#contre

#Contrepèterie_invisible

Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz est une historienne et une militante connue aux USA pour sa participation active aux luttes d’émancipation des années 60 (droits civiques, anticolonialiste,féministe). Elle nous propose cette contre-histoire passionnante des États-Unis, « telle que les peuples indigènes la vécurent », ce qui « requiert de mettre à neuf le récit national ».

S’appuyant sur une description précises des faits, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz n’hésite pas à qualifier en terme de « génocide », la politique de colonisation de peuplement conduite par les colons états-uniens. D’autres auteurs, notamment Robert Jaulin, ont employé le terme d’ethnocide pour décrire les conséquences du colonialisme (voir le lien ci-dessous).

La première partie du livre est consacrée à l’examen historique des faits concernant l’éradication des nations autochtones. Il semblerait que ces faits historique soient méconnus ou ignorés de la grande partie de la population états-unienne. Des mises en perspectives expliquent comment ces faits structurent encore largement l’idéologie du pays.

Les fondations de l’histoire des États-Unis sont à trouver dans le débarquement des caravelles espagnoles sur le continent d’Amérique. Le mythe fondateur états-unien, proprement dit, débute officiellement, à l’issue de la guerre d’indépendance des colonies anglaises, en 1783. Environ 4 millions d’européens vivent alors sur 13 colonies britanniques, le long de la côte atlantique. « La conquête de l’Ouest » qui s’en suit, conduit progressivement en un siècle à la dépossession de l’intégralité des territoires autochtones situés sur cette partie du continent.

L’autrice explique par le détail comment les conquérants étasuniens ont systématiquement mis en œuvre une politique de colonisation de peuplement en chassant les nations indigènes afin de s’approprier leurs terres. Plusieurs méthodes furent employées à cette fin : les massacres des populations, la destruction de leurs ressources végétales et animales (notamment les bisons), la manipulation des nations indigènes dressées les unes contre les autres, la signature d’accords systématiquement violés, l’enferment des autochtones dans des réserves racistes, l’assimilation forcée, l’acculturation, la corruption, leur dépendance aux logiques capitalistes…

Le mythe colonialiste du « nouveau monde » est taillé en pièces par l’autrice. Ce récit évoque un continent vide et habité par des sauvages avant l’arrivée des Européen ; ces derniers s’émerveillent, par exemple, de la présence de « bois ouverts », estimant qu’il s’agissait d’une configuration caractéristique de l’Amérique du nord, sans voir que ce paysage n’était rien d’autre que la résultante du rapport que les peuples indigènes entretiennent avec la nature.

L’autrice remet en cause le contenu du mythe fondateur états-unien qui fait de cette nation, se constituant sur le colonialisme le plus brutal, une nation exceptionnelle. On glorifie l’appropriation du continent par une sorte de délire mystique alors que la création des États-Unis est directement liée à l’émergence du capitalisme et de ses contingences de développement économique.

Outre son intérêt pour la restitution historique de faits qui semblent méconnus au pays de l’oncle Sam, l’ouvrage propose une réflexion assez approfondie sur les considérants idéologiques structurant l’imaginaire états-unien encore aujourd’hui. Ce qui constitue la seconde partie de l’ouvrage.

On voit comment, à partir de fables nationales telles que celle du « destin manifeste », on construit un mythe selon lequel les États unis est une nation prédestinée à conquérir les territoires « d’un océan à l’autre ». Le pays est composé « d’exceptionnelles entités » eu égard à l’influence calviniste des premiers colons. De ce fait, la fin justifiant les moyens, rien n’est plus ordinaire que d’y entendre des voix conduite à vanter « les conséquence positives de la colonisation ».

Enfin, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz explique comment la guerre permanente contre les peuples autochtones a construit une logique militarise omniprésente, encore aujourd’hui, dans l’idéologie dominante de ce pays. Le militarisme états-unien sert de justificatif à la politique impérialiste conduite dans le monde entier. Il est rappelé, aussi, en quoi le deuxième amendement de la constitution (sur le port d’arme) en est tributaire.

L’autrice explique comment le passé colonial contre les nations indigènes, a directement structuré des concepts militaires, encore mis en pratique à notre époque par les États-Unis dans leur politique impérialiste (guerres du Vietnam, d’Irak, etc.). Les termes en usage pour définir les tactiques guerrières pour exterminer les nations indigènes lors de le « conquête de l’Ouest » tels que « guerre totale », « guerre irrégulière » ou « guerre de contre-insurrection » font encore partie du vocabulaire des militaires états-uniens d’aujourd’hui. On apprend, enfin que, bien au-delà des frontières du continent américain, le terme de « pays indiens » est encore employé encore de nos jours, par l’administration militaire États-unienne pour désigner une zone située derrière les lignes ennemies.

Un extrait de la conclusion de Contre-histoire des États-Unis, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz :

▻https://www.salon.com/2014/10/13/north_america_is_a_crime_scene_the_untold_history_of_america

North America is a crime scene: The untold history of America this Columbus Day
The founding myth of the United States is a lie. It is time to re-examine our ruthless past — and present
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Published October 13, 2014 5:45PM (EDT)

Excerpted from “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”

That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within—and yet continually obscured by—what is essentially a settler colony’s national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy. . . . [T]he status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d’etre. —Jodi Byrd

The conventional narrative of U.S. history routinely segregates the “Indian wars” as a subspecialization within the dubious category “the West.” Then there are the westerns, those cheap novels, movies, and television shows that nearly every American imbibed with mother’s milk and that by the mid-twentieth century were popular in every corner of the world. The architecture of US world dominance was designed and tested by this period of continental U.S. militarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its own innovations in total war. The opening of the twenty-first century saw a new, even more brazen form of U.S. militarism and imperialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W. Bush turned over control of U.S. foreign policy to a long-gestating neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control included two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars employing U.S. Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template that continued after their political power waned.

Injun Country

One highly regarded military analyst stepped forward to make the connections between the “Indian wars” and what he considered the country’s bright imperialist past and future. Robert D. Kaplan, in his 2005 book Imperial Grunts, presented several case studies that he considered highly successful operations: Yemen, Colombia, Mongolia, and the Philippines, in addition to ongoing complex projects in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq. While US citizens and many of their elected representatives called for ending the US military interventions they knew about—including Iraq and Afghanistan—Kaplan hailed protracted counterinsurgencies in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific. He presented a guide for the U.S. controlling those areas of the world based on its having achieved continental dominance in North America by means of counterinsurgency and employing total and unlimited war.

Kaplan, a meticulous researcher and influential writer born in 1952 in New York City, wrote for major newspapers and magazines before serving as “chief geopolitical strategist” for the private security think tank Stratfor. Among other prestigious posts, he has been a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Defense Policy Board, a federal advisory committee to the US Department of Defense. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan as one of the world’s “top 100 global thinkers.” Author of numerous best-selling books, including Balkan Ghosts and Surrender or Starve, Kaplan became one of the principal intellectual boosters for U.S. power in the world through the tried-and-true “American way of war.” This is the way of war dating to the British-colonial period that military historian John Grenier called a combination of “unlimited war and irregular war,” a military tradition “that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages and agricultural resources . . . in shockingly violent campaigns to achieve their goals of conquest.”

Kaplan sums up his thesis in the prologue to Imperial Grunts, which he subtitles “Injun Country”:

By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice.

The Pentagon divided the planet into five area commands—similar to the way that the Indian Country of the American West had been divided in the mid-nineteenth century by the U.S. Army. . . . [A]ccording to the soldiers and marines I met on the ground in far-flung corners of the earth, the comparison with the nineteenth century was . . . apt. “Welcome to Injun Country” was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. To be sure, the problem for the American military was less [Islamic] fundamentalism than anarchy. The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.

Kaplan goes on to ridicule “elites in New York and Washington” who debate imperialism in “grand, historical terms,” while individuals from all the armed services interpret policy according to the particular circumstances they face and are indifferent to or unaware of the fact that they are part of an imperialist project. This book shows how colonialism and imperialism work.

Kaplan challenges the concept of manifest destiny, arguing that “it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire in the western part of the continent.” Rather, he argues, western empire was brought about by “small groups of frontiersmen, separated from each other by great distances.” Here Kaplan refers to what Grenier calls settler “rangers,” destroying Indigenous towns and fields and food supplies. Although Kaplan downplays the role of the U.S. Army compared to the settler vigilantes, which he equates to the modern Special Forces, he acknowledges that the regular army provided lethal backup for settler counterinsurgency in slaughtering the buffalo, the food supply of Plains peoples, as well as making continuous raids on settlements to kill or confine the families of the Indigenous fighters. Kaplan summarizes the genealogy of U.S. militarism today:

Whereas the average American at the dawn of the new millennium found patriotic inspiration in the legacies of the Civil War and World War II, when the evils of slavery and fascism were confronted and vanquished, for many commissioned and noncommissioned officers the U.S. Army’s defining moment was fighting the “Indians.”

The legacy of the Indian wars was palpable in the numerous military bases spread across the South, the Middle West, and particularly the Great Plains: that vast desert and steppe comprising the Army’s historical “heartland,” punctuated by such storied outposts as Forts Hays, Kearney, Leavenworth, Riley, and Sill. Leavenworth, where the Oregon and Santa Fe trails separated, was now the home of the Army’s Command and General Staff College; Riley, the base of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry, now that of the 1st Infantry Division; and Sill, where Geronimo lived out the last years of his life, the headquarters of the U.S. Artillery. . . .

While microscopic in size, it was the fast and irregular military actions against the Indians, memorialized in bronze and oil by Remington, that shaped the nature of American nationalism.

Although Kaplan relies principally on the late-nineteenth-century source of US counterinsurgency, in a footnote he reports what he learned at the Airborne Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, North Carolina: “It is a small but interesting fact that members of the 101st Airborne Division, in preparation for their parachute drop on D-Day, shaved themselves in Mohawk style and applied war paint on their faces.” This takes us back to the pre-independence colonial wars and then through US independence and the myth popularized by The Last of the Mohicans.

Kaplan debunks the argument that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, brought the United States into a new era of warfare and prompted it to establish military bases around the world. Prior to 2001, Kaplan rightly observes, the US Army’s Special Operations Command had been carrying out maneuvers since the 1980s in “170 countries per year, with an average of nine ‘quiet professionals’ on each mission. America’s reach was long; its involvement in the obscurest states protean. Rather than the conscript army of citizen soldiers that fought World War II, there was now a professional military that, true to other imperial forces throughout history, enjoyed the soldiering life for its own sake.”

On October 13, 2011, testifying before the Armed Services Committee of the US House of Representatives, General Martin Dempsey stated: “I didn’t become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of the United States, and an end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global power. . . . That is not who we are as a nation.”

The Return of Legalized Torture

Bodies—tortured bodies, sexually violated bodies, imprisoned bodies, dead bodies—arose as a primary topic in the first years of the George W. Bush administration following the September 2001 attacks with a war of revenge against Afghanistan and the overthrow of the government of Iraq. Afghans resisting U.S. forces and others who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were taken into custody, and most of them were sent to a hastily constructed prison facility on the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on land the United States appropriated in its 1898 war against Cuba. Rather than bestowing the status of prisoner of war on the detainees, which would have given them certain rights under the Geneva Conventions, they were designated as “unlawful combatants,” a status previously unknown in the annals of Western warfare. As such, the detainees were subjected to torture by U.S. interrogators and shamelessly monitored by civilian psychologists and medical personnel.

In response to questions and condemnations from around the globe, a University of California international law professor, John C. Yoo, on leave to serve as assistant U.S. attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, penned in March 2003 what became the infamous “Torture Memo.” Not much was made at the time of one of the precedents Yoo used to defend the designation “unlawful combatant,” the US Supreme Court’s 1873 opinion in Modoc Indian Prisoners.

In 1872, a group of Modoc men led by Kintpuash, also known as Captain Jack, attempted to return to their own country in Northern California after the U.S. Army had rounded them up and forced them to share a reservation in Oregon. The insurgent group of fifty-three was surrounded by U.S. troops and Oregon militiamen and forced to take refuge in the barren and rugged lava beds around Mount Lassen, a dormant volcano, a part of their ancestral homeland that they knew every inch of. More than a thousand troops commanded by General Edward R. S. Canby, a former Civil War general, attempted to capture the resisters, but had no success as the Modocs engaged in effective guerrilla warfare. Before the Civil War, Canby had built his military career fighting in the Second Seminole War and later in the invasion of Mexico. Posted to Utah on the eve of the Civil War, he had led attacks against the Navajos, and then began his Civil War service in New Mexico. Therefore, Canby was a seasoned Indian killer. In a negotiating meeting between the general and Kintpuash, the Modoc leader killed the general and the other commissioners when they would allow only for surrender. In response, the United States sent another former Civil War general in with more than a thousand additional soldiers as reinforcements, and in April 1873 these troops attacked the Modoc stronghold, this time forcing the Indigenous fighters to flee. After four months of fighting that cost the United States almost $500,000—equal to nearly $10 million currently—and the lives of more than four hundred of its soldiers and a general, the nationwide backlash against the Modocs was vengeful. Kintpuash and several other captured Modocs were imprisoned and then hanged at Alcatraz, and the Modoc families were scattered and incarcerated on reservations. Kintpuash’s corpse was embalmed and exhibited at circuses around the country. The commander of the army’s Pacific Military Division at the time, Lieutenant General John M. Schofield, wrote of the Modoc War in his memoir, Forty-Six Years in the Army: “If the innocent could be separated from the guilty, plague, pestilence, and famine would not be an unjust punishment for the crimes committed in this country against the original occupants of the soil.”

Drawing a legal analogy between the Modoc prisoners and the Guantánamo detainees, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Yoo employed the legal category of homo sacer—in Roman law, a person banned from society, excluded from its legal protections but still subject to the sovereign’s power. Anyone may kill a homo sacer without it being considered murder. As Jodi Byrd notes, “One begins to understand why John C. Yoo’s infamous March 14, 2003, torture memos cited the 1865 Military Commissions and the 1873 The Modoc Indian Prisoners legal opinions in order to articulate executive power in declaring the state of exception, particularly when The Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion explicitly marks the Indian combatant as homo sacer to the United States.” To buttress his claim, Yoo quoted from the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion:

It cannot be pretended that a United States soldier is guilty of murder if he kills a public enemy in battle, which would be the case if the municipal law were in force and applicable to an act committed under such circumstances. All the laws and customs of civilized warfare may not be applicable to an armed conflict with the Indian tribes upon our western frontier; but the circumstances attending the assassination of Canby [Army general] and Thomas [U.S. peace commissioner] are such as to make their murder as much a violation of the laws of savage as of civilized warfare, and the Indians concerned in it fully understood the baseness and treachery of their act.

Byrd points out that, according to this line of thinking, anyone who could be defined as “Indian” could thus be killed legally, and they also could be held responsible for crimes they committed against any US soldier. “As a result, citizens of American Indian nations become in this moment the origin of the stateless terrorist combatant within U.S. enunciations of sovereignty.”

Ramped Up Militarization

The Chagos Archipelago comprises more than sixty small coral islands isolated in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and Indonesia, a thousand miles south of the nearest continent, India. Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major U.S. military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia. As if being rounded up and removed from their homelands in the name of global security were not cruel enough, before being deported the Chagossians had to watch as British agents and U.S. troops herded their pet dogs into sealed sheds where they were gassed and burned. As David Vine writes in his chronicle of this tragedy:

“The base on Diego Garcia has become one of the most secretive and powerful U.S. military facilities in the world, helping to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), threatening Iran, China, Russia, and nations from southern Africa to southeast Asia, host to a secret CIA detention center for high-profile terrorist suspects, and home to thousands of U.S. military personnel and billions of dollars in deadly weaponry.”

The Chagossians are not the only indigenous people around the world that the US military has displaced. The military established a pattern during and after the Vietnam War of forcibly removing indigenous peoples from sites deemed strategic for the placement of military bases. The peoples of the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific and Puerto Rico’s Vieques Island are perhaps the best-known examples, but there were also the Inughuit of Thule, Greenland, and the thousands of Okinawans and Indigenous peoples of Micronesia. During the harsh deportation of the Micronesians in the 1970s, the press took some notice. In response to one reporter’s question, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of the Micronesians: “There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?” This is a statement of permissive genocide.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States operated more than 900 military bases around the world, including 287 in Germany, 130 in Japan, 106 in South Korea, 89 in Italy, 57 in the British Isles, 21 in Portugal, and 19 in Turkey. The number also comprised additional bases or installations located in Aruba, Australia, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Singapore, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Crete, Sicily, Iceland, Romania, Bulgaria, Honduras, Colombia, and Cuba (Guantánamo Bay), among many other locations in some 150 countries, along with those recently added in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In her book The Militarization of Indian Country, Anishinaabe activist and writer Winona LaDuke analyzes the continuing negative effects of the military on Native Americans, considering the consequences wrought on Native economy, land, future, and people, especially Native combat veterans and their families. Indigenous territories in New Mexico bristle with nuclear weapons storage, and Shoshone and Paiute territories in Nevada are scarred by decades of aboveground and underground nuclear weapons testing. The Navajo Nation and some New Mexico Pueblos have experienced decades of uranium strip mining, the pollution of water, and subsequent deadly health effects. “I am awed by the impact of the military on the world and on Native America,” LaDuke writes. “It is pervasive.”

Political scientist Cynthia Enloe, who specializes in US foreign policy and the military, observes that US culture has become even more militarized since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Her analysis of this trend draws on a feminist perspective:

Militarization . . . [is] happening at the individual level, when a woman who has a son is persuaded that the best way she can be a good mother is to allow the military recruiter to recruit her son so her son will get off the couch. When she is persuaded to let him go, even if reluctantly, she’s being militarized. She’s not as militarized as somebody who is a Special Forces soldier, but she’s being militarized all the same. Somebody who gets excited because a jet bomber flies over the football stadium to open the football season and is glad that he or she is in the stadium to see it, is being militarized. So militarization is not just about the question “do you think the military is the most important part of the state?” (although obviously that matters). It’s not just “do you think that the use of collective violence is the most effective way to solve social problems?”—which is also a part of militarization. But it’s also about ordinary, daily culture, certainly in the United States.

