Importance of the Women's Peace March 2024 in Port Louis
02.03.2024
The day after the massacre perpetrated by the Israeli army’s snipers and tanks against the Palestinian families waiting for bags of flour, as they starve to death in Gaza City after 21 weeks of the Israeli-imposed starvation siege, some 100-200 women took part in a march in the very heart of Port Louis starting midday to protest against the genocide. It was 1 March 2024.
This article will look at the importance of this “Women’s Peace March” organized by the Muvman Liberasyon Fam (MLF), starting and ending in the Company Gardens, the very place, as Rajni Lallah pointed out in her address to those gathered on Friday, where the first big women’s meeting was held in 1978. Perhaps as many as 20 women present Friday were also present 46 years ago at the 1978 rally. The Company Gardens was also where the Chagossian and LALIT women in 1981 had a confrontation with the Riot Police who arrested eight of them, as they took part in a solidarity gathering, while women hunger strikers lay in a tent right there in the Company Gardens. The struggle then in 1981, was to get Britain to end its colonizing of the Mauritian lands of Chagos, including Diego Garcia, to stop its joint military occupation with the USA, close down the base on Diego, and to win the right of return for all Chagossians. Eight women were arrested then, held in cells, and later tried and found not guilty of an unlawful gathering. Two of us were present Friday as speakers at the march, at the protest 43 years ago, Ragini Kistnasamy and myself. We can add to the depth of the history by mentioning that the famous 1979 hunger strike of trade union leaders after Mauritius’ biggest ever mass movement, the general strike movement of August ’79 took place there, leading to a victory for the strike. And very long ago, the Company Gardens, during the French Revolution, as a lasting memory here of that revolution there, was given by the French State to “the people of Mauritius in perpetuity”. The Government when it tried to privatize it, and there were protests, the Government found that it was effectively “un-privatizable” by the nature of that donation. These are all lessons in the importance of the long lines that link the history of geography, our collective memory.
The importance of the Women’s Peace March is that there was a march at all.
There was an accelerated genocide going on for 21 weeks, and we will come later in this article to why it was difficult to organize a march against it, and this will explain why it was important that there was a march at all.
The march turned out to be more than a march. It brought together – in order to oppose this genocide – the women’s wings of all the main political parties in Opposition, including the three in Parliament, the Labour Party, the MMM and the PMSD, who all sent delegations that included former Ministers like Arianne Navarre MP, Aurore Perraud, MP Stephanie Anquetil and Jocelyne Minerve, as well as trade unions that sent delegations, including a big delegation of CTSP women members, who like the MLF, are members of the Solidarity Morisyin avek Lepep Palestine (SOMALP) which developed from the BDS Mauritius, and whose very name is intentionally reminiscent of the strong common front called SOMAAP set up in 1977 to fight Apartheid in South Africa, now that there is an outright Apartheid regime imposed by the Israeli State and army “from the River to the sea”, over the whole of historic Palestine. Other organizations in SOMALP that sent delegations include the Consumer Advocacy Platform and LALIT, as well, and highlighting the links of the struggle of Palestine with our struggles in the Republic of Mauritius was the Chagos Refugees Group, that had a delegation of women present. Another women’s organization Fam Ape Zwenn was represented by a delegation, including women like Sheila Bunwaree, Nalini Burn, Adi Teeluck and the Alzeimers’ Association and ABAIM that works with children, were represented by delegations. (Please let me know if I have left out any association.) Tania Haberland helped organize a group of women to be present.
The beginning of the march was behind the banner “Women’s Peace March: FREE PALESTINE” headed by Sadna Jumnoodoo, Veronique Topize and Madu Gungadin, while the end of the march was defended, as the end of a march must be, by the strong team of Firoza Dilmohamed and Sudha Ramen, bearing the banner: “Israel+ USA: STOP ZENOSID”. The call-and-response leaders, for the MLF, were Rajni Lallah, Begum Budulla, Anne-Marie Jolie , Cindy Clelie and Ragini Kistnasamy (also known as Kisna and Devi).
Before the march set off, there was a speech by Kisna, who has been to the West Bank including to East Jerusalem, on two occasions to stand beside Palestinians facing up to the Israeli Defence Force at check-points, and she also tried to get into Gaza through the Rafah Crossing, but the whole international group was not allowed, by Mubarack, the then dictator of Egypt – there is a new one now – into Gaza. This was followed by an introduction to the march, given by Rajni Lallah, whose musical skills, as she wittily put it, give her the role of leading the slogans we would chant, to guide us through their rhythms and “tunes”.
