consider its strategy in the election after the “disappointment”.
And, if reports are to be believed, the rank and file is in disarray. An anonymous FN official told the Mediapart website that a the party’s post-debate postbag contained a number of torn-up membership. And the “fachosphere” – the far-right social media network – is full of recriminations, mostly against Marine Le Pen and Florian Philippot, the FN vice-president who’s seen as the Svengali behind the dedemonisation strategy and the party’s “social” turn.
One is tempted to ask whether Le Pen threw the debate deliberately. As a Trump admirer, she must have read his comment that leading a country is harder than he’d thought. Being the party of mean-minded, resentful opposition has been a profitable business for her family, making them millionaires. Had the FN watered down its opposition to the EU, the real point of difference with the Fillons, Sarkozys and other tough guys of the mainstream right, it could have undergone the same transformation as Italy’s MSI and joined a coalition government some years ago.
But no, the FN leaders were riding a wave of anti-establishment resentment mixed with xenophobia and seemed genuinely to believe they were on the road to power on their own terms. Hence the disappointment today.
It remains to be seen if the backbiting will hamper their campaign in June’s parliamentary elections. A good result there could staunch the crisis.
Macron and extremes
Something else revealed in that TV debate is that Macron is not a very skilful politician.
He’s an intelligent man, a skilled technocrat who knows his facts.
But Le Pen destroyed herself, he didn’t destroy her.
When she posed as a defender of gay and women’s rights during an attack on a Muslim group that supported him, he failed to remind her of her own party’s record on those questions – the potential for mockery was great but Macron doesn’t do funny. When she justified her claim that the wartime deportation of Jews was not France’s responsibility but that of the Vichy government, he let it go without even a mention the former collaborators who helped found the party. Apparently, he also doesn’t do history.
This is not just a historical quibble. Obscuring the party’s Nazi origins and airbrushing out its anti-Semitism are a key part of the dedemonisation strategy and Macron passed on an opportunity to deal it a powerful blow.
In short, Macron has no political culture, which is also the problem of his newly founded En Marche ! movement. Apparently, the political experience that his presidential campaign lacked was made up for by Socialist Party traitors, working against their own candidate, Benoît Macron, in the first round and even more openly for a republican front – nominally anti-fascist but in reality more pro-Brussels – in the second round.
That was also apparent in his speech after the result was announced. In what he imagined was an olive branch to supporters of Le Pen and left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he told them they had voted for “extremists”.
Repeating the old canard of the “extremes” meeting up is hardly a way to win over the seven million who voted Mélenchon in the first round and Macron’s assurance that he understood voters’ “anger, anxiety and doubts” is undermined by his obvious lack of empathy with ordinary people on the campaign trail.
With 25 percent abstention, the highest since 1969 when France’s youth was radicalised by May ’68, and an absolute record of four million blank votes, Macron can expect trouble.
His programme, for the most part a collection of micro-measures and expressions of good intentions, is ardently pro-EU and pro-capitalist. Despite a promise to revive Europe’s connection with “the people”, Macron is determined to press on with reducing the debt through austerity, the very policy that has done so much to help demagogues like Le Pen. On the economy it’s more of the same – tax cuts and subsidies for employers, in the desperate and so far unrewarded hope that they will be bribed to invest, longer hours, later retirement and less social protection for employees.
He has promised to bring in more changes to labour law in the summer, his main proposal being to encourage company-level negotiations on working hours and other conditions, a further undermining of collective bargaining and trade union solidarity.
Mélenchon’s seven million votes mean that, for the first time for years, the left is not demoralised.
Rather it is in combative mood, witness all those blank votes. So strikes, demonstrations and social upheaval are guaranteed, indeed the first took place on the afternoon after the election.
Parliamentary elections – who know what will happen?
It’s all very well winning the presidency but afterwards you have to form a government.
For someone who doesn’t actually have a real party that’s a problem.
And, with the mainstream parties rejected by voters in the presidential election, everything’s up for grabs in June’s parliamentary election.
Will Macron succeed in destroying the Socialist Party, as seems to be his intention, with his assurance that En Marche ! won’t endorse any candidate standing under another party’s colours?
Will the mainstream right Republicans lose their more liberal MPs, tempted by the prospect of ministerial positions?
Will voters be as ready to reject sitting MPs as they were to turn their backs on their parties’ candidates in the presidential first round?
Will the FN pick up MPs in some of the 95 constituencies where Le Pen won more than 30 percent in that round?
Can Mélenchon and his allies build on the presidential campaign success and win more seats?
I don’t know the answers to these questions and I don’t think anyone else does, either.
Which means that the parliamentary poll is going to be another cliffhanger and, whatever happens, French politics will never be the same again.
Read my analysis of the result for RFI English here
Turkish President President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is furious at foreign criticism of the crackdown that has followed the 15 July coup attempt. What does anyone expect after a military power grab? he wants to know. So has the West been holier-than-thou its reaction? And have innocent people been swept up in the purge?
The road between the Turkish parliament and armed forces headquarters where civilians confronted soldiers during the coup atttempt Photo: Tony Cross
Ankara 27 July 2016
Her husband said he’d divorce her when she was suspended from her job teaching in Ankara school.
“I never knew I was living with a Gülenist,” he said.
He was joking. In fact, they both thought it was pretty funny.
“I laughed,” she told us in a local office of education union Eğitim Sen. “I thought it was a joke because it seemed like a joke and funny for a leftist and democratic person such as myself to be a part of such a frame.”
But the next day the seriousness of her situation was beginning to sink in. She could lose her job. She could be labelled a coup supporter for life. Even if she is reinstated, the suspicion could remain.
This teacher, who didn’t want her name given, was one of about 21,000 teachers in public and private schools to be suspended.
Only 88 of them are members of Egitim Sen, which does not recruit in the private sector, but Ankara organiser Kamuran Karaca was amazed to find any.
The union is resolutely secular, campaigning against religion in schools, and its activists tend to be left-wing, while Fehtullah Gülen, the man the government accuses of being behind the failed putsch, is a right-wing Islamist who, according to his opponents, works within Turkey’s secular democracy in order to subvert it.
Karuman Karaca of Egitim Sen Photo: Tony Cross
The union is no stranger to legal action, however.
Six of its members are currently awaiting trial, because of their role in strikes and their support for Kurdish rights, according to the union – one of them having been charged since the coup attempt.
The evidence against the suspended members appears to be mainly that they have taken loans from an allegedly Gülenist-run bank, Bank Asya, or have bought books or office supplies from shops believed to be run by the movement.
Karaca points out that, since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for a long time worked with the Gülen movement, many of its members must have done the same.
“We are concerned that there is a tendency to regard the oppositional segments of society as putschist as well,” he remarks.
Lazmi Özgen’s shares that fear.
He’s an organiser for the Kesk public-sector trade union, 32 of whose members have been in prison since January for offences he says are linked to their union activism.
Over 50,000 public-sector workers were suspended within two days of the coup attempt. So how did the authorities know who to pick?
It is common knowledge that the lists already existed, Özgen claims. Tens of thousands of public employees had been illegally profiled “Gülenist, separationist, Alevi, Atheist, secular” and so on.
