Pramila Patten - Background
01.04.2024
Pramila Patten, who has recently been in the headlines for her controversial Mission Report on sexual violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict to the UN Secretary General, has already been criticized by us in LALIT for her Report.*In our opinion, her conclusions add wind to the sails of Israel’s flagging propaganda lies and thus she effectively promotes the Israeli genocide.
Since her Report was published, academics and others from abroad have contacted LALIT to find out more about Pramila Patten’s politics and her personal stands. Here is how we reply to them:
How we know Pramila Patten
She was first known to our political party, LALIT, in the 1980s. She was a young barrister who had gone into mainstream politics. She was an elected Municipal Councilor for the Mouvement Militant Mauricien (MMM) party – but only by the time it was no longer a socialist party. She later, however, became very well known in Mauritius for mainstream women’s rights issues. She represented, for example, CEDAW.
She set up an NGO in Mauritius, and it is important to mention this only so as to situate her as being an integral part of the contribution of women to what Arundhati Roy calls the “NGO-ization of the struggle”. This political current made a late start in Mauritius but Pramila Patten typifies it. Her NGO folded long ago. But she continued to rise in her career. Some of our LALIT women members knew her in the international organization called WILDAF (Women in Law and Development in Africa) where our members were representing a Mauritian women’s organization in a very different political current from Pramila Patten’s. She is part of the political current that overtly and proudly aims to advance ambitious and privileged women so that they can rise within the hierarchies of patriarchy to positions of power. She succeeded, herself, in becoming someone who, as you know, reports direct to the UN Secretary General, and then speaks direct to the world’s press reporters.
The Personal and the Political
In 2004, she had a very public separation fight against her former partner, Ivan Collendavelloo, an MMM leader, and this fight had political implications. In the course of the legal manifestation of the fight, he produced his version of events and promptly filed for a “protection order” to prevent her from giving her version publicly. He was, at the time, a Member of Parliament and was General Secretary of the MMM, which was in the Government alliance and whose leader actually held the post of Prime Minister. She was at the weak end of a drastic power differential. FYI, the issues raised in this paragraph were in the Mauritian press at the time, and come up in quick google searches. (Easier to search in French.)
In 2005 general elections, Pramila Patten campaigned for the opposing party, the Labour Party coalition, which won the elections. That same year, she was appointed by the new government to prepare a report to set up a Family Court in Mauritius. In a press interview at that time she stated that this was not a mere political pay-back but instead that “... je suis régulièrement aux États-Unis où j’ai beaucoup étudié les modèles de family Court de New York et de Washington. En août de cette année, j’ai été invitée par le State Department des États-Unis, avec l’appui de l’ambassade des États-Unis à Maurice, et j’ai travaillé étroitement avec la family Court de Philadelphie et celle de Baltimore ...”** (I regularly visit the USA where I have studied models of family courts in New York and Washington. In August this year, I was invited by the State Department of the USA, with the support of the US Embassy in Mauritius, and I then worked closely with family courts of Philadelphia and Baltimore ...”). So, that is where she leant for support: on a competing powerful political party, and on the US Embassy.
As for her former partner Ivan Collendavelloo, he left the MMM around 2014 to join the Mouvement Socialiste Mauricien Alliance, and he was elected in 2014 and again in 2019, and became Vice Prime Minister until his revocation in 2020 on allegations of corruption over a contract. He is still an MP in the government alliance.
They have an adult child.
Political forces at work in Mauritius in the background to the Genocide
Let us now come to the Mauritian political background to the Israeli genocide, so that this can perhaps elucidate any bias that Pramila Patten might have, conscious or otherwise.
It is fair to say that all political parties in Government, and all political parties in the Parliamentary Opposition and almost all the extra-Parliamentary opposition parties, stand with the Palestinians and against the Israeli State.
This support for Palestine is long-standing and across the board – except for two newish, minor extra-Parliamentary parties that are suspiciously silent on the issue (i.e. the parties led by Bruneau Laurette, One Moris, and Roshi Bhadain, Reform Party, respectively). All other political voices are pro-Palestine.
The present MSM Government, for example, recently gave oral submissions of high calibre before the ICJ in the case Palestine has put against Israel for an Advisory Opinion on illegal occupation. The MSM on 30 March ran an official all-day fund-raising event for the people of Palestine at the different Municipalities and District Councils.
