Genocide Blog 57- Our LALIT Electoral Campaign in Times of Genocide and of Missie Moustass
06.11.2024
Ragoo Lane is quiet. Other than the voices of neighbours passing by chatting, the happy sounds of rubbish collectors at work after Divali house-cleaning, “informal sector” mango pickers hurrying off with a bag over a shoulder, agitated boys and young men await a drug delivery at the end of the Lane. A maryaz lisyin in the lane. Life seems unchanged.
You would not think there was a genocide happening live.
You would not think votes are being counted right now as to whether in the USA, the raving, mad Trump will be elected, as he seems to be on the verge of being, or Vice-President Kamala Harris, who oversaw the genocide in Gaza, and who seems to be headed for defeat.
You wouldn’t think Mauritius was in the final week of an electoral campaign, either.
You might just notice one house-in-construction has brightly coloured oriflam decorating it – “I will rent it to the highest bidder”, the neighbour had explained, with an ashamed glance away, signifying his awareness that “they” would buy, and have now, in fact, bought, his, and no doubt his family’s, right to speak in the electoral campaign, and maybe even afterwards. One of the alliances has thus encroached into Ragoo Lane.
People from time to time ask, as they go by, “Ki tandans?” referring to the elections now only 4 days away. No-one brings up the Missie Moustass excitation that titillates the social networks and private radios. It surprises me they don’t. But, by contrast, everyone who asks where Kisna has been, and when I reply “In Palestine, for LALIT”, they stop what they are doing, forget they were in a hurry, and ask for details. All are already appalled by the genocide. Hardly any do not already know about it.
And the door-knocking I have been doing with LALIT members standing for election in Constituency Number One has the same atmosphere, so far, of quietness and calm as Ragoo Lane, and, again surprising me, the same interest in the elections and yet near-total absence of interest, at least so far, in Missie Moustass, or even in any of the very serious issues that the frivolous “tele-novella” feeds to us in episodes. As if people sense the danger of being led by the nose by an anonymous actor, backed by even more anonymous forces. As if people equate “him” with a candidate who might have “donn bwar” in times past. Maybe people are aware that the Missie Moustass man’s stash of “recordings” may well be in “bundles”, as he now puts out the anti-Jugnauth bundle, or, more accurately, to quote Jocelyn Chan Law, the bundle aimed at “sabotaging” the campaign of the Alliance Lepep, but that soon he may bring out the anti-Ramgoolam or anti-Bérenger bundles, the anti-Bhadain bundle, wielding this same occult power gained by being in possession of materials that could be used or manipulated-and-used so as to sabotage them soon? Or anti-anyone bundles, for that matter, anyone in the country and even some outside it, like the British High Commissioner, who has had her private conversation “exposed”. For whatever reason, people are circumspect. To my surprise.
All this to say, the mass hysteria around the Missie Moustass series has not, at least not so far, caught on in the working class areas. Maybe the new episodes that attack, as the main enemy, not Jugnauth himself, but his wife, instead, will whip up a misogynist stir?
By contrast, and to our pleasant surprise once again, when we, in our conversation with people in this Port Louis area bring up programmatic points, what people are most interested in is the military base on Diego Garcia – nearly all say they want it closed down – and Palestine – all want the genocide, which they recognize as slaughter, to end. People are also interested in food security, particularly in forcing the sugar estates, by law, to produce food crops on a proportion of their land. They link this to the dangers exposed by the Corona virus pandemic and to the danger of world war affecting shipping. And of course they worry about price increases. Very few people bring up the usual moans about a street light, here, or even the absence of their MP from the area, there. They are more interested in the big issues of the day. This is true until yesterday, at least.
All this to say, that, as usual, the broad masses of the people in working class areas are both sophisticated and calm. Whether in La Tour Koenig, Cité Vallijee, Cité Grand River North West, Camp Chapelon, Canal Dayot, Cité Borstal, Camp Raket, Cité Richelieu, or at the Pte aux Sables Lafwar on Sundays at 6:30 am, we have experienced serenity amongst the working people we meet. We deduce that the mass hysteria around Missie Moustass is, so far, an affair of the petit-bourgeoisie, the higher the echelon of petit-bourgeoisie, the higher the timbre of hysteria. People have not, in the broad masses, yet succumbed to the mindlessness of some Missie Moustass feeding them, just before an election, material recorded by who-knows-who for who-knows-what-reason in this infantile format. This does not mean that they are somehow permanently “inoculated” against this kind of manipulation. It means they have a certain degree of resistance to it. But so far, they have kept their calm. It does not mean that there is not a foundation laid by the anonymity of the series of “leaks” of recordings, and the irrationality of accusing Jugnauth of making the recordings and arranging the leaks, of which he is victim, for dangerous irrational outbursts to take place in the next few days. Either in response to the content of some recordings, or in opposition to the very idea of influencing an election in this way. The danger is there.
