EDITORIAL: Crisis and War
04.05.2022
This first LALIT Magazine of 2022 comes out at a moment of double-crisis: the persistence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the break out of full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. Both of these crises impact the political situation in the country. (The REVI LALIT, in which a version of this editorial was first published in its original Kreol, is for sale through members as usual at Rs20 a copy, and will also be up-loaded soon on to our site and Facebook page, again as usual.)
The Russia-Ukraine conflict, already having taken a prior, related form of a deadly Ukrainian civil war for eight years between nationalist Ukrainians that came to power in a USA-backed coup d’etat in 2014 and the Russian-speaking Ukranians living near the boundary with Russia, who backed them, has now, since 24 February this year, become an even more bloody war with the Russian invasion.
This war, with the USA through NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) supplying the arms and training to Ukraine’s armed forces, has brought all manner of suffering on the people of Ukraine, and is still doing so. Men, women and children have lost their lives. Millions have become refugees. Thousands of civilians and soldiers have lost their lives. The LALIT Magazine, Revi LALIT number 147, is dedicated to different aspects of this war. (See our article in English with the titles of the articles in the Magazine.) It is important that we understand this war and the sanctions on Russia, particularly because they are already affecting life elsewhere, including here. Prices rise, the political situation becomes unstable, as the war continues and as sanctions bite. The whole geo-political situation is on the verge of new realities.
The war, taken together with the economic sanctions that the USA and Europe are imposing on Russia, will thus directly impact on the lives of the working people of the globe, as well as the relations between countries.
Poorer countries, those dominated by imperialism, and the most exploited people in all countries, will suffer the most. The powerful will dominate. All manner of populists will profit from the genuine misery provoked.
In Mauritius, despite being geographically distant from the war, we already begin to feel the effects. Russia, now under sanctions, and the Ukraine with war on its territory, for example, together produce some 30% of the world’s staple, wheat. So, flour will be in short supply. It is not just a question of price rises, but also of sheer supply. Cooking oil, too will be gravely affected as so much comes from those two countries. Fertilizers, the same. All basic foods will become hard to get hold of, as the war goes on. Other food producers are stopping their usual exports, to maintain their own food security. Mauritius is totally exposed to this mortal danger. LALIT has long been warning of exactly this.
LALIT predicted this exact kind of scenario. We have campaigned for proper food production in the Republic – on a large scale, not just the supplement of kitchen gardens – ever since 1984, when we ran our campaign, Disik ki Lavenir? But pro-capitalist governments, one after the other up to the Jugnauth-led Government today, stubbornly refuse to make food production a priority, even when we live in these times of endless crises that make it so eminently predictable that staples will be hard to get. Like little poodles, the Governments, one after the other, follow the politics that are in the short-term interests of the big bosses, our own oligarchs. Jugnauth does not have a plan for food sovereignty. He does not even have a Minister of the Plan.
Mauritian working people and the poor are already facing the effects of the depreciation of the Mauritian Rupee. This means nothing but price increases when there is no food self-sufficiency.
Inflation has doubled in a year. 5% has risen to 10%. And this has happened even before the effects of the war and sanctions against Russia have made the kind of mark they will make.
There have been price increases in cooking gas, staple foods, fuel, building materials, fertilizers and other basic items. This means making working people increasingly have to struggle to make ends meet at the end of each month. The anxiety people are living with has been the main cause of the outbursts of anger when Ministers and even MPs try to hold meetings at the grassroots. It also explains the mini-rebellions in places like Vacoas, Plaine Magnien and Camp Diable. And each time the Government makes things worse by using the only reply it seems to know: repression.
Faced with the crisis in the rise of food prices, the Government has announced increased subsidies for basic food. This is good, but it does not respond to the depth of the problem. It is stop-gap. The Bank of Mauritius has already had to inject $200 Million (Rs 8.6 billion) into the banking system, and put these dollars at the disposition of the State Trading Corporation and other importers, to prop up the Rupee. Then, the Finance Minister admits that this is a problem because speculators bet against the Rupee and this makes such measures less useful. In any case, this is stop-gap action, just resorting to using public funds to prop up an economy in crisis, an economy dangerously dependent on imports, and without producing anything new in the country. It cannot go on. At once the Government must act, do things like pass laws to force the big sugar estates at once to put a proportion of their land under food production, and at once to free up the infrastructure around all the mills and former mills, for use as factories for the preservation and transformation of staple foods – oil, maize, beans, potatoes, and so on.
