Africa News Wrap for February 2023

Recent polls indicate left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro and his running mate, Francia Márquez, are the most popular candidates in Colombia. But they appear to fall short of the 50 percent of potential votes required to win the first round of the presidential election on Sunday.

Onlookers say their popularity might explain a surge in death threats against the candidates. The ticket is striking: Petro is a former guerilla-turned-elected-official while Márquez is an award-winning Afro-descendant activist. The pair have inspired people in the country, which has been torn apart by decades of paramilitary violence, partly due to being tied politically, militarily and economically to the United States. Plus, state-sanctioned violence and dozens of deaths at the hands of police during last year’s nation-wide strike remain fresh in the national memory.

The situation has gotten so dangerous, the candidates have been seen at campaign events flanked by bodyguards holding bulletproof shields, as the Washington Post recently reported.

“The U.S. will not be happy with their victory because they will challenge U.S. military ties and ties with NATO,” said Dan Kovalik, professor of international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Such a break could devastate U.S. hegemonic relations in the Western Hemisphere, which the United States has long related to as its “backyard.”

Just a week ago, the United States invited the Colombian defense minister to Washington to announce the country as a “major non-NATO ally.” This comes after $4.5 billion in arms and military training have been poured into Colombia through the United States’ Plan Colombia, which claims to go after the illicit drug trade. However, many activists say small-time farmers have suffered while the flow of drugs have not stopped.

Kovalik pointed to another time a leftist was almost elected. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated during his second presidential run in 1948. That set off “La Violencia,” a 10-year period that ended with at least 200,000 people dead.

Meanwhile, six years after peace accords were signed with paramilitary groups, more than 1,000 social leaders have been killed, a statistic that disturbs many activists.

Even with a Petro-Márquez victory, security for the candidates could be dicey after entering office, given how closely linked the paramilitaries, the military and economic elites are in Colombia. A Márquez advisor, Hildebrando Vélez Galeano, told Toward Freedom the campaign had received information paramilitary groups were planning to murder the candidates. He referred to the police and military as “mafia controlled.”

Earlier this month, a military analyst and former colonel was accused of violating the Colombian constitution when he condemned Petro’s candidacy. The constitution bars members of the military from expressing political opinions.

“It’s because of Petro’s commitment to use the power of the state to go after these Uribistas,” said Ajamu Baraka, a campaign advisor. In mentioning Uribistas, Baraka referred to the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, a right-winger who militarized the police and ramped up the war against farmers and activists of Indigenous and Afro-descendant backgrounds. Petro recently mentioned that, if elected, he would hold accountable those who have been threatening his and Márquez’s lives.

Teri Mattson, a U.S. activist who hosts CodePink’s “What the F Is Going On In Latin America and the Caribbean” YouTube show, was denied entrance into Colombia on Sunday to serve as an election observer. She was deported to the United States the following day.

“I would not be surprised if that was orchestrated to say, ‘It’s getting very chaotic and the government will need to suspend the election,'” Mattson told Toward Freedom.

A few other election observers have been denied entrance, too, including Argentinian Alejandro Rusconi.

BREAKING: Official electoral observer @ale_rusconi —invited by the @CNE_COLOMBIA ahead of Sunday's election — has been denied entry to Colombia without explanation. CNE Magistrate @LuisGPerezCasas has said: "This is not good for [Duque's] government, nor for democracy." pic.twitter.com/9zGUyhE2Ge

— Progressive International (@ProgIntl) May 25, 2022

“The people who have sustained war and violence are determined to continue sustaining it at all costs,” said Charo Mina Rojas, a leader in Proceso de Comunidades Negras, an alliance of Afro-descendant organizations in Colombia. She also relayed concern about election fraud and voter intimidation.

Overall, though, the situation looks promising to many onlookers because of the presence of left-wing regional strongholds like Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela; as well as many countries boycotting the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas; and the political tide recently turning in countries like Honduras and Perú.

“Colombia is the last beachhead the U.S. has in Latin America,” Kovalik said.

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom. She recently wrote about the historic candidacy of Márquez.