The police officers present, seeing the march had been well-organized, had marshals, or servis-dord in the form of MLF members with MLF scarves tied around their necks, and being aware that the present Government has, itself, given oral submissions in support of Palestine in the case against Israel for the illegal occupation, were perfect gentlemen and gentlewomen.
Let us explain the route the MLF took. We had informed the police – the law recognizes a Constitutional right to gather this way and requires mere “notification” to be given to the police – of our intention to end the march in front of the US Embassy in John Kennedy Street. The Police Commissioner objected to us being “directly opposite” the US Embassy. We sent a second route, which ended on the corner behind the State Bank building (where there are those places for horses to drink from in the white wall). They objected again. We were unwilling to change the subject from the protest against the genocide, it is too important, to being about the route. Anyway, in exchange, the police offered the perfect alternative, in mafia language, an offer we could not refuse. In front of Government House, up a bit of the Royal Road, past the Central Bank, up to Desforges Street, turn right and march to the Municipality of Port Louis, then past the National Assembly building, commonly and wittily known as the “kastrol presyon”, past the Prime Minister’s Office and back to Company Gardens on La Chaussée.
People poured out of all the offices and shops on to the pavement in support of the march. Some filmed snippets on their phones. Others raised their fists, others called out. No cars, though caught in a traffic jam, lost patience. The support from the public was total.
So, the march was held.
And that it was held was important.
The background
All the member organizations and individual members of SOMALP had wanted to organize a march from Day One of the Israeli carpet-bombing of Gaza, accompanied by their leaders’ genocidal language, and their bombing of the Palestinians into ever-smaller bits of Gaza, all the better to expel them into the Egyptian desert of Sinai. But, we were, collectively, not sure we could assure the safety of a demonstration or a march, from some kind of perhaps agent-provocateur action.
Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, trade unions had fantastic “servis-dord”, as did the MMM and LALIT, to prevent this kind of thing, with the down-turn in the struggle, demonstrations have become ill-organized and, in Kreol, somewhat “deleryom”, with people having little or no common understanding of why they are even there at all, any grievance will do, and having to put up with violent slogans like hegemonic “B ... li deor” actually introduced by the leaders of the marches, let alone anti-woman language, again, used by the organizers. So, this climate was not propitious for organizing a demonstration after what is now referred to as “the events at the Citadel”.
No sooner was there the 7 October Hamas-led incursion into Israel, perhaps better framed as the jail-break out of Gaza, than in Mauritius, there were preparations, in parallel, for two events less than 12 hours apart, and at the same place: the Citadel. The site itself is unfortunate, historically speaking. It is the very symbol of colonial military domination. It was the old British colonial fort called Fort Adelaide, built for the army to control the streets of Port Louis, built on a hill looking down over where now many people of the Muslim community live on the sides of the hill. To those who know grassroots Mauritius, it is an extension of Vallée Pitot. It is now turned into a place where musical concerts are held, without its history having been unpicked by all of us, together. The State just took the fort, made it into a venue for art, art, if you’ve got the money to rent it, that is.
On the fateful night, a big hotel group, Attitude, rented it, and held a concert to both raise money and hand it out to four charities, three of which were Catholic Church charities, all in this one event, and the event was planned to come to its close with a “surprise”. Bosses like these are blissfully unaware, we suppose, of who lives near the Citadel, and maybe even insensitive to the genocide being perpetrated by Israel and opposed right near the concert. Perhaps by sheer coincidence, which would make this a red herring, it was the same night that there were Gay Pride events, though this Concert is unrelated to Gay Pride events. I mention this because there had been conflict, over the past few years, whenever the Gay Pride events were organized in Port Louis, when mainly Muslim men, organized around religious slogans, opposed the events with threats of violence.
So, anyway, the concert at the Citadel was drawing to an end. The “surprise” had not yet come.
If events followed the tradition in Mauritius, we can expect that perhaps the concert did not end promptly at the time scheduled.
That same night was the eve of a “Solidarity with Palestine” march due to be held in Port Louis the next morning. The march was due to start from “the Citadel” and had been advertised this way. It was organized by “Mauritius Muslim Awakening”. This organization has no known links of any kind at all with the anti-gay rallies that had been held in Port Louis. In fact, the MMA had held a similar quite big march of support for Palestine the last time that the Israeli Defense Force had bombed Gaza some years before. It was peaceful.
