[News] Nahel's France - Neo-Colonized and Pan-African Voice Speak Up

[Anti-Imperialist News]

panafricannews.blogspot.com
<https://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2023/07/nahels-france-neo-colonialized-and-pan.html>

*NAHEL'S FRANCE: NEO-COLONIZED AND PAN-AFRICAN VOICES SPEAK UP*

<https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH1rxkleVCgl2e6ol-iRvJajO2iI3g0steCCngMjD1sUxvOXIBZKravgSagG_JSQTb2iWETBfi-t34hufxoa8XJ-M4_qlEKvFuKLf8LP6K8jqneziP2SibQNUnsMPsw52NVOFtX79U5WUjDJgfyKz4DJ91T076IQ6LMeKXyKe85BtFkE9R3fzszg/s1200/France%20rebellion%20after%20killing%20of%20Nahel.jpg>

By Julia Wright - July 14, 2023

Two days ago, my client told me he was thinking of committing suicide
because his profession has been attacked for two to three weeks now even
though he is convinced he acted right - he is convinced he acts right every
day. (,,,) He says to me: How do I get out of this? So, I told him to
switch to another job, leave the police, there are other professions. And
he replies: "Yes, but this is who I am, I live for my work, I want to be a
police officer, I want to go arrest people. I want to be able to strangle
them when they struggle".

Statement by the lawyer defending the police officer who killed Nahel on
June 27th 2023.

Richard Wright voluntarily expatriated himself with his family (Ellen, my
mother, and myself) in 1947 and was welcomed there by the likes of Jean
Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir - who later both became "suitcase
carriers" in the Francis Jeanson network supplying weapons to the National
Front for Liberation, Algeria's national liberation movement. My father
wholeheartedly condemned the colonial war conducted by the French in
Algeria and when Simone de Beauvoir used to ring at our door to give my
parents the latest news about the war, I noticed her suitcase-carrying
hands were covered with nervous excema. She later co-authored a book about
the torture of an FLN activist, Djamila Boupacha, who was raped by the
French army with a broken beer bottle.

During the cold war, Black American expatriates in Paris caught between the
rock of McCarthyism - and the hard place of non-intervention into French
policy at the price of being sent back to the USA - had to be publicly
silent even though they were personally increasingly concerned about
France's drift towards fascism. But Richard would often go to cafes with
FLN revolutionaries and let his most trusted friends know the depth of his
concerns. On August 28th 1957, he wrote to his Dutch translator: "France is
sinking each day, each hour. We may have a dictatorship here before the
year is over. A fascist one! It is strange. And it will now have to happen.
Poor mankind." That same year the Richard Gibson affair broke out shaking
the whole of the Black American community in Paris: a letter attacking
French policy in Algeria was printed in Life magazine under the forged
signature of a Black American, Ollie Harrington, who was my father's best
friend and confidente as well as close to the CPUSA. My father threw
caution aside and testified on Ollie's behalf in front of the French
Homeland Security Department. The forged signature was later found to have
been penned by another Black American, Richard Gibson. From then onwards my
father's foreign service documents forwarded to Washington were stamped
ominously ' Subversive Control' [ FBI files, July 7 1958]. My father died
in a shabby Paris clinic, alone in 1960. Richard Wright scholars like
Ishmael Reed, the late Addison Gayle and others discuss the possibility of
his having been neutralized. A few years ago, when a part of the J.F.
Kennedy files were declassified, my father's suspicions about Richard
Gibson turned out to be correct: he had been a CIA agent.

This pre-COINTELPRO and cold war context versus the groundbreaking Bandoeng
conference where non-alignment was born in 1955 dominated the international
context of the Algerian war as far as many radical Pan Africanists were
concerned. And this is strangely similar to the tension today between the
global rise of the ultra-right on both sides of the Atlantic - and the
nonalignment of BRICS.

Historically and geopolitically the Franco-Algerian war and the eight
grueling years it took to unwind between 1954 and 1962 sinks deep into the
French collective unconscious not least because the French army started
fighting for their colony on the heels of their national disgrace at Dien
Ben Phu when they were defeated by the North Vietnamese and the U.S. took
over. In Algeria they dug in partly because they could not afford to be
seen to be losing again, partly because Algeria was oil and gas rich.

Ramata Dieng who is Senegalese and who lost her brother at the hands of the
French police "thanks" to a chokehold similar to George Floyd's had this to
say when I asked her to react to Nahel's murder: " Fifteen days before
Nahel, there was Alhoussein Camara a young Guinean aged 19 who was shot
down on his way to work. And before that there was Monzomba. " Ramata has
founded a Stolen Lives Collective in her brother Lamine's memory to help
victims' families get justice. I can sense her enough-is-enoughness. In
order to get the French courts to hear her case for Lamine, she had to take
it to the European Court of Justice - eleven long years of litigation. Her
tireless efforts are an indictment of the politisation of justice in France.