How did Benjamin Netanyahu manage to serve as Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister? With a total of 15 years in office, Netanyahu surpassed the 12-year leadership of Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. The answer to this question will become particularly critical for future Israeli leaders who hope to emulate Netanyahu’s legacy, now that his historic leadership is likely to end. 

Netanyahu’s ‘achievements’ for Israel cannot be judged according to the same criteria as that of Ben Gurion. Both were staunch Zionist ideologues and savvy politicians. Unlike Ben Gurion, though, Netanyahu did not lead a so-called ‘war of independence’, merging militias into an army and carefully constructing a ‘national narrative’ that helped Israel justify its numerous crimes against the indigenous Palestinians, at least in the eyes of Israel and its supporters. 

The cliched explanation of Netanyahu’s success in politics is that he is a ‘survivor’, a hustler, a fox or, at best, a political genius. However, there is more to Netanyahu than mere soundbites. Unlike other right-wing politicians around the world, Netanyahu did not simply exploit or ride the wave of an existing populist movement. Instead, he was the main architect of the current version of Israel’s right-wing politics. If Ben Gurion was the founding father of Israel in 1948, Netanyahu is the founding father of the new Israel in 1996. While Ben Gurion and his disciples used ethnic cleansing, colonization and illegal settlement construction for strategic and military reasons, Netanyahu, while carrying on with the same practices, changed the narrative altogether. 

For Netanyahu, the biblical version of Israel was far more convincing than secular Zionist ideology of yesteryears. By changing the narrative, Netanyahu managed to redefine the support for Israel around the world, bringing together right-wing religious zealots, chauvinistic, Islamophobic, far-right and ultra-nationalist parties in the United States and elsewhere.

Netanyahu’s success in rebranding the centrality of the idea of Israel in the minds of its traditional supporters was not a mere political strategy. He also shifted the balance of power in Israel by making Jewish extremists and illegal settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories his core constituency. Subsequently, he reinvented Israeli conservative politics altogether. 

He also trained an entire generation of Israeli right-wing, far-right and ultra-nationalist politicians, giving rise to such unruly characters such as former Defense Minister and the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman, former Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, and former Defense Minister, and Netanyahu’s likely replacement, Naftali Bennett. 

Indeed, a whole new generation of Israelis grew up watching Netanyahu take the right-wing camp from one success to another. For them, he is the savior. His hate-filled rallies and anti-peace rhetoric in the mid-1990s galvanized Jewish extremists, one of whom killed Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s former Prime Minister who engaged the Palestinian leadership through the ‘peace process’ and, ultimately, signed the Oslo Accords. 

On Rabin’s death in November 1995, Israel’s political ‘left’ was devastated by right-wing populism championed by its new charismatic leader, Netanyahu, who, merely a few months later, became Israel’s youngest Prime Minister. 

Despite the fact that, historically, Israeli politics is defined by its ever-changing dynamics, Netanyahu has helped the right prolong its dominance, completely eclipsing the once-hegemonic Labor Party. This is why the right loves Netanyahu. Under his reign, illegal Jewish colonies expanded unprecedentedly, and any possibility, however meager, of a two-state solution has been forever buried. 

Additionally, Netanyahu changed the relationship between the US and Israel, where the latter was no longer a ‘client regime’ – not that it ever was in the strict definition of the term – but one that holds much sway over the U.S. Congress and the White House. 

Every attempt by Israel’s political elites to dislodge Netanyahu from power has failed. No coalition was powerful enough; no election outcome was decisive enough and no one was successful enough in convincing Israeli society that he could do more for them than Netanyahu has. Even when Gideon Sa’ar from Netanyahu’s own Likud party tried to stage his own coup against Netanyahu, he lost the vote and the support of the Likudists, later to be ostracized altogether.

Sa’ar later founded his own party, New Hope, continuing with the desperate attempt to oust the seemingly unconquerable Netanyahu. Four general elections within only two years still failed to push Netanyahu out. Every possible mathematical equation to unify various coalitions, all united by the single aim of defeating Netanyahu, has also failed. Each time, Netanyahu came back, with greater resolve to hang on to his seat, challenging contenders within his own party as well as his enemies from without. Even Israel’s court system, which is currently trying Netanyahu for corruption, was not powerful enough to compel disgraced Netanyahu to resign.   

