A look back at a decade of protests following the 2011 uprisings ----
The revolutionary uprisings of 2010-2011 in Tunisia not only led to the
retirement of dictator Ben Ali in Saudi Arabia and allowed
cross-partisan debates on the drafting of a new constitution, supposed
to guarantee the security of a "democratic transition" (which
nonetheless, barely 7 years later, hit the Saïed Wall in the face). They
also brought about the emergence of oppositional spaces, where social
groups hitherto excluded from political life manifested themselves in
the public space, outside of usual routines, where new issues, or at
least new framing of these issues , have emerged. This is particularly
the case for a set of local struggles which confronted the question of
environmental degradation induced by a set of activities which structure
the Tunisian economy.
Discharges of wastewater from textile factories on the Sahel coast (the
region of Sousse and Monastir), supposedly "controlled" landfills which
overflow and whose leachate spreads into the surrounding inhabited
areas, brickworks and cement factories which emit fumes toxic, oil and
gas drilling which drains water reserves, phosphate mines which release
the ore with dynamite, raising clouds of dust laden with heavy metals,
processing factories for these ores which emit fumes toxic and release
enormous quantities of weakly radioactive sludge into the sea... Behind
these phenomena constituting mining and industrial activity, there are
farmers whose crops are contaminated and drying up due to lack of access
to water resources , small fishermen who are no longer able to find fish
in their nets, nor to buy the fuel that would take them further,
asthmatic children, cancer patients forced to seek treatment several
hundred kilometers away... There are also landscape transformations that
make childhood memories disappear, a scarcity of walking and leisure
spaces, constant pestilential odors, fatigue that seems heavier, etc.
And then the feeling of being treated less well than the inhabitants of
Tunisia in the capital (even if the latter also has its share of galley
slaves). All this in a context where, mechanization, structural
adjustment, relocations having taken place, unemployment is massive in
several regions, without entitlement to any benefit.
Ben Ali had made the environmental issue a showcase for his regime. To
maintain his image as a good student among international donors, he
hastened to sign all the international conventions that came to hand: on
the prevention of pollution, the fight against desertification, climate
change, for the preservation of biodiversity... He had given impetus to
the creation of dedicated institutions - national environmental
protection agency, ministry of the environment, coastal protection
agency, waste management agency - but also associations often retaining
a link of subjection to the regime. He also commissioned the development
of a fennec mascot, Labib, to teach children, in television spots, not
to throw their waste anywhere and not to make too much noise under their
neighbors' windows. Finally, he had renamed streets in every city in the
country into "environmental avenues" and other "quality of life
boulevards"... during the revolution, these plaques were adorned with
additional characters: "...shit" . The Labib statues which adorned the
entrance to the public gardens were stoned and destroyed.
Labib and the "quality of life" boulevards, the legacy of Ben Ali,
Tunisian ecology
The reduction of environmental issues to matters of education, good
moral conduct, or even markers of the degree of advancement of a society
has left some traces. When during the first years following January
14[in 2011, the date of Ben Ali's flight], garbage piled up on the
sidewalks, notably due to the garbage collectors' strikes, it was in the
light of "lack of environmental awareness of the citizen" that various
editorialists and commentators have analyzed the situation, renewing a
well-rooted distrust towards a "people" who are too backward, not modern
enough, which the political elites should hasten to address for his own
good.
The analysis of local struggles, however, allows us to move away from
idealistic visions of the relationship with the environment by showing
how the taking of resources and toxic discharges are inseparable from
the social organization which amounts to a way of arranging nature. ,
and cut across class divides.
Among the social groups that participated in these mobilizations, we can
schematically distinguish three categories.
* The first corresponds to farmers and/or fishermen who denounce the
loss of income they suffer due to contamination and increased
competition for water resources attributable to the industry. In the
aftermath of 2011, it is above all the anchors linked to the place of
work and residence which fuel these mobilizations, while the Tunisian
Union of Agriculture and Fishing (UTAP), the main agricultural union and
historically close to the Constitutional Rally democratic (RCD, Ben
Ali's party), was disavowed. However, little by little, UTAP, closer to
the Islamist party Ennahdha, was able to regain control over certain
mobilizations. These took the form of gatherings in front of places of
political power (headquarters of the governorate, of the municipality)
or in front of the buildings of the companies in question, but also,
occasionally, of attempts to block production.