Anyway, as is the tradition in Mauritius, on the eve of a big rally or march, people adorn the place from which the march will set off. So, a large group of men were waiting at Champ de Mars for the concert to end, so that they could begin to hang flags and banners on the hill on which the Citadel stands, in preparation for their march the next morning at 9:30 a.m.
It seems there was another group of men, too, in Port Louis, some 30 of them. They seem quite separate, but there may be some overlap, who knows? These 30 men, masked, went into the Citadel where the Concert was drawing to a close and began to break up the instruments the band was playing and ordering everyone out, audience and all. Some from the audience told us that they were slow to react because they thought it was a bit of theatre, i.e. part of “the surprise”. In fact, the “surprise”, it turned out – again, perhaps coincidentally – to be a song composed and sung by a rather infamous American Zionist called Matisyahu, a song that had been translated into Kreol. This, too, is probably coincidental. In 2009, too, there was a coincidental concert by another infamous Zionist that caused a stir during the 2009 Israeli bombing of Gaza, and was denounced publicly by Jean-Mée Desveaux at the very time. The famous Zionist singer at that time was called Enrico Macias
Anyway, according to the Press, most of the 30 men who had brutalized the concert-goers and musicians, if not all the men, were tracked down by the police, arrested and many charged, and most, if not all, released on bail. The actions at the concert were clearly absolutely uncalled for and unacceptable, whatever the supposed, if any, rationale.
But, the event left Mauritius in shock.
It brought back memories of the so-called “race wars” in the run-up to Independence.
And it took a number of months for us, in LALIT, to piece together what actually happened. We still don’t really understand. It seems the backdrop is one of the MMM, which had for decades been very strong in that area, having weakened so much so as to have caused a political vacuum. (Even the Cehl Meeah parties, which had challenged the MMM, had waned completely.) It seems that supporters of the MSM and Labour Parties are vying with each other to fill the vacuum, as the next general elections loom. And then a series of coincidences, in the context of political conflicts. The event, however, showed that people who hold that kind of concert in Port Louis live in bubbles completely separate from the people organizing the Palestine solidarity march the next day. This is, in itself, a potentially worrying situation. And society is so unequal. A hotel boss is a universe away from people who live around the Citadel, and he does not even know that. And raising money and then giving it to well-meaning causes this way is reminiscent of the old days: the Catholic Church near the Sugar Estate (this closeness was a pattern) would wait for the first coinciding monthly pay for skilled workers and fortnightly pay for so-called unskilled labourers to be in their hands, and would organize a Fancy Fair with the help of the Sugar Estate resources, including labour. Then part of this money, having left the hands of the sugar boss, would end up via games of chance and little tombola’s and some alcoholic drink, end up in the hands of the Church authorities for the year.
So, history lives on in the present when a hotel boss raises money and gives it to charities on the spot, blind to all around him. When the race wars are conjured up, almost by accident. When we do not confront the attacks on the gay community with rationality. When communal identities get the upper hand on class solidarity. When we do not have a clear political program that unites us around a common understanding of what we are working towards.
All this to say, it was quite a task to just organize a Palestine Solidarity March.
So, the women of the Muvman Liberasyon Fam decided that women are perhaps best equipped to oppose these murky and violent forms of patriarchy that lurk within our society. We, as women, with experience in the struggle against patriarchy, have got to know how patriarchy works, as a particular form of ancient domination that has persisted into the modern times of capitalism, and persists still.
Now that we have shown that a march can be done, we are freed from the fear left by the attack on the concert at the Citadel, a serious action, and one which came and reminded us that we are still haunted by our memories of the race wars of the 1960s – even though we think we have buried them for good.
We must be freed from our past, and be able to act for our future, as human beings. The Women’s Peace March was held. That was its greatest importance. That it was held at all.
And, one march, like this one, in times of crisis for an empire like the USA-UK-Israel empire, can help. The balance of forces becomes crucial. Every collective action undertaken with thought, can add to other such actions, and bring about change. We can stop this genocide. We must stop it.
It is for this reason that we call on the Mauritian Government, just as it gave excellent oral submissions in the case on Israel’s illegal settlements, to support the South African case at the ICJ for genocide, too. Each country that adds its weight, allows another country to do so, until we isolate completely those who are guilty, and this way get them to stop.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT.
