It is a face that we did not expect. In any case, not this Wednesday, June 28, at the rally which was held in Place de la République, in Paris, to denounce the dissolution of the environmental movement of the Uprisings of the Earth. “Laws have been passed against people from working-class neighborhoods, laws have been passed against Muslim people. That’s when you have to move. Because, when you let those laws pass […]we have Nahel coming”, denounces at the microphone Assa Traoré, founder of the Truth and Justice Committee for Adama.
The fight against “racism in institutions”, especially within the police, of the sister of Adama Traoré, who died during a police arrest in 2016, is known. After Nahel’s death, his association distinguished itself alongside the mother of the young boy, killed at close range by a police officer on June 26. But his presence in support of the environmental movement dissolved by the government seems more surprising. “We saw a lot of you in Sainte-Soline, that’s very good. We are expecting many of you in Nanterre tomorrow [NDLR : une marche blanche était organisée en hommage à Nahel le 29 juin]. We are waiting for you at the Adama march on July 8 […] We are waiting for you in our working-class neighborhoods,” she finished to thunderous applause. “We’ll be there, we’ll be there!” shouted a protester.
“Anti-racist ecology”
What is the link between mobilizations against mega-basins and riots in the suburbs? Attempt to answer in a column by activist Nicolas Haeringer entitled “Let’s be in solidarity with the Nanterre Uprisings”, published on July 3 by the media Reporterre. “The control of bodies and lives is gradually becoming widespread. Police and state strategies of domination through the use of force are clearly first deployed in the colonies […] ; then in the popular districts. More recently, these same techniques are directed at militants: use of lethal weapons, counter-terrorism measures diverted from their initial function”, he writes. In other words, the Uprisings of the Earth like the rioters of suburbs would have a common enemy : “the state repressive apparatus”. Armed with this guarantee, the author explains that “supporting this front implies asking for a general amnesty for anyone arrested these days (whether they are militants of the Uprisings and Bassines no thank you; or those whom the police hasten to present as nihilistic “rioters”)”.
In politics, we would probably speak of “recovery”. In militant lexicon, this is called a “common resistance front” or, more soberly, “the junction of struggles”. On Twitter, Fatima Ouassak, political scientist, co-founder of the Front de mères collective and supporter of the Earth Uprisings, called on June 28 for an “anti-racist ecology, against the police order #JusticePourNahel / For children in working-class neighborhoods, so that they can breathe and move freely”. “What best defines the population from Africa settled in Europe: it is deprived of land, it lives without land, it wanders,” she wrote in her book. For a pirate ecology. And we’ll be free (Discovery). She added that “in working-class neighborhoods, the ecological issue cannot be that of protecting the Earth – of the environment, of nature, of the living; it must be that of its liberation”.
Revolution
But this “common resistance front” is not limited only to ecology. After undergoing its baptism of fire during the mobilization against the pension reform, the Permanent Revolution movement – a former current of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) – seems to have found a new way to carry out its project of “restoring vitality to ideas Marxists and revolutionaries”. Because behind his many communications in support of Nahel’s family, we find a rhetoric castigating a “bourgeois” order, a “repressive state” and an “authoritarian offensive”. On June 27, the trade unionist Anasse Kazib, at the head of the movement, thus called on Twitter to quickly coordinate “all the organizations of our social camp to face the radicalism of power”. But it is undoubtedly his response to the intervention on Telematin, on France 2, of the boss of the PCF, Fabien Roussel, who best clarifies the priorities of Permanent Revolution. On July 4, the latter declared that he dissociated himself “totally from the remarks of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the deputies who refuse to call for calm and legitimize this urban violence”, adding that “we need order, justice and respect for all citizens […]of republican equality”. In response, Anasse Kazib denounced on Twitter a PCF that had become a “political apparatus to the aid of the bourgeois state, in order to maintain class domination, exploitation and oppression”.
“Our queer, trans, racialized ancestors”
Driven by this revolutionary argument, Permanent Revolution activists even managed to integrate the LGBTQ + cause into the issue of the riots, during the Marseille Pride on July 1. “The first Pride was a revolt. It was Stonewall [NDLR : des émeutes intervenues en 1969 à la suite d’une descente de police dans un bar gay clandestin de Greenwich, à New York]. And it was our queer, trans, racialized ancestors who rose up against a police that prevents them[ait] simply to live”, thus recalled an activist of the movement. “We need a huge bloc of feminist, queer, workers’, environmentalist movements: we cannot leave isolated what is happening today in the neighborhoods which are rising up against to racist, murderous and systemic oppression.”
Activists from the feminist movement We All were also present on June 29 at the white march in Nanterre, to support “the family of Nahel, the anti-racist collectives fighting daily against police violence and state racism, to those who suffer discrimination and racist violence from the police”. “Sexism and racism are systems of oppression that work hand in hand. Fighting one without fighting the other is pointless and doomed to failure,” read a follow-up tweet. at the gathering. Have these feminists forgotten that urban violence is the almost exclusive prerogative of men? And how to interpret this disavowal of the police as a whole, even though one of the problems facing women victims of sexual violence is the chronic lack of means and staff of the police?
“Colonialism”
Because the joining of struggles is limited only by the imagination of those who carry them, some pro-Palestinian movements have also joined the movement in favor of the riots. In a press release published on July 1, entitled “Justice for Nahel: Who sows the Haggra, reaps the Intifada!”, the collective Palestine Vaincra estimated that “this state violence finds its roots in particular in the history of French colonialism. Better: “State racism and police repression are the arm of French imperialism, which is a strategic ally of the Zionist state which oppresses the Palestinian people. More than ever, the mobilizations here and there are a single and even fight for justice, equality and dignity!”
This “anti-colonialist” rhetoric is also found in Islamist circles. The association Perspectives Musulmanes, at the initiative of the rally in support of the preacher Hassan Iquioussen in 2022, for example published a press release on June 27 denouncing “a law of Islamophobic inspiration from 2017 [NDLR : ce texte visait à assouplir les règles sur l’usage des armes à feu pour les policiers] who established a new license to kill our young people,” then deeming that “Muslims and people of color are a free target in this country.” Among activists citing “Islamophobia” in connection with the death of Nahel, we find the controversial figure of Imam Hamza Chaoui, who theorized in his sermons and on social networks that there is a basic incompatibility between Islam and democracy, in particular because the latter could lead to a parliament formed “of a disbeliever or of a homosexual or an atheist who affirms the non-existence of Allah”…