Joanna Bérenger v. Who Exactly?
30.05.2026
The facts after the MP Joanna Bérenger spat with Minister Reza Uteem are now clear from Hansard:
The Speaker made rulings on two points-of-order.
One point-of-order was by Labour Party Minister Shakeel Mohammed to the effect that ex-MMM MP Joanna Bérenger should withdraw “everything” she said to the MMM Minister of Labour Reza Uteem about the alleged sequestration by Minister Uteem’s mother of her domestic worker. She duly withdrew everything, as called upon to do.
The other point-of-order was by MP Joanna Bérenger, herself, that Minister Uteem should withdraw saying he did not, like her, have “disan kolon” in his veins, whatever that might mean. He duly withdrew. Curiously, MP J. Bérenger did not call specifically upon the Minister of Labour to withdraw something else grave i.e. he had called what MP J. Bérenger said about his mother “an absolute lie.” That has a very clear meaning: he is saying she told a lie. So, that statement against MP J.Bérenger stands until today as “an absolute lie”, as well as having been withdrawn, in the Speaker’s decision that “she has to withdraw everything”.
With both statements withdrawn, and the main allegation being accepted as “an absolute lie”, the matter should be over.
But, because of the context of a fratricide and sororicide, the social media, and even the mainstream press have raised a furore about how awful it is to accuse someone of having “disan kolon” in their veins – although the words have been withdrawn, and although again we say whatever they might mean. Precisely what Minister Uteem, in his reply to the Parliamentary Question said, and which has been withdrawn in any case, was this: “We [we meaning his family] are not like you [meaning her family]. We were not colonial! Pena disan kolon dan mo disan mwa! Pena disan kolon dan mo disan mwa!” We will come back to this issue of “disan this” and “disan that” at the end of the article.
But before getting to this, look at the reality framing the fight? What is the political context of this spat? What is all thismesquinerie and venom about? So violent a confrontation, and so easily withdrawn? And all this coming at a time of such huge world and national-level real crises?
Well, everybody in the whole country knows what the spat is about. It is just that in most of the media articles, there is a pretense of nobody knowing, or pretending nobody knows.
Context is all
Understanding anything any human being says needs context. Context cannot excuse anything, let alone everything, but it explains what is going on. Without relevant context, debate is a waste of time.
What is going on is this. The MMM has broken into two very unequal warring parts: the leader plus just two MPs, including his daughter Joanna Bérenger i.e. only 20% of total MMM MP’s, have left both the MMM and the Government, and now sit, much reduced in numbers, opposite their often life-long MMM friends that have stayed in Government, and are much reduced by having lost their only leader. Both sides are raw, suffering after an unintended and irreversible split that poses each part existential problems.
What seems to have happened is that something went wrong with a Paul Bérenger political manoeuvre. He went and lost his party, including 80% of his MPs. And his group is still basically flaying around. They wait for the Government to become more and more unpopular, which it will do, having sold out (with the three who resigned, included in the process) on all major issues imaginable: they tried very hard to sell Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos for “blood money”, which they put in last year’s budget and then the British cancelled it; they attacked universal pension rights with a massive blow to the entire working class; they sold out on non-alignment; and they refused to oppose the Israeli-US genocide in Palestine, or their war of aggression on Iran. The blame for this joint selling-out will fall, quite rightly, on the Government. Bérenger and his two colleagues in his new party are evading the inevitable rage of the people, as the effect of this genocide and related war of aggression against Iran, cuts the living standards of ordinary working people in Mauritius as everywhere in the world.
Strangely, the new Bérenger party, the Fron Militan Progresis (FMP) has not even accepted the “Leader of the Opposition” role that is their statistical due. Instead, they have opened up the front of petty politicking against their former party the MMM, and are setting about it.