As John Grenier notes, however, the cultural aspects of militarization are not new; they have deep historical roots, reaching into the nation’s British-colonial past and continuing through unrelenting wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing over three centuries.

“Beyond its sheer military utility, Americans also found a use for the first way of war in the construction of an ‘American identity.’. . . [T]he enduring appeal of the romanticized myth of the ‘settlement’ (not the conquest) of the frontier, either by ‘actual’ men such as Robert Rogers or Daniel Boone or fictitious ones like Nathaniel Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper’s creation, points to what D. H. Lawrence called the ‘myth of the essential white American.’”

The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment as a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture. Everyday life and the culture in general are damaged by ramped-up militarization, and this includes academia, particularly the social sciences, with psychologists and anthropologists being recruited as advisors to the military. Anthropologist David H. Price, in his indispensable book Weaponizing Anthropology, remarks that “anthropology has always fed between the lines of war.” Anthropology was born of European and U.S. colonial wars. Price, like Enloe, sees an accelerated pace of militarization in the early twenty-first century: “Today’s weaponization of anthropology and other social sciences has been a long time coming, and post-9/11 America’s climate of fear coupled with reductions in traditional academic funding provided the conditions of a sort of perfect storm for the militarization of the discipline and the academy as a whole.”

In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven-hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask: “Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat?” These are key questions. Stone and Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions. The authors see the post–World War II development of the United States into the world’s sole superpower as a sharp divergence from the founders’ original intent and historical development prior to the mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding.

North America is a Crime Scene

Jodi Byrd writes: “The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime.” It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples—and what still happens. It’s not just past colonialist actions but also “the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands” that allows the United States “to cast its imperialist gaze globally” with “what is essentially a settler colony’s national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy,” while “the status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d’etre.” Here Byrd quotes Lakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who spells out the connection between the “Indian wars” and the Iraq War:

The current mission of the United States to become the center of political enlightenment to be taught to the rest of the world began with the Indian wars and has become the dangerous provocation of this nation’s historical intent. The historical connection between the Little Big Horn event and the “uprising” in Baghdad must become part of the political dialogue of America if the fiction of decolonization is to happen and the hoped for deconstruction of the colonial story is to come about.

A “race to innocence” is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country’s past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence.

These are symptoms, and there are many more, of a deeply troubled society, and they are not new. The large and influential civil rights, student, labor, and women’s movements of the 1950s through the 1970s exposed the structural inequalities in the economy and the historical effects of more than two centuries of slavery and brutal genocidal wars waged against Indigenous peoples. For a time, US society verged on a process of truth seeking regarding past atrocities, making demands to end aggressive wars and to end poverty, witnessed by the huge peace movement of the 1970s and the War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, prison reform, women’s equity and reproductive rights, promotion of the arts and humanities, public media, the Indian Self-Determination Act, and many other initiatives.

A more sophisticated version of the race to innocence that helps perpetuate settler colonialism began to develop in social movement theory in the 1990s, popularized in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth, the third volume in a trilogy, is one of a number of books in an academic fad of the early twenty-first century seeking to revive the Medieval European concept of the commons as an aspiration for contemporary social movements. Most writings about the commons barely mention the fate of Indigenous peoples in relation to the call for all land to be shared. Two Canadian scholar-activists, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, for example, do not mince words in rejecting Native land claims and sovereignty, characterizing them as xenophobic elitism. They see Indigenous claims as “regressive neo-racism in light of the global diasporas arising from oppression around the world.”

Cree scholar Lorraine Le Camp calls this kind of erasure of Indigenous peoples in North America “terranullism,” harking back to the characterization, under the Doctrine of Discovery, of purportedly vacant lands as terra nullis. This is a kind of no-fault history. From the theory of a liberated future of no borders and nations, of a vague commons for all, the theorists obliterate the present and presence of Indigenous nations struggling for their liberation from states of colonialism. Thereby, Indigenous rhetoric and programs for decolonization, nationhood, and sovereignty are, according to this project, rendered invalid and futile. From the Indigenous perspective, as Jodi Byrd writes, “any notion of the commons that speaks for and as indigenous as it advocates transforming indigenous governance or incorporating indigenous peoples into a multitude that might then reside on those lands forcibly taken from indigenous peoples does nothing to disrupt the genocidal and colonialist intent of the initial and now repeated historical process.”

Excerpted from “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Beacon Press, 2014). Copyright 2014 by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

A propos de Robert Jaulin :

▻https://www.persee.fr/doc/jsa_0037-9174_1998_num_84_1_2825

▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jaulin

Pascal Menoret, le traducteur, est un brillant arabisant français (qui a donc dû chercher du travail à l’étranger !).

Je trouve que c’est bien traduit ; en tous cas, agréable à lire. Le traducteur a aussi écrit l’introduction.

Autre chose, qui n’a rien à voir avec la traduction... maintenant que j’y pense ; j’ai oublié de le mettre dans ma présentation : le seul reproche que je ferais c’est l’absence de cartes, à l’exception de la reproduction, à la fin de l’ouvrage, d’un document à peine lisible. Dommage cela aurait été bien utile.

#histoire #contre-histoire #livre #USA #Etats-Unis #maïs #conquête #alliance #nation #Etat-nation #colonialisme #peuples_autochtones #créolisation #génocide #virus #variole #extermination #crime #massacre #Amérindiens

pour ce qui est devenu le Québec, Marie-Christine Lévesque et Serge Bouchard, tombés en amour pour les Innus, décrivent dans Le peuple rieur, Hommage à mes amis innus (ethnographie qui ne propose pas une histoire d’ensemble), un bref moment de rapport plutôt égalitaire, à l’arrivée de Champlain, où l’établissement de comptoirs commerciaux isolés, rares, occasionne des échanges (traite des fourrures), et durant lequel les Innus sont admirés par les arrivants pour leurs capacités cynégétiques ainsi que leur manière de réussir à subsister sur un territoire que les arrivants voient comme principalement hostile. mais c’était avant qu’ils deviennent des ostie de sauvages.
#peuples_premiers #nations_sans_état

Le nom et le livre me disait bien quelque chose : ▻https://www.instagram.com/p/CZRAeAXqdeC

Encore un truc joyeux à lire à trouver :p

Aussi, une #BD ...
Une histoire populaire de l’empire américain

https://www.editions-delcourt.fr/sites/default/files/styles/image_list/public/product/9782413011088-001-X.jpeg?itok=gJHlsw0w#.jpg

Depuis le génocide des Indiens jusqu’à la guerre en Irak en passant par le développement d’un capitalisme financier globalisé, les États- Unis se sont constitués au fil des siècles comme un empire incontournable. Peu à peu, leur histoire est devenue mythologie, mais ce livre propose le récit d’une nation, un récit qui a réussi à changer le regard des Américains sur eux-mêmes.

▻https://www.editions-delcourt.fr/bd/series/serie-une-histoire-populaire-de-l-empire-americian/album-une-histoire-populaire-de-l-empire-americian
#bande-dessinée #histoire_populaire

que j’avais signalé ici :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/784696

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1028912

Survivors: ‘Greek coastguard was next to us when boat capsized’

Two Syrian refugees recall their harrowing journey and pin blame on the coastguard for the devastating shipwreck.

“The boat was too heavy,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We were sitting next to each other, and there was a constant fear of sinking.”

On the derelict blue ship that was soon to hit international headlines, he saw about 750 people crammed together, shoulder-to-shoulder, unable to move. They had all hoped to eventually reach Europe.

In a few days, he would see hundreds of these people drown as a Greek coastguard ship floated nearby.

Ahmed fled Syria with his friend Mohammed*, 23. They both asked to use pseudonyms because they fear the Greek government would punish them for speaking out about what they saw that night.

They are two of the 104 survivors of the shipwreck off the coast of Pylos, Greece. Seventy-eight people have been confirmed dead.

Like hundreds of other people on board, their third companion, Mohammed’s cousin, was never found.

Their path to the central Mediterranean was taken in many steps. Ahmed and Mohammed said they left home hoping for a future without violence.

Their journey took them to Lebanon, then Egypt and Libya.

They spent about a month in Libya, where smugglers kept them closed up in an apartment with Egyptians, Pakistanis and other Syrians also making the journey.

Mohammed said the smugglers beat the Egyptians and Pakistanis, constantly cursing and insulting them.

Finally, in the first days of June, they were told, “You are leaving today.”

They were put on the back of trucks that drove to the shore, were loaded onto small boats and were taken to a trawler, the Adriana, out in deeper waters.

“They were beating people there,” Ahmed said.

“They were beating them while taking them to the lower deck of the boat. … It was very bad down there. It smelled of diesel and fish. You couldn’t breathe.”

Ahmed and his companions managed to pay a bribe of $200 to get themselves a spot on the upper deck.

But wherever the passengers sat on the ship, they were wedged together.

Women and children were kept below in the hold. From their cramped spot on the top deck, the young men could see the sea.
‘People were starting to lose consciousness’

From the second day of the voyage, the boat’s engine started breaking down.

“They would repair it, and after a while, it would break down again,” Mohammed said. “Every time they repaired it, it would stop again after two to three hours.”

After the second day at sea, food and water ran out. Panic began to percolate across the ship.

“At that time, people were starting to lose consciousness,” Ahmed said.

“They were falling on the ground. They were fainting. Some were shaking. We were seeing tens, hundreds of people in this state.”

They heard fights were breaking out all across the boat due to hunger, thirst and fear.

“Me, Ahmed and my relative who is now missing were always trying to keep our spirits up,” Mohammed said. “When someone cried, we made jokes. ‘We will make it,’ we were saying to ourselves. But everyone was going crazy.”

By the fourth day, they heard disturbing news from the hold.

“Some people coming up from below said, ‘There are dead people down there,’” Ahmed said.

“They said there were six dead bodies on the boat. Five bodies were down below, and we didn’t see them. One was on the upper deck. We saw him.”

Ahmed and Mohammed said the passengers started telephoning the Italian authorities and the Greek coastguard to ask for help.

“From the fourth day onwards, the Greek coastguard had been aware of us,” Mohammed said.

By the fifth day, June 13, they said it looked like the Adriana had stopped moving completely.

In the afternoon, a helicopter flew overhead.

The passengers could not understand from the deck, but it was the Greek coastguard. In the afternoon, one and then another commercial ship passed by and tossed those on board water over the waves.

“People were saying: ‘Take us with you.’ They were saying, ‘No.’” Mohammed said. “We asked for help, but they refused to help us.”

A Greek coastguard vessel finally approached the fishing trawler around midnight in the first minutes of June 14, the friends said. “‘Follow us,’ they told us. We followed them,” Mohammed said.

“Half an hour later, our boat stopped completely. It could not move. They came back and tied us to their boat.”

Ahmed and Mohammed said the coastguard started to tow their stalled-out trawler, but it took a sharp turn, and the Adriana heaved precariously left, then right, then capsized.

“They were right next to us when it capsized. In the moment it sank, they moved away from us. They deliberately made us sink,” Mohammed said. “We were standing on top of the boat, and we were able to see everything clearly.”

Tossed into the dark Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of people tried to find something to cling onto, some way to survive. “People were holding onto me,” Ahmed said.

“I was going under the water and getting away from people. Every time I got away, I would come across someone else, and they would hold onto me to save themselves. When someone grabbed onto me, we both went underwater together.”

After an hour and a half, Ahmed said he spotted an inflatable coastguard boat and swam towards it.

“They were 200 or 300 metres [220 to 330 yards] away from us,” he said. “I swam to them and got into the boat. They did not come close to us to save us. They were standing far away, and those who could swim were going towards them, like me.”

As he made his way towards the inflatable boat, Ahmed had to push aside bodies floating in the water.

Once taken to the larger coastguard boat, Ahmed was reunited with Mohammed. The two hugged each other, overwhelmed and elated to have found each other.

They started asking about their third companion. He had not made it, and they realised how incomplete their relief was.

The survivors of the shipwreck were taken ashore. Mohammed said that when they were first held in the Greek city of Kalamata, the authorities came to take his testimony of the tragedy three or four times.

“When we told them that we had been towed with a rope, they stopped,” he said. “They were saying that the problem was our boat. They wrote our statements with their own words. They did not write down what we said. They made us say it and write it down.”

Ahmed said no officials have ever taken his testimony.
‘Accountability vacuum’

Both men are now in the Malakasa refugee camp, 40km (25 miles) north of Athens. They are awaiting their asylum claims to be processed. Mohammed is desperate for news of his cousin, even if that news is confirmation he is dead.

Ahmed’s and Mohammed’s accounts contradict the account of the Greek coastguard, which has said the passengers of the Adriana refused aid, it was only immobile for about 20 minutes before it capsized and the coastguard had not towed the boat prior to it capsizing.

Survivors’ accounts line up with other evidence.

The Greek investigative website Solomon has published emails showing that the Greek authorities had been notified that the ship was in distress by 6pm (15:00 GMT) on June 13. And tracking data published and verified by the BBC and The New York Times show that the trawler was not moving for at least seven hours before it capsized.

When asked to comment on allegations that the coastguard towed the boat and was involved in the shipwreck, the Greek Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Insular Policy told Al Jazeera: “The required information is part of the investigation procedure that is being conducted under strict confidentiality based on the instructions given by the prosecutor of the Supreme Court. Regarding the details of the operation plan of the Hellenic coastguard, no further comments can be made by our service.”

Fingers have been pointed at the Greek coastguard for both the shipwreck and its large death toll.

“It has been evidenced that the Hellenic coastguard uses a range of tactics to move boats they have intercepted at sea into different territorial areas to avoid responsibility for search and rescue and the lodging of their applications for international protection,” said Hope Barker, a policy analyst at the Border Violence Monitoring Network.

“Whilst this usually includes towing boats back to Turkish territorial waters, it is equally likely that if the boat was closer to Italian territorial waters, they would try to transfer it there instead.”

The organisation is calling for an independent investigation and for Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, to withdraw from Greece.

“Violations of fundamental rights by the Hellenic coastguard are routine and systematised operations that have proven to be under-investigated by the Greek state. There is an accountability vacuum that allows these actions to continue unabated,” Barker said.

In Malakasa, Mohammed said he cannot stop thinking about the moment the boat capsized and the screams of the people around him. He does not know how he survived in the water.

“I shouted Ahmed’s and my cousin’s names for a while,” he said. “In that moment, I heard a voice screaming, ‘Mother! Mother!’ I asked that person for his name, and he said, ‘Fuat’.

“He and I told each other our names, so that whichever of us survived would be able to bring the news to the other’s family.”

▻https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/7/5/survivors-greek-coastguard-was-next-to-us-when-boat-capsized

Under the unwatchful eye of the authorities’ deactivated cameras: dying in the darkest depths of the Mediterranean

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A collaborative investigation by Solomon, Forensis, The Guardian and ARD presents the most complete tracing, to date, of the course that the fishing vessel Adriana took until it ultimately sank, causing over 600 people to drown − while under the supervision of Greek and European authorities. A document reveals that according to Frontex recommendations, the Coast Guard vessel was obligated to record the operation on video.

In the early hours of June 14, the state-of-the-art cameras of the Coast Guard vessel ΠΠΛΣ-920 were off.

The deadliest shipwreck within the Greek Search and Rescue Zone, one of the largest the Mediterranean has ever seen, was reportedly not visually detected.

Only hours before, aerial photos of the overloaded fishing vessel were taken. Nearby tankers recorded videos before they were ordered to leave the scene. There were satellite images that captured its movement.

But the exact circumstances in which the Adriana capsized off Pylos, killing more than 600 people, remain unclear three weeks on.

In affidavits and interviews, some of the 104 survivors attributed the sinking of the fishing vessel to an attempt by the Hellenic Coast Guard to tow it to Italian waters.

The Coast Guard emphasizes that it saved human lives, and maintains that the fishing vessel overturned due to a disturbance by the passengers.

Solomon, in a joint investigation with the research group Forensis, The Guardian and German public broadcaster ARD reveals: the Coast Guard vessel ΠΠΛΣ-920, the only vessel present at the time the Adriana capsized, was obligated to “document its operation by video-recording” in accordance with a 2021 Frontex document which recommends that the Greek authorities record their operations continually.

If this had been done, today there would be answers to the questions that the victims’ families are still asking.

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The ΠΠΛΣ-920 cameras were supposed to record

By midday on June 13, the Greek and Italian authorities and Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency), were aware of the overloaded fishing vessel, which had been sailing aimlessly for four days in the central Mediterranean – its only means of navigation was a compass and the position of the sun.

The activist network Alarm Phone had also relayed to the authorities the desperate SOS of some 750 men, women, and children — mostly from Pakistan, Egypt and Syria — who, lacking potable water, were using their shoelaces to lower containers into the sea: “They are urgently asking for help”.

ΠΠΛΣ-920, the Coast Guard vessel which received the order to depart from the port of Souda, Crete to assist, has been the pride of the Coast Guard since 2021. European funding covered 90% of its cost, and it is one of the best-equipped vessels available in Greece.

And it could not be in better hands: earlier this year, in March, its captain was awarded for “his valuable contribution to the protection of maritime borders and human life at sea.”

According to the Coast Guard, ΠΠΛΣ-920, like its three sister ships (ΠΠΛΣ-900, ΠΠΛΣ-910 and ΠΠΛΣ-930), has two state-of-the-art thermal camera systems. According to the Coast Guard, however, when the fishing vessel capsized, the cameras were not in operation because the crew’s attention was focused on the rescue efforts.

“When we have an incident, we try to have the ability to operate seamlessly. Making some crew members ‘inactive’ so that they can record a video, you understand, is unethical,” Coast Guard spokesman Nikos Alexiou stated on June 15, justifying why the incident was not recorded on video.

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However, one of the three former and current Coast Guard officers who spoke to us during our investigation, said that these cameras do not require constant manual operation and they exist exactly for this reason – to record such incidents.

But there is still a critical issue: a document reveals that, according to Frontex recommendations in March 2021, the Coast Guard vessel was obligated to record the operation.

