IVP603 - April 2025

The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil — the Palestinian graduate student and green card holder seized March 8 at his Columbia University residence — is now multiplied by other high-profile detentions and deportation threats, and dozens or even hundreds of unpublicized cases. Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly boasts as much.

Last spring, huge demonstrations took place across Kenya against the finance bill under the slogan “#RejectFinanceBill2024”. This IMF-backed project aimed to impose new taxes on the population in order to pay off debts amounting to $79 billion. The mobilization, mainly by young people, forced President William Ruto to cancel the bill.

Since the abrupt reversal of US policy towards Ukraine, the Russian concessions obtained by President Trump have been non-existent. The ceasefire on energy infrastructure has not been implemented; worse, bombing on Ukrainian territory has never been so intense, while the opening of a corridor to resume maritime trade in the Black Sea only benefits Russia.

This year’s Newroz festival in Diyarbakir drew huge crowds with one hope: to finally find a political solution to the decades-long conflict in the Kurdish region. A Newroz message from the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, was broadcast over the loudspeakers, something that had not happened for several years, as Öcalan has been in total isolation. The portrait of the charismatic PKK president was everywhere, which was not previously allowed. So was the portrait of Selahettin Demirtas, former chair of the HDP party (now DEM). Negotiating a ceasefire is no simple matter.

President Donald Trump’s macho, white, nationalist ideology leads him to attack women, LGBT people, workers, the poor, the disabled and others, but his racism is particularly striking. He has in myriad ways made racism against Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants official U.S. policy. From the highest levels of government to the lowest economic levels of society people of color are being discriminated against, mistreated, and victimized as at no time since the 1920s.

An alliance is emerging between jihadist forces and pro-independence forces in northern Mali, which would improve their balance of power in the ongoing conflict.

“A hundred students have set off on bicycles from Novi Sad on 3 April to reach Strasbourg, where they are due to arrive on 15 April to present their demands to the European institutions. In this long 1,400-kilometre race ‘to wake up Europe’, they were welcomed as heroes in Budapest - the mayor of the Hungarian capital, an opponent of Viktor Orbán, joined the Serbian diaspora - and in Vienna. In the Austrian capital, all the Balkan diasporas gathered to cheer the student cyclists in Marie-Thérèse Square, recalling that, in all their countries, ‘corruption kills’.”

Since 1976, the Palestinian people have celebrated Land Day every March 30th, a day rooted in the history of Palestinian resistance and emblematic of the current struggle for survival. In 1976, the Israeli government launched a plan to Judaize the Galilee, confiscating 20,000 dunams of land (18 km2) in the midst of Arab villages. The aim was to build Jewish settlements on land belonging to Palestinian Arab citizens - the majority of the region’s population. Everywhere in Palestine, from the Galilee to the Negev, in towns and villages, there were general strikes and demonstrations.

France’s far right Rassemblement national (RN) party has been trying to establish relations in Africa for several years now, and party leader Marine Le Pen’s visit to Chad from 14-16 March 2025 is the latest avatar. The RN leader, accompanied by one of her close associates Louis Aliot, was received by Mahamat Déby, the Chadian president who has been in power for over three years thanks to a coup d’état ostensibly supported by Emmanuel Macron. Even if relative, the RN leader’s interest in Africa, the source and cause of the much-hated “migratory submersion”, seems counter-intuitive to say the least.

The Brussels Solidarity with Ukraine conference on March 26–27drew together about 200 activists from a score of countries, in support of the Ukrainian people’s national and social rights.