The wretched of the sea: An Algerian perspective

[polly7]

By Hamza Hamouchene
Source: Middle East Eye
May 10, 2015

In the last few weeks, the EU neighbourhood and the Western foreign policies alongside the ongoing economic domination of the African continent have yet again shown their deadly consequences in the immigration tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea.

Thousands of people, mainly from Africa and Syria, risk their lives every year crossing the sea in fragile boats to flee war-torn areas, poverty, persecution and misery in order to reach the shores of Europe for a better and safer life. Sadly a significant number of them perish in the attempts to do so or end up in humiliating camps and prisons in southern European countries only to be deported and returned and see their dreams shattered.

What distinguishes this year’s tragedy from the previous ones is the sheer scale of it as the death toll of drowning this year now stands at over 1,500 – 50 times more than at the same point in 2014. This can be explained mainly by the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Libya and Mali as well as the inhumane decision by several European Union (EU) governments to refuse funding to the Italian-run rescue operation Mare Nostrum, preferring thus to let migrants die, something that was claimed would act as a deterrent for unwanted people who are trying to reach fortress Europe.

Harga in a way represents the pursuit of a future that came to a dead-end in the home-country. It is a means to overcome the restrictions on freedom of movement, precariousness of employment and the marginalisation by clientelist networks – in a nutshell everything that makes life unsustainable, in order to realise a life project that we think is impossible to achieve in Algeria given present conditions. One inhabitant of a marginalised village, Sidi Salem in Annaba, eastern Algeria, declared to his Harrag brother: “I lost the keys of my future in a cemetery in Algeria called Sidi Salem.”

Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-wretched-of-the-sea-an-algerian-perspective/

Algeria, an Immense Bazaar: The Politics and Economic Consequences of Infitah

With the global neoliberal wave gaining momentum in the 80s, sweeping away the Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc, eventually spreading to the whole world from Argentina to Poland and not sparing China in the way, and with the plummeting of oil revenues, the Algerian national development project was abandoned by the Chadli clique. It was dismantled as a process of deindustrialization and carried out to give way to neoliberal policies and the submission to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its structural adjustment programs (1992-1993, 1994-1999). This had heavy consequences on the population: job losses (more than 500,000 in a few years), decrease of purchasing power, cuts to public spending, increasing precariousness of salaried workers, opening up of foreign trade, and the privatization of public companies. Algeria paid around ninety billion dollars in debt service between 1990 and 2004, and paid its debt several times. . . in fact, seven times. This does not constitute a necessary imperative, but a choice of a regime that abdicated to Western hegemony. Instead of reindustrializing the country and investing in Algerian youths who risk their lives to reach the northern shores of the Mediterranean in order to escape the despair of being marginalized and relegated to being Hittistes,[1] the Algerian authorities offered financial support to the IMF, a neo-colonial tool of plunder that crippled the economy.

The dignitaries of the new neoliberal religion declared that everything was for sale and opened the way for privatizations. This allowed an explosion of import activity, which pronounced a death sentence on the productive economy. Rachid Tlemçani notes that by 1997, 7100 companies (5500 private) controlled the non-hydrocarbon foreign trade, the majority of which were specialized in import activities resulting in the transformation of the Algerian market into an immense bazaar for foreign goods with its reservoir of corruption.

Under President Bouteflika, from 1999, this neoliberal logic of undermining national production while promoting an import-import economy (imports increased from 9.3 billion dollars in 2000 to 27.6 billion in 2007, and 47.25 billion by 2011) was pushed even further, aiming for a complete integration into the global economy. This is evidenced by the dismantling of all custom barriers, the adherence to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA), and the signature of an association agreement with the European Union.

It is in the name of the sacrosanct principles of the neoliberal dogma that industrial investment halted for thirty years. It is because of their profiteering disciples that industrial figures mutated into traders-importers. It is also in their name that the share of industry in GDP went down from twenty-six percent in 1985 to about five percent in 2009. The successive governments made all the necessary arrangements for the foreign investors to rush into Algeria.

Full article: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/9851/algeria-an-immense-bazaar_the-politics-and-economi

[Blue_Tires]

2. Unfortunately, Italy and the rest of Europe have no

obligation whatsoever to let the migrants in, and more resources/funding for Mare Nostrum means more exploitation of the "humanitarian" loophole when human traffickers leave a boat full of migrants "abandoned" and in need of "rescue"...