A past Government recognized the State of Palestine, and the recognition still stands. One past Government, a Labour one, suspended diplomatic relations with Israel – over the bombardment by Israel of Gaza in 2009 – after pressure from the Mauritian people.
Yes, the people of Mauritius support Palestine. That is the feel. And that is the political reality – on the ground and in the leadership of all political parties of any significance.
However, in Mauritius, at the same time and in the opposite direction, are other forces.
There are powerful institutions that are traditionally “crypto-Zionist”, it would be accurate to say. They remain deathly silent, but probably not inert at all. These institutions are what we sometimes call “the old state”, meaning pre-Independence, and even before that, going back to the times of French rule before the British took over in 1810. This “old state” is made up of the Franco-Mauritian bourgeoisie (an oligarchy left over from French colonial settler times), as well as parts of the powerful, old written French-language Press mini-empires, and also the top echelons of the powerful Catholic Church’s hierarchy, still being very much a bastion of the oligarch part of the ruling class***. These powerful forces were in the nexus, incidentally, of the Apartheid South Africa State, the French State, and the Israeli State that together set up both Apartheid South Africa and Apartheid Israel with nuclear weapons – both crypto-manoevers – and this nexus seems to have lingered past its sell-by date in the form of crypto-Zionism. It is politically very difficult for these forces to say anything aloud or do anything overt in favour of Israel. But, they are still there.
There was one exception: the L’Express newspaper published two separate articles by a woman journalist, clearly piloted by the Israeli State, in the couple of years before the 7 October, and then, during the actual genocide, sent another woman journalist on an IDF invitation to Israel****; she came back and wrote a scurrilous dossier. It was widely and severely criticized on line, including by us, and an announced follow-up article/interview with the Israel representative here (the Israeli Ambassador to South Africa) seems to have been completely cancelled, as a result. The foray out into the public domain was over, so back into silence they went.
There is an Israeli-Mauritius Friendship Society, which is at present not overt either. But, it exists. It does things like write the odd e-mail to reply to someone.
As well as these traditional mainly-secretive Zionists, there is also a relatively new pro-Modi political current with influence on the Mauritian State that we can expect to perhaps grow, but so far, it has not raised its head overtly in public on the Israel issue. The government controlled TV channel does not, for example, highlight the Government’s own pro-Palestine stand, but tends to lip-sync US and French TV stations’ overtly pro-Israel bias – and this is through a double bias – pro-West and pro-Modi.
However, the sum total of all this, means it has not, so far, been possible for us in the “Solidarite Morisyin avek Lepep Palestinn” (SOMALP) Palestine Solidarity common front that LALIT is in, to get the Mauritian Government to support, for example, the South African case of genocide against Israel. And this, despite all political parties being in favour of Palestine.
All this to say that the secretive Zionists have some power, because of the strength of the reactionary forces that they are, despite their invisibility.
And of course, the real present-day power behind these crypto-Zionists is, in addition, the USA.
Take, for example, one objective example: the extra-territorial US legislation – the AGOA, Africa Growth and Opportunities Act – that Mauritian bosses benefit from, for exports of textiles at lower tax rates to the USA market. These “benefits” for the bosses are in exchange, inter alia, for the Mauritian Government not taking positions or actions against the USA’s foreign policy, the wording of the Act actually spells this out. This kind of “conditionality” is somewhat elastic, but it presumably works better for the USA when the bosses in Mauritius, or any other African country that benefits from these tax favours, bring pressure to bear. The bosses will threaten closure if they lose this market, and the ensuing sackings will impact negatively on government popularity for the coming general elections.
The USA Embassy is about to expand into a very lavish new Embassy. Nine months ago the US under-secretary of State, Richard Verner laid foundation stones for a monstrous Rs14 billion new US Embassy in Mauritius i.e. nearly one-third of a billion dollars. This massive up-grading is of course because of the US military base illegally planted on Diego Garcia in Chagos, part of Mauritius. In 2019, the ICJ, as was quoted in so many of the oral submissions in the Palestine case against Israel before the ICJ, told the UK and its US tenant to decolonize Mauritius completely by getting out of Chagos including Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia is now not just illegally occupied, but known to be illegally occupied.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries are quite politically influential in Mauritius, and this, too, has an effect, amplified since the Abraham Accords.