* The second category relates to residents of areas bordering
industries, forced to live as close as possible to industrial nuisances
and risks. They belong to categories of the population who have not had
the means to go a little further, even if only a few kilometers. They
encounter difficulties in treating the illnesses they catch due to air,
soil and water pollution, especially since health infrastructures are
concentrated in the richest coastal regions of Tunisia ( Tunis,
Sousse-Monastir, Sfax). Among these populations, young unemployed people
constitute a particular subgroup: in addition to being subjected to
pollution, they are deprived of a job that allows them to marry, build a
house and be considered adults in the eyes of the public. patriarchal
society: single at 40, it's as if they were stuck in adolescence. The
mobilizations of groups of residents are based on neighborhood networks,
links of male acquaintance forged in cafes and an associative fabric
which largely developed after the revolutionary uprisings with the
creation of a myriad of small associations: the title of president of an
association is seen as a mark of prestige likely to bring social
recognition, even if the association in question only includes the
members of the office (themselves often nominees). Among the preferred
modes of action are street demonstrations, rallies, road blockades, and
even industrial activities.
* Finally, we can distinguish a third category made up of local or
regional sections of large organizations - the Tunisian General Labor
Union, the Tunisian Human Rights League, the Bar Association, and
sometimes even employers' organizations - , associations - recognized at
regional level and most of the time eligible to receive development aid
funds - and collectives, whose members are less directly exposed to
nuisances, but who intend to take up a question having gained importance
locally. These groups, often having communication and logistical
capabilities, organize marches and rallies that are sometimes very well
attended. They have access to the media and some are easily received by
the authorities.
Chott Salem beach in Gabès, polluted by phosphogypsum (2017)
If all these groups claim to be "defending the territory", they do not
put the same issues behind the notion of "defense" and do not delimit
the "territory" in question in the same way. For groups of farmers and
fishermen, as for groups of residents, there is rarely any question of
demanding an end to industrial activity, which seems an inaccessible
horizon and which, casually, would generate destruction of jobs, often
better paid than their equivalent in other sectors, to members of their
families. The challenge is therefore to push industries to optimize
their processes so that discharges are less significant or less harmful,
but above all to negotiate financial, material and employment
compensation. Moreover, groups of unemployed people from neighborhoods
bordering industrial zones, who regularly work to block them in the hope
of being granted jobs, believe that they must be given priority over
unemployed people from other areas by virtue of their status as victims.
of pollution.
On the other hand, the dismantling of installations (in fact, their
relocation to even more peripheral regions) may be a demand of certain
organizations which bring together bosses and management classes. For
example, in Sfax, the second Tunisian city in terms of population and
economic activity, a coalition of associations specializing in the field
of environment, leisure, human rights and development and organizations
employers mobilized for many years (and ultimately successfully) for the
shutdown of the SIAPE factory located to the south of the city. The
speech articulated arguments on the quality of life, on the need to
boost the development of the city through the tertiary sector and by
strengthening its attractiveness, and advocacy against the "political
marginalization" of the city by the Tunisian elites and Sahelian regions
that would embody the industrial specialization of the city. Clearly,
these mobilizations were driven by the dream of a clean and dynamic city
center responding to the preferences of the wealthy social classes, at
the risk of worsening unemployment among the working classes (who would
not necessarily find their place in the projects of "hubs based on new
technologies" intended to constitute the new economic orientations of
the city) and to multiply the garbage peripheries where polluting
industries and recycling centers congregate. In other cities, certain
groups dreamed of it without managing to unite as much or develop
"alternative development projects" tangible enough to convince central
governments.
On the other hand, there is no trace, or only very marginally, of
slogans like "let's leave the resources in the ground!"» or "neither
here nor elsewhere!" ". In a context of persistent economic difficulties
at a time when many textile and manufacturing companies have relocated
their activities to other regions, where the tourist boom has weakened,
where most farmers are struggling, few who envisage that the national
economy can do without exports of resources, both in the raw and
processed state. Degrowth does not appear to be an encouraging prospect:
it is difficult to see how it would be distinguished from a recession.
Furthermore, the purpose of the production does not matter: in any case,
the latter is often intended to be exported. But the reference scale of
the struggle also gives rise to debates and tensions. Among farmers and
fishermen, among residents of industrial zones, the defended territory
corresponds to the neighborhood, the locality, the village. It is
because it is affected by nuisances and because we have our strongest
ties there that we mobilize; it is also the level which appears relevant
for compensation claims. On the other hand, certain organizations -
league for the defense of human rights, UGTT, etc. - criticize this
"localism" (category equivalent to that of NIMBY ("not in my garden"),
not very used in Tunisia). It is the region - and not the neighborhood -
that is supposed to be the "victim". For the latter, if there must be
compensation, these should be public facilities (a new hospital for
example).