The teacher we met mentioned that she was an Alevi, a religious minority that was often persecuted in the Ottoman era and whose followers tends to have anti-establishment opinions.
To read my report for RFI Turkey’s purge becoming witch-hunt, activists click here
Erdogan angered by purge criticisms
Taxi driver Ahmet, who confronted troops and tool the wounded to hospital on 15 July Photto: Tony Cross
The scale of the purge, in the public sector, the armed forces, the media and industry, has given rise to expressions of concern in Europe and the US, which in turn has infuriated Erdogan.
AKP supporters point out that France has had a state of emergency for eight months because of a series of terror attacks, which for all their gravity were not an attempt to seize power by arms by people involved in a longstanding conspiratorial network.
Of course, France hasn’t suspended more than 50,000 people from their jobs, detained thousands of soldiers and given prosecutors the right to search lawyers’ offices and seize documents.
And Erdogan was already well down the road to authoritarianism before the failed putsch, building a megalomaniacal presidential palace, effectively taking political power into his own hands, pushing out prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu for being a potential rival, purging the magistrature and the police following an allegedly Gülen-inspired investigation into AKP corruption, prosecuting hundreds, including two opposition party leaders, for a republican version of lèse majesté – he has magnanimously declared that those charges will be dropped since the coup – and harrying critical media.
His desire to be a new sultan is widely mocked. But he is not the only ambitious politician on the planet.
Sure, abuses of France’s state of emergency have been relatively limited – alleged troublemakers banned from ecology and anti-labour reform protests and some apparently arbitrary house arrests, for example.
But I hate to think what powers French Prime Minister Manuel Valls or, for that matter, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, would give themselves if there was a serious attempt at a military coup in France.
The Turkish coup attempt was a serious threat to a democracy that has been overturned on four occasions, apparently launched by a network that has infiltrated the state, the media and private industry.
Since it was defeated, it has strengthened Erdogan and allowed his government to purge that state machine, a purge which, the evidence already shows, is unlikely to be confined to people who really did plot to seize power.
Who defeated the coup and why?
CHP vice-president Bülent Tezcan Photo: Tony Cross
“If they had let us, we would have got into those tanks. We would! It was our duty to kill those two soldiers inside,” Ahmet, a taxi driver who’d confronted the troops in front of parliament on 15 July, told us.
Little doubt that he is an AKP supporter. Little doubt that most of those who faced down the tanks were, judging by the divide between AKP and secular supporters I witnessed on the rallies in Istanbul.
So, although the popular mobilisation was certainly to defend a democratically elected government, can we really describe it as a mobilisation to defend the principle of democracy, as the Turkish government claims.
Like the rest of us, Turks tend to be most enthusiastic about democracy when it produces the results they desire.
Of course, opposition MPs courageously went to parliament on the night of the coup, as the vice-president of the secular People’s Republican Party (CHP), Bülent Tezcan, reminds me at the party’s huge Ankara headquarters.
As jets flew overhead, they held a special session, even discarding the jacket-and-tie dress code given the circumstances, although they took to the bunkers when the bombs started falling.
“We call the Turkish parliament a veteran parliament,” Tezcan declares in poetic-historic mode. “Because this parliament managed the independence war and this parliament was built through that battle, that struggle. And that night the parliament showed that it is a veteran parliament.”
The following day all the parties, including the left-wing, pro-Kurd People’s Democratic Party (HDP) whose members had not been in the parliament building overnight, signed a declaration in support of democracy.
“The unity that emerged out of the struggle against the coup still continues, we are working for it to continue and we are working for it not to dissipated,” Tezcan says. “I hope it will continue.”
CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has made a big play of national unity, in part, one suspects, for defensive reasons. The secular camp is afraid that a strengthened Erdogan could use the state’s beefed-up powers against them and is anxious to make it politically difficult to do so.
For the moment Erdogan is playing along, inviting Kılıçdaroğlu and right-wing secular leader Devlet Bahçeli to a meeting, along with Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.
How far is the CHP prepared to go?
Erdogan said that there appeared to be consensus to “minor changes” to the constitution, a puzzling formulation when referring to a state’s fundamental law.
“What was discussed was a quick amendment in the provisions of the constitution concerning judicial processes,” Tezcan says. “Our position concerning judicial process has not changed. We have previously stated that we stand for the primacy of independence and impartiality of the judiciary. For all the amendments we will approve, our basic and essential condition will always be the independence and impartiality of the judiciary.”
But Erdogan had already hinted that the secular parties might be ready to go along with his pet plan of establishing a presidential system.
Tezcan claims to believe that he won’t push that too far. “I don’t think he will damage conciliation with a discussion of the system of government. The president of the republic may argue for a presidential regime, we defend parliamentary democracy. To have differences of opinion should not prevent dialogue, conciliation and working together.”
To read my my report Will Turkey’s political unity last? click here
Kazan distct mayor Lokm Ertürk Photo: Tony Cross
That evening in a sprawling restaurant on the outskirts of Ankara I meet the mayor of the district that is home to the Akinci airbase, from which the planes that bombarded parliament took off.
He proudly describes how residents surrounded the base, set fire to their furniture and bales of hay to prevent the planes taking off and eventually forced the rebels to surrender, capturing key plotters.
Eighty-four people are still in hospital after having been wounded.
The mayor is given to professions of loyalty to democracy and the president.
Bosnian, Turkmen, Arab and Syrian immigrants live there, he says, people of all ages are “standing together, waiting, guarding” in response to Erdogan’s appeal in case of a new attack on democracy.
“Until our president and our superiors tell us to go home and stay home, we are going to be guarding the streets.”
With charges of anti-Semitism against critics of Israel flying in Britain and France, I’m publishing an account I wrote up going to cover Israel’s 2009 offensive on Gaza. It marked a new stage in the bitterness between Israelis and Palestinians, a bitterness that infects the world’s politics, as we see today. I was in Israel and the West Bank because Israel prevented entry to Gaza, although colleagues managed to get in via Egypt just as I left the region. I found fear and distrust on both sides, a deeply divided Palestinian leadership and a demoralised and isolated Israeli left.
War as a spectator sport – Israelis and journalists watch Gaza from a hill near Sderot Photo: Tony Cross
12 January 2009
On a small hill just outside the Israeli town of Sderot, the world’s press, and a few curious local people, are looking at Gaza. With the international news media banned from entering Gaza, photographers’ huge telephoto lenses point south, towards Israeli tanks, whose barrels point further south again. TV reporters record to camera with the territory in the distance and an Israeli information-gathering balloon floating above.
It’s the beginning of the third week of Israel’s offensive against the territory and, compared to the early days, the old hands say things are calm. Nevertheless, a tank lets off a shell, there’s some gunfire and a larger explosion lets off a large cloud of smoke which rises lazily towards the clear blue sky.
A shell falls on Gaza Photo: Tony Cross
A convoy of land-cruisers flying Israeli flags pulls into the dirt car park behind the hill. All the drivers are women.
Ariela Geneger is one of them. She explains that they have been collecting for the troops and have put together packages of thermal underwear, gloves, socks and “some goodies” for 1,000 soldiers.
Geneger says that this is a gesture of support for the offensive but the women’s concern seems more maternal than geostrategic.
