Over 2,300 dead and thousands missing in eastern Libya, after catastrophic floods:
Several countries have offered to send aid, among them Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, France, Italy, Qatar, Tunisia and the United States.
Read more here: https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20230912-thousands-dead-missing-in-eastern-libya-after-freak-floods
Libya Storm Daniel Emergency Appeal
Terribly sad news from Morocco...
A woman searches through the rubble of a home in Imoulas village of the Taroudant province, one of the most devastated in quake-hit Morocco, on September 11, 2023. Moroccan rescuers supported by newly-arrived foreign teams on September 11 faced an intensifying race against time to dig out any survivors from the rubble of mountain villages, on the third day after the country's strongest-ever earthquake.
- Fethi Belaid / AFP
A British friend of mine is worried for a father, who had been cycling in the region of Taroudant, near Tizi n' Test, between Agadir and Marrakesh...
He's been seen last on Friday evening.
He's very experienced and has raised funds for the British Red Cross for years.
https://www.davebardenworldcyclist.com/
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If anyone has contact in the area, please let me know.
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Here is the helpline for everyone: +212 537689900
Check Bristol Ideas here: https://www.bristolideas.co.uk/projects/festival-of-the-future-city/
France ・ Police brutality |
Seven years after the death of Adama Traoré, a young black Frenchman who died in custody in the summer of 2016, the court concluded that the three officers responsible for his arrest had not committed illegitimate violence. While the circumstances of his death are still disputed, his family have denounced efforts to protect the police officers and made the case a symbol of police brutality. Assa Traoré, the victim's sister and now an icon of the French Black Lives Matter movement, organised a rally on Tuesday to protest what she describes as "a shame for France and the French justice system."
 | Melissa Chemam The Adama Traoré affaire is a highly mediatised case that became the symbol of the police brutality debate in France. Despite the lack of clarity around his death, it remains today a rallying cry for those protesting police brutality in France, especially as the country grapples with the aftermath of unrest in late June and early July following the police killing of a French teenager of North African descent at a traffic stop in a Paris suburb. |
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The European Correspondent aims to change that. We cover the whole of Europe and write for a community of citizens who want to look beyond their own national borders. Without European journalism, there is no European civil society.
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From late September onwards 'The Old Oak' from Ken Loach is out in the UK and in France.
The Old Oak pub becomes contested territory after the arrival of Syrian refugees, placed in the village without any notice...
Presentation:
THE OLD OAK is a special place.
Not only is it the last pub standing, but it’s also the only remaining public space where people can meet in a once thriving mining community that has now fallen on hard times after 30 years of decline.
TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) the landlord hangs on to The Old Oak by his fingertips, and his predicament is endangered even more when the pub becomes contested territory after the arrival of Syrian refugees who are placed in the village without any notice. In an unlikely friendship TJ meets a curious young Syrian Yara [Ebla Mari] with her camera.
Can they find a way for the two communities to understand each other?
So unfolds a deeply moving drama about their fragilities and hopes.
THE OLD OAK is directed by BAFTA winner Ken Loach, written by BAFTA winner Paul Laverty and produced by BAFTA winner Rebecca O’Brien for Sixteen Films, all of whom continue their long-time collaboration following acclaimed films including Sorry We Missed You and I, Daniel Blake.
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Ken Loach's films have been with us for many generations now, but in a year like 2023 very few other filmmakers have had to energy to remain so engaged with the collective and with the world around them.
Loach and his films are to be treasured.
I wrote about his latest films, and particularly loved 'The Angels' Share' and 'I, Daniel Blake'.
I also wrote about how his legacy influenced some of the new generation of British filmmakers, in 2016, for a French magazine.
Meeting him in person for a discussion about Palestine, at Bristol's Arnolfini art centre, was a highlight of a particularly difficult period for me.
Thank you, Mr Ken Loach, and I so look forward to see your new film!
Covering for RFI English, sadly not from Nairobi, my city in Africa (where I live for 18 months)
4 September 2023
High hopes for lucrative green deals at Africa's first climate summit
Africa's first climate summit opens in the Kenyan capital this Monday as the continent looks to limit the devastating impact of global warming by spearheading efforts for green growth and shoring up finance for developing countries on the frontline of climate change.
Despite accounting for about 3 percent of global carbon emissions, African countries are increasingly exposed to the impact of extreme weather linked to climate change, highlighted by the Horn of Africa's worst drought in decades.
More than 20 African heads of state and government and 20,000 delegates from around the world, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, are joining the summit, which runs until 6 September in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
"This summit will in priority look at climate financing," Crisis Group expert Nazanine Moshiri told RFI.