The document states that “if feasible, all actions taken by Frontex assets or Frontex co-financed assets… should be documented by video consistently.”

The cost of the ΠΠΛΣ-290, one of four state-of-the-art vessels purchased for €55.5 million, has been 90% financed through Frontex. It is designated to be “available for four months a year, for Frontex missions outside of Greek waters.”

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Frontex had recommended the visual recording of operations, during a meeting where representatives from Greece were present as well as from other European countries, following complaints of human rights violations by the Coast Guard.

The complaints that were assessed during the meeting referred to the exact same practice, attributed to ΠΠΛΣ-920: towing vessels of asylum seekers outside of Greek waters.
We created a 3D model of the Adriana

Solomon, Forensis, The Guardian and ARD worked together and after analyzing a wealth of evidence, we present the most complete picture to date, of the Adriana’s course up to the time of its sinking.

We collected more than 20 survivor accounts and analyzed material derived from, among others, witness statements, official reports from the Coast Guard and Frontex, deck logs of the Coast Guard vessel and tankers in transit, aerial photographs and data on the position and movement of ships and aircraft. We also secured exclusive footage from the commercial vessels that were in the area and spoke to sources at Frontex, the Coast Guard, and rescuers.

The analysis of this information resulted in a detailed chronology of the events that occurred on June 13 and 14, an interactive map showing Adriana‘s movement, as well as a 3D model of the fishing vessel.

With the help of the 3D model, we were able to do what no official authority or journalistic investigation has done so far: to conduct in-person interviews with survivors of the wreck, using the visual impression of this body of data.

Using the method of situated testimony, the survivors placed themselves in the 3D model of the ship, indicated their location on the deck, and recalled the events that unfolded before the sinking of the Adriana: from the alleged towing to its capsize.

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In this way, we were able to cross-reference accounts of what happened in the presence of the Coast Guard vessel, based on each person’s eyewitness account.
Main conclusions

Eleven critical findings emerge from the joint investigation:

– Frontex offered to help three times. A Frontex source stated that the Coast Guard did not respond to any of the three requests for assistance.

- The records of ΠΠΛΣ-920 are incoherent and raise questions. For example, while it is reported that immediately before the sinking, the fishing vessel was moving west, it actually appears to be moving for about an hour (00:44 – 01:40) in a southerly direction at a speed of only 0.6 knots. In addition: since, according to the Coast Guard, the fishing vessel’s engine had stopped working at 00:44, why was the preparation of life-saving equipment carried out an hour later, at 01:40?

- While the fishing vessel’s engine was running but there was no navigation capability, according to testimonies, ΠΠΛΣ-920 approached the vessel and gave directions to Italy. A survivor stated: “[a crew member] told us that the Greek ship would go ahead of us and lead us to Italian waters. He told us that in two hours we would be in Italy.” ΠΠΛΣ-920 directed the fishing vessel from a distance, which followed until its engine broke down again.

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– According to Syrian survivors on deck, when the engine broke down, masked men from ΠΠΛΣ-920 boarded the fishing vessel and tied a blue rope to the stern. The above-mentioned testimonies are also consistent with an entry in the ΠΠΛΣ-920 deck logbook, which mentions the participation of a four-member team from the Special Missions Unit in the operation.

- According to the same survivors, there were two brief attempts to tow the fishing vessel. The first time the rope broke. The second time the ΠΠΛΣ-920 increased its speed and the fishing vessel rocked to the right, then to the left, then to the right again and flipped onto its right side.

– The Pakistani survivors were located in the interior of the ship, and could not see what was happening. They stated, however, that while the fishing vessel’s engine was not working, they felt a sharp forward thrust “like a rocket” — a sensation that corroborates the use of a rope for towing.

– Testimonies in this investigation support testaments presented by other journalistic investigations, as well as survivor statements included in the official case file: this action appears to have led to the capsize and eventual sinking of the ship.

- The fishing vessel capsized and survivors climbed on top of it. ΠΠΛΣ-920 left the scene, creating waves that made it more difficult for the survivors to stay afloat.

– After withdrawing, ΠΠΛΣ-920 directed its floodlights on the shipwreck site. Survivors tried to swim to the Coast Guard vessel, but the distance was too great.

– ΠΠΛΣ-920 began the rescue operation 30 minutes after the sinking, and only after the fishing vessel had completely disappeared from the water’s surface.

- Survivors claim that their phones (which were protected in plastic cases) contain visual material from the incident. Immediately after the rescue, according to the same testimonies, Coast Guard officers confiscated their phones, which have not been returned to them.

▻https://vimeo.com/843117800

Survivor accounts of the towing

In the deck log of ΠΠΛΣ-920, which we have seen, there is no mention of any towing attempt. The Coast Guard captain reports that they approached the fishing vessel to offer assistance, received no response, and followed it “from a discreet distance”.

This is disputed by the accounts of the survivors, some of whom not only tell of a rope that was tied to the fishing vessel, but they all mention its color: blue.

This investigation documents, for the first time, the blue cable that was used by ΠΠΛΣ-920, which can also be seen in earlier photos of the vessel.

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The estimation that the attempt to tow the fishing vessel by the ΠΠΛΣ-920 led to its sinking is underlined by the statements of survivors, that form part of the case file which is available to the journalists that participated in this investigation.

“Then the Greek ship came and threw the rope which was tied to the front of our ship,” says a survivor who was on the deck.

The Coast Guard started towing the fishing vessel, he adds, and “when it was going slowly the fishing vessel was fine, but instead of approaching the Greek ship we were moving away. When they hit the gas, I’m sorry to say, that’s when our ship sank.”

The same survivor estimates that the fishing boat capsized due to the “pulling from the Greek ship, because then our ship began to lean to one side. And I, who was standing in a corner, slipped into the water with a relative of mine, who died.”

Another survivor who was also on the deck, but at the stern and without full visibility, says in his testimony that “it was night, the guys in front told me that they tied the rope, but I could feel the motion too, because then we moved, but not for more than two minutes.”

“Then we said stop-stop because our ship is leaning,” he says, adding, “I think we sank due to the fact that our boat was in bad condition and overloaded and that it shouldn’t have been towed.”

In another testimony, the description of the towing attempt is concise: “On the last day the Greek ship threw us a rope and tied us to their ship. The Greek one turned right, then ours overturned and we fell into the water.”

We contacted the Coast Guard, asking questions about the timeline of the shipwreck and asking them to comment on the findings of our investigation. At the time of publication, we have not received a response.
Why didn’t Greece respond to Frontex?

The picture of what actually happened would be more complete if the ΠΠΛΣ-920 was not the only vessel present during the incident.

According to the captain of the merchant ship Faithful Warrior, at 00:18 the Coast Guard’s Search & Rescue Coordination Center gave him permission to depart the scene, thus removing the last witness present. The Faithful Warrior left at 00:30, about 15 minutes before the fishing vessel’s engine stopped working, according to Coast Guard records.

Frontex, which operates in the central Mediterranean, had informed the Greek authorities about the fishing vessel early in the afternoon, and had offered to help.

Specifically, at 19:35 (local Greek time) Frontex offered to assist with the Eagle I aircraft. Afterwards, the Greek side asked Frontex to assist in a search and rescue incident south of Crete, where 80 people were in danger. The vessel in question was spotted by the Frontex Heron drone at 22:50.

At 00:34, Frontex again offered to provide assistance with the Eagle I and a few minutes later, at 00:52, it also offered the Heron. According to a Frontex source who spoke to our joint investigation, the Greek authorities did not respond to any request to send aerial assets to the overloaded fishing vessel.
Fabricated testimonies?

Concerns have also been raised about the possible alteration of survivors’ testimonies.

Survivors gave two rounds of statements: first to the Coast Guard and then to an investigator. Both versions are available to Solomon and the international colleagues who participated in this investigation.

While there are no references to the attempted towing of the fishing vessel in the survivor testimonies recorded by the Coast Guard, the same survivors spoke about it in the second interview with the investigator.

Also, when describing the shipwreck, the testimonies that appear to have been given to the Coast Guard by two survivors of different nationalities, are the same, word for word: “There were too many people in the boat, which was old and rusty … that’s why it capsized and sank in the end.”
Inside the hold

The TikTok video shows his older brother hugging him tightly and kissing him, before he enters the airport, dragging along his suitcase.

He had flown from Karachi to Dubai, and from Dubai to Alexandria, Egypt. From there he boarded another plane that took him to Benghazi, Libya, where he spent over ten days locked in a trafficker’s hideout, before he was taken to board the Adriana.

When he saw the old fishing boat he couldn’t believe it — he thought the trip to Italy would also be by plane. He wanted to go back to Pakistan, but the traffickers wouldn’t let him.

Inside the Adriana, Abdul traveled on the lowest of three levels, in suffocating conditions where he had to sit with his knees bent. “To get from one place to another, you had to step on people.”

Conditions were similar on the middle level, where about 300 people were reportedly crammed in, with more than 200 people still on deck. The testimonies speak of another, separate space inside the fishing vessel, where women and children were located. No women were among the 104 people that were rescued.

The Pakistani travelers had paid a total of €8,000-€10,000 each for the long journey to Europe – Abdul’s family of rice farmers had sold their land to finance his trip.

Abdul had learned to swim in the canals around his family’s crops – when the Adriana sank, it was his ability to swim that allowed Abdul to reach the Coast Guard vessel and save himself.

As he walks along in Athens, Abdul’s relatives call him, asking what’s the name of the city he’s in. He tells us about his family, but he also shows us photos of loved ones who perished: he was onboard the Adriana with 14 of his friends and his uncle. Only he survived.

And of his 350 fellow Pakistanis who were also in the hold with him, only 12 were rescued. “Beautiful people were lost,” says Abdul.

People who participated in the investigation: Christina Varvia, Lydia Emmanouilidou, Katy Fallon, Ebrahem Farooqui, Armin Ghassim, Sebastian Heidelberger, Stefanos Levidis, Andreas Makas, Stavros Malichudis, Iliana Papangeli, Corina Petridi, Timo Robben, Georgia Skartadou, Sulaiman Tadmory, George Christides.

▻https://wearesolomon.com/mag/format/investigation/under-the-unwatchful-eye-of-the-authorities-deactivated-cameras-dying-

Greek shipwreck: hi-tech investigation suggests coastguard responsible for sinking

Research into loss of trawler with hundreds of deaths strongly contradicts official accounts – while finding a failure to mobilise help and evidence that survivor statements were tampered with

Attempts by the Greek coastguard to tow a fishing trawler carrying hundreds of migrants may have caused the vessel to sink, according to a new investigation by the Guardian and media partners that has raised further questions about the incident, which left an estimated 500 people missing

The trawler carrying migrants from Libya to Italy sank off the coast of Greece on 14 June. There were 104 survivors.

Reporters and researchers conducted more than 20 interviews with survivors and drew on court documents and coastguard sources to build a picture of missed rescue opportunities and offers of assistance that were ignored. Multiple survivors said that attempts by the Greek coastguard to tow the vessel had ultimately caused the sinking. The coastguard has strenuously denied that it attempted to tow the trawler.

The night that the trawler capsized, 47 nautical miles off Pylos, in south-western Greece, was reconstructed using an interactive 3D model of the boat created by Forensis, a Berlin-based research agency founded by Forensic Architecture, which investigates human rights violations.

The joint investigation by the Guardian, German public broadcaster ARD/NDR/Funk and Greek investigative outlet Solomon, in collaboration with Forensis, has given one of the fullest accounts to date of the trawler’s course up to its sinking. It unearthed new evidence such as a coastguard vessel moored at a closer port but never dispatched to the incident and how Greek authorities failed to respond not twice, as previously reported, but three times to offers of assistance by Frontex, the EU border and coastguard agency.

Forensis mapped the final hours before the sinking, using data from the coastguard’s log and the testimony of the coast guard vessel’s captain, as well as flight paths, maritime traffic data, satellite imagery and information from videos taken by nearby commercial vessels and other sources. The ship’s last movements contradict the coastguard and reveal inconsistencies within the official account of events, including the trawler’s direction and speed.

Crucially, the investigation showed the overcrowded trawler started moving westward on meeting the single Greek coastguard vessel sent to the scene. According to multiple survivor testimonies given to the Guardian and Greek prosecutors, the coastguard had told the migrants it would lead them to Italy – clashing with the official version that the trawler started moving west of its own accord. The investigation also showed the trawler had turned to the south and was almost stationary for at least an hour until, survivors said, a second and fatal towing attempt took place.
Survivors use the 3D model of the boat to describe what happened on the night of the 14 June.

Two survivors used the 3D model to describe the towing itself, while three others, who were sitting inside or on the vessel’s lower deck, described being propelled forward “like a rocket”, but with the engine not operating. That suggests a towing attempt.

Another survivor separately said he heard people shouting about a rope being attached by the “Greek army” and described being towed for 10 minutes shortly before the trawler sank. “I feel that they have tried to push us out of Greek water so that their responsibility ends,” a survivor said after considering the map of events and reflecting on his memories of the night.

Maria Papamina, a lawyer from the Greek Council for Refugees, one of two legal organisations representing between 40 and 50 survivors, said that there had been two towing attempts recounted to her team. Court documents also show that seven out of eight survivors gave accounts to the civil prosecutor of the presence of a rope, towing and a strong pull, in depositions conducted on 17 and 18 June.

The exact circumstances of the sinking cannot be conclusively proved in the absence of visual evidence. Several survivors testified to having had their phones confiscated by the authorities and some mentioned having filmed videos moments before the sinking. Questions remain over why the newly acquired Greek coastguard vessel at the scene did not record the operation on its thermal cameras. The vessel, called the 920, was 90% financed by the EU to bolster the capabilities of Frontex in Greece and is part of the EU border agency’s joint operations in the country. Frontex recommends that “if feasible, all actions taken by … Frontex co-financed assets should be documented by video consistently”.

In official statements the Greek coastguard said the operation was not recorded because the crew’s focus was on the rescue operation. But a source within the coastguard said cameras do not need constant manual operation and are there precisely to capture such incidents.

The presence of masked men, described by two survivors as attaching a rope to the trawler, is also documented in the ship’s log, which includes an entry about a special ops team known as KEA joining the 920 that night.

According to coastguard sources, it would not be unusual to deploy KEA – typically used in risky situations such as suspected arms or drug smuggling at sea – given the vessel’s unknown status, but one source said that their presence suggested the vessel should have been intercepted on security and maritime safety grounds alone.

One source described the failure to mobilise help closer to the incident as “incomprehensible”. The 920 was deployed from Chania, in Crete, about 150 nautical miles from the site of the sinking. The source said the coastguard had somewhat smaller but still capable vessels, based in Patras, Kalamata, Neapoli Voion and even Pylos itself. The 920 was ordered by coastguard HQ to “locate” the trawler at about 3pm local time on 13 June. It finally made contact close to midnight. An eyewitness official confirmed another vessel was stationed in Kalamata on 14 June and could have reached the trawler within a couple of hours. “It should have been a ‘send everything you’ve got’ situation. The trawler was in clear need of assistance,” the source said.

The Greek coastguard and Frontex were alerted to the trawler on the morning of 13 June. Both agencies had photographed it from the air but no search and rescue operation was conducted – according to the Greek side, because the boat had refused assistance. Authorities received an urgent SOS said to have been relayed to them at 5.53pm local time by the small boats emergency hotline Alarmphone, which was in contact with people on board.

Two of the coastguard sources told the Guardian they believed towing was a likely reason for the boat capsizing. This would not be without precedent. In 2014, an attempt to tow a refugee boat off the coast of Farmakonisi cost 11 lives. Greek courts cleared the coastguard, but the European court of human rights passed a damning judgment in 2022.

Allegations have also been made that survivors’ statements were tampered with. Two rounds of testimonies were given – first to the coastguard and then to a civil prosecutor – both seen by the Guardian. Testimonies to the coastguard by two separate survivors of different nationalities are word for word the same when describing the sinking: “We were too many people on the boat, which was old and rusty … this is why it capsized and sank in the end.”

Under oath to the civil prosecutor, days later, the same survivors describe towing incidents and blame the Greek coastguard for the sinking. The same Syrian survivor who stated in his coastguard testimony that the trawler capsized due to its age and overcrowding would later testify: “When they stepped on it, and I am sorry to mention this, our boat sank. I believe the reason was the towing by the Greek boat.”

Brussels has asked for a “transparent” investigation into the wreck, while there is frustration within Frontex, which repeatedly offered assets to Greek authorities – a plane twice and later a drone – but received no reply. Although Frontex is facing mounting calls to pull out of Greece, the Guardian understands it is considering less drastic measures such as discontinuing co-financing of Greek coastguard vessels.

The Coast Guard said it “would not comment on operational issues or the ongoing investigation which is confidential according to a Supreme Court Order.”

Nine Egyptians on the trawler have been arrested on charges including involuntary manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and migrant smuggling; they deny wrongdoing. According to Guardian information, the accused testified there were two towing attempts, the second resulting in the sinking of the boat. A brother of one of the accused said his sibling paid about £3,000 to be on the boat, amounting to proof, he said, that he was not a smuggler.

In Greece and beyond, survivors and victims’ families are trying to understand what happened. Three Pakistani survivors said they flew from Pakistan through Dubai or Egypt to Libya. Two believed they would fly from Libya to Italy and were shocked on seeing the trawler. “I can’t sleep properly. When I sleep I feel as if I am sinking into the water and will die,” one said.

Nearly half of the estimated 750 people on board are thought to have been Pakistani citizens taking an emerging people-smuggling route to Italy. Pakistani authorities estimate that 115 came from Gujranwala in the east of the country, a region known for its rice plantations and cotton fields but deeply mired in Pakistan’s economic crisis.

Ahmed Farouq, who lives on the outskirts of the city of Gujranwala, lost his son in the Pylos shipwreck. Talking of the alleged towing, he saids: “They wanted it to sink. Why didn’t they save the people first? If they don’t want illegal migrants, let them deport us, but don’t let us drown.”

