Algeria's 50 years of independence

5 July 2012 marked Algeria’s 50th anniversary of national independence from 132 years of the French colonial control at the heavy price of a bitter eight-year armed struggle. 300,000-1,000,000 Algerian deaths, large-scale repression, torture and military removal of millions from their homes. Algeria’s liberation from a major Western power was well-publicized by the writings of Franz Fanon.

Yet for most Algerians it is hard to celebrate. What is there to celebrate when only 20 years ago, the military moved from the background to the fore with a coup d’etat cancelling elections and quickly leading to a decade of horrendous civil war between the military and Islamists, causing the deaths of some 200,000. The post-independence regime continues to produce a constant stream of exiles abroad.

Nevertheless, from a different perspective, Algeria has much to celebrate. From 1962 to the present, many grassroots Algerians have steadily resisted, in a variety of ways, the greed, power schemes and repression from above.  In the first year of independence and after, thousands of Algerian workers spontaneously and with the encouragement of the nationalist trade union took over operation of modern farms and units in industrial and other realms abandoned by Europeans fleeing to France and set to work to self-manage the grassroots re-booting of the national economy. Even though opposed and sabotaged by the military, bureaucrats and the bourgeoisie who resented this growing horizontalist sector of hundreds of thousands and the general challenge to elite power and privileges it represented, many self-management workers struggled for several years to maintain and embrace this attempt at "socialism" from below.

In 1980 emerged a largely spontaneous wave of massive protest and resistance among the proud Berbers of Kabylia, based on long-standing grievances against regime authoritarianism, its disdain for rich Berber linguistic and cultural identity as well as its neglect of the region’s economy. This “Berber Spring” was the first large-scale political challenge to the regime since the early 60s. The later Kabyle insurrection of April 2001 was followed by mass demonstrations and a widespread horizontalist “assemblies movement,” also showed a large-scale rejection of the regime. Virtually the entire region of Kabylia rose up in defiant protest, besieging police stations with rocks and fire bombs while also burning government and political party offices. Other Kabyles formed local grassroots councils based on centuries-old Kabyle horizontalist principles and confederated together from the bottom up. This rising massive defiance and spontaneous self-organization threatened to spread elsewhere in Algeria and to mobilize a national uprising against the regime until the regime repressed it. However, the self-organized assemblies movement persisted for several years.

 A similar but larger protest by thousands of young people took place in the capital, Algiers, in October 1988—without an explicit political program, but demonstrating through their choice of targets (government and FLN party offices and opulent retail stores) their contempt for political and economic elites prospering at the expense of most Algerians. This explosion of massive street demonstrations over several days was then repressed by gunfire, arrests and torture and used by the regime to justify and manipulate a partial liberalization of politics and economic policy. In this brief moment like the recent Arab Spring, many hoped for a genuine multiparty pluralist political system with respect for free expression and human rights. A new outspoken human rights league developed in this period along with new media, independent women’s rights groups and autonomous trade unions separate from the regime’s  largely submissive UGTA union federation. In the end, however, the combination of a growing and increasingly confident and demagogic Islamist movement, including a strong radical component, and manipulation by the dominant military to block genuine democratization culminated in a cancelled legislative electoral process (about to be won by Islamists) in January 1992. What followed was a long nightmare decade of repression, massacres, tortures, assassinations, “disappearances” and rapes committed by both sides.

Nevertheless, the human rights league, autonomous trade unions, women’s rights groups and other grassroots organizations continue to survive and to take strong political stands.The rigged lections are boycotted by large numbers, most recently a month ago for the national assembly. The continued habit of boycotts by alienated voters and further appeals for abstention by opposition figures produced another humiliating grassroots rejection of the system. While the regime claimed a 42% participation rate of eligible voters, the lack of transparency in vote-counting and other traditional forms of electoral manipulation led critics to suggest a much lower rate and fraudulent victories. As well, even among those who voted, admitted the government, about 22% of cast ballots were faulty or blank.

Each year sees thousands of more-or-less spontaneous local demonstrations, riots and confrontations, the only way aggrieved people can gain “dialogue” with oppressive officials. Whether at the level of local daily life or in broader social movements large numbers of grassroots Algerians over the past five decades have refused to accept the authoritarian and corrupt regime imposed since independence and continued the “national liberation struggle” against the national bourgeoisie. Chawki Amari suggested two years ago in El Watan, a leading Algiers newspaper, that Algerians are by nature anarchists who Bakunin would have no trouble recognizing. Every substantial political upheaval is rooted in millions of individual rebellious attitudes and behaviors nourished anonymously over generations until the right conjuncture of economic and political factors breaks through existing bonds of oppression.

It is this struggle which is to be celebrated.

Adapted from here

Sudan's Spring Arrives

Protesters blocked roads in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital,  on Saturday, the eighth day of widening unrest sparked by rising prices. Inflation has risen each month, hitting 30.4 percent in May, before Finance Minister Ali Mahmud al-Rasul on Wednesday announced the scrapping of fuel subsidies, causing an immediate jump in the price of petrol. Bankrupt Sudan has lost billions of dollars in oil receipts since South Sudan gained independence last July leaving the north struggling for revenue, plagued by inflation, and with a severe shortage of dollars to pay for imports. The country's poverty rate is 46.5 percent, the United Nations says

Witnesses reported five separate demonstrations across the city after nightfall despite a police order to stamp out the unrest. Throughout the city, shouts against high food prices mixed with calls for freedom and an end to the 33-year regime of President Omar al-Bashir. The people are "fed up," said a taxi driver coping with a government-imposed fuel price increase of about 50 percent which took effect this week. Police and plain-clothed state intelligence agents have adopted a zero-tolerance policy, using tear gas, batons and whips against protesters.

