The annual anti-imperialism march in Washington, D.C., on African Liberation Day was a rallying point for various groups and organizations. On May 27, 1972, an estimated 60,000 people gathered for the first march in cities across the United States, the Caribbean and Canada / Rasasi Zachariah Dais
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from the Black Alliance for Peace’s AFRICOM Watch Bulletin.
African Liberation Day (ALD), celebrated on May 25, has its origins in the long struggle of African people to liberate themselves from European domination and white supremacy. It is a time in which we emphasize our oneness as a people with a common past, common set of problems and a common future.
The capture of millions of African people, who were enslaved and introduced into the Western Hemisphere as property and commodities, is the backdrop upon which we commemorate ALD. The colonial-capitalist system imposes a divide between the millions of Africans kidnapped to the Americas during the Transatlantic slave trade and those left on the African continent.
ALD is a vehicle to continue to highlight the problems, challenges and the future of African people everywhere. The challenges facing Africa and African people worldwide require that we remain dedicated to the cause of Africa’s liberation. We can continue to showcase that dedication by actively participating in ALD activities held throughout the world.
U.S. Out of Africa: Voices from the Struggle
Gamal Nkrumah is a Ghanaian journalist, a Pan-Africanist and an editor of Al Ahram Weekly newspaper. He is the eldest son of the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah.
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin: Could you speak about the history of African Liberation Day?
Gamal Nkrumah: May 25th is celebrated as African Liberation Day. The day marks the foundation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1963. The formation of the OAU was a key moment in a centuries-long struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism.
For more than 500 years, African people have been dehumanized and degraded, with their bodies and labor commodified to enrich a ruling elite. From slave labor on cotton and sugar plantations to the extraction of gold and diamonds from the earth, the development of Europe and the Americas happened through the rapid exploitation of African people.
Through the collective experiences of deprivation, African people in the diaspora and continent developed a resistance movement. There were many milestones in this process: the formation of independent, maroon communities by former slaves and Afro-Caribbean people, the first Pan-African congress held in 1900, the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, 1945.
Over the decades, political consciousness grew around the necessity to wage a revolutionary, Pan-African struggle against colonial and imperial rule in the 20th century. The revolutionary anti-colonial movements culminated in the mid-century with the independence of several African nations from European powers and the formation of the Organization of African Unity.
AWB: How does ALD relate to the struggles of African people today?
Gamal Nkrumah: African Liberation Day, as it came to be known, was born from the fierce fight for a new society. As Kwame Nkrumah said, “The African Revolution, while still concentrating its main effort on the destruction of imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism, aims at the same time to bring about a radical transformation of society. The choice has already been made by the workers and peasants of Africa. They have chosen liberation and unification… for the political unification of Africa and socialism are synonymous. One cannot be achieved without the other.”
Today, capitalism continues to brutally ravage and exploit Africa and its people. The West, through their militaries as well as the IMF and World Bank, have consistently imposed a neocolonial agenda on the continent, and the Organization of African Unity, now known as the African Union, is a puppet of capital and elite interests.
African people on May 25 celebrate the victories of revolutionary Pan-Africanism. African Liberation Day recalls the long history of struggles against class exploitation, colonialism and imperialism.
Revolutionary Africans know that attaining full emancipation demands a revolution from below, in the interests of people over profit. The only antidote to this colonial-capitalist system that continues to impoverish African people is an organized force in Africa ready to pursue Pan-Africanism under scientific socialism.
Garbage piled up in the Tunisian city of Sfax / credit: Alessandra Bajec
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.
A map of Tunisia within the broader region / credit: Google
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.
Protest over garbage pileup in 2021 / credit: Middle East Monitor/Houssem Zouari/Anadolu Agency
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.
Map of Tunisia, with a red pin indicating the location of the city of Sfax / credit: Google
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.
In 2015, artist Aida Kchaou performed an act of protest on Chaffar Beach, 26 kilometers (or 16 miles) south of the city of Sfax. She wore plastic garbage bags and picked litter to raise awareness of the decaying state of the seashore because of long-time chemical industries in Sfax governorate / credit: instagram.com/aidakchaoukhroufart
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.
Untransported garbage heaps, like this one in the Tunisian city of Sfax, have caused environmental and health challenges / credit: Alessandra Bajec
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.
As anger over incoming tax hikes boils over in Kenya, African Stream takes a deep dive into the role the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played in ramming austerity down Africans’ throats. It boils down to neocolonial debt slavery, a system designed to oppress Africans, while oiling the wheels of otherwise faltering Western economies. African Stream’s Kenneth Kaigua breaks down this complex issue.
A Saharawi refugee camp in the Tindouf province of Algeria / credit: European Commission DG ECHO
Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s analysis about a disputed area known as “Western Sahara” and was produced byGlobetrotter.
In November 2020, the Moroccan government sent its military to the Guerguerat area, a buffer zone between the territory claimed by the Kingdom of Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The Guerguerat border post is at the very southern edge of Western Sahara along the road that goes to Mauritania. The presence of Moroccan troops “in the Buffer Strip in the Guerguerat area” violated the 1991 ceasefire agreed upon by the Moroccan monarchy and the Polisario Front of the Sahrawi. That ceasefire deal was crafted with the assumption that the United Nations would hold a referendum in Western Sahara to decide on its fate; no such referendum has been held, and the region has existed in stasis for three decades now.