▻https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jul/10/greek-shipwreck-hi-tech-investigation-suggests-coastguard-responsible-f

Greek coastguard ’pressured’ disaster survivors to blame Egyptian men

New evidence found by BBC News casts further doubt on the Greek coastguard’s version of events surrounding last month’s deadly migrant boat sinking, in which up to 600 people died.

Two survivors have described how the coastguard pressed them to identify nine Egyptians on board as traffickers.

A new video of the overcrowded boat foundering at sea also challenges the Greek coastguard’s account.

It was taken when the boat was said to be on a “steady course”.

BBC Verify has confirmed the footage was filmed when the coastguard claimed the boat was not in need of rescue - and was in fact filmed by the coastguard itself.

We have also confirmed that the larger vessel in the background is the oil tanker Faithful Warrior, which had been asked to give supplies to the migrant boat.

The official Greek coastguard account had already been challenged in a BBC Verify report - but now we have seen court documents which show serious discrepancies between survivors’ witness statements taken by the coastguards, and the in-person evidence later presented to a judge.

A translator has also come forward with his account of a people-smuggling investigation last year, after another group of migrants were rescued by the coastguard. He describes how witnesses from that incident were intimidated by the coastguard. The legal case collapsed before it could reach trial.

The revelations raise fresh questions about how the Greek authorities handle such disasters.

Both the Greek coastguard and Greek government did not comment and declined our requests for interview.
A map of a section of the Mediterranean Sea showing the possible route taken by the migrant boat off the coast of Libya, near the city of Tobruk. The possible route shows the last approximate location of the boat before it sunk and the path taken by the Faithful Warrior, which had made contact with the boat. Also shown is the Greek port city of Pylos.

Survivors ’silenced and intimidated’

Soon after the 14 June sinking, nine Egyptian men were detained and charged with manslaughter and people-smuggling.

But two survivors of the disaster say migrants were silenced and intimidated by Greek authorities, after suggesting the coastguards may have been to blame for the tragedy.

For the past month, allegations have been made that the coastguard used a rope to tow the fishing vessel, causing it to sink.

The two survivors we spoke to in Athens - who we are calling Ahmad and Musaab to protect their identities - say that is what happened.

“They attached a rope from the left. Everyone moved to the right side of our boat to balance it,” says Musaab. “The Greek vessel moved off quickly causing our boat to flip. They kept dragging it for quite a distance.”

The men described how they spent two hours in the water before being picked up by the coastguard.

When I ask how they knew it was that amount of time, Musaab says his watch was still working so he could tell.

Once on land, in Kalamata, they claim the coastguard told survivors to “shut up” when they started to talk about how the Greek authorities had caused the disaster.

“When people replied by saying the Greek coastguard was the cause, the official in charge of the questioning asked the interpreter to tell the interviewee to stop talking,” says Ahmad.

Ahmad says those rescued were told to be grateful they hadn’t died.

He says there were shouts of: “You have survived death! Stop talking about the incident! Don’t ask more questions about it!”

he men say they are scared to speak out publicly because they fear they too will be accused like the Egyptians.

“If there was a fair system in place, we would contribute to this case,” says Ahmad.

The men told us they had both paid $4,500 (£3,480) for a spot on the boat. Ahmad’s younger brother was also on board. He is still missing.
Collapsing court cases

As well as this testimony given to us by survivors, we have seen court documents which raise questions about the way evidence is being gathered to be presented in court.

In initial statements from five survivors, none mentioned the coastguard trying to tow the migrant vessel with a rope. But days later, in front of a judge, all explained that there had been a failed attempt to tow it.

One initial statement reads:

https://pixelfed.zoo-logique.org/storage/m/_v2/578583396227231930/bf0f52ff2-92677b/GZPtNGn28ert/TCqaetyAAqySoqUQIAtj0hLdxHJ0fJAgpHniKDZ6.png

But the same witness later told a judge:

https://pixelfed.zoo-logique.org/storage/m/_v2/578583396227231930/bf0f52ff2-92677b/LO6j82vDE8Lf/ivYbuO2JgxmC84URc3B9UsVHTpLjSAmTHEfrIXvs.png

BBC Verify has not spoken to these witnesses and so we can’t say why their accounts changed.

The Greek coastguard initially denied using a rope - but later backtracked, admitting one had been used. But it said it was only to try to board the vessel and assess the situation. It said this was at least two hours before the fishing vessel capsized.

Eighty-two people are confirmed dead in the sinking, but the United Nations estimates as many as 500 more lost their lives.

The Greek authorities say the charged Egyptian men are part of a smuggling ring and were identified by fellow passengers. They face up to life imprisonment if found guilty.

Some survivors allege some of the nine suspects mistreated those on board - while other testimony says some were actually trying to help.

But Ahmad and Musaab told us the coastguard had instructed all of the survivors to say that the nine Egyptian men were to blame for trafficking them.

“They were imprisoned and were wrongly accused by the Greek authorities as an attempt to cover their crime,” says Musaab.

A Greek Supreme Criminal Court deputy prosecutor is carrying out an investigation, but calls - including from the UN - for an international, independent inquiry have so far been ignored. The European Commission has indicated it has faith in the Greek investigation.

But Ahmad and Musaab are not alone in their concerns about the Greek coastguard.
Interpreter comes forward to BBC

When the nine Egyptian men were arrested in the hours after the shipwreck, it was widely reported as an example of efficient detective work by the Greek authorities.

But for Farzin Khavand it rang alarm bells. He feared history was repeating itself.

He says he witnessed Greek coastguards put two innocent Iranian men in the frame for people-smuggling last year, following the rescue of 32 migrants whose boat had got into trouble crossing from Turkey.

Mr Khavand, a UK citizen who speaks Farsi and has lived in the Kalamata area for 20 years, acted as a translator during the coastguard’s investigation into what happened then.

He says the migrants - 28 from Afghanistan and four from Iran - explained that they had set off from Turkey and been at sea for eight days before being rescued.

During this time, the Greek coastguard had approached the boat, before leaving, he was told.

Two Arabic-speaking men had abandoned the boat after the engine blew up, Mr Khavand was told by the Afghan migrants. They said that most people on board had taken turns to try to steer the stricken boat to safety - including the two accused Iranians, who had paid to be on board like everyone else.

“They [the Iranian men] were highly traumatised,” Mr Khavand said.

“They were repeating to me that they’d never even seen an ocean before they set off in Turkey. And they kept being told they were the captain and they said: ’We know nothing about the boat. We can’t even swim.’”

One of the two accused - a man called Sayeed who was facing a long prison sentence - had been rescued with his young son, explained Mr Khavand.

“I asked him ’Why did you take a six-year-old child on a boat?’ And he said the smugglers told us it’s only two hours’ journey.”

Mr Khavand relayed their accounts to the coastguard, exactly as it had been told to him - but he says when he saw the transcripts, the Afghans’ testimony had changed. He fears they altered their stories after pressure from the Greek authorities.

He says the Iranians told him that some of their fellow Afghan passengers had been leaned on by the coastguard to name them as the people-smugglers - to avoid being “treated unpleasantly”, threatened with prison, and being “returned to the Taliban”.

The case eventually collapsed. Mr Khavand says he was not willing to assist the Greek coastguard again. He says when Sayeed and his son were released from custody the €1,500 (£1,278) that had been confiscated from them was not returned.

“The scene ended with me thinking I don’t want to do this again because they were not trying to get to the bottom of the truth. They were trying to pick a couple of guys and accuse them of being people smugglers.”

All of these accusations were put to the Greek authorities by the BBC - but we have received no response. Our request for an interview with Greece’s minister of maritime affairs - who oversees the coastguard - was also rejected.
Greece previously accused of human rights violations

Kalamata lawyer Chrysanthi Kaouni says she has seen other criminal cases brought against alleged people smugglers which have troubled her.

She has been involved in more than 10 such cases, she tells us.

“My concerns are around the translations, the way evidence is gathered and - later on - the ability of the defendants to challenge this evidence,” she said.

“Because of these three points, I don’t think there are enough safeguards according to the international law, and in the end I don’t believe justice is done.”

A new study has found that the average trial in Greece for migrants accused of people smuggling lasted just 37 minutes and the average prison sentence given was 46 years.

The study, commissioned by The Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament, looked at 81 trials involving 95 people - all of whom were tried for smuggling in eight different areas of Greece between February 2020 and March 2023.

The study claims verdicts were reached often on the testimony of a single police or coastguard officer and, in more than three-quarters of the cases, they didn’t appear in court for their evidence to be cross-examined.

Ahmad says he and the other survivors now want authorities to recover the shipwreck and the people that went down with it, but they have been told it’s too difficult and the water is too deep.

He compares this to the vast amounts of money and resources spent on searching for five people on the Titan submersible in the North Atlantic in June.

“But we were hundreds,” he says. “It’s not just a ship. It’s our friends and family.”

▻https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66154654

Italy warned of dead children on migrant ship hours before it capsized

The findings of an investigation by Welt am Sonntag and

POLITICO raise questions about whether the authorities knew the boat was in distress earlier than they admitted.

Early on the morning of the Adriana’s final day at sea, the Italian authorities sent a troubling warning to their EU and Greek colleagues: Two children had died aboard the overloaded migrant boat.

The alert was sent at 8:01 a.m. UTC, just over an hour after the Italians initially spotted the vessel at 6:51 a.m., an investigation by Welt am Sonntag and POLITICO found. The ship would later stall out in the ocean and capsize that night, killing hundreds of migrants on board.

The new details are revealed in an internal document at the EU border agency Frontex and seen by Welt, part of a “serious incident report” Frontex is compiling on the tragedy.

The findings raise questions about whether the authorities knew of serious distress on the boat much earlier than they have admitted. The document further complicates the timeline European authorities have given about the boat — Frontex has said its own plane was the first to discover the Adriana at 9:47 a.m., while the Greek government has said it was alerted around 8 a.m.

According to the internal document, Rome’s warning went to both Frontex and the Greek coast guard’s central office for rescue operations in Piraeus, which sits on the coast near Athens. Yet despite the alert, the Greek authorities did not send a coast guard vessel to the boat until 7:40 p.m., nearly 12 hours later. The boat then capsized around 11 p.m., roughly 15 hours after Rome’s notice first came through, leaving approximately 600 people dead.

Survivors have said the Greek coast guard’s attempts to attach ropes to the ship caused it to capsize — accounts Greek officials say are not definitive. Only 104 people were brought to shore alive.

Frontex declined to comment on the internal document showing the Italian warning, citing the “ongoing investigations” and referring to a June 16 statement. That statement lists a chronology of events starting at 9:47 a.m. with the Frontex plane spotting the boat.

Dimitris Kairidis, Greece’s newly appointed migration minister, told POLITICO in Brussels that he had not seen the Frontex note, and he neither confirmed nor denied that Athens had received the Rome alert mentioning dead children.

There is, he said, an “independent judicial investigation,” and if anyone is found responsible, “there will definitely be consequences.”

“But until then,” he added, “we should not rush to conclusions and bow to political pressure.”

Asked for comment, the Greek government referred to a statement on its coast guard website from June 14, which mentions information coming from Rome around 8 a.m. It doesn’t say whether that information included a warning about dead children on board.

The Italian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Greece has faced mounting political pressure over the tragedy.

German lawmaker Clara Bünger, a member of The Left, is pushing for a review of the drama that unfolded off the shore of Pylos.

She told Welt that “upon sighting such an overcrowded boat, Frontex should have immediately issued a mayday distress signal; even more so if Frontex knew that there were already Tuesday morning about two dead children on board.”

That this didn’t happen, she added, is “outrageous and unforgivable.”

Frontex has been trying to rehab its reputation under new Director Hans Leijtens, but Bünger argued he is on a doomed mission. Frontex, she argued, should just be dissolved.

“This project has failed miserably,” she said.

Erik Marquardt, a German European Parliament member from the Greens, pointed out that Germany chairs the Frontex Management Board.

“I expect the German government to enforce full transparency here,” he said.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive, said it does not comment on “ongoing investigations” or “leaks.”

But the Commission stressed: “The facts about the tragic incident off the coast of Pylos must be clarified. That is the priority now.”

▻https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-warned-greece-of-dead-children-on-migrant-ship-hour-before-it-capsize

Frontex und Athen wussten 15 Stunden vor Bootsdrama von toten Kindern an Bord

Mitte Juni starben vor der griechischen Küste 600 Migranten, als ihr Boot kenterte. Über die Verantwortung für die schlimmste Katastrophe seit Jahren im Mittelmeer wird seitdem gestritten. Nun kommt heraus: Eine wichtige Information zu den wahren Abläufen wird nach Informationen von WELT AM SONNTAG bewusst zurückgehalten.

Die EU-Grenzschutzagentur Frontex sowie die griechische Regierung verschweigen die wahren Abläufe eines Bootsdramas im Juni mit rund 600 Toten. Wie WELT AM SONNTAG und das ebenfalls zum Axel-Springer-Verlag gehörende Nachrichtenunternehmen „Politico“ erfuhren, muss die hochdramatische Situation vor der griechischen Küste Athen und den Grenzschützern viel früher bewusst gewesen sein als bislang bekannt.

Frontex hatte in einer Stellungnahme mitgeteilt, als Erstes habe ein agentureigenes Flugzeug das völlig überladene Boot um 9.47 Uhr (UTC) entdeckt. Allerdings soll das Boot – so geht es aus einem internen Frontex-Dokument hervor – bereits um 6.51 Uhr erstmals gesichtet worden sein – und zwar durch italienische Behörden.

Um 8.01 Uhr alarmierte die Seenotrettungstelle Rom demnach sowohl Frontex als auch die Leitstelle in Piräus, von wo aus Rettungseinsätze der griechischen Küstenwache gesteuert werden. Noch brisanter: Bestandteil dieses Alarms war die Information, dass an Bord des Bootes bereits zwei Kinder verstorben seien. Wie Italien an seine Informationen zu der Existenz des Bootes und den toten Kindern gelangte, ist unklar.

Der Alarm ist nach Informationen von WELT AM SONNTAG Teil der Notizen des noch in Arbeit befindlichen „Serious Incident Report“, der das Aktenzeichen 12595/2023 trägt. Trotz des Alarms aus Roms unternahmen die griechischen Behörden lange nichts. Erst gegen 19.40 Uhr traf ein Schiff der Küstenwache in der Nähe der Migranten ein.

Das Boot kenterte schließlich gegen 23 Uhr, 15 Stunden nach dem Alarm aus Rom. Unmittelbar davor hatten griechische Küstenwächter Seile an das Boot angebracht, was – so berichteten Überlebende – zum Kentern geführt habe. Nur 104 Menschen wurden lebend an Land gebracht.

WELT AM SONNTAG konfrontierte Frontex mit den Informationen zu dem Alarm aus Rom. Wann ging dieser ein? Was war die Reaktion der Agentur? In einer schriftlichen Antwort hieß es, man könne „aufgrund von laufenden Ermittlungen“ kein Statement abgeben, das über jenes vom 16. Juni hinausgeht. Darin wird die Chronologie der Ereignisse geschildert – mit 9.47 Uhr als Startpunkt, der Sichtung des Bootes durch ein Frontex-Flugzeug.

Der neu ernannte griechische Migrationsminister Dimitris Kairidis sagte in Brüssel, er habe die Frontex-Notiz nicht gesehen; weder bestätigte noch dementierte er, dass Athen diese Information aus Rom erhalten hat. Er erklärte, dass „eine unabhängige gerichtliche Untersuchung“ stattfinde. Sofern jemand für schuldig befunden werde, „wird es definitiv Konsequenzen geben.

Bis dahin solle man „keine voreiligen Schlüsse ziehen und sich dem politischen Druck beugen“. Am Freitag verwies Athen auf ein Statement auf der Küstenwache-Webseite vom 14. Juni, in dem eine Info zu dem Boot aus Rom gegen acht Uhr erwähnt wird. Von toten Kindern kein Wort. Die italienische Regierung beantwortete eine Anfrage zu dem Sachverhalt nicht.

Der Druck aus der Politik auf die Behörde und Athen wächst derweil. Die Linken-Bundestagsabgeordnete Clara Bünger, die auf eine Aufarbeitung des Pylos-Dramas drängt, sagte WELT AM SONNTAG: „Beim Sichten eines derart überfüllten Bootes hätte Frontex sofort einen Mayday-Notruf machen müssen. Das gilt umso mehr, wenn Frontex wusste, dass es am Dienstagmorgen bereits zwei tote Kinder an Bord gab.“ Dass das nicht geschehen ist, sei „ungeheuerlich und unverzeihbar“. Frontex-Direktor Hans Leijtens hätte angekündigt, er wolle Vertrauen wiederherstellen und Menschenrechte achten: „Dieses Vorhaben ist krachend gescheitert.“ Bünger sagte, Frontex sei nicht reformierbar – und forderte die Auflösung.

Der EU-Parlamentarier Erik Marquardt (Grüne) verwies darauf, dass Deutschland den Vorsitz im Frontex-Verwaltungsrat hat: „Ich erwarte von der Bundesregierung, dass sie hier vollständige Transparenz durchsetzt.“ Derartige Versprechen seitens Leijtens würden bislang nicht eingehalten.

Die EU-Kommission ließ verlauten, man äußere sich „weder zu laufenden Untersuchungen noch zu Leaks“, machte aber klar: „Die Fakten über den tragischen Vorfall vor der Küste von Pylos müssen geklärt werden. Das ist jetzt die Priorität.“

▻https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article246382076/Migration-Frontex-und-Athen-wussten-15-Stunden-vor-Bootsdrama-von-toten-Kindern

Pylos shipwreck: the Greek authorities must ensure that effective investigations are conducted

In a letter to the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, published today, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, stresses that Greece has the legal obligation to conduct effective investigations into the Pylos shipwreck, which resulted in the death of more than 80 persons with many hundreds still missing, to establish the facts and, where appropriate, to lead to the punishment of those responsible.

The Commissioner expresses concern about reports of pressure having been exercised on survivors and about allegations of irregularities in the collection of evidence and testimonies, which may have led to a minimisation of the focus on certain actors in this tragedy, including the Greek Coast Guard. In the case of Safi and Others v. Greece, the European Court of Human Rights spelled out the parameters of an effective investigation into a similar event. Among those parameters, the Commissioner notes that independence is critical to securing the trust of the victims’ relatives, the survivors, the public and Greece’s international partners. While stressing that investigations cannot be limited to the role of alleged smugglers, she requests clarifications on the scope of the investigations initiated after the shipwreck.