“Those are our children they’re fighting,” she says.
Her son is a pilot, she explains, and the son of the group’s organiser is in Gaza.
“It’s not this separate thing, army and civilians; it’s part of this … this country’s all bound together.”
The group has also collected supplies for the bomb shelters in Sderot, which has been one of the principal targets of rockets fired from Gaza. “These people live under attack, so it can’t go on like this,” Geneger says.
But she also expresses sympathy for the people of Gaza.
“A lot of sympathy. My heart breaks for them; it’s just awful. And I don’t know, I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know if it can be stopped now or if it needs to go on in order for people to talk. Because eventually people have to talk, so why do we have to go through all this?”
Maybe fighting first and talking after is the way of the world, she says, but, as a professional psychologist, she knows that “everybody should talk”. And that includes the Israeli government talking to Hamas, although the politicians argue that the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza cannot be an interlocutor because it does not recognise Israel’s right to exist.
Will the offensive bring peace?
“I don’t know,” she sighs. “I hope it will make it better. I really don’t know. I think too many people assume that they know too much but I’m afraid that we don’t know enough.”
There’s another anxious mother at Zikim, a kibbutz which lies just 400 metres from the Gaza border.
“Mothers in Israel can’t really think rationally,” says kibbutz secretary Ilil Burde. “I don’t think any mother can think rationally when it comes to this question. So don’t ask me.”
Two of her four sons may be called up to fight, so Burde, aware of her status as a representative of the kibbutz, is reluctant to express an opinion on the offensive.
“When you reach this point, I don’t think any mother in the world is a rational person. You get only emotion. At least, that’s the way I am,” she says.
“If all the mothers around the world would be the leaders of the world, there wouldn’t be any war and we’d all be happy. So, if you want to see any declarations, let all the mothers of the world be the leaders of this world and we’ll stop all the wars.”
Meanwhile, she blames Hamas for the latest fighting and the civilian deaths in Gaza, which are now in the hundreds.
“In war there’s casualties,” she says. “And Hamas uses civilians as human shields.”
Burde, who sees herself as a left-winger, also blames Hamas for undermining the peace camp in Israel. Most of the kibbutz members supported the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005, she says, but now they feel betrayed by the breakdown of the truce.
“We’re very, very deeply disappointed because we feel instead of going forwards things are just going backwards,” she says. “What happens here, with all the rockets that we suffer for years and years, we the more left-wing in Israel can’t convince the more right-wing in Israel that we have to go on with the peace process because we get the answer, ‘See what happens, we draw out of the occupied territories in Gaza and they shoot rockets on us.’ ”
The kibbutz is doing its bit for the nation by playing host to a group of soldiers, some of whom are playing basket ball on a tarmacked surface near Burde’s office.
Standing by a paddock where two white horses graze, Zikim resident Marlène Markovitvh points to a field between her home and the barbed-wire topped fence which surrounds the kibbutz.
“That was all on fire,” she says. On the terrace of her white-painted bungalow stands an improvised flower-pot – trailing plants grow out of exploded ordnance.
Rocket attacks reached the level of 50-70 per day before Hamas’s six-month truce with Israel, she says. The number was reduced during the Egyptian-brokered six-month truce but the attacks increased again when it ended.
No kibbutz members were killed, although some children were injured and a direct hit on the dairy killed six cows. Zikim is one of the biggest milk producers in Israel and has two small factories, which have also been hit.
The offensive drastically reduced the number of attacks but brought new disruption to the kibbutzniks’ lives. The sound of the military’s drones and helicopters frightened the children so much that they had to be evacuated.
The kibbutz’s school Photo: Tony Cross
“They know that they are from Israel but it’s frightening when you hear them at night, the few last days it was horrible,” says Markovitch. “The few last days, we couldn’t sleep, we were scared. Everbody was scared.”
Markovitch speaks with a certain pride of her good relations with Gaza residents who worked on the kibbutz before the Israeli blockade of the territory.
“These were made by a friend from Gaza,” she says, inviting us to sit on metal chairs at her dining table.
She and her husband have phoned some of their Gazan acquaintances during the offensive but believe that they are not keen to talk for fear that Hamas will find out that they are in contact with Israelis.
The abandoned Arab house on the kibbutz Photo: Tony Cross
Markovitch takes us up a gentle slope, past the neat bungalows and the school with its roof reinforced in case it’s hit by a rocket, to a half-ruined house looking onto the kibbutz on one side and onto Gaza on the other. It belonged to an Arab family who fled in 1948, after the state of Israel was founded.
“They were scared, they were very scared by the Israelis and they didn’t want to stay here. But, anyway, I think they didn’t have a choice, too. The Israelis didn’t give them any choice.”
The family came to visit not long ago, says Markovitch.
“We invited them and they ate here and it was very nice. They are angry because we are getting their place but it’s the eternal problem between Palestinian and Israeli – who owns what?
“But they have the right to be here, too,” she concludes with a laugh, which has perhaps a hint of embarrassment.
To read and hear my report from Zikim for RFI click here
West Bank Palestinians collect for Gaza, criticise Abbas
Rezeq Barghouti, RFI colleague Eduardo Febbro, interpreter Steve Nasi Photo: Tony Cross
14 January 2009
In Ramallah the collections are for Gaza and the declarations of solidarity are with the 1,000-plus people killed there, the several thousand wounded or homeless.
Collecting aid has replaced dance and poetry as the principal activity of the Baladna Cultural Centre. Cardboard boxes are piled up the walls, bags of clothes and babies’nappies lie on the ground.
Rezeq Barghouti, who works for the Palestinian Authority’s farming section, explains that people have given everything from agricultural produce to blood.
“Here’s olive oil from the farmers in the West Bank,” he says. “And here we have blankets, you see, because they suffer from cold now in Gaza.”
An appeal to give blood got a big response, says Barghouti, “because you know that we cannot go to Gaza now. We cannot stand with our people there, so what can we do?”
Barghouti wants to see unity of the Palestinian leadership, after more than two years of often violent clashes between President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas.
But he is critical of Abbas’s response to the offensive, as are, it seems, the big majority of people on the West Bank, which, until now, has been Fatah’s base of support. At the start of the offensive Abbas declared that Hamas was at least partly to blame because it had broken off the truce with Israel and resumed rocket attacks.
Most Palestinians point out that Israel’s killing of seven Gazans on 5 November last year was already a breach of the ceasefire and agree with Hamas that the blockade of the territory is another form of hostile act.
“All the Palestinians in Gaza suffer the same enemy and they suffer the same killing … Israel doesn’t distinguish between this and this,” says Barghouti. He is particularly critical of Egypt for closing the Rafah crossing and preventing Gazans from escaping the offensive and of Abbas for failing to criticise Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Despite being a Palestinian Authority employee, Iman Nafeh, who is organising another collection in Ramallah’s main square, is even more outspoken in her criticism of Abbas.
“He is all the time saying he wants peace and he’s supporting the peace,” she says. “And he is even shaking hands with the people that killed the Palestinians and … they are not giving him anything.”
Iman Nafeh with helpers Photo: Tony Cross
Nafeh, who is tightly wrapped in hijab and a long coat over a long dress, insinuates that informants are likely to report her words to people in power, even the president himself.
