N° 32 février 2023 The Davos summit...When Scholz meets Macron...The Burkinabé government tries to loosen the neocolonial grip of imperialist France...Unspeakable aggression by the Moroccan forces of repression against delegates to the Polisario Front Congress
The summit of Davos
The 53rd Davos summit, which brings together thousands of business leaders, governments, academics, heads of international organizations and journalists, has just ended. It was the reflection of a world in full change and confrontations, the title chosen for this summit "Cooperation in a fragmented world"is the best illustration of this. This fragmentation, which is accentuated by the war in Ukraine, is reflected in the votes on this issue at the UN where part of Africa, Latin America and Asia refused to enlist in the camp led by the United States while maintaining a certain distance with the Russian Federation. In fact in Davos, a part of the world is no longer represented and in the first place, Russia, Iran, Turkey. On the side of China, she was represented by Liu He, the last of the five vice-prime ministers in the order of protocol.
If all the participants agree to describe the current crisis as climatic, geopolitical and social, what predominates in the speeches are the interests of the big capitalist monopolies and the States. This is all the more true since the role of the States is decisive in the process of capital accumulation in a situation where profit rates continue their downward trend. Thus, the major issue of energy is a violent battleground, whether in the production and transport of fossil fuels, as shown by the war waged on the territory of Ukraine by the imperialist powers, as C' This is also the case for technologies linked to the energy transition, which is a formidable weapon in the fierce struggles between the capitalist monopolies. When the United States with the Inflation Reduction Act mobilized 370 billion dollars for the energy transition, they provided massive aid to their industries to increase their competitiveness against those of European states. . At the same time, the United States is waging an intense trade war, especially against China, its major competitor in Asia. Some see these clashes as a sign that capitalist globalization is coming to an end and theorize that a necessary protectionist retreat is underway. It is not this position that expressed the Chinese Vice-Premier who on the contrary pleaded for the continuation of the opening and the world exchanges of goods and capital. This re-globalization desired by China corresponds to its strategic interests to actively participate in global value chains and to investment needs. Thus, the two most powerful poles in the world, the United States and China, are developing different strategies to consolidate their power and influence. At the same time, both are working to strengthen their military capabilities. If this aspect of things was little expressed in Davos, it reflects the rise of tensions within imperialism. This re-globalization desired by China corresponds to its strategic interests to actively participate in global value chains and to investment needs. Thus, the two most powerful poles in the world, the United States and China, are developing different strategies to consolidate their power and influence. At the same time, both are working to strengthen their military capabilities. If this aspect of things was little expressed in Davos, it reflects the rise of tensions within imperialism. This re-globalization desired by China corresponds to its strategic interests to actively participate in global value chains and to investment needs. Thus, the two most powerful poles in the world, the United States and China, are developing different strategies to consolidate their power and influence. At the same time, both are working to strengthen their military capabilities. If this aspect of things was little expressed in Davos, it reflects the rise of tensions within imperialism. the United States and China are developing different strategies to consolidate their power and influence. At the same time, both are working to strengthen their military capabilities. If this aspect of things was little expressed in Davos, it reflects the rise of tensions within imperialism. the United States and China are developing different strategies to consolidate their power and influence. At the same time, both are working to strengthen their military capabilities. If this aspect of things was little expressed in Davos, it reflects the rise of tensions within imperialism.
When Scholz meets Macron
We put the dishes in the big ones for a birthday
It is with booms and almost tremolos in the voice that the journalists of France evoked the meeting between Macron and Scholz, the German chancellor. They saw and talked to each other on Sunday 22 during a Franco-German council of ministers, an annual ritual, but which was to take place in October and had been postponed due to differences on a series of key subjects, from energy to defense.
In addition, the meeting had the air of a pilgrimage since the two leaders and their collaborators found themselves sixty years to the day after the signing of the Elysée Treaty, signed by Charles De Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, supposed to celebrate "Franco reconciliation -german" .