As the group's senior analyst on climate, environment and conflict, she expects heads of state to make a strong statement on investment in green growth.
Moshiri also hopes that the countries in the deepest crises, like Sudan, Somalia and the coup-hit Niger and Gabon, won't be forgotten.
Deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars are expected to be struck during the summit, organisers say. This includes progress on nature-based investments, clean energy production and climate adaptation efforts.
"We are anticipating deals from $1 million all the way to hundreds of millions of dollars," summit chief Joseph Ng'ang'a told Reuters.
Several nature-based deals involving African countries, which help resolve the dilemma of who foots the bill to combat climate change impacts, have already been announced in recent months.
In June Portugal said it would swap $153 million worth of Cape Verde's debt for nature investments, while Gabon completed a deal this month to buy back $500 million of its international debt and issue an eco-friendly bond of equal size.
African countries have been severely affected by changing weather patterns and increasingly suffer from droughts, floods and storms.
Most regions are affected, especially the Sahel and the Horn of Africa.
"Human-caused climate change has made agricultural drought in the Horn of Africa about 100 times more likely," a report by the World Weather Attribution found in April.
Dry seasons are becoming longer in parts of the Sahel, and rainfall more intense and erratic, meaning droughts and floods are set to intensify, according to a report by the US International Rescue Committee.
Niger has been hit hard by climate change, losing 100,000 hectares of arable land each year to desert.
A comprehensive analysis examining the wealth of nations and their dependence on fossil fuels also concluded poorer countries would be most hurt by a rapid move away from oil and gas, even risking political instability.
African governments are also gearing up for December's Cop28 climate summit in Dubai, when they will be pushing for the realisation of financing commitments made in previous climate summits by richer nations.
Last year's Cop27 in Egypt agreed to create a loss and damage fund for developing countries, but it has not yet materialised.
Ali Mohamed, Kenya's special envoy for climate change, said the recognition of the Congo forest basin as a key carbon sink was a main objectives heading into Cop28.
"We are holding this summit not to continue repeating the same messages. We are holding this summit for Africa to present solutions to the challenges," he said.
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5 September 2023
UAE pledge a record $4.5 billion in clean energy investments in Africa at
Nairobi's Climate Summit
Already
described as "Africa's moment", the Climate Summit has already
brought a record pledge from the Emirates and a strong statement from the UN
chief, Antonio Guterres.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) pledged $4.5 billion in clean energy investments in Africa on Tuesday at the landmark Africa Climate Summit, which opened on Monday in Kenya's capital Nairobi.
The pledge is most significant
so far, coming from the UAE which will also host the COP28 summit in Dubai in November-December.
The investment would "jumpstart
a pipeline of bankable clean energy projects in this very important
continent", Sultan Al Jaber, head of the UAE's national oil company ADNOC,
of government-owned renewable energy company Masdar, and president of the COP28
climate summit.
Jaber also said a consortium including
Masdar would help develop 15 gigawatts of clean power by 2030.
He called for a "surgical
intervention of the global financial architecture that was built for a
different era", urging institutions to lower debt burdens.
International
'responsibilities'
The three-day Nairobi summit has
attracted heads of state, government and industry, including leaders from
Mozambique and Tanzania, as well as United Nations head
Antonio Guterres,
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen and US climate envoy John Kerry.
This Tuesday morning, the UN
Secretary-General urged the international community to help make Africa "a
renewable energy superpower".
"Renewable energy could be the
African miracle. But we must make it happen," Guterres told the summit,
asking leaders of the Group of 20 major economies in particular, who are meeting
in India on the weekend, to "assume your responsibilities" in the
fight against climate change.
Before the summit opened, Crisis Group senior
analyst on climate, environment and conflict, Nazanine Moshiri, told RFI English
that experts also hoped that the disasters linked to climate crisis wouldn't be
forgotten, especially the need for conflict resolution in region like the Horn
of Africa and the Sahel, profoundly impacted by the changes.
A coalition of civil society groups
has been urging Kenya's
President William Ruto
to steer global climate priorities away from what they perceive as a
Western-led agenda that champions carbon markets and other financial tools to
redress the climate crisis.
Green investments and shift in perception
The summit is aimed at showcasing
the continent's potential as a green powerhouse and focused on drawing
investment to projects to fight global warming.
Ruto has sought to use this Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi to shift the narrative on the region, presenting the clean energy transition as a unique opportunity for Africa.
He believes it can attract the
financing to realise its potential.
Ruto said trillions of dollars in
"green investment opportunities" would be needed as the climate
crisis accelerates.