The demonstrations symbolise "mass rejection of the regime's oppressive policies and its failure in governing this country," said Sudan Change Now, an activist youth movement. "The government must immediately retract the austerity measures it has adopted which reflect the distortion in its expenditure which continues to prioritise defence and security at the expense of social services,"

In Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman, an AFP reporter saw separate groups of about 100 protesters scattering when police arrived firing tear gas or wielding batons. Witnesses in the eastern city of Gedaref said that about 200 people gathered in the main market where they denounced the high cost of food before police dispersed them with batons. "We will not be governed by a dictatorship!" they shouted, the witnesses said. Poverty is endemic in Gedaref and the two other eastern states of Kassala and Red Sea.

A lesser evil is still evil

A year ago, waves of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa swept away western-backed tyrants one after the other - first Tunisia’s Ben Ali, then Egypt’s Mubarak. Occupiers from London to Wall Street were proud to “Walk like an Egyptian”. These revolts had echoes in other countries because they shared the same detonators of the explosion: authoritarianism, inegalitarian development, high unemployment, poverty, endemic corruption and nepotism, a suffocated political life, repression, human rights abuses, a frustrated educated youth without horizons and parasitic bourgeoisies who continue their protected robbery, exploitation and self-enrichment. It put to rest the lie the racist stereotype and contemptuous cliché that Arabs and Muslims are not fit for democracy. The Arab Spring debunked these myths.

From the beginning of the Egyptian protests, the powers that be have launched a counter-revolution to contain the struggle in a process of meaningless, piecemeal political reforms, aimed at deflecting people from a revolutionary path. The political elites has been of dismissing and appointing ministers in cabinet and committee reshuffles, conducting referendums parliamentary and now presidential elections. None of which represents any substantial, real democracy. Some people say that democratic change will come from above. But as long as the masses do not exercise pressure from beneath, struggle to radically change the status quo will be unfulfilled and the interests of the profiteering cast will be maintained.

Egyptians find themselves with a choice between ‘two evils’. These are: Ahmed Shafiq, who representing the interests of the previous regime guarantees ‘security’ and ‘stability’ ; and Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood who we are expected to believe will  ‘save’ us from the ‘old regime’ through a cultural and religious renaissance - all the while consolidating the financial and capitalist hegemony which depends on the rampant exploitation of Egypt’s people and their resources.

Most voters (75 per cent) have chosen neither Shafiq nor Morsi in the first round of elections. There is another choice - the immediate and uncompromising rejection of the status quo: of exploitation and class division, of militarized power and police repression. Egyptians must protest against the narrow perspective that says democracy is merely choosing the lesser of ‘two evils'.

The struggle in the workplace and factories, in the schools and universities and popular committees in the neighbourhoods must continue, an ongoing revolution, a revolution that will only be realized by the strength, community and persistence of the people. It is time to renew the struggle for a true liberation and meaningful democratic change, and to build a strong mass-movement against authoritarianism and any form of oppression and injustice.

The World Socialist Movement and the blog Socialist Banner are striving to build a platform for debate and an exchange of ideas regarding the challenges that face the people of Africa, from Cairo to Capetown.

Mauritanian Arab Spring

Many people have never heard of Mauritania, and most would probably be unable to pinpoint it on a map even though its land mass is larger than France and Germany combined. Many Arabs are unaware that it is a member of the Arab League. Since January 2011, when Yacoub Ould Dahoud fatally set himself alight in front of the presidential palace, the country has been ungoing an Arab Spring. Protests have taken place across Mauritania ever since, spurred by the same factors as in other Arab states: economic, political and social disenfranchisement. But unlike those in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere in the region, Mauritania's have been barely a blip on the news radar. Very low internet usage in the country – reportedly less than 2% of households – has made it difficult for Mauritanians to get their views, eyewitness accounts and images out to the rest of the world. It is the overlooked uprising.

 Few have taken little interest in Mauritania since its independence from France in 1960, because until recently it was seen as a poor expanse of desert with little strategic value (it has one of the lowest GDPs in Africa, making it among the poorest countries in the world). However, its importance is likely to increase, and with it the world's attention. Mauritania's extensive iron ore deposits, which account for almost half of its exports, have increased in value due to rising metal prices, leading to more mines being opened, and increased revenues. Furthermore, oil was discovered in 2001, although Mauritanians have yet to benefit because the country lacks the necessary infrastructure to fully exploit its reserves. However, with production on the rise, several oil exploration deals inked in the last year, the potential windfall is huge.

 There is also the possibility, or perhaps even the probability, that the protests in Mauritania will intensify, mainly because the government seems not to have learned from the mistakes of other Arab regimes that are under threat. It has used a combination of repression and pledges of reform that have left Mauritanians unconvinced and more frustrated. Demonstrations have thus far been peaceful and centred around reforms. However, as in other Arab states, if protesters feel they are being indefinitely ignored or oppressed, not only might calls for reform become demands for regime change, but violence may become a means to advance those demands – a particularly dangerous development given Mauritania's ethnic fault lines.

 Mauritanians are no less deserving of their rights, rather than the self-serving interests of  the world powers.


Taken from here