So that is the context of MP Joanna Bérenger kicking off without, so far, a shred of evidence, attacking not so much the mother of the Minister concerned with Labour, Mrs. Uteem, but attacking obliquely the father of the Minister, who is the former President of the Republic of Mauritius, Mr. Cassam Uteem. And doing this in order to weaken not just Minister Reza Uteem, but the whole of the MMM, that she has just left. Not only is Mr. Cassam Uteem still a dignitary that the state rightly protects with 24-hour guards, but he is one of the most highly esteemed of all former MMM leading members, even including all current MMM members, still alive. His political credibility is way above all those MMM and ex-MMM MPs now in Parliament. He has never sold out on the issue of closing the US military base on Diego Garcia. He has never sold out on the issue of the Kreol language as a mother tongue. He has never sold out on the issue of supporting the people of Palestine, and never feared to call what is a “plausible genocide” what it is. He still has the aura of his bravery in calming the communal confrontation that was provoked after the uprising caused by Kaya being killed in police custody in 1999. And, in the matter at hand, Cassam Uteem’s “sin” is that he is father of an MMM Minister, who did not follow Bérenger into the Opposition. No facts have ever been mentioned against him, only against his wife and his son. Although he is the target. In addition, Joanna Bérenger has withdrawn everything she said about the Minister’s parents having sequestrated a domestic worker, if anything did spill over on to him.
The Foreign Worker
What is so difficult about discussing the substantive part of the question is that the facts are so shrouded in intentional fog. If the worker was sequestrated illegally, how did she walk out the back entrance door? Well, there is fog even over the door issue. Ms Bérenger says she “escaped” by the rubbish exit, or “par la sortie destinée à l'évacuation des ordures”. The implication, now withdrawn anyway, was that she was locked in and went out through some rubbish hatch. Why ask a question that is so vague, so full of insinuations, so empty of factual content? And then it seems you intended to withdraw it all on the spot, anyway? These are very serious accusations to make against the mother of a Minister, let alone against a former President of the Republic? And if they are spurious, as they appear to be because there is no substantiation of any of the allegations, what kind of cruelty is this against an ailing woman and her 85-year-old husband, in order to harm his politically active son?
And of course, more worrying still. Where is this poor woman worker? Is she just working somewhere without the proper papers, like hundreds of others from abroad are in Mauritius? And as tens of thousands of Mauritians are abroad? As part of the Government-sponsored policy of the import and export of human beings, as work-machines? This policy is what both Minister Uteem and MP J. Bérenger should be setting about getting changed.
Or is the woman worker in difficulty of some sort that we do not know of? Does Ms Bérenger know about any such difficulty?
It is a very sensitive matter.
Is there even perhaps some machination going on? Who knows?
All this explains why we need to stick to facts, and not to rely, as Ms. Bérenger did, on anonymous “media reports”.
And as for the panic of the Bangladeshi High Commission, it is not surprising that this particular “missing worker” is singled out for special attention because it could be a diplomatic incident as well as an “ordinary” immigration issue. She was, after all, employed by a Former President of the Republic, with state protection until today for this role.
“Disan esklav”, “disan kuli”, “disan “kolon”
Just to remind people. In feudal times, and especially in Medieval times, people believed that superiority and inferiority were in one’s “blood”. The King’s and nobles had “blue blood”, unlike the rest of us, who had blood that was just ordinary red! “Li dan disan, sa!” All inequality was dismissed as inevitable, being inherited. Class was caste, so to speak. So, the poor had to “resigne, aksepte”, and stop moaning. Luvraz bondye, was the motto. And, of course, much of this reactionary philosophy has persisted into modern times. Actual riches, for example, are just “passed down” by blood by the law, in reality. Although the law does not make someone responsible for the sins of anyone else, including their ancestors or descendants, this kind of “lager lor disan” maintains vestiges of this reactionary philosophy.
And many still believe until today in “race” as a biological fact, which it is not. All humans have the same varieties of blood groups. And there is no such thing as a “pure race” therefore no such thing as “mixed race”. We are all simply human beings, with a continuum of differences of a superficial nature.