“I know he will hear me,” she says, adding that all Palestinians are under observation.
“I am sorry because he’s not going to be elected if we have another person who is stronger than him … People here, they are angry about what Mr Abbas is doing.”
Palestinian activists thank Hugo Chavez for breaking off relations with Israel over the offensive Photo: Tony Cross
Outside a modern building on a windy street a kilometre or so outside Ramallah’s town centre stands a small but noisy crowd, mainly women, waving the Palestinian flag and shouting slogans in Arabic and English.
They are a delegation of Palestinian political parties, who have come to present a letter of thanks to the Venezuelan consulate, which is inside the building, because the Bolivarian republic broke off diplomatic ties with Israel over the offensive.
According to our interpreter, Steve, the move has made Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez more popular than Abbas, with TV presenters asking why Arab countries, who are supposed to be the Palestinians’ allies, have not made such vigorous protests and why the Palestinians don’t have such resolute leaders.
Khitam Fahim, an activist in a women’s organisation linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, sees the Venezuelan leader as a comrade in the struggle.
“So, we are here to say Viva Venezuela! Viva Hugo Chavez! Viva every freedom fighter in this world!” she exclaims. Foreign politicians should stop calling Palestinians “terrorists, she says, “We are freedom fighters and we are struggling for our freedom and we are with the whole freedom fighters in the world.”
Fahim, too, wants Palestinian unity: “The Palestinian leaders should go to emergency negotiations, emergency unified leadership for their people.”
They should stop quarrelling and they should stop listening to the US, she says.
For all Fahim’s criticisms of the US, many Palestinians hope that an event in Washington will bring an end to the offensive. They think that Israel may want to finish its operations before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president next week.
Abdallah Al-Frangi is a Fatah veteran and a member of the movement’s Central Committee. But, when he meets us in a capacious office in Ramallah, he doesn’t rush to defend Mahmoud Abbas.
Asked about popular criticism of the president, Al-Frangi sighs and shrugs. Nobody believed that the attack would be so intense when it started, he says, by way of a partial excuse.
But he believes that the Israelis were preparing the offensive for longer than eight months, a claim based on information which Abbas presumably also has access to.
“So I don’t believe that the Israelis came to Gaza because of the missiles of Hamas,” Al-Frangi says. “From time to time they want to show the world, and the Arab people, that they are strong and that nobody can touch them and nobody can fight against them and I think they used Hamas in this case.”
Al-Frangi’s family is from Gaza and he seems deeply moved by the effects of the offensive.
“It is too hard! It is too hard for me, it is too hard for everybody who is a human being,” he says. Basing himself on frequent calls to Gaza, he says that people are living without water or electricity and that many have been wounded or killed, mostly civilians.
“Surely I am suffering with them,” he adds.
Above all, Al-Frangi wishes to see en end to the split between Fatah and Hamas, which “is helping the Israelis more than this attack”.
Abbas’s priority is a ceasefire, according to Al-Frangi. He also wants to reopen Gaza borders and rebuild Palestinian unity.
But “it is not easy.” For the last two years the two sides have not spoken. Hamas is perhaps justified in its suspicions of Abbas, who dismissed an elected Hamas-led government two years ago, after Israel, followed by the US and the European Union, refused to deal with the movement.
For his part, Al-Frangi is suspicious of Hamas, which seized power in Gaza and drove out leading Fatah members after the dismissal.
He used to negotiate with the group and says that the Islamists are unreliable negotiators, prone to demanding radical revisions of already agreed points just when a deal seems close.
Al-Frangi is blessed, or cursed, with a name which means foreigner. His father insisted that it came from an ancestor who was the first to wear European clothes rather than from the family’s origins, but Hamas exploited it when he returned to Gaza from exile with PLO leader Yasser Arafat in Tunis.
Hamas members told him to “go back abroad” or even “return to your foreign religion”, he recalls.
Even now he is not optimistic.
“I have the feeling the Hamas people are not ready to make a step towards Fatah to make a common policy together.”
As we meet Dr Mustapha Barghouti in another spacious Ramallah office, the television shows footage of the Gaza press centre just after it has been hit by Israeli bombs.
Barghouti, who was information minister in a short-lived unity government, accuses the world’s news media of bringing this on the journalists reporting from Gaza, who are almost all Arabs because of Israel’s ban on reporters entering during the offensive.
“I think this is a result of the silence of the world media about the Israeli violation of every basic principle of free journalism and press,” he says.
There was “no serious protest” against the Israeli ban, he feels.
“This is the third time that they bombard journalists. Already three journalists were killed and now several others injured. They have now upscaled their attack to include not only Abu Dhabi channel and Al Arabiya channel but even Reuters offices and that’s because of the international community and the complicity of the international media, worldwide.”
“The time has come to stop treating Israel as if it is above international law,” Barghouti says.
The press ban is because Israel “is trying to hide the truth”, he says. “They’re trying to hide the fact that this is not a war on an army, it’s a criminal war against civilian population with a totally disproportionate power between the two sides and with the use of prohibited equipment and prohibited weapons.”
Barghouti considers it proven that Israel is using white phosphorous in Gaza. The Israeli army denies using the chemical and ICRC chief Jakob Kelleberger told a press conference in Jerusalem yesterday that he had seen no evidence of its use on a visit to the territory’s main hospital.
But several newspapers and a report by the US-based group Human Rights Watch agree with Barghouti. Human Rights Watch points out that its use in densely populated areas violates international legal requirements to avoid civilian injury and loss of life. Gaza has 75,000 people per square kilometre, compared to 25,000 per square kilometre in Manhattan, according to Kellenberger, who took care to declare that such a dense population means that “the choice of weapons is important”.
Barghouti, who is a medical doctor, claims that other, unknown chemicals are being put inside munitions, saying that they “seem to burn the whole tissue to the bone”.
“The only thing that is not burnt by these chemicals is the bone …. Doctors called me and said that when we find somebody with an internal injury we open it and we cannot do anything because this is not a bleeding we can stop. It’s a burn that goes on and on and on till the patient dies.”
Barghouti was once general secretary of the Palestinain People’s Party, the former Communist Party, but left the post and the party in 2002 to establish the Palestinian National Initiative, along with US-based academic Edward Said. He stood as an independent in the 2005 presidential election, coming second but winning only 156,000 votes to Abbas’s 501,000.
Like Al-Frangi, Barghouti calls for unity, although he is less indulgent towards President Abbas. Blaming Hamas rocket attacks for provoking the Israeli offensive was “a very big mistake”, he says. “And he’s paying for it.
“His credibility is very low today. It’s the lowest ever and I don’t know if he will regain any credibility after what he has done.”
Admitting that the divisions in the Palestinian camp are “very damaging”, Barghouti insists that there is also “very serious internal transformation”. Abbas’s Fatah, along with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), is likely to be “the biggest loser from this war”.
The lack of internal democracy means that “most of the Palestinian forces that are struggling for Palestinian rights are outside the PLO now and most forces inside the PLO have become a bureaucracy, feeding on the Palestinian Authority”.