His goal is also to bring together
African leaders to define a shared vision for green development on the diverse
continent of 1.4 billion and set the tone for a flurry of international
diplomacy leading up to the COP28 meeting.
France officially occupied Gabon in 1885, ten years after French-Italian explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza led a first mission to the region and founded the town of Franceville – one of Gabon's largest cities to this day.
In 1910 Gabon was declared part of French Equatorial Africa, and would remain under French rule for the next 50 years.
Like most of France's sub-Saharan colonies, it gained independence in 1960.
But Gabon and France remained close. Thousands of French citizens remained in the country after independence, the French oil company Elf exploited a large part of its crude production, and others mined its iron, manganese and timber for exports.
Gabonese uranium also supplied France's nuclear weapons and power plants.
And the friendship was closely protected by the family that ruled over Gabon for 55 years: the Bongos.
Omar Bongo Ondimba, the man who ruled Gabon from 1967 until his death in 2009, famously said: "Gabon without France is like a car with no driver. France without Gabon is like a car with no fuel."
Bongo was promoted to key positions in the 1960s as a young official under Gabon's first president, Léon Mba, before being elected vice-president in his own right in 1966.
In 1964, when renegade soldiers arrested Bongo in Libreville and kidnapped Mba, French paratroopers rescued the abducted president and his deputy, restoring them to power.
When Mba died in November 1967, Bongo succeeded him to become the second president of Gabon.
As head of state he travelled regularly to France, where he owned dozens of properties, and enjoyed the backing – more or less openly – of successive French governments.
Bongo's international relations were dominated by his relationship with France, Gabon falling within the ambit of what experts began calling "Françafrique".
"Gabon is an extreme case, verging on caricature, of neocolonialism," wrote French journalist Pierre Péan in 1983.
Omar Bongo carefully cultivated close relations with French politicians.
The Gabonese president was accused of bankrolling election campaigns for friendly candidates in France. Most notably, former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing publicly claimed that Bongo helped fund the 1981 presidential campaign of his rival, Jacques Chirac.
Chirac denied the allegation.
Meanwhile France's footprint in Gabon was clear to see.
In 1988, the New York Times reported that through its aid, France subsidised "a third of Gabon's budget, extending low-interest trade loans, paying the salaries of 170 French advisers and 350 French teachers and paying scholarships for most of the roughly 800 Gabonese who study in France every year".
According to French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, "$2.6 million of this aid also went for the interior decoration of a DC-8 jet belonging to President Bongo".
For years, France even turned a blind eye to the Bongo family's acquisition of luxury homes in Paris and on the Côte d'Azur.
France always maintained a permanent military base in Gabon, and in 1990, when pro-democracy protests threatened to oust Bongo from power, it helped keep him in place.
In 1993, with Bongo threatened again, the French government brokered a peace accord between Bongo's leadership and an angry opposition.
When Omar Bongo died in June 2009, his son Ali took over as head of the Gabonese Democratic Party.
He ran as the party's candidate for president in a snap election in August that year.
The French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy – who had made Gabon one of the first countries he visited when he became president two years earlier – openly backed Ali Bongo's campaign.
Rumours flew that the elder Bongo had stashed secret documents at the presidential palace that could discredit France, which according to Florence Bernault, professor of African history at political science university Sciences Po, was thought to be a factor in Sarkozy's support.
But relations weren't always so cosy under the second President Bongo.
In 2010 the French judiciary opened a so-called "ill-gotten gains" enquiry into the origin of the fortune Omar Bongo used to buy expensive assets in France.
Spanning 15 years, the probe resulted in the seizure of several properties and embezzlement charges against several of Bongo's children – though not Ali Bongo, who as a sitting president benefitted from immunity.
In 2015, France also opened an investigation into Ali Bongo's chief of staff on suspicion of accepting a bribe from a French company to help secure a contract.
Since his election in 2017, President Emmanuel Macron has promised to put an end to "Françafrique" and to be a more neutral partner.
And Bongo did decide to diversify Gabon's partners.
In 2022, as Bongo requested, Gabon even joined the Commonwealth, alongside with Togo, becoming the latest nations with no historic ties to Britain to enter the English-speaking club headed by Queen Elizabeth II.
But during his latest visit to Libreville in March 2023, Macron appeared as close to Bongo as his predecessors ever were.
France condemned his toppling, and still has around 400 troops in the country.
African-infused London-based jazz 13-piece band Balimaya Project sounds like a tour-de-force of sound fusion and energy. The band are coming to in Paris, before a headline show in London in October.
I caught up with the band at the Womad festival in late July.
Article on rfi's website.
