MOROCCO: An Epiphany in Imider: the true history, how it began, how it has been ignored

22.11.2014  by By Abdellatif Talibi

Imider is located between Tinghir and Boumalne Dades in the south-east of Morocco. It’s a small village with rustic charm. Those who dwell there are marked by their simplicity and hospitality. “Tamazgha” is the word for land inhabited by residents who speak Tamazight, commonly known in the west as “Berber.” It is a dry, remote region in the mountains, still maintaining traditional religious values and not yet tarnished by massive globalization. What is more striking is that if you read about the popular understanding of Imider, one is surprised to find out that people know the area as one of the most famous silver mines in North Africa and the 7th largest in the world. Major profits are generated by it on a daily basis. However, a certain irony lies in the fact that these same people were ignored, despite the life that they had been living there long before the mine — human beings who suffer daily because of that mine. The great majority ignores both the mine and residents primarily because the owners are reluctant to make the the commercial affair a widely-known fact. They want it remain under cover permanently, and for that very reason, have kept the media from discovering the facts. It’s been nearly three years of discomfort and struggles that the Imidri people have endured through their peaceful sit-in. They are condemned to all forms of humiliation in their ‘occupied land.’ They are, roughly speaking, subject to acts of ‘looting’ and dramatic disruptions in their daily lives. All these impositions can be attributed to human cupidity to possess. It is, simply speaking, pure greed.

Autonomous Self-Organization and Anarchist Intervention: A Tension in Practice

07.03.2009 by Wolfi Landstreicher

Introduction: a few definitions and explanations

Any potentially liberatory struggle among the exploited and dispossessed must be based on autonomous self-organization. As anarchists, who are also usually among the exploited, we have every reason to participate in and encourage these struggles. But since we have specific ideas of how we want to go about our struggles and a specifically revolutionary aim, our participation takes the form of an intervention seeking to move the struggles in a specific direction. Having no desire to be any sort of vanguard or leadership or to be caught up in the joyless game of politicking, we find ourselves in a tension of trying to live our conception of struggle and freedom within the context of an unfree reality, of trying to confront the real daily problems we face with our own refusal to play by the rules of this world. Thus, the question of autonomous self-organization and anarchist intervention is an ongoing problem with which to grapple, refusing to fall into easy answers and faith in organizational panaceas. To begin exploring this question let’s start with a few definitions and explanations.

EGYPT: Down with Military Rule…Again?

02.07.2013 by Hesham Salam

[“Down with military rule” and “Muslim Brotherhood are the enemies of the nation” written on the walls of the al-Qubba Presidential Palace. 2 July 2013. Photo by Alaa Abd El Fattah]

Millions of Egyptians are continuing to take to the streets. They are calling on President Mohamed Morsi to resign and to hold early presidential elections. At the same time many express concern about the army’s 1 July statement and the potential for a return to military rule at the hands of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). The statement said that SCAF would impose its own “roadmap” to exit the current impasse if no solutions surface in the next forty-eight hours:

ALGERIA twenty years on: words do not die

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Algerian jihadists war on culture. Those who waged the intellectual struggle against fundamentalism in Algeria throughout the 1990s received little support internationally. Karima Bennoune pays tribute to those who fell in the culturicide, and warns of the urgent need to remember.

Women protest killings in Algiers on March 22, 1994, carrying the
picture of Tahar Djaout, among others. Photo: El Watan

العربية

BULGARIA: Report of Anarchist Federation of Bulgaria on the situation after the last protests

3 April 2013

Comrades from abroad asked to send them our analysis of what is happening in Bulgaria. Without going into details, we tried to compound our vision for the development of the events and the determining factors. We tried also to summarize our vision of the tasks that the anarchists are facing today.

ISRAEL: A smug, bourgeois Israeli ‘social protest’

May 19, 2013 by Larry Derfner

Despite the wishes of many — if not most — of the people in the streets, the masses who identify with the ‘social protest’ are callous to those whose complaints are so much more urgent than theirs.  

SPAIN: Spain’s Micro-Utopias: The 15M Movement and its Prototypes (Part 1)

17.05.2013

Image: Voces con Futura

Bernardo Gutiérrez

“The old protests, so dull and single-minded, have passed into obsolescence, and given rise to infinite possibility. We’ve rethought the concepts of action, protest, relationship, the public, the common…”

SPAIN: Manifesto for 25A and the Base Document – Roadmap of the “En Pie!” Platform

22.04.2013

(machine translation, the Spanish original below

MANIFESTO FOR 25A

We, ordinary people are sick of suffering the consequences of living under the dictatorship of the capitalist and patriarchal system, which takes shape in a clearly undemocratic regime, in which people are not only buying merchandise serving the powerful minority, and tired of supporting economic, social and political unsustainability in our country, which is dragging us as a society to live in a state of poverty completely unjustified and in a degree of suffering and lack of freedom absolutely intolerable, we join to write this manifesto and invited everyone to join our claims.

PALESTINE: Hunger Speech by Samer Issawi

Israelis:
I am Samer Issawi on hunger strike for eight consecutive months, laying in one of your hospitals called Kaplan. On my body is a medical devise connected to a surveillance room operating 24 hours a day. My heartbeats are slow and quiet and may stop at any minute, and everybody, doctors, officials and intelligence officers are waiting for my setback and my loss of life.

EGYPT: The necessity of revolutionary violence in Egypt

by Philip Rizk on April 7, 2013

Despite a glorification of the Egyptian revolution as a “non-violent” one, violence has been a part of the uprising since the first stone was thrown.