Moulares, a mining town in the Gafsa region where phosphate is extracted
and washed
To fully understand the forms that these mobilizations take and what the
different groups are demanding, we must succeed in situating them in the
context of the modes of governing collective action. On this level, it
is clear that police and judicial repression decreased after the
departure of Ben Ali. The event damaged the myth of the all-powerful
State, at least partially. In the eyes of industrial companies, the
latter has ceased to act as a buffer between them and the populations of
their territories of establishment. Their efforts to claim "corporate
social responsibility" by acquiring techniques supposedly more efficient
and "clean" and by financing medical equipment for neighborhood medical
dispensaries, school supplies, subsidies for sports clubs or associative
projects have rarely managed to calm the protests.
But the State remained a privileged interlocutor of the protests, to
which most of the demands were addressed. The authorities responded with
a mixture of wait-and-see, never keeping their commitments - putting an
end to discharge into the sea or relocating the installations - within
the announced deadlines, and more or less discretionary distribution of
compensation to individuals or groups mobilized or presenting themselves
as such. In Gabès (see box), following actions carried out by fishermen
against the Tunisian Chemical Group, whose activity pollutes the seas,
the company announced that it would donate fishing nets to listed boats
and that it would would take care of the social security of fishermen.
It took several other blocking actions for it to pay the expenses
announced in the first year, before it forgot again the next... Even the
fishermen who hold responsibilities in groups financed by international
cooperation say: "if we don't block, we get nothing!" ". Blocking does
not necessarily appear to be a sign of political radicalism: it is what
makes it possible to establish or re-establish contact with the
authorities. The same is true for many young men in industrial regions.
By blocking the transport of products or industrial activity, by
installing a tent on a factory entrance, a road or a railway line, they
hope to be able to negotiate, to enter into the customer networks in
which they are excluded, to obtain a job in the industrial company or a
subcontracting company (preferably linked to the State because the
contract is better and there is social security). Sit-ins and blockades
are thus seen as a means of recruitment. This establishes a
routinization of protests, to which the authorities respond on a
case-by-case basis, thus contributing to a fragmentation of protest
dynamics. In the region of the Gafsa mining basin, sit-ins led by groups
of four or five people each time follow one another without generating
broader collective dynamics.
In the second half of the 2010s, we saw the emergence of forms of
organization of mobilizations of the unemployed opening up prospects for
combating the individualized treatment of collective demands, with the
appearance of "coordination" (tansiqiyyat): in 2017, in El Kamour, in
the Tataouine region where hydrocarbon extraction companies are
concentrated, this mode of organization made it possible to block oil
pumping, to hold a sit-in of several hundred demonstrators over several
months and to create a more favorable balance of power to negotiate an
ambitious agreement with the authorities (an agreement which, as usual,
was not entirely kept...). This mode of organization was then replicated
in other regions.
Even if the number of jobs created by the authorities was still lower
than in their promises, the workforce of state industrial companies
swelled after the revolution, which greatly displeased the World Bank
and the IMF, benefactors of the "transition". democratic" (in the sense
that they granted loans without too much difficulty for a time) but
nevertheless adept at budgetary rigor. To overcome this constraint,
state companies have created more or less fictitious subsidiaries called
"environmental and planting companies" and/or "gardening companies" to
hire the unemployed without exploding their workforce. Why more or less
fictional? Because most of the time, employees are only asked to clock
in in the morning, without any activity being required of them. If some
CEOs of these companies have tried to set up activities from scratch -
planting trees destined to die at the first heat stroke, cleaning public
establishments, etc. - to occupy these employees whose idleness risked,
in the eyes of many notables, causing the "value of work" to disappear
in the region, a large part of the employees in question - and aspiring
employees who did not lack demand to be hired there in turn - in fact
consider these "jobs" as a form of social protection or unemployment
benefit in a country which is almost completely devoid of them.