Ramata writes to me:

"These tragedies happen because the courts follow orders from the State and
therefore refuse to impose sanctions on the police. My Collective calls for
the abolition of the use of military weapons and of the use of chokeholds
in policing; the setting up of a public body independent of the police and
the gendarmes ( military police ) to investigate claims and complaints
against law enforcement officers; a set of rules enabling families to be
fully present and represented as soon as a death has been declared (
autopsy allowed only after the family has conferred with the forensic
medical authorities ); the yearly publication by the Ministry of the
Interior of the number of persons wounded or killed by law enforcement, the
number of charges pressed for police violence and the resulting number of
convictions".

I have Ramata to thank for raising a very important question: why Nahel?
Why did the murder of this young disarming 17-year-old French citizen of
Algerian and Moroccan descent become the spark of such unprecedented
national unrest when the other killings - one a month over the last 18
months - didn't?

NAHEL: A BUTTERFLY EFFECT IN REVERSE

A commentator on the Algerian channel "Le Destin" gave an interesting
answer to Ramata's question when he stated on July 1st that:

 "This is a butterfly effect in reverse. We define a butterfly effect as
the vibration of a butterfly's wings that creates a storm thousands of
miles away. In Nahel's case there was such a storm brewing that this young
man was killed in cold blood".

So, what are the elements of this storm? We find that the very name of
"Nanterre" where Nahel was killed is historically loaded going back to May
1968 when the students on the campus of the new University of Nanterre came
up against the poverty of its North African slums and were sensitized. A
storm is also certainly brewing because the extreme right is on the rise in
France and that right was born through its identification with colonial
settler demands and the hatred of the Arabs in Algeria: they have a
nostalgia for the O.A.S. (The Secret Army Organization) that waged
counterinsurgency against the freedom fighters and therefore support Marine
Le Pen's party, the R.N.  74% of police officers on active duty intend to
vote for Le Pen at the next elections. Her father, Jean Marie Le Pen upheld
the use of torture during the Algerian war. Another element of the storm is
Macron's heavy dependence on Algerian gas now that the U.S. has imposed a
boycott of Russian gas - that same Russia where President Tebboune of
Algeria was recently received with great ceremony whereas he has postponed
an official invitation to Paris three times and issued a communique
severely criticizing Nahel's murder and calling for the protection of all
Algerians on French soil. "Le Destin's" commentary points to an axis of
common ultra-right interests between Le Pen's R.N., the French Repubicans,
the Moroccans ("the eyes and ears of France in North Africa"), Israel and
the former "harkis" and their descendants (the Algerians who fought with
the French against their own). Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior,
walks a tightrope between that axis and his more appeasing boss, Macron - a
bad cop, good cop dance typical of neoliberalism.

Interestingly, Valerie Pecresse of the French Republicans in a move which
takes me back to the cold war Paris my father lived in, has now decided
that, in her capacity of President of the region Ile de France, she can
demand that the Angela Davis High School located in another suburb called
Saint-Denis right around the corner from Mumia Abu-Jamal Street, be
de-baptized and re-named for the more consensual Rosa Parks. In spite of
the majority vote of students and parents in favor of Angela Davis. A storm
within a storm.

Finally, this Summer marks the 50th anniversary of the 1973 brutal racist
aggressions against Algerians in Marseille: over fifty of them were
assassinated.

Nahel lived in a slum in the dirt-poor suburb of Nanterre. These slums are
called in France: "bidonvilles" a term literally meaning "towns made of
cans". In fact, the first slums were where the North African immigrants
were imported and warehoused to rebuild France at starvation wages after
world war two. The irony being that petrol had been the reason why the
French had been so hard put to relinquish Algeria as a colony in the first
place and why the Algerian national liberation struggle lasted so long.
France still refuses to recognize its war crimes and owes information and
reparation to the Algerian government for their secret nuclear tests
conducted in the Southern part of the country.

The French mainstream corporate-owned media has gagged two generations
suffering from the absence of closure of French colonization. Dassault who
controls the French armament industry and Vincent Bollore the corrupt
multi-billionnaire who once owned most of the West African ports thus
controlling the logistics of circulation of minerals and raw material -
both still control much of the moderate and rightwing press.

 Nahel's generation is still excluded from access to schools and there is
over 40% unemployment in the suburbs. In terms of social services, the
suburbs are a desert.