Forces that are “not Hamas and not Fatah” are “working very hard to find a way to go back to national unity and that’s what we need”, he insists, citing the government in which he served as proof that unity is possible.
Even though he is one of the most outspoken secular Palestinian politicians, Barghouti seems to believe that the immediate answer to his people’s problems is in foreign hands. The European Union should stop buying arms from Israel, he says, and “what will stop aggression is a serious change of the behaviour of the international community, which looks like either careless or complicit with Israeli aggression”.
Gaza day of anger in Ramallah
Women on the day of anger demonstration Photo: Tony Cross
16 January 2009
Friday morning in Ramallah, the streets are unusually empty. Uniformed police gather on the central Manara Square, while groups of men loiter around its edges.
This is the third Friday since Hamas called on Palestinians to demonstrate their solidarity with Gaza after Friday prayers.
Youths wait for the Gaza day of anger protest to start Photo: Tony Cross
Among those waiting is Faisal, a thin, dark, shabbily dressed man, with sunken cheeks and an intense stare. He is a member of Fatah and spent 12 years in Israeli jails. His faith in his leaders has been shaken and his patience with the peace process with Israel has run out.
“There is no other solution,” he says. “The only solution is resistance. First it was Jenin [the refugee camp where over 50 Palestinians were killed in 2002], now it is Gaza, maybe tomorrow it will be Ramallah, so the only solution is resistance.”
Faisal thinks that the Palestinian National Authority should be disbanded and armed struggle resumed. Like Hamas, he argues that Mahmoud Abbas’s mandate has run out since he was elected for four years in 2005. Abbas claims he should stay on until 2010 because the Palestinian Legislative Council has since decreed that presidential and legislative elections should be held together.
We discuss where it would be best to stand and which roads can serve as escape routes if teargas is fired. On the previous two “days of anger” the Palestinian Authority’s police have dispersed Hamas supporters in a manner unlikely to foster Palestinian unity.
As the call to prayer rings out a crowd fills the Jamal Abdel Nasser mosque, spilling out onto the street in front of a market which stops business as the imam begins his sermon.
Thousands have been killed in Gaza, he says. UN resolutions against Israel have not been implemented, while resolutions against Muslims are, so what’s the use of the international body?
Prayers before the Gaza day of anger demonstration in Ramallah Photo: Tony Cross
The preacher is as contemptuous of the leaders of Muslim countries as he is of the UN.
The unbeliever has declared war on Gaza and the leaders of Islamic nations watch and do nothing except count the killed and wounded, he says. Unbelievers attack believers all over the world.
In the mosque, in a passage down the side reserved for women and in the street, hundreds of the faithful join the prayer. Then the demonstration starts.
Or rather demonstrations, because, although this has been billed as a demonstration for Palestinian unity, the crowd splits in two – hundreds of Hamas supporters gathering on one street at the front of the mosque, while hundreds of others head down another street behind it, both marches heading for Manara Square.
Hamas supporters brandish the Koran Photo: Tony Cross
Loudspeakers crackle slogans and orders, one of which is from Hamas leaders telling their supporters not to wave banners so as to avoid trouble. Some small groups of women wave the green flag nonetheless, but are quickly instructed to put them away and obey.
The Hamas contingent is segregated according to gender. The women, in hijab and long dresses and coats, brandish the Koran and shout shrill slogans, calling on the movement’s armed wing, the Brigades of Ezzedine al-Qassam, to fire Kassam rockets as far as Tel Aviv.
The march heads for the centre of Ramallah Photo: Tony Cross
Wahid Mansour seems a little out of place among the Islamists. Clean-shaven and in western dress, he says he is “just seeing what they’re doing” on his way home from the mosque. Unlike the Hamas women shouting right behind him, he is extremely supportive of Abbas.
“Mahmoud Abbas is the president of all Palestinians,” he says. “He is elected from Palestinians and he is one who express our Palestinian will.”
On the square the two protests come together without dispute. One young demonstrator, Rami, believes that Palestinians should “unite under one legitimate leader” but won’t commit himself on the question of whether Abbas is the man for the job.
Mustapha Barghouti and supporters on the day of anger Photo: Tony Cross
As the different currents of the demonstration eddy around the lion monument in the centre of the square, Mustafa Barghouti and his supporters make a nosiy entrance, shouting slogans in support of Hugo Chavez. As the Hamas women pass them, they scream “Haniyeh! Haniyeh!” in support of the Hamas chief in Gaza who was deposed by Abbas as prime minister. In another corner, Fatah supporters shout their own slogans.
Unity doesn’t seem to be a done deal.
To read and hear my reports of the day of anger in Ramallah click here
Israelis on edge in Sderot and Ashkelon
Israeli flags greet visitors to Sderot Photo: Tony Cross
17-18 January 2009
On Saturday in Jerusalem Hassidic Jews in their black hats and coats make reproachful signs at our taxi driver for driving on the Sabbath, on the hill outside Sderot secular residents spend their day off staring at the occasional explosion on the Palestinian horizon, late in the evening Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declares a ceasefire and announces: “We won”.
Overnight the alarm sounds in Ashkelon, where we have found a hotel. On Sunday morning there are reports of six rockets being fired from Gaza. At the government press centre in Sderot, officials say that two landed near the town. When we ask to see them, we’re told that they fell in fields outside the town and there isn’t much to see.
“It’s another proof that Israel made the decision unilaterally that we would like to halt fire, unfortunately Hamas is responding, firing rockets into Israel again and again,” says Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Leo Vinovesky.
Israeli officials hold Hamas responsible for all attacks. If it’s pointed out that they could be the work of other groups, they reply that Hamas controls Gaza and should therefore control them. How it can do this after a three-week bombing campaign aimed at destroying their political and administrative apparatus is unclear.
So how long can the truce last?
“The fact is that Israeli forces are still there in the Gaza Strip, ready for any scenario,” says Vinovesky.
“We have the right to protect ourselves,” he adds “You witness here in Sderot – it’s not a life to rush into the shelters every five minutes, every 10 minutes. Imagine that happening to this population in the south of Israel for more than eight years, so enough is enough!”
The whole of Sderot is draped in Israeli flags and banners. Billboards depicting a heart pierced by a missile welcome you to the town. In the centre men sit around gossiping under a tree, as they would in any town around the Mediterranean.
Shopkeeper Sasson Sara hasn’t much confidence in the ceasefire. He gives it “maybe one month, that’s all” and says that the rockets won’t stop until the Israeli army has wiped out all of Hamas.
Two women passing through town also put all the blame on Hamas. One of them, Nama, is on her way home from a centre which helps people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of rocket fire.
“I think they should have stopped the fighting,” she says but adds that Hamas must stop firing rockets and shooting “their own people”.
“I don’t like the war,” she sighs.
The sirens sound as I arrive in Ashkelon in a taxi whose hitherto-lethargic driver is spurred into action. I don’t realise what is happening and he yells at me in Hebrew, jumps out of the car and leads me into a bank where a crowd of customers and passers-by is shepherded into a shelter. People talk calmly, there’s even a certain camaraderie. We hear no explosion.
Hamas announces a one-week ceasefire, calling on Israel to withdraw and open the border crossings. Its leaders, too, claim victory.
