[Racism against people of Arab and African descent in France has
become almost banal, something that takes place and no longer raises
an eyebrow. The killing of Nael was absolutely explicable — the
result of general social toxicity towards minorities.]
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A BRUTAL COLONIAL LEGACY IS TINDER FOR THE FIRES THAT ARE SWEEPING
ACROSS FRANCE  
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Vijay Prashad
July 6, 2023
Peoples Dispatch
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_ Racism against people of Arab and African descent in France has
become almost banal, something that takes place and no longer raises
an eyebrow. The killing of Nael was absolutely explicable — the
result of general social toxicity towards minorities. _

Protests in Nanterre in France on June 29, photo: Aurelien
Morissard/Xinhua

 

On Saturday, July 1, 2023, a large crowd gathered
[[link removed]] inside
and around the Ibn Badis Mosque in Nanterre, France, where a
seventeen-year-old boy, Nael M, was mourned and then later buried.
Nael M, of Algerian and Tunisian heritage, was shot dead by a police
officer during a traffic stop. It was clear
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the police officer had not acted in self-defense but had shot the
young man in cold blood. A wave of outrage swept through the country,
with protests and riots breaking out across France. French President
Emmanuel Macron sent out security forces to stem the protests, which
inflamed the protestors whose anger at the police is at very high
levels. Antipathy toward the police was confirmed by the language
[[link removed]] of
the police unions (Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA), who called the
protestors “vermin” and “savage hordes” and said that
“it’s no longer enough to call for calm; it must be imposed.”
This is an act of war by the French police against the French
population who come from France’s former colonies.

President Macron called
[[link removed]] the killing of Nael M
“inexplicable,” but this is hardly a credible response. Racism
against people of Arab and African descent in France has become almost
banal, something that takes place and no longer raises an eyebrow.
When France’s Ministry of the Interior released
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numbers of racist attacks and killings from 2021, the French National
Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH) said that the
situation was “alarming.” Sophie Elizéon, chief of the
inter-ministerial delegation for the fight against racism,
anti-Semitism, and anti-LGBT hate (DILCRAH) said
[[link removed]],
“What is being reported from the ground is the exacerbation of
unabashed [behavior.]” The killing of Nael M, in this context, was
absolutely explicable—it was the result of a general social toxicity
towards minorities and one that is given expression through the police
force. No wonder the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights said [[link removed]],
“This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep
issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement.”

DEEP ISSUES OF COLONIALISM

France never really came to terms with its colonial heritage or its
colonial mindset. French colonizers went to the Americas in the 16th
century, and a hundred years later set up a number of plantations in
the Caribbean that operated a slave-based economy. At the heart of the
French colonial enterprise was the island of Hispaniola, half of which
is today’s Haiti, and from where the French Empire derived an
enormous volume of its considerable wealth. France’s attitude to its
colonies and to their urge for freedom is encapsulated in the story of
Haiti. When the Afro-descendent population of Haiti rose up in a major
rebellion in 1791, France—bubbling with its own Revolution of
1789—nonetheless denied the Haitians of their freedom and fought
till 1804 to deprive Haiti of its independence. Even after Haiti
defeated the French planters, the French state—with the full backing
of the United States—forced the Haitian government in 1825 to pay an
enormous indemnity
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150 million French francs, which Haiti only paid off in 1947 to
Citibank (which bought the debt after 1888).

The reticence of France to allow its own universal pretensions
(Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—the phrase from the revolution that
was the center
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the 1958 Constitution of the Third Republic) to be heard in the
colonies ran from 1804 in Haiti to the wars against national
liberation by the French from Algeria to Vietnam in the 1950s and
1960s. So ugly is that history
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students are not taught it in an unvarnished manner. If a French
student is asked how many Algerians died due to the brutality of the
French regime during the liberation war (1954-1962), they would be
hard-pressed to come up with the real number, which is over a million;
nor would those students know that when 30,000 Algerians marched in
Paris on October 17, 1961, the French police killed
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least a hundred of them and threw their bodies into the River Seine,
while arresting at least 14,000 people. This is an unacknowledged
history, and an unacknowledged colonial history confounds the French
public who are therefore unprepared for the colonial structures that
assert themselves through the police force and through France’s
continued colonial adventures.