Indeed “blood” is merely a metaphor for “descendants”, and is not a fact. Translators from English to Japanese, for example, complain how difficult it is to use any word pertaining to “blood-lines” in translation, because it sounds, to the Japanese language ear, dreadfully macabre.
For all these reasons, let us constantly remind everyone that it is not just useless, but harmful, to refer to blood-lines. The point here is that Joanna Bérenger, as an individual, found a way to annoy Reza Uteem, as “blood-son” of his own mother, and pretended that this was not her aim. The second point is that Reza Uteem should be mature enough to ignore how hurtful this jibe is, and call for her to withdraw her words because they are based on lies. In fact, he did call her a liar, and has, so far, not been called upon to withdraw. In particular, Minister Uteem should know that it is not only his mother that Joanna Bérenger is really attacking, but his father, and she is doing this in order to attack him, himself, and the whole of the MMM, now that she, Joanna Bérenger, has just become estranged from, through attacking the “blood” father of this Minister. She is doing this out of inherent weakness of the political position she and the FMP find themselves in. There is no other explanation for such apparent mesquinerie that was so extreme that she could so easily withdrew “everything” she said. As if she never meant it.
So, let us all steer away from this nonsense about blood-lines. And let us face the fact that good and evil done by individuals is their own fault, and that “race”, as an extension of all this “blood-lines” nonsense, does not exist.
The same cannot be said for class. Underneath all this talk about “disan kolon” is the reality of social class. Under all this talk about “blood” lies imperialism, in the very word “colon-izer”. Class is with us still. Imperialism is still with us.
And while “race” does not exist, “racism” most certainly does exist. Today, the most virulent racism and bigotry are aimed, in our society and in the world, however, at people of African descent and Muslims. That is just a reality check.
Today’s working class people have inherited the laws of slavery and indenture, now improved, but along the same basic lines: the law allows and regulates the excesses of a system where some private people employ other private people, and skim off the cream of their labour, deciding what to do with it. One class turns the labour of another class into “capital” and gets to keep it. This second class even gets to pass the capital on to its “blood” heirs! The law insists upon this.
The point here is that talking about “blood” is really nothing but changing the subject. So, we must just remember that the MMM, with Paul Bérenger as “sef jaz”, along with leaders of other parties when in opposition, spent nearly all their adult lives deploring “papa-piti”, which is blood-lines, in his adversaries, Navin Ramgoolam and/or Pravind Jugnauth, as the case may be. This was opportunist and silly. The bad politics that leads to bad leaders is not going to be cured by passing a law to say that no son or daughter can become leader of a party his father was leader of. And now, there Paul Bérenger sits in the Opposition with half his co-colleagues being his very own “piti”. He has used “blood-lines” as a political argument for decades now and it is being used against him and his party, too.
Class and Imperialism
So, the substantive issue of making “cheap labour” available to the propertied classes is a serious one: Mauritius as a nation-state has a real-life policy of intentionally not creating jobs for young Mauritians preferring to “export” them to work legally and illegally abroad, where they inevitably lower the bargaining strength of the oppressed working class there. At the same time, Reza Uteem’s department actually organizes the “import” of tens of thousands of workers from abroad for the bosses here to exploit at a rate higher than the bosses can manage to exploit Mauritian workers.
So, what the Minister should be doing, and the demands that an Opposition MP should be putting to the Minister, should include things like this:
* That all Mauritians working abroad be assured full rights abroad, including the right to vote after, say, 6 months.
* That all workers from abroad in Mauritius be assured full rights, including the right to vote after, say, 6 months.
Voting rights flow from residence and from taxation, not from blood, either. Workers should vote where they are living their lives (with the exception of those forcibly removed, whose voting rights should remain while they are refugees.) And because VAT and other direct taxes strip money from all workers, with nationality and without, all workers need full rights flowing from this, as well as from the place of their residence. Again not from blood-lines, otherwise known as caste.