Since the end of the 2010s, mobilizations seem to have become less
numerous. It would undoubtedly be too easy to attribute the cause to the
establishment of the hyper-presidentialist regime of Kaïs Saïed in the
aftermath of the Covid crisis, even if the legal attacks against certain
activists who played a role in denouncing pollution may had the
objective of warning potential future protesters. Thus, in 2023, charges
with potential prison sentences were issued against several members of
the Manich msab ("we are not a landfill") collective based in Agareb,
where the second largest landfill in the country is located. It closed
permanently in 2021 after the assassination by police of Abderrazak
Lachhab, a demonstrator against the reopening of this landfill,
increased the protest against the nuisance caused to residents. It is
also probable that the context of latent economic crisis, the
disappointed hopes, the weariness of never being heard weigh heavily on
the desire for collective action, as if no one really believed in it
anymore... But in these regions, the contaminations always constitute
time bombs!
Gabès: The mobilizations cast a harsh light on a national industrial
flagship
In Gabès, a (relatively) large oasis town on the southern coast, it only
took a few weeks after January 14, the day of Ben Ali's departure, for
the first street demonstrations to take place under the slogan
"Pollution , cleared! ". In this urban center, from 1972, an imposing
industrial complex was established for the transformation of phosphate
ores (extracted in the region of the Gafsa mining basin) into phosphoric
acid and fertilizer intended, for the most part, to be exported to from
the industrial port built for the occasion. For 50 years now, enormous
quantities of phosphogypsum, a by-product of these reactions loaded with
heavy metals and slightly radioactive, have been released directly into
the Mediterranean, at a rate of more than 10,000 tonnes per day. At this
sea level, the seabed is not covered with Posidonia beds but with a
sticky and toxic material. Factories spew a range of colored, smelly, or
less perceptible but equally harmful gases: sulfur oxides, fluorinated
gases, nitrogen oxides, ammonia, dust, hydrogen sulphide, etc. Water
tables and soils are also contaminated by effluent over a radius of
several kilometers.
In the field of phosphates, extractive activity was established at the
end of the 19th century under the aegis of French colonial power. On the
other hand, it is precisely to establish the economic independence of
the country vis-à-vis the former colonizer that Habib Bourguiba, the
nationalist leader who became the first president, assisted by his
super-minister Ahmed Ben Salah from the central union of the Tunisian
General Labor Union, have decided to enhance the Tunisian position in
the value chain of the sector and to equip itself with processing
industries. Industrial development was seen as a way out of the
(neo)colonial yoke. Initially, at the local level, the creation of the
industrial center in Gabès was rather well received, it seems: it
brought better paid jobs than the agricultural and craft work thanks to
which the populations subsisted, which which attracted new workers from
all regions of southern Tunisia. But the damage was felt relatively
quickly, firstly on water resources: before industrial installations,
water flowed through the oasis from artesian springs. Afterwards, the
flow rates collapsed and it was necessary to pump. State-led housing
construction programs were not enough to respond to the influx of
workers seeking industrial employment. We began to build in the oases,
since due to changes in the economic orientation of the territory and
agricultural income cut by contamination and expenses for access to
water, many plots were left abandoned. The economic structure, the
landscape, the social norms have been completely transformed.
In Gabès, the Tunisian chemical group had a wall erected around its site
The factories are today largely dilapidated. The numerous blockages in
the delivery of phosphate ores from the Mining Basin cause them to stop
and restart frequently, releasing enormous quantities of gas into the
air with each stroke. For the most part, the installations are managed
by the Tunisian Chemical Group, a national company linked to that of the
Compagnie des Phosphates de Gafsa which takes care of extraction, even
if a few private companies in turn use the Group's products. chemical,
such as TIMAB, a subsidiary of Roullier: although several reports have
recently appeared to question the Breton group, its factory has little
weight compared to all the activities of the industrial zone, where the
Tunisian chemical group remains a heavyweight . Most phosphate products
are exported to emerging markets such as the Middle East, Asia and South
America, and less and less to Europe where phosphate consumption tends
to decline.
For several years, mobilizations were relatively intense in the region,
carried out by diverse and sometimes antagonistic groups. Indeed, for
example, the Islamists (the majority in Gabès) on the one hand, the
Tunisian General Labor Union and center-left groups on the other, have
sometimes made the fight against pollution an area of confrontation.
These mobilizations broke certain taboos; they criticized territorial
injustices and contributed to the politicization of many people. They
also publicized the problem at the national level, or even beyond,
motivating some interventions by development aid agencies which, by
bringing in funding, have somewhat transformed the associative
landscape. But after all these years, the air still smells bad and the
emissions continue to accumulate. A project to relocate part of the
factories in the industrial zone to the outskirts of the region did not
come to fruition due to lack of financing; a seawater desalination
project, wrongly presented as an ecological advance (sic) since it would
allow less pumping of the water table, is on hold.
