COMMON STRUGGLES AND FORGOTTEN WARS

The voices of a Mediterranean that does not give up

 The Mediterranean stands daily on the pages of our newspapers, as the escape route that immigrants or refugees undertake to land on the Northern Mediterranean shores, hoping to find a safer and more decent life. News reports give us the image of a sea in which hundreds of human beings lose their life, where the boats sailing from Northern Africa sink at sea and where the land seems to be too far away. Despite the tragedies that characterise the immigrants’ flight toward Europe, there are however many positive experiences of sharing a common destiny between the two shores of the Mediterranean Sea to be highlighted. These experiences were on focus at the second debate of Sabir Maydan II, “People for Mediterranean Citizenship: Toward a grassroots initiative for a United Mediterranean” where the main topic of discussion were projects about community development and a common sustained policy for the region.

The first to speak is Aboubakr El Khamlichi, president of the Moroccan association Chabaka, who tells about fruitful exchanges between Morocco and Andalusia. Since 1995, his association is committed to strengthen the exchanges between Tangier and Andalusia, in order to contrast this one-way migration stream and to halt deaths at sea. They do it through training workshops and exchange between the two shores’ communities, as well as through women empowerment activities in Morocco. Aboubakr explains that their network of collaboration has expanded to include 212 local associations, which struggle on a daily basis in defence of  migrants’ rights, rights which are too often trampled on or nullified.

The winning asset of this experience is the development of a grassroots-based social awareness. The community and the citizens have made themselves available for the success of the project, with their genuine engagement and often voluntary social commitment, responding to concrete needs.

A similar story has been put forward by Fatima Zohra Menouar. Fatima is committed in training and exchange projects between young people from Marseille and Algeria. The first steps to carry out, so Fatima says, in order to create a Mediterranean space which is perceived as a home and it embodies a symbol of transversal identity, are: educating about differences; and experiencing the daily life of those people living on the other sea shore.

The territory stretching from the West to the East of the Mediterranean is punctuated by conflicts, some of them recently exploded, and some others being part of our daily chronicles of denied rights and violated homelands.

This is the case of the population of the Palestinian territories, forced to live in situations of violations of the most basic freedoms, first of all the right to their own land. Since years, Moharram S.H. Bargouti, president of Palestinian Youth Union, is trying, with his association, to create solidarity networks with European civil society and other associations.

The religious connotation that characterises the Israeli-Palestinian narrative is the focus of his speech. He believes that we need to separate the religious factor from the social conditions, in order to make closer the two shores of the Mediterranean. Beliefs should no longer be a weapon to embrace, but a common treasure of values, were there be an international social fabric having a clear and shared political vision based on the respect of universal rights.

This is the challenge: building a transversal advocacy policy based on common principles and laws. To do it, we need a solid civil consciousness among people of different nationalities fighting together to pursue the same rights, creating solidarity networks to achieve common goals.

Maria Al Abdeh, young Syrian girl, thinks along the same lines and focuses her speech on the tragic civil war that is destroying her own country. Citizens for Syria, the association to which she belongs to, is trying to go beyond the silence imposed by international medias on this conflict, and is acting to create dialogue spaces between activist communities of the Mediterranean countries, in order to denounce the situation of Syrians, facing a war that seems to not have an end.  The growing number of Syrians in refugee camps, the dissidents forced to flee to the Northern shore of the Mediterranean, are just some of the millions people who have no more voice in the medias. Those people without voice need to be supported by the international associative networks, in order to give to the issue of the 5-years long Syrian conflict the adequate attention it deserves.

The first ones who should sign up to the project for Mediterranean citizenship are those belonging to the so-called “Northern shore”, who are unfortunately still not very sensitive to social issues concerning the communities living in North Africa and the Middle East. According to the blogger Lina Ben Mhenni, a real transversal citizenship cannot exist without a full freedom of movement, without the emergence of an effective awareness among European peoples of what happens to those who decide to embark in a trip from the Southern coasts of the Mediterranean toward the opposite shores.  A real Mediterranean citizenship is only possible if we manage to engage in an effective dialogue on the problems affecting the Southern countries, concludes Lina. Only if the civil society of the Northern shore is aware and organize itself to denounce the number of deaths at sea, and to put a stop to the systematic rights violations occurring in the region, we can win legitimacy for a Mediterranean citizenship.

A common consciousness is therefore required, so say the participants in this SabirMaydan II debate, in order to build a policy able to look towards both shores in an equal way, without the use of “double standards”, but with the objective to engage in a common struggle towards a shared Mediterranean code of principles and rules of law.