2023-10-30 10:18:44
In the city center of Fort-de-France, Fabien Roussel’s walkabout turned into a rain bath. Saturday October 28, the communist deputy for the 20th district of the North participated in a demonstration against the dismissal pronounced in January by the Paris judicial court in the chlordecone scandal. A thousand people were marching in the streets of the capital of Martinique, at the call of around thirty local organizations, when the procession was dispersed by a storm, as sudden as it was violent.
The demonstration closed a week of events aimed at remobilizing the Martinique population in this matter of pollution of thousands of hectares of agricultural land in the French West Indies, after the massive use of this insecticide in the banana plantations of Guadeloupe and Martinique, between 1973 and 1992. “The dismissal is not definitive”, says, behind a long banner, Laetitia Privat, president of the Environmental Health association without exemption. In fact, the civil parties appealed the decision of the investigating judges. While waiting for the continuation of the legal standoff, the associations are maintaining the pressure, because “when a subject falls into oblivion, nothing more happens and the French state no longer acts”continues the environmental activist.
Invited by the organizers of this Simenn Matinik Doubout (“Martinique Standing Week”), Olivier Besancenot traveled from Paris and is walking alongside union officials. “No one can make people believe that the French state did nothing to cover up the affair”castigates the former spokesperson for the New Anticapitalist Party, while mocking “this part of the left” who does not go to the West Indies “only at the time of the elections”.
Read also: Article reserved for our Antilles subscribers: the decision to dismiss the case in the chlordecone case spares neither the State nor the industrialists
These criticisms of the former postman from Neuilly (Hauts-de-Seine) should not target Fabien Roussel: the national secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF) is currently making a five-day trip to Martinique until October 30. Of course, there was no question of him missing Saturday’s demonstration. “This mobilization is extremely important because it shows the French government the level of anger that exists among residentsunfolds the northern deputy. This has been going on for seventeen years; That can not continue. This is why I am here today: to share this anger and so that there is a political and legal solution. »
“A class fight”
But while, for the people of Martinique, the chlordecone affair is above all an environmental and health scandal with colonial overtones, the communist leader wishes to make it “a class fight”. “It’s always the same people who are poisoned: the workers, and it’s always the same people who are poisoning: these large companies which have little regard for employees and the world of work”harangues Fabien Roussel, in a protesting tone.
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