Diane
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4186
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
The revolutionary uprisings of 2010-2011 in Tunisia not only led to the
retirement of dictator Ben Ali in Saudi Arabia and allowed
cross-partisan debates on the drafting of a new constitution, supposed
to guarantee the security of a "democratic transition" (which
nonetheless, barely 7 years later, hit the Saïed Wall in the face). They
also brought about the emergence of oppositional spaces, where social
groups hitherto excluded from political life manifested themselves in
the public space, outside of usual routines, where new issues, or at
least new framing of these issues , have emerged. This is particularly
the case for a set of local struggles which confronted the question of
environmental degradation induced by a set of activities which structure
the Tunisian economy.
Discharges of wastewater from textile factories on the Sahel coast (the
region of Sousse and Monastir), supposedly "controlled" landfills which
overflow and whose leachate spreads into the surrounding inhabited
areas, brickworks and cement factories which emit fumes toxic, oil and
gas drilling which drains water reserves, phosphate mines which release
the ore with dynamite, raising clouds of dust laden with heavy metals,
processing factories for these ores which emit fumes toxic and release
enormous quantities of weakly radioactive sludge into the sea... Behind
these phenomena constituting mining and industrial activity, there are
farmers whose crops are contaminated and drying up due to lack of access
to water resources , small fishermen who are no longer able to find fish
in their nets, nor to buy the fuel that would take them further,
asthmatic children, cancer patients forced to seek treatment several
hundred kilometers away... There are also landscape transformations that
make childhood memories disappear, a scarcity of walking and leisure
spaces, constant pestilential odors, fatigue that seems heavier, etc.
And then the feeling of being treated less well than the inhabitants of
Tunisia in the capital (even if the latter also has its share of galley
slaves). All this in a context where, mechanization, structural
adjustment, relocations having taken place, unemployment is massive in
several regions, without entitlement to any benefit.
Ben Ali had made the environmental issue a showcase for his regime. To
maintain his image as a good student among international donors, he
hastened to sign all the international conventions that came to hand: on
the prevention of pollution, the fight against desertification, climate
change, for the preservation of biodiversity... He had given impetus to
the creation of dedicated institutions - national environmental
protection agency, ministry of the environment, coastal protection
agency, waste management agency - but also associations often retaining
a link of subjection to the regime. He also commissioned the development
of a fennec mascot, Labib, to teach children, in television spots, not
to throw their waste anywhere and not to make too much noise under their
neighbors' windows. Finally, he had renamed streets in every city in the
country into "environmental avenues" and other "quality of life
boulevards"... during the revolution, these plaques were adorned with
additional characters: "...shit" . The Labib statues which adorned the
entrance to the public gardens were stoned and destroyed.
Labib and the "quality of life" boulevards, the legacy of Ben Ali,
Tunisian ecology
The reduction of environmental issues to matters of education, good
moral conduct, or even markers of the degree of advancement of a society
has left some traces. When during the first years following January
14[in 2011, the date of Ben Ali's flight], garbage piled up on the
sidewalks, notably due to the garbage collectors' strikes, it was in the
light of "lack of environmental awareness of the citizen" that various
editorialists and commentators have analyzed the situation, renewing a
well-rooted distrust towards a "people" who are too backward, not modern
enough, which the political elites should hasten to address for his own
good.
The analysis of local struggles, however, allows us to move away from
idealistic visions of the relationship with the environment by showing
how the taking of resources and toxic discharges are inseparable from
the social organization which amounts to a way of arranging nature. ,
and cut across class divides.
Among the social groups that participated in these mobilizations, we can
schematically distinguish three categories.
* The first corresponds to farmers and/or fishermen who denounce the
loss of income they suffer due to contamination and increased
competition for water resources attributable to the industry. In the
aftermath of 2011, it is above all the anchors linked to the place of
work and residence which fuel these mobilizations, while the Tunisian
Union of Agriculture and Fishing (UTAP), the main agricultural union and
historically close to the Constitutional Rally democratic (RCD, Ben
Ali's party), was disavowed. However, little by little, UTAP, closer to
the Islamist party Ennahdha, was able to regain control over certain
mobilizations. These took the form of gatherings in front of places of
political power (headquarters of the governorate, of the municipality)
or in front of the buildings of the companies in question, but also,
occasionally, of attempts to block production.