Map of the disputed Western Sahara, with a red pin marking the location of Guerguerat, a town on the border with Mauritania / credit: Google
In mid-January 2022, the United Nations sent its Personal Envoy for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura, to Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania to begin a new dialogue “toward a constructive resumption of the political process on Western Sahara.” De Mistura was previously deputed to solve the crises of U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; none of his missions have ended well and have mostly been lost causes. The UN has appointed five personal envoys for Western Sahara so far—including De Mistura—beginning with former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III, who served from 1997 to 2004. De Mistura, meanwhile, succeeded former German President Horst Köhler, who resigned in 2019. Köhler’s main achievement was to bring the four main parties—Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria and Mauritania—to a first roundtable discussion in Geneva in December 2018: this roundtable process resulted in a few gains, where all participants agreed on “cooperation and regional integration,” but no further progress seems to have been made to resolve the issues in the region since then. When the UN put forward De Mistura’s nomination to this post, Morocco had initially resisted his appointment. But under pressure from the West, Morocco finally accepted his appointment in October 2021, with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita welcoming him to Rabat on January 14. De Mistura also met the Polisario Front representative to the UN in New York on November 6, 2021, before meeting other representatives in Tindouf, Algeria, at Sahrawi refugee camps in January. There is very little expectation that these meetings will result in any productive solution in the region.
Abraham Accords
In August 2020, the United States government engineered a major diplomatic feat called the Abraham Accords. The United States secured a deal with Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to agree to a rapprochement with Israel in return for the United States making arms sales to these countries, as well as for the United States legitimizing Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. The arms deals were of considerable amounts—$23 billion worth of weapons to the UAE and $1 billion worth of drones and munitions to Morocco. For Morocco, the main prize was that the United States—breaking decades of precedent—decided to back its claim to the vast territory of Western Sahara. The United States is now the only Western country to recognize Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara.
When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, it was expected that he might review parts of the Abraham Accords. However, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it clear during his meeting with Bourita in November 2021 that the U.S. government would continue to maintain the position taken by the previous Trump administration that Morocco has sovereignty over Western Sahara. The United States, meanwhile, has continued with its arms sales to Morocco, but has suspended weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates.
Phosphates
By the end of November 2021, the government of Morocco announced that it had earned $6.45 billion from the export of phosphate from the kingdom and from the occupied territory of Western Sahara. If you add up the phosphate reserves in this entire region, it amounts to 72 percent of the entire phosphate reserves in the world (the second-highest percentage of these reserves is in China, which has around 6 percent). Phosphate, along with nitrogen, makes synthetic fertilizer, a key element in modern food production. While nitrogen is recoverable from the air, phosphates, found in the soil, are a finite reserve. This gives Morocco a tight grip over world food production. There is no doubt that the occupation of Western Sahara is not merely about national pride, but it is largely about the presence of a vast number of resources—especially phosphates—that can be found in the territory.
Detailed map of Western Sahara, showing borders with Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania / credit: Kmusser, based primarily on the Digital Chart of the World, with UN map and commercial atlases (Rand McNally, Google, Encarta, and National Geographic) used as references
In 1975, a UN delegation that visited Western Sahara noted that “eventually the territory will be among the largest exporters of phosphate in the world.” While Western Sahara’s phosphate reserves are less than those of Morocco, the Moroccan state-owned firm OCP SA has been mining the phosphate in Western Sahara and manufacturing phosphate fertilizer for great profit. The most spectacular mine in Western Sahara is in Bou Craa, from which 10 percent of OCP SA’s profits come; Bou Craa, which is known as “the world’s longest conveyor belt system,” carries the phosphate rock more than 60 miles to the port at El Aaiún. In 2002, the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Legal Affairs at that time, Hans Corell, noted in a letter to the president of the UN Security Council that “if further exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara, they would be in violation of the principles of international law applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.” An international campaign to prevent the extraction of the “conflict phosphate” from Western Sahara by Morocco has led many firms around the world to stop buying phosphate from OCP SA. Nutrien, the largest fertilizer manufacturer in the United States that used Moroccan phosphates, decided to stop imports from Morocco in 2018. That same year, the South African court challenged the right of ships carrying phosphate from the region to dock in their ports, ruling that “the Moroccan shippers of the product had no legal right to it.”
Only three known companies continue to buy conflict phosphate mined in Western Sahara: Two from New Zealand (Ballance Agri-Nutrients Limited and Ravensdown) and one from India (Paradeep Phosphates Limited).
Human Rights
After the 1991 ceasefire, the UN set up a Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). This is the only UN peacekeeping force that does not have a mandate to report on human rights. The UN made this concession to appease the Kingdom of Morocco. The Moroccan government has tried to intervene several times when the UN team in Western Sahara attempted to make the slightest noise about the human rights violations in the region. In March 2016, the kingdom expelled MINURSO staff because then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to the Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an “occupation.”
Pressure from the United States is going to ensure that the only realistic outcome of negotiations is for continued Moroccan control of Western Sahara. All parties involved in the conflict are readying for battle. Far from peace, the Abraham Accords are going to accelerate a return to war in this part of Africa.
