Most shops, banks, and transport services, including the island's main airport, have been closed by the general strike, now in its second week. On February 4 hundreds of thousands marched through the streets of Antananarivo, the nation's capital, in a show of support. A week earlier, half a million people had jammed into the streets to demand the current government led by President Didier Ratsiraka step down.

The presidential elections held December 16 pitted Marc Ravalomanana, the current mayor of Antananarivo and a wealthy industrialist, against Ratsiraka, a naval admiral, who has ruled the country for 22 of the past 25 years, 17 of them in his capacity as head of the military. In 1996 he was elected president.

"The opposition candidate Marc Ravalomanana clearly won the ballot with more than 200,000 votes over President Ratsiraka," reported the BBC news service. "But the official vote said he secured only 46 percent, short of the absolute majority needed to avoid a second round of voting."

The nation's High Constitutional Court certified the government's tally, ruling that Ravalomanana won 46.2 percent to Ratsiraka's 40.8 percent, and scheduled a runoff vote for February 24. Ravalomanana, on the other hand, insisted he won 52.1 percent of the vote and issued a call for an indefinite strike to back his demand to be named the outright winner of the presidential vote. He also announced that he would boycott the scheduled second round vote.

Bruno de Foucault, president of the employers' organization the Group of Free Enterprises and Partners, said that the strike was costing the owners of the companies affiliated with this group, many of them textile manufacturers, more than $850,000 a day. U.S., Japanese, and European officials have held meetings with representatives from the opposition to express their concerns about mounting instability in the country.

The massive street mobilizations and ongoing strike actions have thrust hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants in this nation of 15 million people into political action, shining a spotlight on the legacy of 75 years of French colonial rule and ongoing imperialist exploitation.

Madagascar, which gained its independence from France in 1960, is one of the poorest countries in the world. Some 75 percent of its population live below the government's official poverty line, 85 percent of urban children are undernourished, and 55 percent of the population is illiterate. The nation is saddled with a $4.4 billion debt owed to banks in the imperialist centers, while per capita income is just $250 a year.

In the early 1970s the government nationalized all French-owned financial interests and closed French bases and a U.S. space-tracking station.

The regime commenced opening the country to foreign investors in the mid-1990s. It began privatizing state-run industries, set up an export-processing zone, with reduced corporate tax rates for exporting companies, and eliminated local- ownership and -content requirements for investors from abroad.

In June 2000 the U.S. Congress passed the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which allowed 23 sub-Saharan countries, including Madagascar, to export textile products to the United States duty-free. This move boosted Madagascar's exports to the United States to $133 million in the first half of 2001, compared with $63 million the previous year.

However, this has been of little benefit to those employed in these plants. The textile bosses instead have reaped super-profits off the labor of working people through long hours, forced overtime, no benefits, and abysmal wages. Last year, according to an article in the January 2 Wall Street Journal, textile workers in Madagascar received an average pay of just 37 cents an hour.  
 
 
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