* The second category relates to residents of areas bordering
industries, forced to live as close as possible to industrial nuisances
and risks. They belong to categories of the population who have not had
the means to go a little further, even if only a few kilometers. They
encounter difficulties in treating the illnesses they catch due to air,
soil and water pollution, especially since health infrastructures are
concentrated in the richest coastal regions of Tunisia ( Tunis,
Sousse-Monastir, Sfax). Among these populations, young unemployed people
constitute a particular subgroup: in addition to being subjected to
pollution, they are deprived of a job that allows them to marry, build a
house and be considered adults in the eyes of the public. patriarchal
society: single at 40, it's as if they were stuck in adolescence. The
mobilizations of groups of residents are based on neighborhood networks,
links of male acquaintance forged in cafes and an associative fabric
which largely developed after the revolutionary uprisings with the
creation of a myriad of small associations: the title of president of an
association is seen as a mark of prestige likely to bring social
recognition, even if the association in question only includes the
members of the office (themselves often nominees). Among the preferred
modes of action are street demonstrations, rallies, road blockades, and
even industrial activities.
* Finally, we can distinguish a third category made up of local or
regional sections of large organizations - the Tunisian General Labor
Union, the Tunisian Human Rights League, the Bar Association, and
sometimes even employers' organizations - , associations - recognized at
regional level and most of the time eligible to receive development aid
funds - and collectives, whose members are less directly exposed to
nuisances, but who intend to take up a question having gained importance
locally. These groups, often having communication and logistical
capabilities, organize marches and rallies that are sometimes very well
attended. They have access to the media and some are easily received by
the authorities.
Chott Salem beach in Gabès, polluted by phosphogypsum (2017)
If all these groups claim to be "defending the territory", they do not
put the same issues behind the notion of "defense" and do not delimit
the "territory" in question in the same way. For groups of farmers and
fishermen, as for groups of residents, there is rarely any question of
demanding an end to industrial activity, which seems an inaccessible
horizon and which, casually, would generate destruction of jobs, often
better paid than their equivalent in other sectors, to members of their
families. The challenge is therefore to push industries to optimize
their processes so that discharges are less significant or less harmful,
but above all to negotiate financial, material and employment
compensation. Moreover, groups of unemployed people from neighborhoods
bordering industrial zones, who regularly work to block them in the hope
of being granted jobs, believe that they must be given priority over
unemployed people from other areas by virtue of their status as victims.
of pollution.
On the other hand, the dismantling of installations (in fact, their
relocation to even more peripheral regions) may be a demand of certain
organizations which bring together bosses and management classes. For
example, in Sfax, the second Tunisian city in terms of population and
economic activity, a coalition of associations specializing in the field
of environment, leisure, human rights and development and organizations
employers mobilized for many years (and ultimately successfully) for the
shutdown of the SIAPE factory located to the south of the city. The
speech articulated arguments on the quality of life, on the need to
boost the development of the city through the tertiary sector and by
strengthening its attractiveness, and advocacy against the "political
marginalization" of the city by the Tunisian elites and Sahelian regions
that would embody the industrial specialization of the city. Clearly,
these mobilizations were driven by the dream of a clean and dynamic city
center responding to the preferences of the wealthy social classes, at
the risk of worsening unemployment among the working classes (who would
not necessarily find their place in the projects of "hubs based on new
technologies" intended to constitute the new economic orientations of
the city) and to multiply the garbage peripheries where polluting
industries and recycling centers congregate. In other cities, certain
groups dreamed of it without managing to unite as much or develop
"alternative development projects" tangible enough to convince central
governments.
On the other hand, there is no trace, or only very marginally, of
slogans like "let's leave the resources in the ground!"» or "neither
here nor elsewhere!" ". In a context of persistent economic difficulties
at a time when many textile and manufacturing companies have relocated
their activities to other regions, where the tourist boom has weakened,
where most farmers are struggling, few who envisage that the national
economy can do without exports of resources, both in the raw and
processed state. Degrowth does not appear to be an encouraging prospect:
it is difficult to see how it would be distinguished from a recession.
Furthermore, the purpose of the production does not matter: in any case,
the latter is often intended to be exported. But the reference scale of
the struggle also gives rise to debates and tensions. Among farmers and
fishermen, among residents of industrial zones, the defended territory
corresponds to the neighborhood, the locality, the village. It is
because it is affected by nuisances and because we have our strongest
ties there that we mobilize; it is also the level which appears relevant
for compensation claims. On the other hand, certain organizations -
league for the defense of human rights, UGTT, etc. - criticize this
"localism" (category equivalent to that of NIMBY ("not in my garden"),
not very used in Tunisia). It is the region - and not the neighborhood -
that is supposed to be the "victim". For the latter, if there must be
compensation, these should be public facilities (a new hospital for
example).