Until May of this year, Palestinians seemed to be marginal, if at all relevant to this conversation. Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation looked as if they were mollified, thanks to Israeli violence and Palestinian Authority acquiescence. Palestinians in Gaza, despite occasional displays of defiance, were battling a 15-year-long Israeli siege. Palestinian communities inside Israel seemed alien to any political conversation pertaining to the struggle and aspirations of the Palestinian people.

All of these illusions were dispelled when Gaza rose in solidarity with a small Palestinian community in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem. Their resistance ignited a torrent of events that, within days, unified all Palestinians, everywhere. Consequently, the popular Palestinian revolt has shifted the discourse in favor of Palestinians and against the Israeli occupation.

Perfectly depicting the significance of that moment, the Financial Times newspaper wrote, “The ferocity of the Palestinian anger caught Israel by surprise.” Netanyahu, whose extremist goons were unleashed against Palestinians everywhere, similar to his army being unleashed against besieged Gaza, found himself at an unprecedented disadvantage. It took only 11 days of war to shatter Israel’s sense of ‘security’, expose its sham democracy and spoil its image around the world.

The once untouchable Netanyahu became the mockery of Israeli politics. His conduct in Gaza was described by leading Israeli politicians as “embarrassing”, a defeat and a “surrender”. 

Netanyahu struggled to redeem his image. It was too late. As strange as this may sound, it was not Bennett or Lieberman who finally dethroned the “King of Israel’, but the Palestinians themselves. 

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is ramzybaroud.net

SFAX, Tunisia—Until the first week of December, mountains of garbage littered the center of the coastal city of Sfax. For more than two months, locals put up with thousands of tons of rotten household trash and hazardous medical waste left uncollected in public areas.

The crisis began after Sfax governorate authorities closed in late September the governorate’s main controlled landfill, El Gonna, in the town of Agareb, some 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) from the city of Sfax, due to opposition from the local population. (Tunisia is divided into provinces called governorates. Sfax governorate contains a city by the same name.)

The people of Agareb rejected the Ministry of Environment reopening the controversial dumping site. Residents said it was full and being used to dump toxic chemical waste, causing the spread of several diseases. Reported health complications include respiratory and skin disorders, sight problems, and infertility.

Some private waste-management companies are known to illegally dispose of toxic material—such as medical refuse and industrial waste from factories—in the landfill to avoid expensive treatment processes.

Protests Turn Deadly

Opened in 2008 as a near-term fix to ease the burden on the Sfax governorate, the dump at Agareb was originally supposed to close after five years.

“We had a problem of trust with the government, which has still not implemented the solutions that they had announced,” said Sami Bahri, a Agareb-based environmental activist, during a webinar Paris-based think tank Arab Reform Initiative organized in December.

Weeks of protests against the trash crisis and the reopening of the landfill last month escalated on November 8 when security forces’ tear gas killed a protester. The next day, angry demonstrators burned a local national guard station. “We are choking on all this garbage!” was one of the main slogans of the day’s rallies.

The closure of the El Gonna site, which had already been overloaded since September, led to the accumulation of garbage and industrial waste on the streets of Sfax city. Local municipal services had stopped trash collection, citing a lack of alternatives for waste disposal.

“We are in a situation where seeing garbage in the open air becomes something ordinary,” said Hafez Hentati, coordinator of Collectif de l’environnement et du développement de Sfax (Environmental and Development Collective of Sfax) in the city of Sfax, speaking in an exclusive interview with Toward Freedom. “It’s dangerous for all economic and social activity, besides being a human health issue.”

The militant, who’s been campaigning on environmental issues for nearly 40 years, estimated above 44,000 tons of rubbish were discharged into the environment without any treatment for more than 70 days after the main landfill shut down.

