“Our Participation in the Global March To Gaza” – Invitation to the Report-Back
03.07.2025
There will be a Public Report-Back from the three Mauritians who participated in the international movement to “go to Gaza in person” to break the siege against the Palestinians. Don’t miss it!
The Report-Back is organized by the 20 organizations* in a common front “Against Genocide and For Closure of the UK-US Base on Diego Garcia”. It will be held at the Municipal Chamber in Port Louis. This important event will be on Friday 11 July at 4:00 pm. The public is cordially invited.
Alain Ah Vee, Ally Hosenbokus, and Ragini Kistnasamy, who are members of LALIT, which is in turn a member of the common front, took part in the “Global March to Gaza” in Egypt last month.
“Going to Gaza in person” was part of a combined action by three different movements converging at around the same time on Gaza: the Global March, itself, together with the convoy of buses called Sumud or “Steadfastness” that gathered hundreds of people from all along the Maghreb countries, and the ship Madleen of the Freedom Flotilla, with on board a dozen people including the renowned activist Greta Thunberg and the European union MP Rima Hassan. The aim of the three-pronged convergence on Gaza was to expose to the world just how the Israeli siege is imposed. It is so severe a state of siege that people cannot even get near. So, all three parts of the combined movement towards Gaza were to show this. The participants could not get to Gaza, not even to its border or shoreline. They could only get nearer to Gaza.
Which is what they did!
Israel arrested the totality of the crew of the Madleen in international waters off Gaza, and the Egyptian authorities, after threats from Israel, physically prevented the Sumud Convoy and the Global March to Gaza from getting any closer to Gaza than Ismalia. The Egyptian state, a military dictatorship that came to power in a US-backed coup d’état, stopped the convoy and March by means of sheer brutal repression and by the collusion so typical of the world’s Governments. The Report-Back will give details of what the three went through on the Global March.
All three solidarity events dove-tailed together in terms of time. Ordinary people from over 80 countries took part in the three international events that all three moved as near as they possibly could to the people of Gaza – by sea, by bus, and by marching. The people of Gaza and the whole of Palestine knew how close these thousands of ordinary people had in fact got to them. And coming from over 80 countries, it was an incredible feat of coordination.
Now, all over the world there are “report-backs” like ours this coming Friday.
The people of Gaza know from these three collective actions that, out there beyond the siege they have been enduring for 18 years, there are people who stand with them in solidarity. There are people who take the risk of defying the siege. There are people who tried to get to their side physically. And people have done this in order to expose, as they did, how our respective Governments world-wide either, at worst like the USA actually “commandite”, arm, finance and advise Israel, or at best, collude in cowardly fashion with Israel and the USA, one way or another. The new Mauritian Government, for example, at a key moment at the end of last year, withdrew Mauritius’ oral submissions it was due to give at the ICJ in the case, a case that was precisely against Israel for keeping out food and supplies that the UN and others were trying to take in. The Government took Mauritius off the time-table already published by the ICJ and the UN system as a whole. Despite being challenged publicly to explain this cowardice, the Government has given no satisfactory explanation. In fact, it did not even send written submissions to the ICJ. The Egyptian military dictatorship, the second biggest recipient of US arms “aid” after Israel, colludes by using repression against a peaceful march in Egypt towards the Gaza border.
So, three Mauritians went towards Gaza, in person.
They used their own savings. They bought their own air-tickets. They booked their own little hotels. And they went. LALIT and the 20 organizations that are organizing the Report-Back announced their participation in a Press Conference at the Cafe du Vieux Conseil on the very day at the very time the Global March was due to depart from Cairo.
The three Mauritians were amongst the over 4,000 internationals in the three actions. They were there. And they will bear witness at the meeting.
The moment in history when the three-pronged movement of solidarity chose to converge on Gaza was appropriate, in that it is the darkest moment of Palestinian suffering, the bitterest-ever part of the Israeli genocide – the Israeli State is now inflicting starvation, setting food-traps manned by nearby snipers to murder people in cold blood, on top of the daily slaughter for over 20 months by aerial bombardment, collapsing whole buildings, and by tank-shelling and drone bombing. As the world was due to learn of this massive, international convergence on Gaza, Israel on the very same day that the Global March was due to set off from Cairo, for the first time bombed Teheran, began its murders of military leaders and individual scientists, together with their families, in a kind of unlawful war-fare that is nothing less than terrorism by a State. One of the war aims was to “hide” from view this, the cruelest part of the genocide in Gaza.
This Report-Back is thus part of the process of people world-wide organizing in their associations and unions so as to expose the genocide to us all, so that we, the people of the world, can put a stop it.
Governments have not lifted a finger to break the siege by concerted action. They have not forced the borders open and assured that all the thousands of trucks enter Gaza. They have not even put in place a “no-fly zone” to stop Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. Instead Governments world-wide have either been co-sponsors of the genocide, or paying feeble lip-service against it.
And yet, a few thousand people from all over the world in the Global March to Gaza, a dozen individuals on board the Madleen, and another few thousand from North Africa in the Sumud Convoy, did act.
Three of them were Mauritians. It was an experience of a life-time. They will tell us about it, and give us context. This way we can better understand the genocide and the aggression on Iran, and this way help stop both.
This way, too, we can come to see more clearly the way the UK-USA military base on Diego Garcia is part of the USA and Israel’s arsenal being used against countries in the Middle East that Mauritius is not at war with. The Diego Garcia base was used in the USA’s build-up of B-52 and B-2 bombers to attack countries in the Middle East that are defending Palestinians. The USA probably used the Diego Garcia base in its illegal military aggression last month on Iran’s three nuclear sites (sites known to be involved only for peaceful use and monitored under the Non-Proliferation Treaty). What does this, in turn, mean? Well, Iran’s riposte against the USA was aimed this time directly at the big USA military base that Qatar allows to operate on and from its territory. This makes it plain for all of us to see that the USA Diego Garcia military base, on our land, makes us a direct target for retaliation in any wider geopolitical aggression the Trump regime embarks upon. This, in turn, exposes the real threat to the sovereignty of the Republic of Mauritius that the US base there represents.
Your presence at the Report-Back is one way for us, together, to put pressure collectively on the Mauritian Government to isolate and disarm Israel so as to end the genocide, and at the same time, to demand Diego Garcia base closure to prevent our land being used, amongst other things, to support the Israeli genocide.
* List of organizations that are organizing the Report Back
Mauritius Labour Congress
Federation of Parastatal Bodies and Other unions
Conf. des Travailleurs des Secteurs Publique et Privé
National Trade union Confederation
Federation of Civil Service and Other unions
General Workers Federation
Federation des Travailleurs Unis
Government Teachers' union
Rodrigues Private Industries & Allied Workers union
Rodrigues Government Employees Association
Rodrigues Workers Federation
Nursing Association
union of Private Secondary Education Employees
Ledikasyon pu Travayer
Dr Idrice Goomany Treatment Centre
Leve Fam!
Muvman Liberasyon Fam
ABAIM
Never Again-Olive Resistance
Lalit