Moulares, a mining town in the Gafsa region where phosphate is extracted
and washed
To fully understand the forms that these mobilizations take and what the
different groups are demanding, we must succeed in situating them in the
context of the modes of governing collective action. On this level, it
is clear that police and judicial repression decreased after the
departure of Ben Ali. The event damaged the myth of the all-powerful
State, at least partially. In the eyes of industrial companies, the
latter has ceased to act as a buffer between them and the populations of
their territories of establishment. Their efforts to claim "corporate
social responsibility" by acquiring techniques supposedly more efficient
and "clean" and by financing medical equipment for neighborhood medical
dispensaries, school supplies, subsidies for sports clubs or associative
projects have rarely managed to calm the protests.
But the State remained a privileged interlocutor of the protests, to
which most of the demands were addressed. The authorities responded with
a mixture of wait-and-see, never keeping their commitments - putting an
end to discharge into the sea or relocating the installations - within
the announced deadlines, and more or less discretionary distribution of
compensation to individuals or groups mobilized or presenting themselves
as such. In Gabès (see box), following actions carried out by fishermen
against the Tunisian Chemical Group, whose activity pollutes the seas,
the company announced that it would donate fishing nets to listed boats
and that it would would take care of the social security of fishermen.
It took several other blocking actions for it to pay the expenses
announced in the first year, before it forgot again the next... Even the
fishermen who hold responsibilities in groups financed by international
cooperation say: "if we don't block, we get nothing!" ". Blocking does
not necessarily appear to be a sign of political radicalism: it is what
makes it possible to establish or re-establish contact with the
authorities. The same is true for many young men in industrial regions.
By blocking the transport of products or industrial activity, by
installing a tent on a factory entrance, a road or a railway line, they
hope to be able to negotiate, to enter into the customer networks in
which they are excluded, to obtain a job in the industrial company or a
subcontracting company (preferably linked to the State because the
contract is better and there is social security). Sit-ins and blockades
are thus seen as a means of recruitment. This establishes a
routinization of protests, to which the authorities respond on a
case-by-case basis, thus contributing to a fragmentation of protest
dynamics. In the region of the Gafsa mining basin, sit-ins led by groups
of four or five people each time follow one another without generating
broader collective dynamics.
In the second half of the 2010s, we saw the emergence of forms of
organization of mobilizations of the unemployed opening up prospects for
combating the individualized treatment of collective demands, with the
appearance of "coordination" (tansiqiyyat): in 2017, in El Kamour, in
the Tataouine region where hydrocarbon extraction companies are
concentrated, this mode of organization made it possible to block oil
pumping, to hold a sit-in of several hundred demonstrators over several
months and to create a more favorable balance of power to negotiate an
ambitious agreement with the authorities (an agreement which, as usual,
was not entirely kept...). This mode of organization was then replicated
in other regions.
Even if the number of jobs created by the authorities was still lower
than in their promises, the workforce of state industrial companies
swelled after the revolution, which greatly displeased the World Bank
and the IMF, benefactors of the "transition". democratic" (in the sense
that they granted loans without too much difficulty for a time) but
nevertheless adept at budgetary rigor. To overcome this constraint,
state companies have created more or less fictitious subsidiaries called
"environmental and planting companies" and/or "gardening companies" to
hire the unemployed without exploding their workforce. Why more or less
fictional? Because most of the time, employees are only asked to clock
in in the morning, without any activity being required of them. If some
CEOs of these companies have tried to set up activities from scratch -
planting trees destined to die at the first heat stroke, cleaning public
establishments, etc. - to occupy these employees whose idleness risked,
in the eyes of many notables, causing the "value of work" to disappear
in the region, a large part of the employees in question - and aspiring
employees who did not lack demand to be hired there in turn - in fact
consider these "jobs" as a form of social protection or unemployment
benefit in a country which is almost completely devoid of them.