Yes, the National Assembly is the place at which there must be a fight for all rights of all workers living on our land. And it is worth keeping out of petty-politics, especially after a catastrophic split in the MMM which will have left people like both Joanna Bérenger and Reza Uteem very sore, and more likely to make mistakes. And let us all stop this nonsense about papa-piti, blood-lines, and all the communalism and racism that comes from this, while we are about it.
Oppression is basically part of a class legacy. The investors long ago made their profits with the help of a kind of “labour law” called “slavery” for 100 years, later this brutal regime was diluted under “indenture law” for another 100 years, and since then we are still trapped in “wage slavery laws” for over 100 years. This class legacy is where progress is needed. That is why in LALIT, we are in a class-struggle party.
Perhaps people of, and basically in favour of, the social class of Reza Uteem and Joanna Bérenger, who worked professionally in corporate and off-shore law which is a hand-maiden of international finance capital, and in sugar estate Smart City projects which is hand-maiden of the oligarchs, respectively, are not ideal members of the National Assembly to represent the interests of the broader working class, those from abroad or here. Unless, of course, they publicly criticize the kind of “development” they were promoting as the high ranking cadres of this kind of destructive capital. Does Joanna Bérenger oppose real estate projects on arable land, and Smart Cities that are gated and surveillanced? Does Reza Uteem agree with “off-shore”, or “global business” which is, in essence, a way for the capitalist class to avoid paying tax anywhere in the world, and to impoverish the rest of the world? Both MP’s were, themselves, rather too high up in the hierarchy of those paid by the most dangerous of all classes: finance capital, including real estate capital, the destroyers of production, including capitalist production. They need to take a position on this key part of politics: how to get more class equality.
Finance capital is essentially gambling capital (making money from money, not from production or distribution or agriculture, or even from the extraction of minerals, or from fishing) and this type of capital is rather too closely intertwined world-wide with criminal capital. It is well documented, especially since American finance capital, still dominant though falling, has combined so closely with the CIA and the Mafia over the past 75 years or so to advance their coming to power over other sectors of capital.
Internationally, this class is what has begun to wreak the destruction of the USA’s economy and that of the whole of Europe, and bringing their so-called Western civilization into a genocidal frenzy, a financial and military vortex that is drawing in and destroying international law and even human decency, in the midst of mass slaughter. It is doing so right now – after Biden and those before him, now at an accelerated rate, under Trump. Its social base, this vortex of pillage, has been exposed: it is now called “the Epstein class”.
Both Ms Bérenger and Mr. Uteem would do well to work towards separating the Mauritian economy from this catastrophic form of “investment” called “finance capital” including its “real estate” branch.
They should get their parties to work towards getting Mauritius back into production in a big way. They should work towards forcing sugar estates, by new laws, to use their land, NOT for “dumb cities” or any other real estate, but for food production (say, 30% of their land) and to dedicate their infrastructure for the transformation, preservation and distribution, including as exports, of food products. They should work towards forcing hotel bosses to invest in a fishing fleet to sustainably fish our huge waters, and to preserve and transform sea-food, distribute it, including abroad. This would not only help the balance of payments deficit, create jobs, but contribute to giving the Republic of Mauritius dignity enough, and independence enough, to stand up to the UK-USA over Diego Garcia and the Chagos, and to be able to take a lead in international institutions against the Israeli-US genocide in Palestine and aggression in Iran. Instead of the abject bowing down to imperialist power that the MMM, Ramgoolam, Richard Duval and Ashok Subron, and that ex-MMM MPs have combined to do, we need to oppose this imperialism and this dangerous capitalist system it is part of.
Anyone who thinks along the same lines as LALIT, join the others contacting us! The moment demands us to be courageous and to take a stand on the serious issues that threaten our country and our world.
LALIT