Referring to the right of missing persons’ families to know the truth, the Commissioner seeks information on the efforts made to ensure that the remains of deceased migrants are located, respected, identified, and buried.

Expressing concerns at restrictions on survivors’ freedom of movement and the way asylum interviews have been conducted, she requests information on the concrete measures that Greece has taken to abide by its human rights obligations regarding reception conditions and access to the asylum procedure.

"In my view, the shipwreck of 14 June is unfortunately not an isolated incident”, writes the Commissioner. This should prompt a reconsideration of the approach to refugees and migrants arriving by sea at the political, policy and practical level. In this context, the Commissioner urges the Prime Minister to ensure that Greece abides by its international obligations regarding search and rescue, both under maritime law and human rights law.

Finally, the Commissioner reiterates her call for the Greek government to actively create and maintain an enabling legal framework and a political and public environment which is conducive to the existence and functioning of civil society organisations and to the work of human rights defenders and investigative journalists, and to stop their criminalisation and other forms of harassment.

▻https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/pylos-shipwreck-the-greek-authorities-must-ensure-that-effective-investigations

Pour télécharger la lettre:
▻https://rm.coe.int/letter-addressed-to-the-prime-minister-of-greece-by-dunja-mijatovic-co/1680ac03ce

#conseil_de_l'Europe

Après le naufrage d’un bateau avec 750 personnes à bord au large de la Grèce, une enquête de la médiatrice européenne sur le rôle de Frontex

#Emily_O’Reilly, dont le rôle est de demander des comptes aux institutions et aux agences de l’Union européenne, a annoncé avoir ouvert cette procédure à la suite du naufrage survenu en juin, le pire en Méditerranée depuis 2016.

Un peu plus d’un mois après le pire naufrage d’un bateau de migrants depuis 2016 en Méditerrannée, survenu mi-juin au large de la Grèce et qui a fait des centaines de morts, la médiatrice européenne a annoncé, mercredi 26 juillet, avoir ouvert une enquête afin de « clarifier le rôle » de Frontex, l’agence de l’Union européenne (UE) chargée des frontières, dans les opérations de sauvetage.

« Alors que le rôle des autorités grecques fait l’objet d’une enquête au niveau national, celui de Frontex dans les opérations de recherche et de sauvetage doit également être clarifié », a souligné dans un communiqué Emily O’Reilly. Le rôle de la médiatrice est de demander des comptes aux institutions et aux agences de l’UE.

« Il a été signalé que Frontex avait bien alerté les autorités grecques de la présence du navire et proposé son assistance ; mais, ce qui n’est pas clair, c’est ce qu’elle aurait pu ou aurait dû faire d’autre », a-t-elle ajouté.

Le patron de Frontex, Hans Leijtens, a salué l’ouverture de cette enquête, assurant être prêt à coopérer « en toute transparence » pour expliquer le rôle de son agence. « Si nous ne coordonnons pas les opérations de recherche et de sauvetage, sauver des vies en mer est essentiel. Nous apportons une aide aux autorités nationales lorsque cela est nécessaire », a-t-il ajouté dans un message sur X (ex-Twitter).

Partage d’informations entre Frontex et les autorités nationales

Le chalutier vétuste et surchargé, qui était parti de Libye, a fait naufrage au large du sud de Grèce dans la nuit du 13 au 14 juin. Il transportait environ 750 personnes à son bord, mais seule une centaine de migrants ont survécu.

Depuis le naufrage, les interrogations sont tournées autour de la lenteur de l’intervention des gardes-côtes grecs et sur les causes du chavirement de l’embarcation.

Par cette enquête sur le rôle de Frontex, Mme O’Reilly veut en particulier se pencher sur le partage d’informations entre l’agence européenne et les autorités nationales en matière d’opérations de recherche et de sauvetage.

Elle la coordonnera aux côtés du médiateur grec, Andreas Pottakis, qui a « la compétence d’examiner » la façon dont les autorités grecques se sont occupées du bateau Adriana.

Mi-juillet, les eurodéputés ont réclamé l’élaboration d’une « stratégie de recherche et de sauvetage fiable et permanente » des migrants en Méditerranée. Dans une résolution transpartisane, dépourvue de caractère contraignant, ils ont appelé Bruxelles à apporter aux Etats membres de l’UE un « soutien matériel, financier et opérationnel » pour renforcer leurs capacités de sauvetage en mer.

Les élus du Parlement européen citaient les chiffres de l’Organisation internationale pour les migrations (OIM), selon laquelle plus de 27 600 personnes ont disparu en Méditerranée depuis 2014.

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/07/26/naufrage-d-un-bateau-de-migrants-au-large-de-la-grece-la-mediatrice-europeen

Smuggler, Warlord, EU ally

The lead smugglers behind the Pylos shipwreck are closely linked to General Khalifa Haftar, the Libyan warlord who EU leaders are partnering with to curb migration

On the night of 13 June, a vessel carrying around 750 men, women and children mainly from Pakistan, Egypt and Syria capsized in Greek waters. Only 104 men survived. All women and children died.

In an earlier investigation we revealed Greek coastguard efforts to cover up their role in the fatal shipwreck. The country’s naval court has since launched a preliminary investigation into the coastguard’s response to the sinking, with no arrests or suspensions of officers so far.

The only arrests made were those of nine Egyptians, accused in a separate inquiry of being part of the smuggling network behind the deadly voyage. They were charged with six counts including illegal trafficking of foreigners, organisation crime and manslaughter by negligence.

Using the contacts and documents already available to us, we pursued a follow-up investigation to establish the truth about any smugglers behind the fatal sea crossing, with the aim of identifying the key players and establishing the extent to which the nine Egyptians in prison in Greece are actually responsible.
METHODS

Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, SIRAJ, El País and Reporters United used the previously established relationships with survivors and their families, as well as a network of sources in Libya, to investigate the smuggling network behind the Pylos wreck.

We also looked into the ongoing court case against nine alleged smugglers, analysing confidential court documents and speaking to five of the families of those arrested.
STORYLINES

While investigating the circumstances that led to the shipwreck and Greece’s responsibility in it, we spoke to 17 survivors.

Many named the key smugglers involved in organising the trip during our interviews with them – none of them were people on board the ship.

Some were Eastern Libyan nationals with ties to the region’s powerful ruler, Khalifa Haftar.

One name stood out: Muhammad Saad Al-Kahshi Al-Mnfi. Three sources identified him as a key player in the smuggling operation: a survivor, a lower level smuggler and a Libyan insider all gave his name.

Al-Kahshi works for a special forces navy unit called the “frogmen”, run by a family member of his, Bahar Al-Tawati Al-Mnfi. Al-Tawati Al-Mnfi works under the direct orders of Khalifa Haftar.

One survivor explained that Al-Kahshi Al-Mnfi used his position to issue the licence that allowed the boat (which came from Egypt) to navigate in Libyan waters and made sure the Libyan coast guards were paid to shut off the marine radar devices that detect ship movements to allow the departure.

We found that the network goes far beyond Al-Kahshi Al-Mnfi.

Survivors, insiders and analysts explained that the trip was organised with wide ranging support from powerful people reporting to Haftar.

Libya expert Jalel Harchaoui said the “migrant business” had been flourishing in Eastern Libya in the last 18 months. “Haftar cannot say that he’s not aware,” he added. “He can’t say that he’s not involved.”

“All trips are overseen by his son, Saddam Haftar” said one survivor. “Saddam leads the cooperation himself or assigns one of the frogmen battalions [this may have been the case for the Pylos trip] or the 2020 battalion, depending on who has more migrants to pay the fees.”

Five survivors who flew from Syria to Libya describe how immigration officials facilitated their arrival at Benghazi’s military airport. One said: “At the airport, a person took my passport, went to immigration office, put a stamp and took us outside”.

There was a curfew in Eastern Libya on the night of departure (حظر التجول ليلاً في طبرق الليبية), yet the survivors we interviewed said that it was at night that they, along with hundreds of passengers, were taken to a small bay near Wadi Arzouka, east of Tobruk, and boarded onto the vessel.

Militias supported by Khalifa Haftar are not only involved in smuggling, they are also active in illegal “pullbacks” of migrants in EU waters.

At least two pullbacks (in May and July this year) were carried out by a militia (Tariq Bin Ziyad) controlled by Haftar’s son, including one in Maltese waters.

At least four of the people who died in the Pylos shipwreck were on the boat that was pulled back by the Tariq Bin Ziyad militia on 25 May, according to family members.

These findings raise serious questions about EU member states’ migration prevention policies.

It is known by EU authorities that Eastern Libyan militias answering to Haftar carry out both pullback and smuggling operations. The IOM and the UNHCR briefed EU officials on an increase in departures from eastern Libya , describing them as a “lucrative source of income for the eastern Libyan rulers involved”.

In spite of this, Italy and Malta are making deals with Haftar to prevent migration.

In May, Haftar met with Italian PM Meloni to discuss migration related issues and in June Italy’s interior minister said they would ask Haftar to collaborate in stopping departures.

The same month, for the first time, a Maltese delegation met Haftar in Benghazi to discuss security challenges in the region, with particular emphasis on irregular migration.

Internal EU documents show the commission is looking for ways to curb arrivals from Benghazi’s airport with the collaboration of local operators.

Harchaoui described Italian efforts to encourage Khalifa Haftar to stop departures as “bribery” and pointed to “a very clear admission of how Italy intends to work and what it promised to Haftar: if you reduce the human smuggling volumes, we will inject capital”.

Meanwhile, there’s growing evidence that nine Egyptians imprisoned for trafficking in Greece are being scapegoated.

We spoke to the families of five of the nine Egyptians under arrest – all of them say that they were passengers, not smugglers.

Three of them provided evidence that their relatives paid for their trip, indicating that it’s highly unlikely that they were involved in organising the smuggling operation.

We were able to verify the identity of a smuggler who asked one of the accused men for money ahead of the trip.

We previously found that witness testimony provided to the coast guard had been tampered with, including survivors’ answers to questions about smugglers.

In the documents, two answers to questions about smugglers contain identical sentences.

Those who were interrogated by the coast guard mentioned being pressured to place the blame on the nine Egyptians later indicted.

▻https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/smuggler-warlord-eu-ally

Naufrage au large de la Grèce : deux ONG pointent les défaillances des autorités grecques

Dans un rapport publié le 3 août, Amnesty International et Human Rights Watch reviennent sur les circonstances troubles du drame survenu aux portes de l’Europe dans la nuit du 13 au 14 juin, qui a coûté la vie à au moins six cents personnes. Les associations réclament une enquête « efficace, indépendante et impartiale ».

C’est un naufrage qui a d’abord marqué les esprits de par son ampleur : pas moins de 750 personnes se trouvaient à bord d’un bateau de pêche en bois, L’Adriana, au moment où il a chaviré, dans la nuit du 13 au 14 juin, au large de Pýlos en Grèce. Partie de Tobrouk en Libye pour rejoindre l’Italie, l’embarcation surchargée transportait des ressortissants syriens, égyptiens, palestiniens ou pakistanais, dont de nombreuses femmes et enfants placés dans la cale pour être « à l’abri » des éventuelles intempéries ou du soleil.

Mais on retient aussi les circonstances troubles dans lequel il s’est produit. Très vite après le naufrage, des premières voix parmi la centaine de rescapés se sont élevées pour pointer le rôle potentiel des gardes-côtes grecs dans ce drame.

Mediapart a documenté, dès le 17 juin, cette version différente de celle avancée par les autorités du pays. Une enquête de la BBC est venue l’appuyer, puis le New York Times a suivi : des témoignages de survivant·es attestent que les gardes-côtes ont non seulement tardé à organiser un sauvetage, mais ont aussi tenté de tirer le bateau à l’aide d’une corde, pouvant ainsi avoir contribué à le faire chavirer.

Après un déplacement de neuf jours en Grèce et une vingtaine d’entretiens réalisés avec des exilé·es sur place, Amnesty International et Human Rights Watch ont relevé également les « disparités extrêmement préoccupantes » entre les récits des survivant·es du Pýlos et la version des événements livrée par les autorités.

Les survivant·es interrogé·es par les deux ONG « ont systématiquement déclaré que le navire des gardes-côtes grecs envoyé sur les lieux avait attaché une corde à L’Adriana et l’avait remorqué, le faisant tanguer, puis chavirer », peut-on lire dans le rapport d’enquête publié conjointement ce jeudi 3 août.

Aux ONG, les responsables des gardes-côtes ont de leur côté affirmé que leurs équipes s’étaient approchées du bateau, reconnaissant avoir utilisé une corde, mais qu’après de « premières négociations », les passagers avaient repoussé la corde pour poursuivre leur trajet.
Le rôle des gardes-côtes grecs et de Frontex interrogé

Une version contredite par le témoignage des survivant·es interrogé·es : « Peu importe leur position sur le bateau, les survivants disent tous avoir ressenti le mouvement du bateau une fois tracté, qui avançait alors très vite alors que le moteur ne fonctionnait plus, précise Alice Autin, chercheuse pour la division Europe et Asie centrale à Human Rights Watch. Tous sont d’accord pour dire que c’est cela qui a fait vaciller le bateau, avant de le faire chavirer. »

Frontex a par ailleurs déclaré avoir repéré l’embarcation dès la veille du naufrage, ce qui a poussé certains acteurs à s’interroger sur le rôle de l’agence européenne de surveillance des frontières. Pourquoi n’est-elle pas intervenue pour venir en aide aux passagers ? A-t-elle bien alerté les autorités grecques pour qu’une opération de recherche et de sauvetage soit menée en urgence ?

Dans un communiqué, Frontex a précisé que l’un de ses avions de surveillance « avait immédiatement informé les autorités compétentes », sans toutefois intervenir, au prétexte que les exilé·es avaient refusé « toute aide ». Le lendemain du drame, le patron de l’agence Hans Leijtens était en déplacement en Grèce pour « mieux comprendre ce qu’il s’était passé », et voir comment ses équipes pouvaient aider les autorités grecques, précisant que le fait de « sauver des vies était leur priorité ».

Une version qui ne semble pas avoir convaincu la médiatrice européenne, qui a décidé, le 24 juillet dernier, d’ouvrir une enquête de sa propre initiative pour interroger le rôle de Frontex dans les opérations de recherche et de sauvetage à la suite du naufrage survenu en Grèce.

« Il est clair que Frontex a joué un rôle important dans la mission de recherche et de sauvetage du point de vue de la coordination. À ce titre, je pense qu’il est possible de clarifier davantage son rôle dans de telles opérations », a déclaré dans une lettre ouverte Emily O’Reilly, qui occupe le poste de Médiateur européen.

« Il a été signalé que Frontex avait bien alerté les autorités grecques de la présence du navire et proposé son assistance ; mais ce qui n’est pas clair, c’est ce qu’elle aurait pu ou aurait dû faire d’autre », a-t-elle souligné. Frontex s’est dite prête à coopérer « en toute transparence ».

« Cela posera des questions importantes sur le rôle, les pratiques et les protocoles de l’agence dans le contexte des opérations [en mer] et sur les mesures qu’elle a prises pour se conformer à ses obligations en matière de droits fondamentaux et aux lois de l’UE », estiment Amnesty International et Human Rights Watch.
Des appels à l’aide ignorés

Les deux ONG s’interrogent aussi sur l’aide que les gardes-côtes grecs auraient pu apporter aux migrant·es dans les heures ayant précédé le naufrage. De hauts responsables des gardes-côtes leur auraient affirmé que « les personnes à bord du bateau limitaient leur demande d’aide à de l’eau et de la nourriture » et avaient exprimé leur volonté de poursuivre leur route vers l’Italie.

Mais les survivant·es interrogé·es par Amnesty International et Human Rights Watch ont « déclaré que les passagers avaient demandé à être secourus » et qu’ils avaient entendu d’autres personnes à bord de l’embarcation appeler à l’aide lors d’un échange avec un téléphone satellite, plusieurs heures avant le naufrage. Certains auraient enlevé leur T-shirt pour le secouer en l’air et appeler à l’aide, d’autres auraient hurlé à l’attention des deux navires marchands croisés avant le drame.

« Des récits concordent pour dire que des personnes ont perdu la vie à bord du bateau avant le naufrage et que l’un des corps a été placé sur le pont supérieur au-dessus de la cabine pour signifier l’urgence de la situation », poursuit Alice Autin d’Human rights watch. Et d’ajouter : « Les gardes-côtes grecs avaient la responsabilité de venir en aide aux passagers du bateau et il apparaît au vu des résultats de notre enquête qu’il y a des doutes sur la manière dont cela s’est déroulé. »

Plusieurs survivants ont enfin déclaré que les autorités leur auraient confisqué leur téléphone après le naufrage, poursuivent les ONG. Or, certaines personnes auraient « tout filmé ». Ces téléphones pourraient, s’ils réapparaissaient, servir dans le cadre de l’enquête ouverte par la justice grecque.

« Il est essentiel d’analyser ce qu’ils contiennent pour faire toute la lumière sur le déroulement des faits », conclut Alice Autin. Amnesty International et Human Rights Watch réclament une enquête « efficace, indépendante et impartiale ».

▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/030823/naufrage-au-large-de-la-grece-deux-ong-pointent-les-defaillances-des-autor

Greece: Disparities in accounts of Pylos shipwreck underscore the need for human rights compliant inquiry

Starkly divergent accounts from survivors and Greek authorities around the circumstances of the deadly Pylos shipwreck, underscore the urgent need for an effective, independent, and impartial investigation, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said today. 

The disparities between survivors’ accounts of the Pylos shipwreck and the authorities’ version of the events are extremely concerning

The fishing vessel, Adriana, was carrying an estimated 750 people when it sank on 14 June off the coast of Pylos. In the aftermath, accounts from several of the 104 survivors suggest that the vessel was towed by a Greek coast guard boat, causing the fatal wreck.  The Greek authorities have strongly denied these claims.