Since the end of the 2010s, mobilizations seem to have become less
numerous. It would undoubtedly be too easy to attribute the cause to the
establishment of the hyper-presidentialist regime of Kaïs Saïed in the
aftermath of the Covid crisis, even if the legal attacks against certain
activists who played a role in denouncing pollution may had the
objective of warning potential future protesters. Thus, in 2023, charges
with potential prison sentences were issued against several members of
the Manich msab ("we are not a landfill") collective based in Agareb,
where the second largest landfill in the country is located. It closed
permanently in 2021 after the assassination by police of Abderrazak
Lachhab, a demonstrator against the reopening of this landfill,
increased the protest against the nuisance caused to residents. It is
also probable that the context of latent economic crisis, the
disappointed hopes, the weariness of never being heard weigh heavily on
the desire for collective action, as if no one really believed in it
anymore... But in these regions, the contaminations always constitute
time bombs!
Gabès: The mobilizations cast a harsh light on a national industrial
flagship
In Gabès, a (relatively) large oasis town on the southern coast, it only
took a few weeks after January 14, the day of Ben Ali's departure, for
the first street demonstrations to take place under the slogan
"Pollution , cleared! ". In this urban center, from 1972, an imposing
industrial complex was established for the transformation of phosphate
ores (extracted in the region of the Gafsa mining basin) into phosphoric
acid and fertilizer intended, for the most part, to be exported to from
the industrial port built for the occasion. For 50 years now, enormous
quantities of phosphogypsum, a by-product of these reactions loaded with
heavy metals and slightly radioactive, have been released directly into
the Mediterranean, at a rate of more than 10,000 tonnes per day. At this
sea level, the seabed is not covered with Posidonia beds but with a
sticky and toxic material. Factories spew a range of colored, smelly, or
less perceptible but equally harmful gases: sulfur oxides, fluorinated
gases, nitrogen oxides, ammonia, dust, hydrogen sulphide, etc. Water
tables and soils are also contaminated by effluent over a radius of
several kilometers.
In the field of phosphates, extractive activity was established at the
end of the 19th century under the aegis of French colonial power. On the
other hand, it is precisely to establish the economic independence of
the country vis-à-vis the former colonizer that Habib Bourguiba, the
nationalist leader who became the first president, assisted by his
super-minister Ahmed Ben Salah from the central union of the Tunisian
General Labor Union, have decided to enhance the Tunisian position in
the value chain of the sector and to equip itself with processing
industries. Industrial development was seen as a way out of the
(neo)colonial yoke. Initially, at the local level, the creation of the
industrial center in Gabès was rather well received, it seems: it
brought better paid jobs than the agricultural and craft work thanks to
which the populations subsisted, which which attracted new workers from
all regions of southern Tunisia. But the damage was felt relatively
quickly, firstly on water resources: before industrial installations,
water flowed through the oasis from artesian springs. Afterwards, the
flow rates collapsed and it was necessary to pump. State-led housing
construction programs were not enough to respond to the influx of
workers seeking industrial employment. We began to build in the oases,
since due to changes in the economic orientation of the territory and
agricultural income cut by contamination and expenses for access to
water, many plots were left abandoned. The economic structure, the
landscape, the social norms have been completely transformed.
In Gabès, the Tunisian chemical group had a wall erected around its site
The factories are today largely dilapidated. The numerous blockages in
the delivery of phosphate ores from the Mining Basin cause them to stop
and restart frequently, releasing enormous quantities of gas into the
air with each stroke. For the most part, the installations are managed
by the Tunisian Chemical Group, a national company linked to that of the
Compagnie des Phosphates de Gafsa which takes care of extraction, even
if a few private companies in turn use the Group's products. chemical,
such as TIMAB, a subsidiary of Roullier: although several reports have
recently appeared to question the Breton group, its factory has little
weight compared to all the activities of the industrial zone, where the
Tunisian chemical group remains a heavyweight . Most phosphate products
are exported to emerging markets such as the Middle East, Asia and South
America, and less and less to Europe where phosphate consumption tends
to decline.
For several years, mobilizations were relatively intense in the region,
carried out by diverse and sometimes antagonistic groups. Indeed, for
example, the Islamists (the majority in Gabès) on the one hand, the
Tunisian General Labor Union and center-left groups on the other, have
sometimes made the fight against pollution an area of confrontation.
These mobilizations broke certain taboos; they criticized territorial
injustices and contributed to the politicization of many people. They
also publicized the problem at the national level, or even beyond,
motivating some interventions by development aid agencies which, by
bringing in funding, have somewhat transformed the associative
landscape. But after all these years, the air still smells bad and the
emissions continue to accumulate. A project to relocate part of the
factories in the industrial zone to the outskirts of the region did not
come to fruition due to lack of financing; a seawater desalination
project, wrongly presented as an ecological advance (sic) since it would
allow less pumping of the water table, is on hold.
Diane
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4186
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