Israeli peace camp isolated and split
Supporters of the offensive argue with peace campaigners in Jerusalem Photo: Tony Cross
In Jerusalem on Sunday evening Israeli leader Ehud Olmert receives European Union leaders, who have been in Egypt negotiating a truce, at a dinner in the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem.
On the other side of a busy crossroads, a small group of protesters chants “War is not a game!” and “Peace yes! War no!”.
In the past their movement, Peace Now, has mobilised thousands to call for negotiations with the Palestinians and peace with Israel’s neighbours. Today, with a large majority of Israelis apparently supporting the offensive, they are less than 20.
“Maybe sometimes you have to use violence to defend your country,’ says one of the protesters, Devora. “But when you have to use violence, you have to make it pointed … you have to use the minimum violence to the maximum effect and I feel like we used the maximum violence to the minimum effect.”
Like so many Israeli women, Devora has sons in the army.
“I’m a mother and I would like the ceasefire to hold that people won’t be killed on both sides of the line but I’m not very hopeful.”
Three girls, armed with banners and the Israeli flag, stage a counter-demonstration, accusing the peace campaigners of supporting “terrorists”, who kill Israeli women and children.
“We want all the Palestinians – no, not all the Palestinians, Hamas – will die!” says one of them, Amara, struggling with her English but not her feelings. The two sides launch into an impassioned argument before the girls cross to the other side of the road to wave the flag and shout at the peaceniks.
Some Peace Now and left-wing leaders initially supported the Gaza offensive, believing it to be a justified response to Palestinian rocket attacks. But by the second week they had organised a demonstration of 1,000 to call for a rapid end to the attack.
“It’s very hard,’ says Peace Now member Yonatan, who admits that he feels isolated from most Israelis at the moment.
“Once you say you’re against the offensive … they take it as agreeing with Israel being bombed and I don’t think Peace Now agrees with Israel being bombed and it doesn’t agree with Israel bombing.”
In the chilly Jerusalem night, the protesters keep up their chants to an audience of police and passing cars. Several drivers sound their horns in disapproval as they speed past.
Israel denies using white phosphorous
Lt-Col David faces the press on a hill overlooking Gaza Photo: Tony Cross
19-20 January 2009
Today the hilltop outside Sderot is serving as the venue for an Israeli army press conference. As a drone whines overhead, an officer presented to us as Lt-Col David tells journalists how his soldiers felt as he led them in combat in Gaza.
“The last eight years, when civilians here, just behind you, were targeted by Hamas terrorists daily with these rockets destroying homes and schools and creating a lot of disruption to civilian live, this is what we were trying to stop and I think, I know, that when my soldiers were in there this is what was in the back of their mind all the time.”
But official minders move in when he is asked whether Israel has used white phosphorous.
Military spokesperson Olivier Rafovitch, who speaks to the media in battle dress with a rifle slung over his shoulder, denies the charge and claims that Hamas used the chemical in one rocket attack on a village near Gaza.
According to the Israeli official line, the offensive is the fault of Hamas, the white phosphorous is the fault of Hamas and, says Rafovitch, the civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas.
“I believe that the ones who have to be blamed for the civilian losses of life are Hamas,” he says. “Hamas was using the people of Gaza as a human shield. It’s not a secret, it’s not new.”
Meanwhile, a report by Amnesty International says that its investigators “found still-burning white phosphorus wedges all around residential buildings” in Gaza.
Israeli troops near the Kalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem Photo: Tony Cross
Yael Stein, Research Director at the Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem, finds the official denials incredible.
“Of course it came from the Israeli army,” she says. “There was one day they said Hamas threw one rocket to Israel and that was with a little bit of white phosphorus. They had such a report, but it can only come from the Israeli army.”
The question has not made the front page of the Israeli press, whose coverage of the offensive has drawn criticism from some NGOs.
One of them, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (Acri) wrote an open letter to the media to tell them that they weren’t exactly speaking the truth to power.
“What’s being portrayed right now is this ultrapatriotic rhetoric, where criticism is really shunned,” Acri’s Melanie Takefman told us last week. “We’re saying that this is a crisis but, look, that doesn’t mean that we can’t have freedom of expression and that there can’t be meaningful debate.”
You’re never far from the army in Israel and the office of Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel (Keshev) is just one floor above a suite guarded by soldiers and clearly closed to the public.
The close military presence doesn’t seem to inhibit Keshev’s Yizhak Be’er, who monitors press coverage of the conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world and doesn’t like what he finds.
Sifting through a pile of copies of best-selling daily, Yediot Aharanot, he contrasts the prominence given to rocket attacks on Israel with no victims, while reports of the hundreds of Gazan civilians killed receive little attention.
Be’er accuses the press of buying into an official discourse which portrays all Israel’s conflicts as battles in a war to defend western civilisation.
“There is a confrontation that is depicted as war of the west against the terror, global terror, and against fundamentalistic groups of Islam,” he says.
Recalling the dictum “just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not getting at you”, he points out that Israeli consciousness is formed by Jewish history and the present hostility of the country’s neighbours. But he thinks that the media-managers have made many mistakes in their handling of this offensive.
“First of all, the closure of the borders to foreign journalists, it is a stupid decision,” he says. “The foreign media have only one source now, the Arab cameras. Al Jazeera and Al Watan who give one side of the story.”
While officials have expressed satisfaction in the work of the newly-established National Information Directorate, Be’er believes that foreign reporters know when they are being treated like idiots and are alienated by officially-organised visits to hospitals with Palestinian patients admitted before the offensive which are meant to show Israeli generosity.
Ban – and Hamas ordnance – face the cameras in Sderot
Israeli police show off rockets fired by Hamas at Sderot and its surroundings Photo: Tony Cross
Sderot’s press centre is closed for “reasons of security”, as Ban Ki-Moon heads for the town. The UN Secretary-General’s press conference is to be held in the town’s police station, allowing the cameras to film him against a background of showcases packed with used ordnance collected after Palestinian rocket attacks.
As we wait for Ban to arrive, corpulent police officers fuss around with flags, trying to hang them from twisted shells and other officials tell us that no questions will be taken after Ban’s statement.
Earlier in the day Ban was in Gaza, where he called for punishment for those responsible for the bombing of UN-run buildings in which a number of civilians died.
Ban Ki-Moon with Sderot’s mayor Photo: Tony Cross
Here he meets Sderot’s police chief, who shows him what an exploded shell looks like, and its mayor, who accompanies him to the mikes.
Ban declares the rocket attacks “unacceptable” and expresses sympathy for the “trauma” experienced by local people.
But he also calls on Israel to open the border crossings, with “transparent, clear and effective border management” to stop weapons being taken into Gaza. And he says that there must be political action “or there will be an increased radicalism among Palestinians”.
Like almost everybody nowadays, it seems, Ban wants Palestinian unity. But, although he does take two questions which allow him to say a little more of what he wants to say, he doesn’t answer when asked if that unity would include Hamas.