“The disparities between survivors’ accounts of the Pylos shipwreck and the authorities’ version of the events are extremely concerning” said Judith Sunderland, Associate Europe and Central Asia Director at Human Rights Watch.

“The Greek authorities, with support and scrutiny from the international community, should ensure that there is a transparent investigation to provide truth and justice for survivors and families of the victims, and hold those responsible to account.”  

A delegation from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch visited Greece between 4 and 13 July 2023 as part of ongoing research into the circumstances of the shipwreck and steps toward accountability. They interviewed 19 survivors of the shipwreck, 4 relatives of the missing, and nongovernmental organizations, UN and international agencies and organizations, and representatives of the Hellenic Coast Guard and the Greek Police.

The organizations’ initial observations confirm the concerns reported by several other reputable sources as to the dynamics of the shipwreck. Survivors interviewed by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch consistently stated that the Hellenic Coast Guard vessel dispatched to the scene attached a rope to the Adriana and started towing, causing it to sway and then capsize. The survivors also consistently said that passengers asked to be rescued, and that they witnessed others on the boat plead for a rescue by satellite phone in the hours before their boat capsized.  

In a meeting with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, senior officials of the Hellenic Coast Guard said individuals on the boat limited their request for assistance to food and water and expressed their intention to proceed to Italy. They said the crew of the Coast Guard vessel came close to the Adriana and used a rope to approach the boat to assess whether passengers wanted help, but that after the first “negotiations”, passengers threw the rope back and the boat continued its journey.

This preventable tragedy demonstrates the bankruptcy of EU migration policies predicated on the racialized exclusion of people on the move and deadly deterrence

Greek authorities have opened two criminal investigations, one targeted at the alleged smugglers, and another into the actions of the coast guard. It is vital for these investigations to comply with international human rights standards of impartiality, independence, and effectiveness. 

To enhance the credibility of judicial investigations both in practice and perception, they should be under the supervision of the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office. Further, Greek authorities should ensure that the Greek Ombudsman’s office is promptly provided with information and resources necessary to carry out its functions as the National Mechanism for Investigating Incidents of Arbitrariness, in relation to any disciplinary investigation.   

Several survivors said that the authorities confiscated their phones following the shipwreck but did not give them any related documentation or tell them how to retrieve their property. Nabil, a survivor of Syrian origin, told the organisations, “It’s not only the evidence of the wreck that has been taken from me, it is my memories of my friends who were lost, my life has been taken from me”. 

The Greek authorities’ longstanding failure to ensure accountability for violent and unlawful pushbacks at the country’s borders raises concerns over their ability and willingness to carry out effective and independent investigations.

Lessons should be learned from the European Court of Human Rights 2022 decision about the 2014 “Farmakonisi” shipwreck, in which survivors argued that their boat had capsized because the Hellenic Coast Guard used dangerous maneuvers to tow them towards Turkish waters. The Court condemned Greece for the authorities’ failures in handling rescue operations and for shortcomings in the subsequent investigation of the incident, including how victims’ testimony was handled.  

In view of the seriousness and international significance of the Pylos tragedy, Greek authorities should seek out and welcome international and/or European assistance and cooperation in the conduct of national investigations as an additional guarantee of independence, effectiveness and transparency.  

A full and credible investigation into the shipwreck should seek to clarify any responsibility for both the sinking of the ship and delays or shortcomings in the rescue efforts that may have contributed to the appalling loss of life. The investigation should involve taking the testimonies of all survivors, under conditions that guarantee their trust and safety.

All forensic evidence, such as traces of communications, videos, and photographs, should be collected, assessed and safeguarded to facilitate accountability processes. Any property, such as cell phones, taken from survivors for investigative purposes should be appropriately logged and returned within a reasonable amount of time.  

All of those involved in or with knowledge of the incident, including the Hellenic Coast Guard, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), the captains and crews of the two merchant vessels, and others who took part in the rescue operation after the shipwreck should be invited or required to testify, as appropriate, and should cooperate fully and promptly with the investigations.

To ensure this is the last, and not the latest, in an unconscionably long list of tragedies in the Mediterranean, the EU should reorient its border policies towards rescue at sea and safe and legal routes

In parallel to the national investigation, the EU Ombudsman has announced that it will open an inquiry into the role of Frontex in search and rescue (SAR) activities in the Mediterranean, including in the Adriana shipwreck. This will pose important questions about the agency’s role, practices and protocols in the context of SAR operations and on what actions it has taken to comply with its fundamental rights obligations and EU laws during this and other shipwrecks.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are continuing to investigate the Pylos shipwreck and demand justice for all those harmed.

“This preventable tragedy demonstrates the bankruptcy of EU migration policies predicated on the racialized exclusion of people on the move and deadly deterrence,” said Esther Major, Amnesty International’s Senior Research Adviser for Europe.

“To ensure this is the last, and not the latest, in an unconscionably long list of tragedies in the Mediterranean, the EU should reorient its border policies towards rescue at sea and safe and legal routes for asylum seekers, refugees and migrants.”  

Background 

As part of their ongoing investigation, the organizations have sent letters requesting information to several key entities, including the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Insular Policy, the Prosecutors of the Supreme Court and of the Piraeus Naval Court and Frontex.

On 13 June 2023, Frontex said its surveillance plane spotted the Adriana at 09:47 UTC (12:47 EEST/in Athens) and alerted authorities in Greece and Italy. In the following hours, two merchant vessels and later a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel interacted with the Adriana. After the boat capsized at around 2 a.m. EEST on 14 June, only 104 survivors, including several children, were rescued.

The Prosecutor of Kalamata ordered the arrest of nine Egyptian nationals who survived the shipwreck on charges of smuggling, membership in an organized criminal network, manslaughter, and other serious crimes.

Following an order by the Head of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Piraeus Naval Court, a prosecutor is currently conducting a preliminary investigation into the conditions of the shipwreck and the potential punishable offences by members of the Hellenic Coast Guard. The organizations have sought information with the Greek Minister of Maritime Affairs and Insular Policy about any disciplinary investigation opened into the actions of members of the Hellenic Coast Guard.

▻https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/08/greece-disparities-in-accounts-of-pylos-shipwreck-underscore-the-need-for-h

scène terrible à Lille, arrestation en pleine ville et plein jour, dans un contexte fort peu agité, d’un jeune qui est braqué au fusil à pompe par un membre du Raid
@InfoRoubaix_
▻https://twitter.com/InfoRoubaix_/status/1674489476058324992

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz0q0jSXgAEZShv?format=jpg&name=360x360#.jpeg

parade avec fusil à pompe et armes à répétition

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz0Kj8AWcBEPwqA?format=jpg&name=large#.jpeg

le Raid utilise également des quads à Lille
▻https://twitter.com/AnonymeCitoyen/status/1674511693244940288

La #militarisation de la police atteint un sommet inédit (depuis ce qui pouvait avoir lieu avec des MAT 49 en métropole lors de la guerre d’Algérie ?). Tout se passe comme si par cet étalage de moyens et de puissance de feu ils voulaient forcer en face le passage au tir sans artifices, de même que tant d’échos du renseignements et de cacas journalistiques semblent espérer la mise en pratique d’une ligne combattantiste parmi des réfractaires opposés à la gestion.

#Raid

en libre accès : Rengainez on arrive ! , de Mogniss H. Abdallah, « rend compte de la richesse des luttes contre les crimes racistes et sécuritaires, de la fin des années 1970 au milieu des années 2000, de Rock against Police aux dernières mobilisations du Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues (MIB) »
►https://www.editionslibertalia.com/blog/rengainez-on-arrive-en-telechargement-libre

https://www.editionslibertalia.com/local/cache-vignettes/L210xH308/arton263-42e84.gif?1645096323#.jpeg

parce que oui, @gonzo a raison, il est bien question de #racisme en la matière, même si il n’est pas rare que des non racisés soient shootés par les flics, cf. Cédric Chouviat, et il ya bien plus longtemps, avant 2017, un gars psychiatrisé du Loir_et_Cher ou du Loiret littéralement mitraillé par une patrouille dont j’avais documentée ici le meurtre alors qu’il était en train de fuir et déjà à plusieurs mètres des flics...

(éléments structurels quant à la police et au racisme au vu desquels, vu les reculs de l’auto-organisation, les déclarations de la mère de Nahel à la télé ne sont pour l’heure malheureusement pas à la hauteur de la situation)

émeutes, police et politiciens. un « live » de Le Monde qui est, au moins pour l’instant, en libre accès
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/live/2023/06/29/mort-de-nahel-m-en-direct-le-policier-auteur-du-coup-de-feu-mortel-a-present

en mode bonne nouvelle (ou pas) pour le lecteur

A Paris, le magasin Nike des Halles vandalisé et pillé

Quatorze personnes ont été interpellées à la suite de l’attaque du magasin Nike du Forum des Halles, en fin de soirée. Des forces de l’ordre sécurisent désormais la boutique.

edit L’imMonde édulcorateur euphémise en insistant sur les arrestations.
l’imprédictible encore, il y a eu aussi un Vuitton, un Zara et je ne sais quoi d’autre pillé dans le secteur
le zbeul s’est étendu rue de Rivoli ! (dont la Samaritaine !)
sans quil ya ait guère§re de keufs, plus présent dans le nord et l’est parisien ah ah ah (don’t forget le RER ! paye toi des sociologues comme tes ancêtres d’il y a 5 minutes)

Si j’avais un marteau
Je cognerais le jour
Je cognerais la nuit
J’y mettrais tout mon cœur

funny game. hier une vidéo depuis un commissariat attaqué montrait des gars sortant munis d’équipements policiers avec en fond musical un « c’est nous les condés », c’est repris ailleurs ce soir dans les mêmes circonstances.

une Audi TT va chez Lidl à Nantes, comme voiture bélier, avant l’instauration d’un libre service dans l’enthousiasme général.

re
Aubervilliers, des travaux des #JO sont en feu, ainsi qu’un dépôt de bus Ratp où la police est intervenue moulâtes fois pour casser la dernière grève

2h29 Maxime Sirvins @MaximeSirvins
▻https://twitter.com/MaximeSirvins/status/1674575762320510977

Des gendarmes s’identifient comme étant du #GIGN actuellement dans le 1er arrondissement de #Paris.

#pillage #Paris

Histoire de « détendre » l’atmosphère : hier soir alors que je scrollais comme un gros « gue-din » sur CuiCui :
▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1674495846258208779/pu/vid/576x1030/0ZeunIq3ZZ51T_Pz.mp4?tag=12

▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1674518244055547904/pu/vid/720x1280/v_uF-4fbkpmvnjSX.mp4?tag=12

▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1674576912230825986/pu/vid/720x1102/7FcIdBJOlS6eKDjs.mp4?tag=12

▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1674564134191390722/pu/vid/720x1280/8s8thPrHS0gUiXJO.mp4?tag=12

Y’a un mec il a perdu son carrosse #emeutes

▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1674576042239860737/pu/vid/592x1280/Q3Rj0h5Wra3gjVDW.mp4?tag=12

Mais franchement, y a des trucs tellement claqués qu’on se demande si on n’a pas franchi un bidule spatio-temporel

Le RAID procédera ensuite à une interpellation musclée d’au moins quatre personnes. « Là, c’est la panique. Ils mettent en joue. Les gamins sont au sol, ventre à terre, une arme pointée sur eux. C’est d’une violence inouïe alors que la situation était très calme. C’est terrifiant ! » Une brigade de police les emmènera ensuite au commissariat.

Vidéo. Arrestations : « J’ai eu peur pour la sécurité des jeunes et pour la mienne, c’était terrifiant »
▻https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1346911/article/2023-06-30/video-arrestations-j-ai-eu-peur-pour-la-securite-des-jeunes-et-pour-la-

RSA : « Et si le gouvernement prenait vraiment les choses au sérieux ? », Jean-Claude Barbier
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/06/01/rsa-et-si-le-gouvernement-prenait-vraiment-les-choses-au-serieux_6175733_323
La querelle sur l’activité obligatoire des allocataires des minima sociaux date d’avant le RMI de 1988, ancêtre du RSA, rappelle dans une tribune au « Monde » le sociologue Jean-Claude Barbier.

Quelles sont les différentes options qui pourraient tracer les pistes d’une possible réforme du revenu de solidarité active (RSA), voulue par le gouvernement ? Elles sont au nombre de quatre et sont bien antérieures à la réforme envisagée aujourd’hui. Il y a d’abord ce que l’on peut qualifier de « méthode Raymond Barre ». Elle remonte à l’époque où l’ancien premier ministre de Valéry Giscard d’Estaing et candidat à l’élection présidentielle de 1988 demandait l’assistance « absolue » uniquement pour les vieillards et les personnes handicapées ne pouvant pas du tout travailler.

Puis il y a la « méthode Nixon », étendue par Clinton en 1996 : obliger pour une allocation de misère – pas même un emploi – à travailler dans les parcs publics. Elle a été surnommée « workfare ». Ensuite, l’insertion, originalité française, la « méthode Jean-Michel Belorgey » (du nom du député socialiste auteur et pilote de la loi revenu minimum d’insertion (RMI) promulguée le 1er décembre 1988), qui combine allocation et accompagnement effectif des personnes par les travailleurs sociaux.

Laissons de côté l’actuelle tentation démagogique qui agite aujourd’hui les députés Renaissance et LR comme elle agita Clinton, et intéressons-nous à la quatrième solution, celle de la « dignité humaine » (Menschenwürde), principe constitutionnel allemand. La Cour de Karlsruhe a en effet exigé en 2019 du gouvernement fédéral qu’il respecte le minimum d’existence (digne) fixé par la Constitution en euros, applicable même après d’éventuelles diminutions pour sanctions.

Rompre avec « l’esprit de radinerie »

Si un gouvernement français prenait vraiment les choses au sérieux, il devrait d’abord rompre avec « l’esprit de radinerie » qui marque l’assistance aux pauvres depuis son invention en Angleterre élisabéthaine au XVIe siècle. Jamais depuis cette époque les gouvernements n’ont accordé un financement suffisant pour aider les personnes pauvres à sortir de la misère.

Si en effet les sommes dépensées paraissent énormes, elles ne représentent, y compris l’indemnisation du chômage, que 8 % des dépenses de protection sociale, contre 80 % pour la santé et les retraites. Près des deux tiers de ceux et celles qui perçoivent les minima sociaux sont en dessous du seuil de pauvreté en France (y compris les enfants).
Une réponse sérieuse devrait donc être celle d’un financement décent mais conséquent, et d’une action d’accompagnement elle aussi conséquente, comme elle existe par exemple au Danemark (à l’exception des immigrants désormais discriminés dans ce pays). Le RMI n’a jamais bien fonctionné en termes de suivi efficace pour le retour ou l’accès à un emploi.

Renforcer les sanctions reste une mesure marginale

En 2022, la Cour des comptes a noté que les dépenses des départements ne sont compensées en longue durée qu’à près de 60 %, ce qui veut dire qu’ils n’ont tout simplement pas les moyens de financer l’insertion. Au Danemark, les collectivités territoriales lèvent leurs propres impôts, et sont au contraire suffisamment dotées.
Mieux, elles sont engagées à gérer efficacement leurs dépenses par des contrats avec l’Etat central qui les incitent à bien le faire. Il est tout à fait possible de dépenser à la fois à bon escient et avec rigueur. Et cela serait une belle réforme à entreprendre pour le ministre français des finances…

Car renforcer les sanctions reste une mesure marginale ou inopérante. Les économistes savent que les sanctions sont d’une efficacité toute relative : elles motivent à la recherche d’emploi quand approche la fin du droit à l’indemnisation, mais elles incitent à prendre des emplois médiocres.

Trouver des emplois de qualité et non des ombres d’emploi

En outre, elles peuvent aussi inciter au non-recours (« Droits et devoirs du RSA : l’impact des contrôles sur la participation des bénéficiaires », Sylvain Chareyron, Rémi Le Gall, Yannick L’Horty, Revue économique n °5/73, 2022). Or, le non-recours au RSA est évalué à un tiers des personnes éligibles. Le problème à résoudre est par conséquent de placer en emploi ou en formation pendant plusieurs mois des centaines de milliers de personnes en difficulté.

Il s’agit de trouver des emplois de qualité et non des ombres d’emploi, comme le redoute l’ancien commissaire au RSA Martin Hirsch. Les personnes pauvres craignent en effet des emplois de seconde zone, selon l’avis du Conseil national des politiques de lutte contre la pauvreté et l’exclusion sociale ▻https://www.cnle.gouv.fr/l-avis-accompagnement-vers-l-1672.html (CNLE) sur l’accompagnement et l’insertion.

Dans le rapport qui envisage la réforme du RSA, l’administration annonce l’objectif d’un conseiller Pôle emploi et d’un travailleur social pour 50 personnes, afin d’obtenir un « accompagnement global » adéquat pour des candidats très éloignés de l’emploi. Or, le régime normal, dit « de suivi », à Pôle emploi est de un pour 363, le régime « guidé » de un pour 211) et régime « renforcé » de un pour 97, selon les chiffres de la Cour des comptes. Un pas immense reste à franchir.

Le service de l’emploi et de l’insertion est en outre confronté à trois populations hétérogènes : les jeunes ayant de grosses difficultés (à qui Le RSA est refusé, jusqu’à l’âge arbitraire de 25 ans), les chômeurs et les titulaires des minima sociaux, et parmi eux ceux qui ont des problèmes de santé (et ils sont nombreux). Chacun de ces groupes a besoin de services adaptés, qui ne peuvent être automatisés.

L’essence de l’esprit de solidarité

Par exemple, il faut des allocations aux jeunes sans emploi ni formation : ils sont plus d’un million, mais moins de 300 000 ont droit au soutien d’un contrat engagement jeune. L’idée d’un accompagnement renforcé accordé à un million de titulaires du RSA (avec un conseiller pour 50 allocataires) coûterait annuellement de 1,4 milliard d’euros, affirme l’IFRAP, un groupe de réflexion ultra-libéral.