They speak with one voice
And, in the words of the two protagonists reported by the press of the two countries, after a "breakdown", we have a burst of a common desire from Macron and Scholz that "Europe becomes even more sovereign" , by investing more in defense and by adopting “a strategy to strengthen European industrial competitiveness”.
At the end of the Council of Ministers, Macron and Scholz endeavored to display all the points of convergence and announced a step forward in European hydrogen infrastructures, with the extension of the Franco-Portuguese-Spanish H2Med gas pipeline project to l 'Germany.
They thus defined a "common line"in favor of an “ambitious and rapid” European response to American industrial subsidies for energy transition, Emmanuel Macron declared during a joint press conference, without specifying how this effort will be financed.
There are still a few hairs to scratch
And this is where the differences lie. For months, Macron has been agitating to convince the "partners" of the EU and in particular the Germans to launch a plan with substantial funding to respond to the massive US plan for renewable energy subsidies, Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), otherwise the EU would be threatened with deindustrialisation. However, as far as France is concerned, deindustrialization did not wait for the US plan in question, and Macron and his policy have something to do with it, but Germany still has a solid industry, and perhaps prefers be the secure supply of electricity from coal-fired power plants to renewable energy pipe dreams. And then, whereas two decades ago, France exported electricity thanks to its nuclear fleet, today,
And this is not the only subject of disagreement. Beyond the words, it does not seem that the two stooges have found an agreement to "stem the surge in energy prices" , as Le Monde says.
Then, in terms of defence, while the Future Air Combat System (SCAF) has made progress recently, anti-missile defense remains a stumbling block: Berlin is promoting a shield project including an Israeli component which 14 countries from the EU, while Paris is working on its own system, with Italy, in the name of "European sovereignty". To Macron's "Maximum sovereignty", Scholz replies that we must: "absolutely take into account what exists, without having to wait too long to obtain certain armaments".
The imperialist powers, allies, defend interests that are sometimes different, even contrary
We therefore see not only that there is no equality between the two imperialist powers, but that there is even antagonism.
This has been the permanent contradiction since capitalism has existed, nothing has been invented or discovered since Marx. The downward trend in the rate of profit is always the problem of the capitalists. And at the stage where we are in Imperialism, there is no longer a new market to seek in Africa or Asia, we must eat or bite the competitors to counter this famous drop.
Even if there are, roughly speaking, two large imperialist blocs, the one around the dominant imperialism, the USA, with Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, in particular, and the one around China, with the BRICS in particular, Within these same blocs, the interests of the various imperialist powers can be divergent or even opposed.
As long as it is a question of breaking social gains, of pushing retirement to 65 or even 70, of hitting the workforce, to combat the famous downward trend, they are all in agreement, but when When it comes to the interests of the multinationals they respectively defend, the governments of the imperialist powers, even if they are the best friends in the world, are uncompromising: it is their multinationals against the others.
For the Revolutionary Communist Party, the only interest of this kind of meeting is precisely to point the real state of capitalist society to the stage of imperialism, friends there is nothing to expect from it for the employees, on both sides of the Rhine. Neither Macron nor Scholz are in place to defend the interests of employees, let alone work to meet their needs. They defend the interests of capitalisms are they are the proxies, of those who set them up, and who turn out to be antagonistic. "No enrichment is lawful" , said Marx, and the capitalists and their servants have no ethics.
The Burkinabe government tries to loosen the neocolonial grip of imperialist France
After Mali, Burkina Faso
We are all moved by this in the Macronian Landerneau: a new African country has just shown the door to the French army.
The spokesperson for the government of Burkina Faso confirmed on Monday January 23 that Ouagadougou had requested the departure of French troops based in the country within a month.
“What we are denouncing is the agreement that allows French forces to be present in Burkina Faso. This is not about the end of diplomatic relations between Burkina Faso and France,” Burkinabe government spokesman Jean-Emmanuel Ouédraogo said in an interview on Radio-Television du Burkina (RTB). ).“French forces are based in Ouagadougou at the request of Burkina Faso and its authorities. This denunciation is in the normal order of things, it is provided for in the terms of the military agreement" , he continued, indicating that the procedure left "one month for the other party to accede to this request" . .