Alley, Jerusalem Old City Photo: Tony Cross
To read and hear my reports of the 2009 Gaza offensive click here
Support for the Pakistan People’s Party has been drastically reduced since it came out in the lead in the 2008 election. But the province of Sindh remains its stronghold. When I visited a rural constituency I found both the PPP and the PML-Q, which supported military ruler Pervez Musharraf, represented by political dynasties, relying on traditional loyalties from the poor to elect wealthy landowners. With corruption charges and a failure to tackle poverty along with ongoing politico-religious violence, the PPP in government proved a disappointment to many of its voters.
Street traders in Thatta Photo: Tony Cross
Thatta 20.02.2008
Buses honk, motorised rickshaws putter and cars and lorries rattle through the centre of Thatta. Mechanics hammer and weld in small workshops. A shopkeeper struggles to open a metal shutter and start business for the day.
Modernity has brought its noise and its pollution to interior Sindh, the rural heartland of the Pakistan People’s Party, the PPP.
Soomar prepares to sell milk in Thata Photo: Tony Cross
But Thatta has kept its traditions, too. Street-vendor Soomar stands in a side-road ladelling milk from large churns to small ones, ready to carry it around town on his skinny shoulders.
Another tradition here, as in much of Pakistan, is a fractious political scene. Monday’s election may have escaped the major bombings that were feared but about 20 people were killed throughout the country on the day.
One of them was Thatta’s assistant presiding officer. He was shot by a police officer. At least the crime doesn’t seem to have been politically motivated. The officer of the Islamic republic is reported to have been drunk.
A donkey cart struggle through the traffic in Thatta Photo: Tony Cross
Another death, yesterday, was political. PPP workers who were celebrating victory in one of the Thatta seats clashed with supporters of the losers, the PML-Q. One PPP member was killed.
On the busy main road, a group of People’s Party supporters say the shoot-out was an unwarranted attack. In his party’s local headquarters, which are almost deserted today, Safraz Shah Shirazi, a former PML-Q National Assembly member, claims that the PPP men provoked the attack by noisily bursting into the homes of his party members.
He adds that he condemns the violence that has taken place during the election.
Safraz Shah Shirazi Photo: Tony Cross
Shirazi didn’t stand this time but his brothers stood for the two Thatta National Assembly seats … one successfully, the other being the loser in the constituency where yesterday’s confrontation took place.
Three other Shirazis stood for the Provincial Assembly and the top district official, the nazim, is also a relation.
So another Pakistani tradition is alive and well in Thatta … a tendency for one or two families to dominate a district’s political life.
PPP activists here denounce this as “feudal”, although their party owes much of its influence in Sindh to the fact that PPP leaders, starting with the Bhuttos, own huge landed estates in the province.
Abdul Jaleel Memon Photo: Tony Cross
In Thatta newly-elected Provincial Assembly member Abdul Jaleel Memon comes from a PPP dynasty.
“My grandfather was elected in 1970 – he was one of the founder-members of the party – and he was elected Provincial Assembly member from this same constituency which I have been elected,” he explains. “My father was elected from this constituency. This is our third generation in People’s Party and we are committed to this party.”
Jaleel’s home resembles a feudal court today, with dozens of local men come to pay their respects. In front of the house, cloth stretched from poles provides shade from the sun for visitors, guards and a couple of cars. Inside the main room is packed with congratulators, favour-seekers and ingratiators.
Local people at the home of Abdul Jaleel Memon Photo: Tony Cross
Jaleel promises to tackle poverty with industrial development.
“The main problem in Thatta is employment,” he says and promises that his party will revive a project for a 5,000-megawatt power-plant, which he claims was planned by the Benazir Bhutto government but shelved by its successor.
To hear my radio report from Thatta in 2008 for RFI click here
Sassi Paleejo Photo: Tony Cross
In her large house just outside town, another newly-elected Provincial Assembly member, Sassi Paleejo, is in her element. Brightly-dressed and weighed down by garlands of flowers, she, too, is holding to court to dozens of well-wishers. In between greeting visitors and an interview with a TV crew, she boisterously leads the crowd in chants of ‘Bhutto zinda hai!” and “People’s Party zindabad!”
Paleejo is quick to point out that not only is she the only woman to have been elected in Sindh, she’s the only woman to have run for either a provincial or a national seat, although others will be given reserved seats in both assemblies.
Her election campaign may have been helped by the Bhutto aura. She was a close friend and political collaborator of Benazir and, unsurprisingly, remains faithful to her memory. She predicts that the first act of the new government will be to ask the UN to investigate Benazir’s assassination, a demand which seems to have slipped national party leaders’ memories in the aftermath of the election.
She dismisses the idea that the Bhutto family’s dominance of the party is a weakness, especially after Benazir’s death, describing such dynasties as “kind of a norm in south Asia”, as with the Bandaranaike family in Sri Lanka or the Gandhis in India.
Paleejo believes that the PPP will be able to cohabit with Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, despite their past rivalry, citing as not very convincing evidence, the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, an anti-Musharraf front which broke up when the two parties fell out.
The new Provincial Assembly member could yet fall victim to the PML-Q’s penchant for the continuation of politics by judicial means. She’s facing terror charges, arising from the riots that exploded after Benazir’s assassination.
“They claim that, at a time, I attacked four to five police stations, that I stole their weapons, I was involved in so many different kinds of riots and attacks.”
No charges have been laid for the murder of PPP workers, she claims, “but right now Pakistan is the unique district where you will see that more than 120,000 cases have been registered against our people.”
Several candidates were charged in Thatta, seriously hampering their campaigns.
“Even during my election campaign, the first thing I used to do was I had to go to the Session Court for a hearing, then I had to rush to Anti-Terrorist Court … and then I had to come back to Thatta and run my election campaign.”
But “we believe democracy, we believe in Benazir Bhutto’s sacrifice, that’s why we won’t let our people down.”
Makli cemetery Photo: Tony Cross
On our way back to Karachi we stopped at the Moghul-era Makli cemetery, parts of which have been restored.
Sufi snake-charmer Photo: Tony Cross
There were Sufi pir snake-charmers there.
An adventure with a snake
Yes, they made me hold the snake – it’s like having a muscle rap itself around your arm.
Mongoose v snake Photo: Tony Cross
… before setting a mongoose on it and killing it (this wasn’t my idea!).
Before the election … the PPP campaigns near Islamabad
During the election campaign I saw the PPP campaigning in a rural constituency near Islamabad. Candidate Nayyar Hussein Bukhari insisted he had the voters’ interests at hear but it wasn’t easy to see what he had in common with them.
Nayyar Hussein Bukhari arrives at the meeting in Zia Masjid Photo: Tony Cross
Zia Masjid 12.02.2008
The village of Zia Masjid doesn’t seem especially bucolic. The motorway out of Islamabad roars right past it. Many of its buildings are brick and concrete structures, several storeys high.
Parliamentary candidate Nayyar Hussein Bukhari describes his constituency, which covers parts of Islamabad and some of the villages around it, as 80% rural and Zia Masjid as one of its suburban districts.
The main entrance from the major road is blocked by stones and a police officer with a rifle, part of the security for an open air meeting in support of Bukhari’s bid to be re-elected on behalf of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party, the PPP.
The audience at Zia Masjid Photo: Tony Cross
You can enter the village by a side road and drive along a ridge until you are overlooking a patch of dusty ground. Here an auditorium has been created by making a wall of blue-patterned cloth stretched on poles. On one side a huge banner bears the party’s colours, red, green and black, its symbol, an arrow, and giant pictures of Bukhari and Bhutto.