Or, la qualité de l’accompagnement conditionne la réussite : c’est précisément son absence qui explique les mauvais résultats de l’insertion, comme l’affirme la Cour des comptes à juste titre. Selon l’Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques (OCDE), le Danemark dépense trois fois plus proportionnellement que la France pour les « mesures actives » de l’emploi (c’est-à-dire les mesures de formation, d’accompagnement, d’insertion…. hors allocations), ce qui explique leur succès relatif dans notre pays.

Or le Danemark est, comme la France, critiqué comme champion européen des dépenses sociales. Mais il n’y a rien sans rien ! Et de toute façon, l’insertion sociale et professionnelle est sans cesse à remettre sur l’ouvrage, avec des taux d’accès à l’emploi souvent décevants. Il ne faut pourtant pas renoncer, car il s’agit ici de l’essence de l’esprit de solidarité.

Jean-Claude Barbier(sociologue CNRS au Centre d’économie de la Sorbonne /Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)*

La réforme du RSA suscite inquiétudes et scepticisme
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2023/05/04/la-reforme-du-rsa-suscite-inquietudes-et-scepticisme_6172003_823448.html

Le gouvernement s’inspire notamment du contrat d’engagement jeune (#CEJ), mis en place en mars 2022. Un dispositif réservé aux 16-25 ans et aux moins de 30 ans en situation de handicap qui ne sont ni en études, ni en activité, ni en formation, et qui peinent à accéder à un emploi durable. Ces derniers s’inscrivent dans un parcours d’accompagnement de quinze à vingt heures hebdomadaires en échange d’une #allocation de 530 euros.

Voilà le tarif : 530e par mois
Toujours aussi drôle de voir les articles de gauche, et les critiques libérales (comme ci-dessus) qui disent 600 euros pour le RSA individuel alors que dans les faits c’est 534,82 (dans plus de 90% des cas, et ce depuis 1988, un « forfait logement » de 12% est retranché du montant maximum théorique).

edit trouvé le reste dont

(...)Des mesures coercitives qui suscitent, là encore, le scepticisme. « Les sanctions annoncées posent une vraie question opérationnelle, considère Antoine Foucher, du cabinet Quintet. Comment va-t-on, même partiellement, même provisoirement, diminuer le RSA des allocataires récalcitrants ? » Ces derniers « sont déjà très contrôlés, avec pas mal de sanctions », ajoute Michaël Zemmour, qui cite notamment « la mise sous surveillance » de leurs comptes en banque.

Discours « démagogiques »
Si les collectivités locales expriment ces craintes c’est aussi parce qu’elles pensent qu’une sorte de double discours existe au sein du gouvernement. « Nous sommes rassurés sur les conditions de l’expérimentation, mais inquiets concernant le contenu de la loi », lance Bruno Bernard. Le président écologiste de la métropole de Lyon dénonce les discours « démagogiques » du président de la République et du ministre des comptes publics, Gabriel Attal. Lors d’un déplacement dans l’Hérault, le 25 avril, ce dernier a opposé « les classes moyennes », « ceux qui comptent pour l’essentiel sur leur travail pour vivre, pas sur les aides sociales ni sur un gros patrimoine », aux opposants à la réforme des retraites qui accueillent les déplacements de ministres avec des casseroles.

Cette opposition entre les actifs et ceux qui bénéficient des minima sociaux avait déjà utilisée par Emmanuel Macron, lors de son entretien télévisé, le 22 mars. « Beaucoup de travailleurs disent “vous nous demandez des efforts mais il y a des gens qui ne travaillent jamais” », avait déclaré le locataire de l’Elysée pour justifier le conditionnement du RSA. (...)

Une rhétorique qui trouve un écho dans la population et qui peut en partie expliquer la difficulté que peuvent avoir les opposants à mobiliser largement. « L’idée s’est imposée dans l’opinion publique [que nous fabriquons] qu’il y a trop de gens qui vivent de la solidarité nationale, analyse le directeur général délégué d’Ipsos, Brice Teinturier. Une forme de consensus sur le sujet s’est installé, donc une telle réforme du RSA ne sera pas vraiment contestée par les Français. » Un climat politique issu de vingt ans de discours sur le supposé « assistanat » auquel vient s’ajouter un contexte économique favorable.
Compte tenu des difficultés de recrutements rencontrées par les employeurs dans de très nombreux secteurs, ceux qui ne travaillent pas sont considérés comme profitant du système. Plusieurs études montrent qu’il y a surtout beaucoup de personnes qui peuvent prétendre au RSA et qui n’en bénéficient pas. « En 2018, un tiers (34 %) des foyers éligibles au RSA serait non recourant chaque trimestre, et un sur cinq (20 %) le serait de façon pérenne trois trimestres consécutifs », rappelle la direction de la recherche, des études, de l’évaluation et des statistiques.
Dans son entretien avec les lecteurs du Parisien, le 23 avril, Emmanuel Macron s’appuie pourtant sur ceux qui « abusent » du RSA pour défendre la réforme. Un sentiment renforcé par la sensation qu’ont les actifs, et surtout les travailleurs dit de première et deuxième lignes, que leur travail est dévalorisé et ne paie pas assez. « La précarisation du monde du travail renforce le ressentiment de ceux qui ont l’impression de se lever tôt pour un travail difficile et mal payé envers ceux qui bénéficient des minima sociaux sans travailler », signale Brice Teinturier.

▻https://justpaste.it/5oq7c

Cela me fait penser à ce passage du Capital de Marx, chapitre 27 – L’expropriation de la population campagnarde – évoquant « la loi sur les pauvres » au XVIe siècle.

Le protestantisme est essentiellement une religion bourgeoise. Pour en faite ressortir « l’esprit » un seul exemple suffira. C’était encore au temps d’Élisabeth : quelques propriétaires fonciers et quelques riches fermiers de l’Angleterre méridionale se réunirent en conciliabule pour approfondir la loi sur les pauvres récemment promulguée. Puis ils résumèrent le résultat de leurs études communes dans un écrit,contenant dix questions raisonnées, qu’ils soumirent ensuite à l’avis d’un célèbre jurisconsulte d’alors, le sergent Snigge, élevé au rang de juge sous le règne de Jacques-Ier. En voici un extrait :

« Neuvième question : Quelques-uns des riches fermiers de la paroisse ont projeté un plan fort sage au moyen duquel on peut éviter toute espèce de trouble dans l’exécution de la loi. Ils proposent de faire bâtir dans la paroisse une prison. Tout pauvre qui ne voudra pas s’y laisser enfermer se verra refuser l’assistance. On fera ensuite savoir dans les environs que, si quelque individu désire louer les pauvres de cette paroisse, il aura à remettre, à un terme fixé d’avance, des propositions cachetées indiquant le plus bas prix auquel il voudra nous en débarrasser. Les auteurs de ce plan supposent qu’il y a dans les comtés voisins des gens qui n’ont aucune envie de travailler, et qui sont sans fortune ou sans crédit pour se procurer soit ferme, soit vaisseau, afin de pouvoir vivre sans travail. Ces gens-là seraient tout disposés à faire à la paroisse des propositions très-avantageuses. Si çà et là des pauvres venaient à mourir sous la garde du contractant, la faute en retomberait sur lui, la paroisse ayant rempli à l’égard de ces pauvres tous ses devoirs. Nous craignons pourtant que la loi dont il s’agit ne permette pas des mesures de prudence de ce genre. Mais il vous faut savoir que le reste des freeholders (francs tenanciers) de ce comté et des comtés voisins se joindra à nous pour engager leurs représentants à la chambre des communes à proposer une loi qui permette d’emprisonner les pauvres et de les contraindre au travail, afin que tout individu qui se refuse à l’emprisonnement perde son droit à l’assistance. Ceci, nous l’espérons, va empêcher les misérables d ’avoir besoin d’être assistés . (a) »

(a) R. Blakey : The History of political, literature from the earliest times. Lond., 1855, vol. II, p. 83, 84

oui, si ce n’est qu’on est passé des #workhouse à la « société de travail » (comme Jospin l’a excellemment formulé en 1998) sur un soubassement matériel et social tout autre que les dimensions communautaires détruites par la dynamique du capital : le salaire et le salaire social (j’entends par là autre chose que Friot ; toutes les formes de salaire socialisé, hors emploi, dont le RSA). là l’enjeu du contrôle, c’est de déterminer par la loi, la jurisprudence, les pratiques de guichet, les gesticulations agressives, etc., l’étiage de la disponibilité à l’emploi (la conditionnalité de fait), quitte à multiplier les simulacres (plutôt que les murs) où s’épuise le temps des prolos (la disponibilité à l’emploi avec ses jeux imposés, du théâtre)

des éléments sur ce théâtre, d’il y a 12 ans (...)
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/46203

là l’enjeu du contrôle, c’est de déterminer par la loi, la jurisprudence, les pratiques de guichet, les gesticulations agressives, etc., l’étiage de la disponibilité à l’emploi (la conditionnalité de fait), quitte à multiplier les simulacres (plutôt que les murs) où s’épuise le temps des prolos (la disponibilité à l’emploi avec ses jeux imposés, du théâtre)

Effectivement, « de l’autre côté » des allocataires du RSA on trouve des personnes qui occupent des emplois d’insertion, qui ne correspondent à guère autre chose que des missions de contrôle social et de gestion administrative de la précarité (dont un certain nombre sont d’ailleurs d’anciens « bénéficiaires » du RSA).

C’est à ce genre d’aberration auquel conduit la défense aveugle des emplois pour les emplois, au lieu de celle des ressources. J’utilise à dessein le mot « ressources » pour évoquer - indépendamment des différentes formes qu’elles peuvent prendre (salaire, minima, pension de retraite, revenu, apprentis, stage, emplois aidés, etc.) - l’accès inconditionnel à des moyens d’existence qui ne soient jamais inférieurs au SMIC (même si le SMIC est un salaire bas, ce sera toujours mieux que ce que donne la liste des emplois bilboques).

Quand à savoir s’il s’agit ou d’un « salaire socialisé » ou d’un « revenu garanti », à la limite, cela ne me semble pas vraiment déterminant (ce genre de questions aurait même plutôt tendance à me gonfler). Si on trouve un autre mot que « ressources » qui exprime le même sens que celui que je viens de proposer, je suis preneur.

L’autre raison pour laquelle, de façon plus générale, je pense qu’il est essentiel de déconnecter la question des emplois et d’insister sur celle des ressources dans la lutte sociale (notamment dans la lutte syndicale - ce qui n’est vraiment pas gagné) c’est qu’à cause de la « défenses de l’emploi » on en vient à justifier le développement des pires aberrations industrielles qui nous conduisent droit dans le mur sur le plan social, politique et écologique.

Il faut arrêter de justifier les choix politiques et sociaux sur les emplois mais, par contre, la défense des fondamentaux de la justice économique doit rester une priorité afin qu’aucune décision économique ou politique (plan sociaux, taxe carbone, etc.) se fasse au détriment des conditions d’existence matérielles de la classe ouvrière (pour faire simple).

Et puis, après, vient la question du travail, mais là, de mon point de vue, c’est encore une autre problématique.

RSA : « La règle des 15 à 20 heures d’activité obligatoires est irréalisable, et le pouvoir le sait très bien », Yves Faucoup, Ancien directeur d’un centre de formation de travailleurs sociaux à Toulouse
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/06/26/rsa-la-regle-des-15-a-20-heures-d-activite-obligatoires-est-irrealisable-et-

Ancien cadre dans le travail social, Yves Faucoup dénonce, dans une tribune au « Monde », la réforme du revenu de solidarité active projetée par le gouvernement au nom d’une « mise au travail » dont il ne donne pas les moyens.

France Travail, remplaçant de Pôle emploi, aura entre autres pour mission de veiller à ce que les attributaires du revenu de solidarité active (RSA) soient inscrits au chômage et établissent un contrat d’engagement.
A terme, il s’agirait officiellement d’imposer quinze à vingt heures hebdomadaires d’activité à celles et ceux qui perçoivent le RSA. Certains commentateurs considèrent que le président de la République et la première ministre se seraient partagé les rôles : à lui la version dure, de droite, à la Sarkozy (« droits et devoirs »), à elle la version plus humaine, de gauche (« accompagnement et insertion »).
Depuis bientôt trente-cinq ans (loi sur le revenu minimum d’insertion, décembre 1988), le principe du revenu minimum consiste en France à garantir à une personne sans ressources une allocation différentielle de faible niveau. Elle est fixée en effet à la moitié du seuil de pauvreté pour une personne seule, soit 534 euros mensuels (et non pas 608 euros comme si souvent colporté, en oubliant de déduire le forfait logement).

Un accompagnement social et professionnel
Il s’agit de lui permettre de survivre, bien loin des « moyens convenables d’existence » prévus par la Constitution ! Il n’a jamais été non plus expliqué clairement pourquoi le RSA est fixé à 60 % de l’allocation aux adultes handicapés (AAH) ou de l’allocation de solidarité aux personnes âgées (ASPA ou minimum vieillesse), autres minima sociaux.
En contrepartie de cette allocation, un engagement d’activité (emploi, bénévolat, formation, création d’entreprise, soins) est signé par la personne en fonction de sa situation (car elle n’est pas toujours en capacité physique ou psychique d’assumer un travail). Cet engagement suppose un accompagnement social et professionnel. C’est du moins ce qu’indiquent les textes en vigueur depuis trente-cinq ans, sauf que les sommes qui y sont consacrées sont passées de 20 % du montant des allocations dans les années 1990 à 7 % aujourd’hui.

Le RSA mis en avant par Nicolas Sarkozy avait pour but, tout comme la réforme annoncée par Emmanuel Macron, de « mettre les gens au travail », un discours autoritaire destiné à siphonner des voix à droite. Mais cela a été un fiasco, à part le renforcement de l’implication de Pôle emploi. En réalité, la mise en œuvre du RSA a entraîné des pertes majeures pour l’efficacité des accompagnements.
L’intéressement à une reprise d’activité existait déjà, il aurait suffi de l’améliorer. Le RSA activité a été une erreur : les ayants droit ne l’ont pas ou peu demandé, redoutant la stigmatisation du minimum social entretenue par les idéologues de la droite dure, à l’instar de Laurent Wauquiez. Il a d’ailleurs été remplacé plus efficacement par la prime d’activité, ce que de nombreux spécialistes de la question réclamaient depuis longtemps.

Le risque de l’affichage
Le débat public sur le RSA est simpliste, parce qu’il entend régler le problème selon le principe des vases communicants : il y a des emplois non pourvus, donc ils peuvent être attribués à des gens au RSA. Alors que tous les professionnels du secteur savent que si l’on veut être efficace, il faut des moyens en matière d’accompagnement.
Si le chef de l’Etat en était persuadé, il n’aurait pas attendu six ans pour se préoccuper de l’efficacité du dispositif – ce qui ne laisse d’ailleurs rien augurer de bon sur la mise en œuvre effective de la réforme. Car le risque est de rester dans l’affichage : non seulement pour passer le plus vite possible à autre chose après la promulgation de la loi sur les retraites, mais aussi pour faire de la communication politique à destination d’une classe moyenne prétendument excédée en se servant de la précarité. Comme Nicolas Sarkozy lors de la campagne présidentielle de 2012 dans sa lettre aux Français : « Nous avons consacré des milliards à maintenir des gens dans l’assistanat (…), nous l’avons payé d’une défaite financière. »
En coulisse, les professionnels de l’accompagnement social suivent vaguement ces débats avec un triste sourire : ils savent que le rapport du haut-commissaire à l’emploi et à l’engagement des entreprises, Thibaut Guilluy, n’a pas fait l’objet d’une véritable concertation (une seule réunion pour toute l’Occitanie) ; et si beaucoup de ses propositions sont intéressantes, elles sont présentées à tort comme des innovations alors qu’elles n’inventent rien. Les nombreuses pistes existent déjà, elles sont appliquées, tentées ou explorées sur les territoires où les autorités départementales ont mis le paquet, et bien moins là où les moyens manquent.
Négocié et non imposé
Elisabeth Borne, en déplacement sur l’île de La Réunion, a parlé de « sanctions » si les attributaires du RSA ne respectent pas l’engagement. Juste pour montrer ses muscles, car la suspension du revenu minimum existe depuis toujours, si la personne ne prend pas contact avec le service d’accompagnement ou ne respecte pas l’engagement qu’elle a pris.

Sauf que la première ministre a ajouté que dans la mesure où « on aura accompli, de notre côté, notre part de responsabilité », la sanction tombera si le bénéficiaire du RSA, lui, ne suit pas « le parcours qu’on lui a proposé ». Or jusqu’à ce jour, il est entendu, et d’ailleurs bien plus efficace, que le parcours soit négocié avec l’intéressé et non imposé. Il y a là un risque énorme d’un dispositif autoritaire voué à l’échec, car les professionnels de l’accompagnement résisteront et les allocataires aussi.

1,8 million de foyers perçoivent le RSA : la règle des quinze à vingt heures d’activité obligatoires est irréalisable, et le pouvoir le sait très bien. S’il l’agite comme un hochet dans l’espoir d’en tirer profit auprès de « ceux qui travaillent », il ne semble pas qu’il ait l’intention de l’inscrire précisément dans la loi.
Ce recul est plutôt une bonne chose, mais qu’en sera-t-il des promesses qu’il a faites sur les moyens d’accompagnement social et professionnel et de formation, indispensables pour aider vraiment les citoyens qui galèrent à tenter d’accéder à une véritable insertion ?

A écouter, ce podcast :
Les cartes sont-elles « objectives » ?
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1020598

#autogestion ##autonomie #anticapitalisme #expérience #contre-société

Le départ de cette expérience de vie autogérée a quand même été permis grâce à une accession à la propriété foncière et immobilière (succession)

@sombre

On ne connaissait pas cette intéressante expérience, dans la lignée des communautés libertaires.

L’article n’indique pas les précisions que tu apportes, mais dans tous les cas ce sera toujours mieux que de la spéculation et le mercantilisme... ;-)

On leur souhaite le meilleurs. 🏴

Pourtant, c’est ce qui est rapporté ici :

C’est ici, sur ce grand terrain de 10 hectares qui appartenait auparavant à ses grands-parents, qu’ils ont choisi de s’installer.