“Sfax’s garbage issues have been ongoing since long ago,” said Aida Kchaou, a painter and active member of civil society in Sfax, in an interview with Toward Freedom. She alluded to years of government neglect. “People are used to dumping trash carelessly as if they want to punish the state somehow.”

The artist cannot remain indifferent to how environmental conditions have degraded in her region. In 2015, she performed an act of protest on Chaffar Beach, 26 kilometers (or 16 miles) south of the city of Sfax, by wearing plastic garbage bags and picking litter to raise awareness of the decaying state of the seashore because of long-time chemical industries in Sfax governorate.

Kchaou has paid more than one visit to Agareb, meeting residents and local activists, and taking part in small actions in the vicinity of uncontrolled hazardous landfills, very close to residential areas. Recently, she staged an action by standing in the middle of a dump near Agareb, holding her paintbrush as if she was going to cover all of the rubbish with paint. She ended by planting an olive tree. “I live my environment: I see there’s something wrong and I react,” the painter said.

Monem Kallel, professor at the National School of Engineering of Sfax and an environmental expert, pointed out the waste crisis is essentially connected with the method of burying waste in open dumps, which Tunisia has adopted for about 24 years.

“It’s an old policy—one of the worst approaches to waste management—that leaves the fate of the litter unknown and makes people think the state will take care of it,” the expert observed while speaking to Toward Freedom. “Meanwhile, the country’s dumps are getting filled up, and people are growing fed up with the accumulation of unremoved garbage.” He stressed an urgent solution to waste dumping, such as immediately hauling it away, must be accompanied by the longer-term sustainable process of sorting, treatment and recycling.

Striking Against Structural Stench

In the face of growing waste mismanagement, posing serious health and environmental risks, civil society groups in Sfax governorate announced they would hold a general regional strike on December 10. They also successfully filed a legal complaint against the parties responsible for the ecological catastrophe, namely the environment ministry, the National Waste Management Agency (Agence Nationale de Gestion des Déchets, or ANGED for short) and the region’s municipalities.

With the local and national government coming under pressure—just a few days before the anticipated strike—the prime minister’s cabinet decided to resume on December 8 the clearance and dumping of household waste in a temporary collection point located near the port. This plan depended on the rubbish heaps being transported within five months to a new landfill to be created on the road to a town in Sfax governorate’s countryside called Menzel Chaker, about 62 kilometers (about 38 miles) from the city of Sfax. The cabinet also resolved to develop a regional plan for recycling and waste recovery within three to five years.

For Hentati, postponing the general strike was a mistake because pressure that should have served to obtain guarantees from authorities dissipated. The government quickly came up with a package of urgent measures to solve the crisis to avert the labor action. Though, he said, “It did not make any real commitment.” He added residents in the city of Sfax have been left in a disarray, as they are cautiously watching the government’s decisions.

The environmental activist made clear the issue is fundamentally a structural one. 

“Today, the garbage crisis in Sfax shows the limits of the long-applied waste treatment system, which only bypasses the problem without resolving it,” Hentati said.

Increasing numbers of local people are demanding the government introduce waste disposal policies that will protect their right to a safe environment because they refuse to allow their neighborhoods to be turned into landfills.

Poor responsibility sharing between the state and regional and local institutions have resulted in a deadlock in the handling of the ongoing crisis: The central government expects municipal councils to provide much of the waste management, while municipalities call on the state to find sustainable solutions.

Trust In the Dumps

Given their proximity to citizens, local governments are the first bodies held responsible for failing to effectively deal with waste treatment. Yet, it should be noted Tunisia’s elected local councils, which have been operating since 2018, “face severe budgetary and human capital constraints,” as Lana Salman, researcher in urban governance and international development, wrote in a research paper published in April. “[It] is a highly lucrative sector where opacity and corruption are not only endemic, but also institutionalized,” she penned.

While municipalities are responsible for hauling garbage to temporary transfer centers with the ANGED’s assistance, the agency is in charge of transporting waste to the final destination at sanitary landfills and managing such landfills.