At first, there are only a few party activists and scruffy children, all male, many with skin complaints and snotty noses, dressed in ear-muffs and woolly hats against the relative cool of a February afternoon.
Prayers open the meeting Photo: Tony Cross
As a young man tests the rackety sound system, without any evident effect on the distortion it visits on the voices and music it broadcasts, eager party members lead the kids in a warm-up chant. A tape of Benazir’s voice, hoarsely addressing a crowd before her assassination, echoes across the empty seats. There are no women present.
A crowd forms well before the arrival of the candidate. Mansour Ahmad, a tall, gaunt man who looks eerily like a Pakistani George Orwell dressed in a checkered scarf and double-breasted jacket over a shalwar kameez, fervently denounces Musharraf as an “unwanted and unnecessary person in our country” and predicts that his party will triumph in next week’s election.
An old, raggedly-dressed man raises the main concern of many voters, the rising price of basic foods and other essentials.
“We are citizens of Pakistan and we cannot find attar [the wheat-flour with which chapattis are made]. Everything is getting very expensive. So we get into debt … We have no money, we don’t run businesses, we don’t have any work. We can’t afford clothes, there’s no electricity, no gas. Everything is finished! Where should we go?”
When Bukhari finally emerges from a land-cruiser, he’s mobbed by boys and men alike.
The candidate glows under the blaze of attention, although he isn’t quite as freshly pink as his picture on the election posters, and handshakes his way through the crowd.
There are good many warm-up acts. Mansour Ahmad chairs the meeting and introduces the local imam who says a prayer. Then a succession of village orators take the stand. Their delivery is more than competent, a tribute to the survival of oral culture in Pakistan. It’s impossible to imagine a comparable number of good speakers in a European village or small town.
Zia Masjid prepares for the PPP meeting Photo: Tony Cross
Bukhari is well-received when he speaks and he doesn’t fail to invoke the memory of Benazir. Like many Pakistani politicians, he’s a lawyer, so certainly considerably better-off than his audience. Seated in the landcruiser as he whizzes to his next engagement, I ask if he understands the problems of the poor people of Zia Masjid.
He seems slightly offended and a little flustered by the question.
“Yes, of course I do, sir,” he says. “Because I hail from a rural area and I understand the people’s problem.”
He adds that he was, in fact, born and brought up in the area that he represents.
“Most of the people they ask for the provision of the basic necessities, you know, provision of the gas, roads, schools, hospitals. These are the basic things which they lack in the area.”
He claims that the PPP started providing gas to smaller communities. “Since 1996 People’s Party’s out of power and not a single village has been provided gas by any succeeding government.”
There are no colleges in the area and he wants more colleges and schools “for girls and for boys, also” to combat illiteracy.
The PPP has been encouraged by opinion polls produced by two right-wing American organizations, Terror Free Tomorrow, on whose board sits Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, and the International Republican Institute. They show the party winning 50% or more of the vote, with Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League-N, coming second and Musharraf’s allies, the Muslim League-Q trailing in third place.
Bukhari says that the party will be pluralistic in victory, seeking to form a coalition with all “democratic forces” even if it wins a majority of seats on its own. But that doesn’t include “the one that was under the umbrella of a uniform”, that is to say PML-Q.
Bukhari arrives at the meeting in Islamabad Photo: Tony Cross
Back in the city, Bukhari rushes into another improvised meeting-place. Colourful materials form decorative walls for the next meeting, which this time is composed only of women.
To hear my radio report for RFI of Bukhari on the campaign trail click here
To read and listen to my reports of 2007-08 in Pakistan click here
French tax services netted a record 21.2 billion euros from tax dodgers last year. And the biggest culprit was big business, a result that should lead the government to dissolve the units responsible since, like most governments nowadays, practically its sole job-creation strategy is to let companies off paying their fiscal share.
More than a quarter of the tax-evasion haul – 5.8 billion euros – came from corporate tax fraud, up from 4.2 billion euros in 2014.
Individual tax-dodgers with secret bank accounts abroad, no doubt panicked by Luxleaks and the UBS investigation, fessed up to the tune of 2.65 billion euros.
“We have to lay to rest this idea that income from tax inspection comes from hammering small taxpayers,” Budget Minister Christian Eckert pointed out in a rare counter to the right-wing – sorry, “centrist” in establishment-speak – offensive against the state collecting its due. “It’s not true! Income from tax inspection comes essentially from big companies.”
The indiscreet junior minister probably won’t keep job for long if he carries on in that vein.
Because France’s Socialist government has pursued an energetic policy of cutting taxes to business, on the pretext that boosting profits will persuade bosses to take on more workers, with only a minor deviation this year in the form of a labour law pretty much drafted by the Medef bosses’ union.
The share of dividends in French companies’ operation profits
It’s a strategy that has proved startlingly unsuccessful. Unemployment remains at 10 per cent as companies have paid out the tax handouts in dividends, an international tendency to short-term gluttony that is particularly virulent in France.
Given that the 2014 Socialist government contained no fewer than eight millionaires, one can imagine that it feels more collective empathy towards those struggling to maximise their wealth than those struggling to survive on the breadline – even if the cabinet’s net worth must have taken a hit with the departure of the fabulously wealthy Laurent Fabius.
So the DVNI, the division responsible for chasing up companies with a turnover of more than 154.2 million euros at whose headquarters Eckert and Finance Minister Michel Sapin announced the good tax news, would be foolish to aspire to longevity.
If we follow the government’s logic, following the current economic orthodoxy, it should be closed down and those companies allowed to carry on fiddling their tax returns in the hope that they will be kind enough to employ a few more members of the lower orders with the gains made from their accountants’ creativity.
Indeed, the tax windfall, which has been one of the only positive contributions to the EU-ordered effort to reduce the deficit, seems to have been pretty much an accident.
The unit to pursue holders of secret foreign accounts was set up after budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac was found to be guilty of that very offence and forced to resign. His case opened last month and, the defendant having arrived lawyered up, been put off until September.
Successful though the tax inspectors have been, unions have complained that they could do better with more resources.
That’s certainly true if estimates of the level of tax fraud quoted by the ministry are true. They put the figure at 60-80 billion euros, so 20 billion should be just the beginning if ministers were serious about tackling white-collar crime.
Eckert’s statement is important – and not just in France – because campaigning against taxation has been the right’s most effective weapon in winning middle and working-class support for policies that have actually shifted wealth away from most of the population.
Tax is the Achilles’ heel of collectivism. Most of us want good public services but we’d all rather somebody else pay for them. At the very least, we’ll take any opportunity to reduce the amount of tax we personally have to pay. The right has played on that conflict between immediate individual interest and delayed collective gratification with enormous success.
An important component of most right-wing campaigning issues – benefits fraud, migrants, “wasteful” public spending – is an appeal to the wallet. And, although there seems to be growing scepticism about capitalism and a revival of some form of collectivism among the young, Donald Trump, or France’s Front National, are evidence of the kind of mass reactionary movements that will be whipped up and manipulated if the interests of the wealthy are ever seriously challenged.