Emotion among “journalists” and NGOs
Burkina currently hosts a contingent of nearly 400 French special forces: the Saber force. The Saber force is a Special Forces device, which means that little information is communicated on it, we know that the French special operations command deployed at the end of the 2000s in Burkina Faso about 400 hyper-trained men, coming from navy, air force or French army commandos. They are specialized in the most sensitive missions. And, precisely, their official mission would be to eliminate the leaders of the jihadist networks.
The emotion of the French authorities won over the official voices of the dominant ideology. Thus TV5 Monde gives us the panegyric of the Saber force: "This very well-endowed group, particularly in terms of intelligence, specifies the media, carries out around forty missions each year and is specialized in the elimination of the big names of the jihadist networks. . And RFI declaims his service record to us: "We owe him the eliminations of Adnan Abou Walid al-Sahraoui, head of the EIGS (Islamic State in the Greater Sahara) killed in September 2021 and Abdelmalek Droukdel, head of AQIM ( Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) killed in June 2020 in Mali. The " Télégramme de Brest" tries to move us with the misfortunes of the NGOs. “There are a lot of emergencies on the ground
, explains Hervé Le Gal, coordinator of programs in Burkina Faso for the Ingalañ association, which fights against famine by training farmers in cereal production. […] Last May, when I was there, I did not perceive any anti-French feeling. […] A point of view shared by Christophe Lemoing, member of the Breton Association for Direct Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa (Abadas): Our Burkinabè correspondents want us to continue working together. But the worst, for us, would be a scenario identical to that of Mali, where French NGOs have been banned. But then, why ?
As if the problem was a so-called anti-French sentiment! As if the "NGOs" did not relay, voluntarily or not, the word of the colonialist power that is France! As if there were not, in French-speaking Africa, demonstrations denouncing the neocolonialism of the former colonial power on a recurring basis, from Dakar to Bamako, but also in Ouagadougou.
To all those journalists who don't seem to understand, we simply say that, like Mali, the government and people of Burkina Faso want to loosen France's neocolonial grip, or even get rid of it.
For several months, this embrace has been strongly contested in Burkina, whose government is also demanding the departure of the French ambassador, Luc Hallade, who behaves like a proconsul or Resident General and attributes, with the well-known contempt of the Macronists, good and especially bad points to the Burkinabe government.
Moreover Jean-Emmanuel Ouédraogo explained: "The request for the departure of the French forces is not linked to a particular event [...] It is linked to the will, today of the authorities of the transition and the all Burkinabés, to be the primary actors in the reconquest of our territory".
It should be added that, as in Mali, the government has doubts about the effectiveness of the French army, when-in the fight against jihadist organizations, some seem "nicer" than others with the neocolonial power and would be spared.
And Macron who dares to "ask for details" !
Macron replied that he was waiting for clarifications from the transitional president Ibrahim Traoré, then imitated by the spokeswoman for the Quay d'Orsay, who told AFP: "We have received the note verbale (from the Burkinabé ministry) forwarded to our embassy. As the President of the Republic said yesterday, we are waiting for the President of the Burkinabe transition to clarify the scope of this note ,” she added.
"At the current stage, we don't see how to make it any clearer than that ," Jean-Emmanuel Ouédraogo said earlier on Monday.
Here is a country independent of France, sovereign, which is intimated by the autocrat Macron the order to clarify. However, it is not complicated to understand that the neocolonial army is packing up!
With Africa, Macron is not at his beginnings, in terms of contempt or lessons, but, there, he crosses a course, to believe that the Burkinabés have committed a crime of lèse-majesté. And we expect the indignation of political leaders when-at this unacceptable behavior.