Kallel specified greater efforts are needed to raise environmental awareness among the concerned institutions as well as among people, and that an adequate budget should be allocated to make possible feasible solutions. “Rather than shifting the responsibility from one to another, if everyone is involved responsibly through the whole waste management chain, the crisis will be overcome,” he said, underscoring the important role citizens can play in contributing to environmental protection.

The specialist maintained that trust in state institutions needs to be restored, after years of unfulfilled promises. “If the state engages by taking serious gradual steps, the average citizen will be confident that a real solution to this crisis will come,” Kallel said. “Else, it will persist.”

Kchaou similarly referred to lack of public trust as a critical matter, blaming the country’s successive governments for appointing incompetent people to ministerial posts over the past decade. She contended people will hardly act in respect of environmental protection as long as they see the relevant government structures—local, regional and national—not providing waste treatment.

Long-standing dysfunctional governance and corruption within Tunisia’s state administration underlie the garbage emergency in the Sfax province. More than half of the country’s landfill sites have reached their maximum capacity, threatening the environment and human health.

The state neglect mirrors the lack of national strategy to develop recycling capacity to deal with solid waste in Tunisia. The Ministry of the Environment has opposed the closure of dumps as no alternatives exist. In October, the new environment minister, Leila Chikhaoui, said while visiting the city of Sfax that no immediate solutions were available in the governorate.

Raouia Amira, head of the sanitation, health and environmental committee in the municipality of Sfax, pointed to the country’s solid waste management strategy being discontinued in 2016. “We need a national strategy,” Amira told Toward Freedom. “To that end, the state needs to put in place a communication campaign and spare no expense.”

She thinks incineration is the most realistic approach to treating household waste in the Sfax governorate. Tunisia has long suffered waste management problems, with an estimated 2.5 million tonnes of rubbish produced annually, 63% of which is organic, and most of it buried in landfills without being processed, recycled or incinerated.

Sustainable Solutions

The thorny matter is aggravated by lack of investment in sustainable solutions and endemic corruption within the sector in the North African country.

In a press conference in 2014, lawyer Faouzia Bacha Amdouni presented findings of an independent audit revealing “colossal funds” intended for environmental projects were channeled through the Ministry of Environment and its agencies, ending up in the hands of the government of Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011) and its allies. The advocate declared several figures within the agencies were working to conceal their involvement in corruption as well as their plan not to design new strategies. “The department of the environment itself was created in 2005, not to develop policies and innovative projects for waste treatment or sanitation stations, but to receive resources from international donors and invest them in personal projects benefiting the clans in power and their relatives,” she said at the press conference. Some of those international donors reportedly include the European Investment Bank, the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, the World Bank and the French Development Agency. 

In July 2020, then-Prime Minister Elyes Fakhfakh resigned following allegations of corrupt links to the waste industry. In December 2020, the environment minister was dismissed and arrested along with 23 other officials—including members of the ANGED, or National Waste Management Agency—for being linked to a scandal involving the illegal transfer from Naples, Italy, to the Tunisian port of Sousse of more than 200 shipping containers packed full of decaying household and medical waste disguised as post-industrial plastic waste. The Italian and Tunisian companies embroiled had signed a contract worth €5 million ($5.76 million) to dispose of 120,000 tons of Italian waste in Tunisian landfills.

An investigation published by Inkyfada last March revealed a vast network of corruption involving Italian waste.

The critical environmental situation in Sfax governorate poses a clear social challenge for President Kais Saied, who promised to close the El Gonna landfill during his 2019 presidential campaign. This came in a region that strongly supported his July 25 power seizure, in what his critics have called a coup.

The mobilizations against the re-opening of the toxic dump and the wider trash crisis in Sfax demonstrates Tunisian citizens’ yearning for a clean and sustainable environment. This, as they escalate their calls on the government to stop imposing short-sighted decisions without popular consent and demand it find alternatives to landfill sites.

“The extent of the garbage crisis we’ve experienced in Sfax has been of some use,” the artist Kchaou remarked. “If that didn’t happen, no one would be taking the issue seriously.”

Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist specializing in West Asia and North Africa. Between 2010 and 2011, she lived in Palestine. She was based in Cairo from 2013 to 2017, and since 2018 has been based in Tunis.