Mobilising in Mauritius

In this article lindsey Collen* outlines the popular resistance to growing economic and social crisis in Mauritius. She argues that social movements must not shy away from political organisation.

Economic & Social crisis

The economic context is the beginning of serious crisis. With the end of protected markets, sugar prices will be down by 36% by 2009, and more after that. The textile industry has almost collapsed. Older local industries – from pots and pans factories to heavy metal works, from cigarette factories to printers – are floundering. Unemployment is rising. Fast expansion of the tourist industry does not inspire too much confidence because of its notorious fragility. The Chikungunya (mosquito-related) epidemic in Reunion Island last year, for example, obliterated its tourist industry altogether.

The National Budget in Mauritius came just a year after a Social Alliance electoral victory that ousted the Mouvement Militant Mauricien, Mouvement Socialistes Mauricien and the Parti Mauricien Social Democratic. By the time of the

Budget people were already becoming disillusioned over the non-respect of electoral promises to “democratise the economy” and “change peoples’ lives in the first 100 days in Government”. It soon became clear that “democratising the economy” was to do with an attempt by Government to spread its tenders, permits, and contracts out amongst a broader-based bourgeoisie than before, no more. The change in peoples’ lives was clearly restricted to non-systemic, albeit important, popular changes like free public transport for everyone over 60, at school or university, or bearing a handicapped person’s card.

Popular Protests

Government policies on all sectors, is affected by the systemic crisis. So, the Budget only brought more issues to the boil. The first immediate reaction was a strong street demonstration by fishermen in Rodrigues Island (part of Mauritius), who found their “bad weather subsidies” more than halved, while their rice bill more than doubled. The Regional Government fell as a direct result of this situation, the Opposition took over, and new elections were set for December. The refusal to use the mother tongues, Kreol and Bhojpuri, in schools is being opposed vociferously. The Government is accused of linguistic genocide under the definition used in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The increasing bankruptcy and indebtedness in the working and middle classes has led to popular resistance as creditors move into people’s homes. Fishermen and other small- vessel owners have gathered in the harbour to physically bar the dredger that is ruining their fishing environment. Street merchants held demonstrations regularly about where they are and are not allowed to ply their wares, with a build-up towards the end-or- the-year spending-spree time. Illicit taxi-drivers had demonstrations in their cars, in a collective attempt to get their precarious work regularised, while counter-demonstrations of licensed taxis demonstrate to defend their incomes. The State is forced to respond to a number of civil-damage cases for deaths and torture in detention, while victims publicly give witness to their hideous experiences.

The pattern has been the same in many different sectors of the working class: they mobilised and held public demonstrations. The closure of the Development Works Corporation was announced in the Budget, as part of the generalised attempt to privatise public works, and this provoked regular demonstrations of the construction workers in front of Parliament. Even employees of the Police

Vehicles Workshop, also being privatised, came out in public protest outside Parliament.

At the same time, the trade union federations held a series of marches on a nation-wide, multi- sectorial level, all contesting the budget. One was called the “bread march”, and another was planned as a women’s march. The demands of these marches were: To continue giving bread to school children, a demand which has been won, to revert to the subsidy on rice and flour, to maintain the traditional tripartite negotiations (government, bosses, unions) for annual across-the-board wage compensation for price increases, not to change labour laws for more flexibility for the bosses, saying “no” to privatisation.

other Classes Protest Too

It has not just been the working class that is unsatisfied with the Budget. Other social classes have also protested, catching the bourgeois State in pincers. The retailers and wholesalers who rent their premises, for example, held a large street demonstration against the end of rent control, which threatens them with drastic rent increases, at a time when many businesses are precarious. Broad sections of the upper middle classes have mobilised in public meetings against the new National Residential Property Tax that the Budget introduced, and the Government has had to back- pedal fast on this, being attacked from too many sides all at once.

But perhaps most politically important amongst the protests have been those of the cane small- planters, faced with the sugar price decrease and then perhaps free-fall. Their protests have not yet mounted into any sort of a threat. However, the economic and political ruling block has, for 60

years or more had to rely on support from these planters, and they are an unruly, protesting class that demands its “fair share” in no uncertain terms, on pain of an easily-made alliance with the working class against the rulers. The economic crisis, and peoples’ expectation of worse to come, has begun to take a heavy social toll. Thefts and burglaries have increased. Hold- ups and break-ins have too. Many people look to emigrating, some legally, others illegally. Suicide has increased, even amongst young children. Intra-familial violence has never been so bad, with deaths resulting from confrontations between brothers, fathers and their children, and men and their wives, over and above the more traditional forms of abuse in the family. Drug-abuse has increased, and unemployed youths end up peddling drugs to pay for their addiction. Mini-rebellions about water shortages or road accidents have started to become common in a country where society flares up easily.

Alternatives

As people realise the gravity of the crisis, they vacillate between moving between and amongst all the basically neo-liberal parties in the two alliances (in Government and in Opposition), becoming angry, and preparing to commit themselves to a creative plan of action. The working class has managed to rise up before, in the 1940’s and the 1970’s. Will it be able to do so again? Students rose up in the 1970’s and transformed education. The small planters have, over history, risen in protest in mass movements at key times. In the 1940’s the Labour Party led workers on a socialist capitalist party.

lalit (Struggle)

It is in these circumstances that the left political work is taking root. Lalit works in alliances with the women’s movement, the trade union movement, the homeless peoples’ movement, the movement against police brutality and the workers education organisations. These alliances that are sometimes at the level of the leaderships as well as the grass-roots, and other times at the levels of the grass roots only.

Create Jobs

Lalit is getting growing support as it mobilises working people to get the Government to force the big landowners and sugar mill owners to use the European compensation money (for the sugar), for example, to create jobs not destroy jobs. Employers have a massive scheme for so-called “voluntary retirement”, making individual workers “offers that they can’t refuse”. Instead, there are ways of collectively creating jobs, if the bosses refuse, then Government must take over the land in order to create jobs on it. If the Government refuses, then the people will have to take it over themselves.

No bASES

Lalit is also part of an ongoing movement to close down the huge United States military base on Diego Garcia, which is one of the Chagos Islands illegally stolen from Mauritius by the United Kingdom in

the late 1960’s. In 2004, at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, Lalit was amongst the organisations that held the first ever meeting of the network known then as “No U.S. Bases”, and known now as “NO BASES”.

In Nairobi, for the 2007 World Social Forum, we will be part of the No Bases network, as we prepare for the first Conference, which will be held in early March in Ecuador.

Conclusion

In Mauritius, and in the region, it is imperative that people in social movements and trade unions do not shy away from overtly political organisation. This hesitancy to take on the existing ruling parties politically, as well as on civil society, social movements and trade unions levels, will risk further weakening the working class and

its organisations, and will leave the main terrain for social change open to a host of neo-capitalist parties. What is important is to find new ways of doing politics that are not purely electoral, and that change the nature of political organisation itself. This means building up political programmes

for economic and social change, that put into question the entire existing unjust, unfree, unequal society, and that bring in the participation of all the organised sections of the exploited and dominated people.

 

*Lindsey Collen is an activist of Lalit, a socialist political party in Mauritius