Over the course of the past six months, the governments of Burkina
Faso and Mali have ejected
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troops. They have argued that the 2013 French intervention,
purportedly against al-Qaeda, in fact intensified the instability in
the region and that France actually consorted with secessionist groups
against the national states. A growing feeling of anti-French and
anti-Western sentiment runs from these countries in Africa’s Sahel
northwards to Algeria and Morocco, where President Macron has been
heckled during recent visits. Confidence is growing in the northern
Africa region, where people are now quite clear that the French
interventions are not for the sake of the African people but are for
the narrow interests of France. For instance, the French continue
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garrison the town of Arlit, Niger,  not for reasons of _Mission
civilisatrice_, but to power the French nuclear reactors; a third of
all lightbulbs in France are powered by the uranium from Arlit. There
is a general swell of anti-French feeling in the country’s former
colonies, now inflamed by the murder of a boy of Tunisian and Algerian
heritage.

DEBT AND THE FRENCH BURDEN

Just a few days before the murder of Nael M, President Macron hosted
the Paris Summit for a New Global Financial Pact
[[link removed]].
The idea for this summit originated with Barbados’ Prime Minister
Mia Mottley, who suggested that countries that were especially
climate-vulnerable—mainly low-lying island states—needed to get
easier access to financing to offset the dangers of rising sea waters.
Mottley had argued that the cost of mitigation—building sea
walls—and the costs of disasters as well as the high cost of
borrowing for green energy, made it impossible for countries such as
Barbados to protect themselves or to undertake the kind of transition
necessary as climate disasters increased. “What is required of
us,” Mottley said
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“is absolute transformation, and not reform, of our institutions.”

Macron’s summit on the Financial Pact was as hollow as the promises
to reform the French police or France’s colonial attitudes to the
African states. Akinwumi Adesina, the head of the African Development
Bank, said
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“Africa alone loses $7 to $15 billion a year because of climate
change, and that’s going to rise to…  almost $50 billion a year
by 2040. So, the world has to meet its commitment, the developed
countries, of the $100 billion” pledge that they have made. Treaty
obligations and promises made since at least 2009, Adesina said, have
been broken. “I mean, it’s a very small amount of money compared
to the scale of the problem, but by not meeting it, it has created a
crisis of trust in the developing countries.”

Macron and the incoming World Bank president Ajay Banga gave speeches
that sounded as if they could have been given over a decade ago. Same
language, same tired promises. “Hope and optimism,” said
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to an audience that was not feeling hopeful or optimistic. At least
Macron put some tangible suggestions on the table such as a global tax
on shipping, on aviation, and on the wealthy to raise $5 billion for a
loss and damage fund. It is unlikely that the corporate sector, which
has influence in the International Maritime Organization (who will see
about the shipping taxes), will allow increased taxation in this
sector.

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed his finger at the
residue of the colonial mindset and the neo-colonial structure when it
comes to financing. The International Monetary Fund’s Special
Drawing Rights (SDRs) are available to ameliorate the negative impact
of the permanent debt crisis and to bring much-needed emergency
finances to poorer countries. But even here, Guterres said
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the European Union—with a total population of 447 million
people—received $160 billion in SDRs, while the continent of
Africa—with a total population of 1.2 billion people—received only
$34 billion in SDRs. “A European citizen received on average almost
13 times more than an African citizen,” Guterres pointed out. “All
this was done according to the rules. But let’s face it: these rules
have become profoundly immoral.” He could have been speaking about
the French police code.

_VIJAY PRASHAD is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is
a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an
editor of LeftWord Books [[link removed]] and the
director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
[[link removed]]. He is a senior non-resident fellow
at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies
[[link removed]], Renmin University of China. He has
written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations
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Poorer Nations
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His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements
for Socialism
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(with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the
Fragility of U.S. Power [[link removed]]._

_This article was produced by Globetrotter
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* France
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* colonialism
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* Algeria
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* Arabs
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* Africa
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