Vol. 77/No. 4      February 4, 2013

The Militant urges working people to join in demanding immediate withdrawal of thousands of French troops sent into Mali and an end to U.S. backing of the intervention. These moves are not in the interests of workers and toilers, in France or Mali.

Washington and Paris, and more recently Beijing, have only calculated self-serving interests in Africa—the exploitation of the continent’s rich natural resources, labor and growing markets.

The French rulers continue to view their former colonies in Africa as their “sphere of influence” and many remain key sources of profit and resources, from oil to uranium.

Mali, like much of Africa, is wracked with internal conflicts whose roots lie in their colonial legacy and whose solutions are intertwined with the fight of the toilers of city and countryside to unite and throw it off.

In sharp contrast to the plunder, oppression and war that accompany the imperialist powers’ relations with Africa, revolutionary Cuba has extended the hand of solidarity across the continent—from its aid to Angola, including 375,000 volunteer combatants who helped defeat invasions by the white supremacist army of South Africa, to its unshakable support for the Algerian Revolution against French rule and other national liberation struggles, to the hundreds of doctors working selflessly in country after country today. These examples of working-class solidarity and internationalism point the road forward for toilers across the continent and the world.

Regimes in northern Africa and the Middle East have been shaken and toppled by the “Arab Spring”—the entry of workers into politics, seeking the space to fight, learn lessons, and debate and discuss the road forward. And their ranks are growing as the continuing penetration of capital into Africa draws fresh detachments into the working class.

What lies ahead will be renewed possibilities to construct proletarian parties in the region that can politically defeat reactionary Islamist forces, who seek to hold back the forward march of progress, and effectively challenge the domination of the imperialist powers along with the African national bourgeoisies beholden to them.

Out of such struggles in Africa and the rest of the semicolonial world international proletarian leadership of the highest caliber will develop—leaders such as Thomas Sankara, who led the 1983-87 revolution in Burkina Faso just south of Mali.

Workers in the U.S. and France share common enemies with the toilers of Africa—the imperialist governments and the dictatorship of capital they protect from one end of the globe to the other.

French and U.S. military forces out of Mali!
 
 
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French gov’t escalates intervention in Mali  
 
 
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