All this to say that on the political surface, “everyone” is pro-Palestinian. But there are strong economic and ideological forces that support Israel under the surface, a destabilizing undertow.
Effect in Mauritius
It is strange that, other than us in LALIT, there has, as far as we are aware, been no other organization or media outlet that has bothered to write about or talk about Pramila Patten’s high-profile Report.
It is particularly curious because Mauritius is a society where any “Mauritian made good” or even just “made famous” or even “made notorious” is lavishly reported upon to the point of ridicule – as “top-grade human interest” material for the mass media to feed to the said masses. So, if someone is victim of a murder abroad, or someone else comes first in an international spelling competition in French, or some other person gets a job as a Senator’s aide in France or the USA, even Canada or Australia, they might well get a banner headline on page 3 or 5, if not on page 1, and a radio headline on a private station, or even public TV. The item would, for a brief moment, be “the talk of the town” just because it is a Mauritian “in the news” anywhere else in the world, let alone a Mauritian taking centre-stage during a genocide that the world media is covering.
Even when, on 31 March, Pramila Patten is reported on in the Press, she is mentioned in small print in two Sunday newspapers and not at all in a third that reported on the event, as having been one of the many speakers at an NGO meeting on quotas for women in Parliamentary elections, but without saying what she said or mentioning her Report. (LALIT was invited to attend, but wrote an Open Letter to the NGO called “Gender Links” criticizing, inter alia, its taking money from the US Embassy when the US is bank-rolling a genocide, as well as occupying part of Mauritius, the Chagos Islands including Diego Garcia.)
Conclusion about Pramila Patten possible bias
The Patten Report, if one reads it with an eye for minute detail, exposes that there is absolutely no evidence available of any systemic rape by Hamas or by anyone else from Gaza on 7 October. She says it. Here in Mauritius, she would have to be careful, in fact, to expressly say something like this – not just because it is true, but because as well as its being true, she would also KNOW FOR SURE that there is no open political support for Israel in Mauritius. She cannot just reproduce the Israeli propaganda when it is so glaringly false and get away with it. She will stand alone here in her home country, in public anyway, if she does that. So, she has to actually spell out, which she in fact does, that there is absolutely no evidence of any mass rape being perpetrated by Hamas. This is to her credit. This would, assuming there is unconscious bias involved, mean this bias helps her avoid the risk of political isolation, whether she believes in what she writes or not. That is “on the one hand”.
However, if, on the other hand, instead of reading her “findings” in detail, one reads just her Report’s conclusions, as she would expect journalists would do, and if one just listens to the press conference she gave to the world’s journalists or to what she said to the UN Security Council orally, one learns that she has taken the Israeli line – hook, line and sinker -- or worse if it is more conscious, and that her conclusions and her announcements reproduce the Israeli propaganda and Israeli unfounded assertions, and give them a loud-hailer effect, coming now from the mouth, not of an Israeli propagandist liar, but from the mouth of “the UN”. Here, assuming unconscious bias, she would be submitting to the powerful forces in Mauritian society – the oligarchs, parts of the Press, and the influential hierarchy of the Catholic Church – who happen, and this is important to her, to have the same stand as the most powerful state in the world’s stand i.e. the USA and other powerful, colonialist nation states that lead the West’s stands. This, assuming it to be unconscious bias, would be bias that could help her to further her career, in particular, an international career. The US Embassy, for example, would have taken note.
The contrast with the Report by Francesca Albanese titled “The Anatomy of a Genocide” could not be more vivid. See our article on our site on 27 March 2024.
* www.lalitmauritius.org in News section on 20 March and 27 March 2024
**https://www.5plus.mu/node/16435
*** On 31 March, for the first time, the Bishop of Port Louis, under pressure from the broad masses in his Church, many of whom know the Pope’s own position on Palestine is more enlightened than the Mauritian hierarchy’s, gave oblique support to the people of Palestine. He mentioned the UN Security Council near unanimous call for a ceasefire, and showed empathy with the suffering of the people of Israel and Palestine. His direction is promising.
**** See our website 15 January 2024