For lack of arguments, we bring out Russia
We are worried in Landerneau, because this decision could reveal the influence of Russia
Since coming to power in September following a putsch, Captain Traoré and his government have shown their desire to diversify their partnerships, particularly in the fight against jihadism. The new authorities have in recent weeks initiated a rapprochement with Russia. The Burkinabe Prime Minister visited Moscow in December and said two weeks ago that a partnership with Russia was "a choice of reason" .
In the Revolutionary Communist Party, we are not naive, we know that there are latent inter-imperialist confrontations, that they do not all take the form of the war in Ukraine. We also know that after China, Russia has been establishing itself in Africa for several years.
Imperialist France out of Africa But the “Putin's hand”
argument only serves to skim over decades of colonial oppression followed by decades of neocolonial oppression. The peoples of Africa do not need to telephone Moscow to know that the presence of the French imperialist power on their soil, and especially of its army, is more than harmful.
The Revolutionary Communist Party supports all attempts by the African peoples to get rid of the neocolonial tutelage of imperialist France!
Unspeakable aggression of the Moroccan forces of repression against delegates to the congress of the Polisario Front
Some elements on the situation in Western Sahara
Since the "Green March" in 1975 and the annexation of Western Sahara by the Kingdom of Morocco in 1975 then 1979 (the former Mauritanian "part" that the Nouakchott government had returned to Font Polisario), Western Sahara has been abusively occupied and colonized by the Moroccan colonial state. Since 1975, when it proclaimed the country's independence, after the departure of the former colonial power, Spain, the Polisario Front has brought together Sahrawis who are fighting against Moroccan colonial domination, and fighting to obtain independence. Since 1991, following a ceasefire, the Moroccan State has built a wall, which separates 80% of the country in the hands of the king, Moroccan bourgeois and feudal from the 20% controlled by the Front-Polisario . But this ceasefire was to be accompanied by a self-determination referendum that, like Sister Anne, no one sees it coming, Morocco does not want it. Finally, it is important to know that tens of thousands of Sahrawi citizens are refugees in camps in Algeria, around Tindouf. Algeria has always historically supported the Polisario Front and the Independence of Western Sahara.
Unspeakable acts of the forces of repression of the Moroccan colonial state
The Polisario Front held its 16th congress from January 13 to 20, welcoming 2,000 delegates, mainly refugees, but also people living in the part controlled by the Front Polisario and finally delegates living in the colonial zone.
Some of the forty delegates from the occupied territory of Western Sahara who took part in the 16thcongress of the Polisario Front returned from Algeria on Sunday evening 22 January. During a one-day stopover at Casablanca airport, they did not encounter any problems. Some then traveled to Agadir where nothing happened at the airport. But as was to be feared, those who went to El Aiun (capital of Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco) were treated “as it should be” in a colonial situation.
The Moroccan forces of repression evacuated the people who were in the airport to then go after the delegates whom they beat up, insulted, humiliated... One of them and them, El Waara Khaya then posted a video where she says "When I returned from the 16thcongress of the Polisario Front I was specially targeted by the occupying forces who took me aside and immediately started insulting me and calling me a dirty traitor. They kept saying that they are going to re-educate me […] They tortured us. It should be noted that, among the delegates thus molested and tortured, there were notably Fatimatou Dahwar
, 65, victim of 16 years of enforced disappearance under Hassan II, and Mariem Dembar, sister of Saïd Dembar assassinated in August 2011 by a policeman who was not not in service.
After taking the women out, the torturers continued to attack the men.
Several delegates from the occupied territory have not yet returned to Western Sahara. Some will stop by Las Palmas. Others are for a few days with the family in the camps of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
It is clear that the Moroccan colonial state will prepare the same session for them upon their arrival.
We denounce the tortures and the colonization of Western Sahara
The Revolutionary Communist Party rises with the greatest firmness against such acts which constitute the daily life of the Moroccan forces of repression and of the militants, in particular of the militants, present in the occupied part.
We condemn these acts, those that could happen, and also the occupation of the sovereign territory of Western Sahara by the army of the colonial state of Morocco. We demand an end to this occupation.