And if these voices are heard at all they are criminalized. The ultra
rightest Eric Zemmour stated in reaction to Nahel's death: "We are shocked
and saddened as we should be about the death of any young man anywhere. But
he was not an angel, his wings were not snow white, there were black stains
on them". Except that as his lawyer explains: Nahel had no criminal record.

 SUPPRESSED YOUTH NARRATIVES

It is important to listen to these suppressed youth narratives all the more
suppressed that Darmanin felt that the riots justified social media
censorship: "Let the internet accounts of those kids burn ".

So here are the words of a young man called Virgil. He is Black, soft
spoken and does not disclose his origins on the video. He is aged 24 and
explains that he was formerly in the French army:

"I went to the Nanterre March in tribute to Nahel to pay my respects to the
family and to put down my little stone for justice. After the march I was
walking alone in a small alley to join some friends when I came upon four
policemen who just said: 'Get out of here' and shot me with a flash ball at
a distance of about ten meters. I had raised my hands. They did not ask for
my papers, I was not hostile, just going to meet my friends. It was
gratuitous. I felt myself falling backwards but I felt that if I let myself
fall. I would die so I braced myself and ran because anyway they were the
ones who had said 'Get out of here.' I did what they asked. For five or ten
minutes I blacked out because I was losing too much blood. I was lucky to
meet two very young boys who charged me on their scooter and took me to the
hospital. The police had roadblocks all over Nanterre and did not want to
let us through even though I was bleeding out so when we arrived at the ER,
the state of emergency diagnosed was too advanced and I had to be
transported to Paris to save my eye. I could feel I had already lost my
eye, so I said to them ' but now my eye is gone, right?' And I could see
the shock on their faces and that they did not want to reply. No words were
needed. I also have loss of hearing, tinnitus, terrible headaches and can
hardly read. My remaining eye will suffer because it will have to
compensate. I am facing surgery on my jaw. My life has been changed
forever. I was in the army: at that distance it could not have been an
accident, they were targeting my face. I want to thank the two young boys
who picked me up: if you have the means to contact me, please do because
you may not know it but you saved my life".

Listening to Virgil, I cannot help thinking of Keziah Nuissier, a student,
also in his early twenties about whom I have written in connection with his
attempt to protect his mother, Madly, during a 2020 eco-protest against the
use of the forever carcinogenic pesticide chlordecone in the French colony
of Martinique. He was brutally beaten by the gendarmes in Fort de France
and then he was pulled behind a van to be tortured with, as his mother
explains, a torture technique that was used by the French army in Algeria:
the severing of the optic nerve. Military torture techniques are passed on
to militarized police to be used from one warfront to another and one
generation to another.

Madly writes to me from Martinique about the situation in France after
Nahel's death:

 "There were hardly no protests here [fires in trash cans were reported in
the city of Schoelcher because those who could protest are daily solicited
by our colonial experience: it is an unending struggle to preserve our
island [ the pesticide chlordecone has contaminated 97% of Martinique's
soil and waterways]. So, there was not much unrest for Nahel. But in France
the riots were spontaneous and the direct result of government policies in
the suburbs: dabs of ineffectual assistance at best and a policy of
deliberate isolation at worst. In order to solve what it calls security
issues the State does nothing to impose sanctions on police violence.
Repression and dribbles of token welfare are the solutions offered. The
recent serious increase in the cost of living in France has sharpened these
social tensions. All the French heads of State have had scandals hushed by
the French courts. Many ministers have been charged here and there. The
youth no longer believe in social mobility. Moreover, France never
deconstructed the real meaning of her colonial role. Racism hides
surreptitiously in the pages of textbooks creating pockets of amnesia - or
in society under the guise of hypocritical exclusion whereas France still
derives advantageous financial benefits from its privileged posture in the
African countries under its influence through the CFA Franc and at the
expense of the African populations forced into immigration. We are in a
real mascarade".

Another anonymous source from the native island of Frantz Fanon says: "They
are hiding the number of deaths. There were two deaths in France as an
outcome of the police repression of the protests after Nahel's death. Maybe
more. They go unreported. France is in a dictatorship."

In fact, in the capital of French Guiana there was another "collateral"
death resulting from a "stray" bullet on June 29th in the section of
Montlucat: Carl T. an anti-mosquito sanitation worker was watching the
protests from his balcony when he was hit. Protests occurred in other
sections of Cayenne: the Chinese village, Macouria and Kourou.

On the island of Reunion, another colony of France, a car was set on fire
and the police prefect of the island outlawed the sale and transport of
fireworks.

INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA

The intergenerational trauma revealed by a mother whose son was tortured
for trying to protect her while she was playing an ancestral drum at an
eco-protest sends me to the words of another mother who organizes in the
French suburbs: Fatima Ouassak who co-founded "Front de Meres" (Mother
Front - the word sea in French also means mother):

"We don't have the time to wait to see if the [French] Left will succeed in
returning to power or if once in power it will launch a big police reform
because our children are dying today ".

This is very close to released USA politcal prisoner Jalil Muntaqim's: "We
must be our own liberators".

I am also reminded of Belkis Teran, the mother of Tortuguita, who was
leading an Atlanta Forest march in memory of her son just one day before
the Nanterre march in honor of Nahel on June 29th.

Intergenerational trauma and temporality awareness are carried by all the
targeted youth who are bearing witness today:

"Nahel did not die alone, a bit of me died with him because each day I too
am exposed to death."

So, since we are listening to muted voices, what about little Nahel's
voice? Once he got over his state of shock, the 14-year-old passenger
sitting next to him in the car related that Nahel's last words like George
Floyd were for his mother: "Say goodbye to Mama and grandma. He shot me,
he's crazy".

A source from the Republic of Guinea (West Africa), who wishes to remain
anonymous, wrote to me that Nahel was in high spirits shortly before he
died because he had had the luck of the draw: he had been random picked to
be included in a Rap by the grassroot rap singer Jul. These are the last
images we have of a young boy overjoyed almost in awe because he was
breaking his invisibility and was becoming the video-graphed actor of his
own social and racial experience. As we watch the clip, we see the hope of
a little ghost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUb0eZbfjj0

Meanwhile caught in the gathering storm, Macron's government with Darmanin
responsible for "law and order" are engaging in a weathercock policy -
going where the wind blows most favorably, dodging the dangerous currents,
curtseying to the extreme right one day, giving guarantees to the
neoliberals the next - but always protecting police impunity.

In an indignant address challenging Gerald Darmanin on July 4th in the
French National Assembly, a member of Rebellious France Party, Antoine
Leaumont said:

"The police unions 'Alliance' and 'UNSA' [extreme Right] have threatened
your executive power in their press release. When will you remind
'Alliance' that the police are not there to give orders but to serve and
obey? The truth is you are paralyzed by fear, the fear of ending up like Mr
Castaner [ Macron's former Minister of the Interior] who was sacked within
48 hours for having spoken up against chokeholds, you are afraid to stop
the shameful fundraising in favor of the policeman who murdered Nahel, you
are afraid the police will turn against you after you used them to force
through your pension reform. This fear paralyzes all action on your part.
This fear prevents you from acting when the UN criticizes racism in our
police. And you deny this racism".

Rebellious France is at the extreme of a French Left that, though not as
divided as during the upheavals that took place after the deaths of Zined
and Bouna in 2005, is still not homogeneous: the Socialist Party and Fabien
Roussel of the French CP are reluctant to recognize structural racism in
the police and disapprove the destruction of property whatever the
circumstances.

If anything, many of the racialized youth are in favor of a coordination
between Leftwing grassroot liberation fronts not Leftwing parties.

Meanwhile mid-May, Darmanin made a much-publicized trip to the United
States where he was received by the Department of Homeland Security to
discuss drug trafficking, cyber criminality and terrorism. His tweet admits
to cooperation with the U.S. police to prepare the Olympic Games of 2024.
He is received at Quantico and tweets that he had very interesting
exchanges on police intervention techniques and the very latest technology
as far as forensics are concerned. The article in Europe 1 continues:
"During heightened tension manifested by the protesters against the pension
reforms, the reemergence of extremism on the Right and the Left, Darmanin
also visited the H.Q. of the NYPD. There he watched simulations by the
police of public order maintenance techniques and of situations where the
police can or cannot shoot ".

Mayor Eric Adams is known for his connection with Israeli police training
programs so are we to find a connection here with a little noticed news
item reported by the French CP paper l'Humanite that soon after Nahel's
murder, Darmanin reached out to the Israelis for "advice on crowd control
and protest containment"? The news would have been suppressed had it not
been for disclosures requested by opposition members of the Knesset
Parliament.

https://www.humanite.fr/monde/mort-de-nahel/maintien-de-l-ordre-quand-le-gouvernement-francais-demande-conseil-israel-801722

At the height of the upheavals following Nahel's death, another hidden move
was taken by Macron: he introduced in his Military Programming Law a new
clause stating that in case of threats targeting the key activities of the
nation or in order to be ready either for a civil war or a war at an
international level, all civilians and all their property could be
requisitioned by the State.