The Government’s priority is the sale to billionaires from abroad of luxury villas on sugar estate land, so the sugar oligarchs can shore up their debts. This means concreting up and then selling off for good the prime agricultural land of the country, land where new production could have been launched instead. And still must be launched. The Government, instead, thus subsidizes industries with no future, lame ducks like sugar cane, fragile industries like tourism and textiles, and illegal and immoral sectors like offshore tax havens.
This Government politics is a cul-de-sac.
It will being revolt and rebellion, uprising and rioting, as people are left without the prospects of secure supplies of food for the future.
Faced by this kind of popular reaction, even before things get really bad, the Jugnauth regime already reacts with repression, and then more repression still. Every time the Government’s back is to the wall because of its failed economic policies, it resorts to using the police for arbitrary arrests. Now they use the ICTA law, now the IBA. Here they resort to the PGA. There they resort to antiquated laws like the one against Rogue and Vagabond. In one case they resort to Outrage against a Public Officer. All the while, the governing MSM goes on and on winning over MMM neighbourhood leaders and members, recruiting people who have been active in human rights groups, even writers and artists, drawing them into the sphere of state power, thus immobilizing them.
The MSM Government is scared to face Municipal elections. They were due in June, having been delayed due to the pandemic. Now they have been postponed again, using this time the excuse of the pandemic, at a time when it is receding. You cannot just postpone elections because you think you will lose them. What kind of democracy is that? So, all this to say that the MSM regime is increasingly repressive and anti-democratic, and is not about to get better. Capitalist rule nearly always ends up being in this same corner.
And now to come to the Opposition, there has once again been “koz-koze” or chit-chat, between Labour’s Ramgoolam and the MMM’s Bérenger, and it has once again been suspended. They want to agree (discussions are then ON) but then all manner of conflicts arise amongst different leaders (then discussions are OFF). There was the public set-to between Roshi Bhadain and Shakeel Mohamed on private Radio. There have been Bodha’s statements against Ramgoolam. Meanwhile, L’Entente de L’Espoirhad set up teams to begin electioneering towards the Municipals, with Labour setting about its own separate campaign. But now elections are postponed, the little momentum that was building up is gone. Demobilization is back.
The Opposition in parliament is obsessed with electoral events, whether Municipal or General, without so much as a political program in common. They give no clue as to how they propose to get out of the crisis the country is in, an economic crisis that affects the daily life or the working classes and the poor. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that the very aim of a political party is to unite people in an organization around a program to change society. They think the aim is just to BLD, or kick the Government out.
Outside of Parliament, we see a lot of the same kind of thing. The new party set up under the name Linyon Pep Morisien (LPM) and amalgamating the 100% Citoyens party of Dev Sunnasy, Linyon Sitwayin of Bruneau Laurette and Grup Reflection Emmanuel Anquetil of Rama Valayden, has had a bad time trying to get off the ground. No sooner were they set up and running, when their first action was Bruneau Laurette suing for Rs25 million of damages against Ivann Bibi, who was one of their team. Meanwhile, Laurette announced his plan to go to Ukraine when he gets his “contract”. All in all, the LPM are no less incoherent than the Parliamentary opposition.
At out level in LALIT, we have been at work distributing leaflets and pasting up posters against the war in Ukraine and for the closing of the US military base on Diego Garcia, and for the dismantling of NATO, an end to fabricating arms and a closing down of all foreign military bases. We have joined with other organizations all over the world to oppose both the war and the NATO expansion that explains the war.
We have also constantly proposed publicly and through Open letters and declarations that a new kind of economy will have to be created to face the crises. By ensuring food sovereignty – by forcing the bosses to invest in food production, including fishing in the 2.4 million square kilometres of EEZ sea -- we will at the same time ensure job creation, and stabilize the foreign exchange situation. And while using land for producing food staples, some must urgently be set aside to help the housing crisis.
All this explains our theme for 2022’s May Day: Against war and for food security, so that the working class can face up to the crises we are going through.
23 April 2022.