In our LALIT teams doing “port-a-port” we, personally, in our group of eight or so, know people in about one-in-four houses when we knock on their door. Agreed, 5 of the 8 of us doing door-knocking in our team over the past few days, live in the Constituency. That is a huge part of it. But others have either learnt to read-and-write with Rada or me, or another colleague in LPT, or their mother or father came to a Fishers’ Literacy Course where Anne-Marie and I were teachers, or they or their parents know Ram and me from the August ’79 strike movement, or youngsters, who our members Anne-Marie or Gary teach or taught at the schools in the area, Anne-Marie knows people in every other house in Vallijee because she grew up there, Georges drove the Biblio-bus for the municipality all over that area lending books so lots of people know him, or he later drove the rubbish lorry, other people in the area worked at the same free-zone factory as Kisna or at the cyber-city with her, there are construction workers Laval met years after having shared work site with them, people know Rada from shared IT courses and LPT work, and, of course, particularly in La Tour Koenig and Pte aux Sables, Sarahjane – well, absolutely everyone knows her even if she can’t remember them – she is bus conductor on the bus route there! But, we are talking only about the areas where the vast majority of Mauritian people live: in working class areas. We did not have time to go to the morcellement in Pte aux Sables, for example, where it may be different. People who stay in their cars, for example, don’t know Sarahjane. And we don’t know what they think.
So, in working class areas, we chat to people, always starting with an open-ended question, like “What do you know about LALIT?” This way, we begin where people are. What shocks us, other than no-one bringing up Missie Moustass after two weeks’ of provocation, is the number of people who are furious with Ashok Subron for allying with Ramgoolam, Duval and Bérenger. I guess we knew where Subron was headed from 20 years ago when he left LALIT, so we are not. For them, he has just recently “vande” as they put it, and they raise their voices denouncing him, for all their neighbours to hear.
The reports we get from the team of LALIT members doing the same work in Constituency No. 13 show the same kind of reception in all the working class areas – in L’Escalier, Britannia, La Flora, Bois Cheri, Riv du Poste, Camp Diable, Riviere des Anguilles, Souillac, Benares, Batimarais, St Aubin, Tyack, La Sourdine: calm and informed, and with a similar mistrust or plain lack of interest in Missie Moustass, devastating as some of the contents – presented in this absurd way – are, and/or seem to be. When one man in a group discussion brought up the Missie Moustass recordings, another man present immediately stepped in to say, in a grave tone and with the authority of experience, “Fode pa ou ekut sa kalite zafer la, li pu amenn lager.”
And meanwhile, the world is on the brink of big changes.
The Israeli Occupying Forces go for the final stage of pure elimination, pure annihilation, the pure enactment of the physical aspect of genocide in northern Gaza, including intentional mass starvation of every Palestinian man, woman and child living there: in the classic ultimate phase of colonization uttered by the colonizer Kurtz in the novel Heart of Darkness, the Israelis now follow orders to “Exterminate all the brutes!” They are executing the so-called “Generals’ Plan”. But, the Israeli army is meeting resistance, strong resistance. It is incredible that Hamas and the other armed resistance groups still hold strong. But they do. What seems to have happened is that the change in Israeli tactics from the tanks – presumably after too many got blown up – to infantry now moving in to this area in the past few days, is proving costly in terms of Israeli soldiers. The foot soldiers are being taken out by explosive devices. The crisis is serious.
Netanyahu yesterday sacked his own Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.
The Authorities, according to today’s Times of Israel, have named 780 soldiers killed since October last year, including 6 colonels, plus 68 police officers. These military losses come and add to the disaster of the Israeli economy, which is in ruin. And the military and economic woes are aggravated by the increasing isolation of Israel and the abhorrence the world feels at the Israeli-USA’s genocide.
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is, this very week, preparing a UN Resolution to expel Israel from the whole UN system. LALIT has been calling for this. The Mauritian government must stand up and be counted.
Turkish President Erdogan, together with 52 other countries, this week called for a UN total arms embargo on Israel. Remember that Turkey is a NATO member. So, a NATO state is calling for an arms embargo on the US’s closest ally. Even French President Emmanuel Macron last month called for an arms embargo. Both the UK and Canada have suspended some arms sales to Israel. The Mauritian government must take an immediate stand.
Will the International Criminal Court finally issue warrants for the arrest of Netanyahu and Gallant? It has, under US pressure, delayed doing so for five months since the Prosecutors called for them?
At the International Court of Justice meanwhile, in the South African case, Bolivia last month joined the case, as the Maldives has done. This follows Chile, Turkey, Spain and Mexico since we gave an update. Again, we call on the Mauritian government to join this case at once.
All this means the Western hegemony is in moral and physical collapse. The slaughter in Gaza, the West Bank and the Lebanon will go on being appalling. How can we even bear to watch it? How can we get our heads around such willful, wanton massacres of the Palestinian people? But, in the medium term, the Israeli-USA project in the Middle East is nearing its brutalizing and self-brutalizing end. In a way, Donald Trump is a symptom of this.
The US’s rule and Israel’s impunity are now at the beginning of their end. The collapse, as it occurs, will not be a pretty thing. Nor will it be over quickly.
And in Mauritius our destinies are linked not only to the election results – and to contestations of the results, especially if Ramgoolam loses – but also to the coming end of the USA-UK hold over the Diego Garcia military base on part of the Republic of Mauritius, Chagos – which the USA-UK are desperately trying, before the collapse of their empire, to prolong for another century or two. Trump will certainly be in contact with the extreme right in the UK that opposes the UK-Mauritius joint declaration and planned Treaty. We need to make sure our Government – whoever leads it – firmly relying on international law, and not on swapping sovereignty over Chagos or any aspect or part thereof for “blood money.”
On all fronts, the struggle continues! Lalit kontinye!
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