On peut en déduire que « Cortney » (le jeune homme de 28 ans) à pu hériter de ce terrain et des bâtiments qui y étaient construits.

Je n’ai pas eu le temps de lire l’article dans les détails.
J’ai survolé leur site web et c’est ainsi que j’ai appris qu’ils avaient un règlement intérieur ce qui à priori ne me gène pas mais je prendrai le temps de le lire :

▻https://www.mallouestan.org/fr/charte

Leur asso fait partie de deux réseaux :

▻https://www.reseau-national-refuges-animalistes.org/refuges/lautre-ferme-4-2

▻https://ecovillage.org/project/le-mallouestan

@sombre

Merci pour les infos, je n’avais pas fait attention à ce passage effectivement.

Oui, ils ont une "charte de vie commune" ce qui est tout à fait normal à nos yeux... comme le dit si bien Marie dans l’article :

« L’anarchie, c’est l’absence de pouvoir sur les autres, pas l’absence de règles »,

en écho à :

« L’anarchie, c’est l’ordre sans le pouvoir » de Proudhon...

La Macronie ou le « poison » d’avril permanent :

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fspi4PIWwAMuBb-.jpg

Télé police, télé fasciste
▻https://contre-attaque.net/2023/04/01/tele-police-tele-fasciste

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/121/853/888/357/884/original/5257fbdff87d0c46.jpg

La « première » chaîne d’information en continu n’en est (évidemment) pas à son coup d’essai : manifestations des Gilets jaunes, rassemblement de la police devant l’Assemblée nationale... le journalisme de préfecture fait partie des spécialités-maison. Aussi, samedi 25 mars, alors que la mobilisation anti-bassines à Sainte-Soline polarise l’antenne, tout l’attirail du maintien de l’ordre journalistique a été une nouvelle fois déployé, légitimant la répression des militants écologistes.

De WhatsApp à BFMTV, les petits messages de la Préfecture de police.
▻https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/de-whatsapp-a-bfmtv-les-petits-messages-de-la-prefecture-de-police

Lors des manifestations, la Préfecture de police de Paris met en place des groupes de discussion sur l’application de messagerie instantanée WhatsApp. Un outil très pratique pour les journalistes télé afin d’abreuver leur antenne d’informations officielles. Mais aussi pour la préfecture dont certains des éléments de langage finissent à l’antenne, dans la bouche de journalistes qui les reprennent à leur compte sans signaler leur provenance.

▻https://mastodon.social/@contreattaque
#contre_attaque #Acrimed #Bolloré #BFM_TV #police #fake_news

#démocratie

#surveillance #contre-insurrection

a priori, c’est le premier emploi en France de cette technique, jusqu’ici restée « en réserve » comme d’autres le sont

Ses VBRG étaient bien équipés d’un dispositif de « pulvérisation » d’un produit « incapacitant », de type « lacrymogène à dose forte », qui n’aurait été utilisé que sur « ordre d’une autorité ». Un dispositif qui n’a jamais « été utilisé en métropole »

▻https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/le-bon-lien/article/des-blindes-de-la-gendarmerie-avec-une-arme-secrete-la-gendarmerie-re

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJBoTfXQAYXLMY?format=jpg&name=medium#.jpeg

#marquage_des_manifestants #police #justice

Il ne reste plus qu’a ecrir ACAB à l’encre UV sur toutes les fringues

Fire in Moria Refugee Camp

https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Fire-in-Moria-Refugee-Camp-13-768x432.png

In the late hours of 8 September 2020, large fires broke out at the migrant camp of Moria, located on the frontier island of Lesvos, Greece. The fires smouldered over several days, displacing thousands of people and reducing the epicentre of the EU’s carceral archipelago to ashes. The overcrowded camp, first established in 2013, was host to more than 13,000 people at the time, and was notorious for its precarious and unsafe living conditions—conditions manufactured and maintained for years by Greek and EU policies.

▻https://counter-investigations.org/investigation/fire-in-moria-refugee-camp

Grecia, incendi e responsabilità

https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/var/obc/storage/images/articoli-da-pubblicare-2/grecia-incendi-e-responsabilita-230976/2218617-4-ita-IT/Grecia-incendi-e-responsabilita.jpg

Il controverso processo per il disastroso incendio che ha distrutto il campo profughi di Moria, sull’isola di Lesbo, terminato con una condanna, ha visto la difesa utilizzare nuovi dati scientifici sulla fragilità degli ecosistemi alla minaccia del fuoco

“Il crimine non è l’incendio, il crimine è Moria”, recitava lo striscione esposto davanti alla corte d’appello dell’isola di Lesbo il 6 marzo 2024, mentre quattro richiedenti asilo afgani aspettavano una decisione sul loro caso.

Poche ore dopo, tre di loro sono stati rilasciati sulla parola e rinviati a nuovo processo, in quanto minorenni al momento degli incidenti. Il processo contro l’altro imputato è continuato fino all’8 marzo 2024, quando è stato dichiarato colpevole e condannato a otto anni di carcere. Il caso ha sollevato preoccupazioni sui diritti umani, sullo stato di diritto e sulla sicurezza nel contesto migratorio.

Cronaca di una tragedia annunciata

I quattro imputati facevano originariamente parte dei cosiddetti “Sei di Moria”, un gruppo di sei giovani richiedenti asilo (cinque minorenni e un adulto) arrestati dalla polizia locale pochi giorni dopo lo scoppio del tragico incendio nel campo profughi di Moria di settembre 2020, che ha lasciato 13mila persone senza riparo.

Al momento degli arresti, i vigili del fuoco stavano ancora indagando. Nonostante la mancanza di prove, le immagini dei “piromani” in manette hanno fatto subito il giro dei media.

Nel frattempo sono venute alla luce le scandalose condizioni di vita nel campo. Notis Mitarachi, l’allora ministro greco della Migrazione, ha cercato di placare l’opinione pubblica con dichiarazioni pompose: rivolgendosi ai membri del Comitato permanente per la pubblica amministrazione, l’ordine pubblico e la giustizia, ha affermato che le infrastrutture a Moria erano già state notevolmente migliorate e che i responsabili dell’incendio “sarebbero stati puniti e deportati”.

A giugno 2021, il tribunale con giuria mista di Chios ha dichiarato i quattro imputati colpevoli di “incendio doloso con pericolo per la vita umana” e li ha condannati a dieci anni di reclusione, basandosi sulla testimonianza scritta di un unico testimone.

Sebbene nessuno potesse dire esattamente come tutto fosse iniziato, diversi testimoni hanno collegato la tragedia ad una serie di incidenti violenti avvenuti tra i residenti del campo nelle tarde ore dell’8 settembre 2020, e in particolare, a forti disaccordi sulle misure di isolamento legate al coronavirus presto trasformatisi in una lotta interetnica, poi sfuggita di mano.

Mitarachi ha dichiarato che «gli incidenti a Moria sono iniziati tra i richiedenti asilo a causa della quarantena». Pochi mesi dopo, intervistato da un media greco, ha dichiarato che il progetto del governo di creare un campo profughi più sicuro con condizioni umane dignitose nella regione aveva incontrato resistenza da parte delle autorità locali, con esiti disastrosi.

Mitarachi ha poi accusato Kostas Moutzouris, governatore regionale del Nord Egeo, che a sua volta lo ha citato in giudizio nell’aprile 2021.

Il famigerato campo profughi è stato definito da reporter internazionali e operatori umanitari come “l’inferno in terra”, “una bomba a orologeria” e “un disastro in attesa di accadere”, dove le persone venivano tenute per anni in condizioni disumane.

Al suo apice, il campo ospitava oltre 14mila persone in uno spazio originariamente progettato per 2.150, e sono state registrate morti a causa delle terribili condizioni di vita, della scarsa igiene e delle scarse scorte di cibo.
Una prospettiva diversa

Il processo contro i quattro afghani del 2021 è stato controverso fin dall’inizio. Poiché l’unico testimone non è comparso in tribunale e quindi non è stato interrogato, la difesa ha sottolineato «interpretazioni errate o incomplete» delle intenzioni dei loro clienti e degli eventi della notte dell’incendio.

Nel 2023 sono venute alla luce nuove prove: gli avvocati della difesa hanno tentato di ricostruire i fatti con l’aiuto delle ricerche condotte da Forensic Architecture/Forensis su loro commissione.

I rilievi di FA/Forensis, sulla base di testimonianze e resoconti ufficiali scritti, nonché dell’esame di materiale audiovisivo, hanno attribuito l’incendio a condizioni geografiche, morfologiche e meteorologiche che rendono questa regione mediterranea più esposta agli incendi, soprattutto a settembre, quando “il terreno è più secco”.

In una conferenza stampa tenutasi a marzo 2023, gli esperti Dimitra Andritsou e Stefanos Levidis hanno spiegato che “le condizioni di siccità, combinate con la precarietà e la densità derivanti dalle politiche imposte dalle autorità greche e dell’UE, hanno portato ad un forte aumento dei grandi incendi ogni anno in questo periodo”.

La nostra analisi”, ha concluso Andritsou, “rivela significative incongruenze nella testimonianza del testimone chiave e getta ulteriori dubbi sulle prove in base alle quali sono stati accusati i giovani richiedenti asilo”.

Il parere degli esperti si è basato in modo significativo sui filmati girati dagli stessi giovani migranti nel quadro di un corso di formazione sulla realizzazione di film e reportage offerto da un’organizzazione che lavora con i rifugiati a Lesbo.
La prevenzione incendi: una questione di cultura e di valori

In una prospettiva più ampia, ciò apre una nuova discussione sul tema della prevenzione e gestione degli incendi, soprattutto nelle regioni ad alto rischio come Lesbo.

Indipendentemente dall’esito finale, il fatto che nella sperimentazione sia stata utilizzata un’ipotesi legata al clima/morfologia evidenzia la rilevanza di progetti che affrontano i fenomeni estremi che colpiscono la Grecia.

OBCT ha intervistato il professor Kostas Kalabokidis, responsabile del Greek Living Lab (LL) nell’iniziativa FIRE-RES, un progetto che fornisce soluzioni innovative per territori resilienti al fuoco in Europa, tra cui Lesbo.

“Gli ecosistemi forestali della regione mediterranea sono costantemente minacciati da incendi estremi, che hanno un impatto significativo sui servizi eco-sistemici essenziali”, afferma Kalabokidis. “I nostri studi mirano a esaminare le intricate relazioni tra le strategie di soppressione e gestione degli incendi e i diversi servizi eco-sistemici colpiti dagli incendi, con l’obiettivo di sviluppare un quadro completo e su misura per paesaggi resilienti agli incendi”.

Il professor Kalabokidis ha sottolineato come l’uso di approcci metodologici avanzati, come l’analisi dei compromessi, la pianificazione degli scenari o le simulazioni stocastiche, possa contribuire a ridurre i pericoli e i rischi di incendi boschivi.

FIRE-RES studia non solo i fattori ambientali, ma anche le condizioni socio-economiche che possono rendere una regione più esposta agli incendi e ad altri disastri. Nel caso del campo sovrappopolato di Moria, le dimensioni e la densità della popolazione hanno agito da catalizzatori, combinate con l’uso di materiali economici e infiammabili.

Altri fattori comprendono la mancanza di un’adeguata formazione tra residenti e operatori su come prevenire e gestire un’emergenza legata agli incendi e una consapevolezza limitata (soprattutto tra i giovani residenti, come evidenziato dagli atti del processo) delle conseguenze di un comportamento irresponsabile che potrebbe portare ad un disastro e un crimine grave.

FIRE-RES sottolinea l’importanza di educare le popolazioni che vivono in regioni resistenti al fuoco; ciò potrebbe tradursi in un insieme di atteggiamenti, competenze e pratiche tra i civili provenienti da diverse sfere della società, che consentirebbe loro di avere una migliore comprensione dei pericoli imminenti, ma anche delle soluzioni praticabili.

►https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/aree/Grecia/Grecia-incendi-e-responsabilita-230976

Bizarre, la même interview de CQFD avait été mise en ligne par basta.media, en janvier :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/987007

Les articles de #Karl_Marx et #Friedrich_Engels dans le New-York Daily Tribune
▻https://mensuel.lutte-ouvriere.org//2023/02/25/les-articles-de-karl-marx-et-friedrich-engels-dans-le-new-yo

Friedrich Engels et Karl Marx, Les articles du New-York Daily Tribune. Volume I (1851-1852), édition et traduction d’Alexia Blin, Yohann Douet, Juliette Farjat, Alexandre Feron et Marion Leclair. Paris, les Éditions sociales, 2022. Prix  : 26 €.

En 1849, la révolution reflue en Europe, et Marx et Engels doivent quitter l’Allemagne pour la Grande-Bretagne. Comme des milliers d’autres exilés, Marx et sa famille se réfugient à Londres. Une période de recul politique s’ouvre, les possibilités d’intervention disparaissent, et Marx et Engels échouent à relancer la Nouvelle Gazette rhénane, le journal que Marx dirigea à Cologne en 1848-1849, et la Ligue des communistes, l’organisation pour laquelle ils avaient rédigé le Manifeste du parti communiste. Pour la famille Marx, c’est aussi une période difficile matériellement  : elle mène une existence précaire dans le quartier de Soho, et deux enfants meurent en bas âge, en 1850 et 1852. Pendant des années, Karl et Jenny Marx dépendent de l’ami Engels qui, afin de subvenir à ses besoins et aux leurs, renoue avec son fabricant de père et occupe un poste à la gestion de la fabrique Ermen & Engels à Manchester. Quand, en août 1851, Karl Marx reçoit la proposition d’écrire pour le journal New-York Daily Tribune du rédacteur Charles Dana, qu’il a rencontré à Cologne en 1848, il accepte. Moyennant une rémunération qui améliore la situation familiale, il devient le correspondant du journal. Malgré le fait que le New-York Daily Tribune s’approprie certains articles de Marx, ou en caviarde d’autres, la collaboration durera onze ans.

Le New-York Daily Tribune n’est pas un journal socialiste. C’est le principal quotidien de la côte est des États-Unis. Propriété d’Horace Greeley, c’est un périodique «  progressiste  », opposé à l’esclavage, favorable aux droits des femmes et à l’abolition de la peine de mort, en sympathie avec les mouvements ouvriers, mais qui défend aussi le capitalisme industriel. L’audience du journal intéresse Marx, qui y voit non seulement un revenu mais aussi un moyen de s’adresser à un vaste lectorat, à une époque où les États-Unis attirent de nombreux émigrants européens et où l’actualité américaine intéresse de plus en plus Marx.

Entre 1851 et 1862, Marx publie ainsi 487 articles, un ensemble de textes dont le volume dépasse les trois livres du Capital. En réalité, comme l’a révélé sa correspondance, tous ne sont pas de sa plume  : Engels rédige 125 des articles, en co-écrit 12 autres, et en traduit un certain nombre d’autres de l’allemand vers l’anglais. «  Je rentre directement chez moi pour terminer l’article pour le Tribune, afin qu’il parte avec la deuxième levée et que tu puisses l’envoyer par le vapeur de demain  », écrit par exemple Engels à Marx le 23 septembre 1852. Entre les deux amis, le courrier Londres-Manchester et des rencontres fréquentes constituent plus qu’un lien personnel, une étroite collaboration politique. Leurs articles abordent de nombreux aspects de la politique européenne, britannique en particulier, mais aussi allemande, espagnole, française, etc. Au fil des années, Marx s’intéresse de plus en plus à l’Asie et aux questions coloniales, notamment à la révolte des Taiping, à la seconde guerre de l’Opium en Chine et à la révolte indienne de 1857. Il s’intéresse également à la Russie, notamment aux troubles résultant de la guerre de Crimée et à l’agitation contre le servage, aboli en 1861. Pour Marx, cette écriture régulière, en prise avec l’actualité, est aussi une façon d’affirmer ses idées et de discuter avec d’autres penseurs et militants de son temps. Les articles font donc partie du capital politique marxiste, même si le terme n’existe pas, à une époque où Marx est certes reconnu, notamment parmi les exilés allemands, mais où il n’a que peu de partisans convaincus.

Le volume des articles du #New-York_Daily_Tribune, récemment paru et concernant les années 1851 et 1852, est le premier d’une série, les #Éditions_sociales ayant entrepris de traduire et d’éditer l’intégralité des articles de Marx et Engels parus dans ce journal. Ce projet s’inscrit dans la #GEME (#Grande_édition_Marx_et_Engels), qui propose de nouvelles traductions de leurs œuvres, à partir de l’édition des œuvres complètes en langue originale, la #MEGA. Ce volume I contient d’abord une série de 19 articles, connue sous le titre #Révolution et #contre-révolution en Allemagne, articles rédigés par Engels, traduits et édités par le passé. Il y analyse les forces à l’œuvre dans les #États_allemands et en #Autriche en 1848-1849, le jeu des #classes_sociales, les aspirations réformatrices de la bourgeoisie et sa crainte du rôle du prolétariat. Ce volume contient également 13 «  dépêches d’Angleterre  », sur la situation et les pratiques politiques britanniques, après plus d’une décennie de mobilisation du #mouvement_chartiste. L’introduction détaillée, utile pour mettre en contexte l’ensemble des articles, insiste néanmoins sur les «  erreurs de pronostic  » de Marx et d’Engels, alors que ceux-ci, forts de leur #optimisme_révolutionnaire, font en réalité des paris militants qui n’ont pas de valeur prédictive. Des notes et des annexes aident à comprendre les nombreuses références à des personnalités et à des événements aujourd’hui oubliés.

#piano

Nina Simone sur les antennes de radio france
▻https://www.radiofrance.fr/personnes/nina-simone

Y a clairement une guitare en arpèges sur le chorus de piano, ce qui donne cette impression de notes démultipliées qui ne tombent pas toujours juste malheureusement ... les musiciens derrière, qui ne sont jamais crédités, sans doute l’orchestre de Sullivan, n’étaient pourtant pas des manchots (Specs Powell tiendra d’ailleurs la batterie sur Nina Simone Sings the Blues en 67).