Macron was obviously not only thinking of a possible escalation of the war
in Ukraine- alongside Biden's cluster bombs, he has just sent Zelensky long
range "Scalp" missiles able to reach Moscow - but also ominously of
internal civil unrest ...

And who defines what is a "threat"?

FRANCE HAS ITS OWN COP CITY

In any event the US and NATO connection are real as revealed by France's
own cop city located in the Dordogne region. It is called the National
Training Center for Gendarme Forces. There ,146 acres welcome various
structures for trainees; training facilities such as a tower to teach
intervention techniques, firing ranges, mock buildings etc... A series of
bravery obstacle courses; a mock city for exercises to train tactical
groups of gendarmes to restore or maintain order. In the framework of
bilateral or multilateral agreements this French cop city organizes
training courses for a number of European countries - as well as under NATO
leadership. On Wikipedia, the precis on France's cop city shows four
illustrations: interestingly half of them represent American Marines
participating in crowd control and crisis response in the French National
Training Center for Gendarme Forces.


https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/centre_national_d%27entra%C3%AEnement_des_forces_de_gendarmerie

However, in classic neocolonialist posture, Macron's government wants to
eat its cake and have it too. The French socio economic crisis due to the
pandemic, the fact that France is the leader of the Euro zone recession,
the sharp increase in the cost of living, the boycott that the U.S. has
imposed on France concerning Russian gas, the concentration of wealth in
the hands of aloof elites, the multiplication of Leftwing protest fronts
like the yellow vests, the anti-retirement movement and the recently
violently repressed and dissolved eco movement "les Soulevements de La
Terrre" - all these factors have destabilized those now holding power.

As a last resort, Emmanuel Macron has tried to apply for membership of
BRICS - realizing that the BRICS countries represent more than 40% of the
world's population, produce one quarter of the world's gross domestic
product and are stronger than the G7. Pan Africanists are warning that a
French membership of BRICS would offer Macron a Trojan horse opportunity to
consolidate neoliberal trade relations with vast global South markets even
as they are showing an increasing will to economic independence. Meanwhile
Macron invited world leaders including all the BRICS heads of State to
Paris to attend "A New Finacial Global Pact Conference". At the conference,
President William Ruto of Kenya confronted Macron with an outspoken
challenge of his neo-colonialist mindset stating: " You are not hearing
us". The conference ended with a rejection of Macron's courtship of BRICS
on June 23rd, four days later Nahel was shot by the police. And the words
that the youth of Nahel's age have kept repeating for decades are the same
as President Ruto's: "We are not being heard".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-7R7Y0Ha6w

FRANCE BETWEEN BRICKS DESTROYED AND BRICS' S BRUSH OFF?

The situation in France and in all NATO countries today makes me think back
to Kwame Nkrumah's funeral which I attended like many Pan Africanists did -
in Conakry, Guinea, in 1972. After Amilcar Cabral pronounced his iconic
speech " The Cancer of Betrayal", we all went back to the Villa Sylli to
offer our condolences to Fathia, Nkrumah's widow. Cabral was there and
since I was working on a series of interviews of African leaders about what
they thought of Black Power, I asked him the question.

He responded that he would reply not as a political leader or a freedom
fighter but as an agronomist:

 "African Americans are like sleeping seeds under the snow of capitalism
and we the liberation movements on the periphery will create through our
own victories the revolutionary Spring that will melt that snow and favor
the conditions of your own definitive victories linked to ours".

Amilcar Cabral was assassinated one year later in 1973.

Besides the ecological wisdom Cabral's words contain I read in them a
brilliant prescience and a question: what would it take for BRICS to offer
the conditions of such a global revolutionary Spring? BRICS already adheres
to Nkrumah's injunction that national independence is nothing without
economic independence and BRICS was founded around the principle of
non-alignment hailed in 1955 as the then Third World's way of winning the
cold war. On August 22nd, at the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, France's
candidacy will be either dealt with by consensus or by a new method of
membership acceptance Naledi Pandor is working on. This will be the pivotal
moment when we will find out whether a powerful regrouping like BRICS will
- alongside its New Development Bank - operate along core anti-imperialist
human rights principles respectful of the lives of future Nahels ,George
Floyds and Tortuguitas - and in recognition of the structural militarist
and neo fascist causes of their deaths.

Only then would Amilcar Cabral's vision come into its own - fifty years
after his assassination.

 (c) Julia Wright. July 14th 2023. All Rights.

Thanks to Ramata Dieng, Patrick Bobulesco and Madly Etilie for contributing
to this article.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20230719/c8c50aaa/attachment.htm>