[Since we are listening to muted voices, what about little Nahels
voice? The 14-year-old passenger sitting next to him in the car
related that Nahels last words like George Floyd were for his mother:
"Say goodby to Mama and grandma. He shot me."]
[[link removed]]

NAHEL’S FRANCE: NEO-COLONIZED AND PAN-AFRICAN VOICES SPEAK UP  
[[link removed]]


 

Julia Wright
July 15, 2023
Pan-African News Wire
[[link removed]]


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_ Since we are listening to muted voices, what about little Nahel's
voice? 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 goodby to Mama and grandma. He shot me." _

,

 

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.

[link removed]

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.

[link removed]

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.

[link removed]…
[[link removed]]

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".

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.

_Julia Wright is the daughter of Richard Wright.  Thanks to the
author for sending this to xxxxxx._

_The Pan-African News Wire is an international electronic press
service designed to foster intelligent discussion on the affairs of
African people throughout the continent and the world. The press
agency was founded in January of 1998 and has published tens of
thousands of articles and dispatches in hundreds of newspapers,
magazines, journals, research reports, blogs and websites throughout
the world. The PANW represents the only daily international news
source on pan-african and global affairs. PANW editor Abayomi Azikiwe
is often solicited by various newspaper, radio and television stations
for comment and analysis on local, national and world affairs. He has
served as a political analyst for Press TV and RT worldwide satellite
television news networks as well as other international media in the
areas of African and world affairs._

* Emmanuel Macron
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* France
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* Kwame Nkrumah
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* Amilcar Cabral
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* Algeria
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* Vietnam
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* BRICS
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*
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*
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