MALAYSIA / MADAGASCAR Popular revolt challenges dictator FOR the past four months Madagascar has been shaken by a popular movement of unprecedented size and duration. A widely observed general strike of state employees has halted the work of much of the administration and banks have been unable to open. Madagascar has moreover ceased paying its debts. Internal air transport has been suspended and
International flights are sporadic. At Tamatave on the east coast, a dock strike has seen violent clashes with the army, leaving several people dead.
### FRANCIS CAZALS
T HE fighting is centred on the demand for the resignation of the president Didier Ratsiraka, who was put in power by a military directorate in 1975. The opposition movement, the most significant the island has ever known, is probably also one of the most impressive peaceful anti-government mobilizations the African continent has experienced.
The agitation started with an opposition demonstration at the opening of a parliamentary session at the start of May 1991. Over the months, and notably through two big meetings called by the Christian churches, the opposition has developed its demands for a national conference to revise the constitution and prepare new elections.
The government did not pay the slightest attention to these demands. The president, in his over-confidence, believed the time ripe for a few cosmetic constitutional changes, as promised in January 1991. At the start of June he proposed constitutional amendments to the National Assembly, where his supporters have a big majority, removing references to socialism, and at the same time reinforcing presidential powers.
The reforms would also have guaranteed the perpetuation of a number of deeply unpopular institutions, such as the Supreme Council of the Revolution based on the military hierarchy. The population saw all this as a direct affront to justice by the president. An appeal by the opposition coalition, the Committee of Living Forces (Heri Velona) for demonstrations against the constitutional changes led to the first of many demonstrations in the May 13 Square in the capital, Antananarivo, and in a number of other towns.
On his return from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit in Nigeria, and after a stop over in France, where he met President Mitterrand, Ratsiraka treated the protests with contempt. The fact that armed forces were not used shows that he believed that this was nothing but a short lived flare-up that could be easily brought under control.
In fact, however, the demonstrations began to grow, leading a number of the regime's notables to demand tough action against the protesters. By then it was too late; the very size of the demonstrations had massively raised the stakes of any attempt at repression. Furthermore, the army high command made it known that it would refuse to take part in any direct repression of such a movement. Paris, also, had discreetly warned the president against any such final solution as long as the popular movement itself remained peaceful.
### Regime's supporters hamstrung
Without any lead from the president, the regime's supporters were totally hamstrung. Ratsiraka retreated to his presidential palace, built by the North Koreans and decorated by the French, and situated some 15 kilometres from the capital, intending to sit things out. Refusing to compromise, he has been banking on the strike movement wearing itself out and on the divisions in the opposition.
However the demonstrations have not subsided, becoming rather a daily event in the capital and elsewhere. Far from fizzling out, the movement has gone on to new heights, each day drawing in new layers of the population. Several times the meetings in the May 13 Square have brought out 400,000 people — a third of the capital's population. he hard core of the protesters are the 23
MADAGASCAR striking public employees, of whom there are some 50,000 in Antananarivo. However many other social groups are evident in the demonstrations, including the middle layers, the unemployed, street traders and private sector workers. Raising a series of democratic demands — for a national conference, new elections and revision of the constitution - the movement soon came to focus on the issue of the resignation of Ratsiraka and his government. This "bourgeois revolution" has the explicit support of a substantial number of the local employers.
The inactivity of the army, where some ranks share the opposition's objectives and the legalist approach of the opposition leaders, has allowed the media to draw the conclusion that they are seeing a "quiet revolution" on the Czechoslovak model.
In fact what we are seeing is the collapse of a system whose authoritarianism had until now been masked by nationalism, which attracted the support of sections of the population. The popular uprising of May 1972, which forced out the neo-colonial regime of president Tsiranana, was mainly sparked off by school students. The Malagasy bourgeoisie adopted a low profile to weather the storm. The old political class - proFrench and corrupt - was completely discredited. A team of young nationalist military men rose to power by turning to their advantage the anti-imperialist themes of the Malagasy May. Didier Ratsiraka, at that time a military attaché at the French embassy, was made president by a military directorate.
The international climate allowed this type of petty bourgeois nationalist current to find a niche, in the context of Moscow's international line (such as the Indian Ocean "peace zone"), and through the adoption of an "anti-imperialist" profile on international stages such as the United Nations or the Non-Aligned Movement. The military received training in the Soviet bloc. At the end of the 1970s, Iraq's Saddam Hussein gave the Malagasy leader a personal gift of several million dollars, which were invested, according to Ratsiraka himself, in a trading company, the Procoops, which is to be found at the centre of numerous deals involving prominent figures in the regime, including the president's wife and sister-in-law.
The Ratsiraka regime also strove to build a social base by taking its distance from France, by leaving the franc zone, by introducing Malagasy into education, nationalizing the banks and insurance companies and setting up national enterprises.! As is the way in Africa, this state control allowed the economically weak petty bourgeoisie to establish links with the national and international bourgeoisie and accumulate the initial funds that would subsequently allow their transfor-
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2 05181 mation into authentic capitalists.
### Economy nears catastrophe
The rise in oil prices, the drop in the price of export products such as coffee and vanilla, corruption, lack of hard currency and industrial obsolescence were among the factors that led the economy to the brink of catastrophe. The opposition was rounded up and integrated into the system of power through the National Democratic Front of the Revolution (FNDR), to which all parties were obliged to adhere. In 1982, Madagascar started its first discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Then followed the usual restructuring plans from the World Bank and the progressive liberalization of the economy. Despite some initial reservations, Ratsiraka turned out to be a good pupil of the IMF, to the extent that the World Bank, in its 1991 report, praises the commitment of the Malagasy govemment to structural economic reforms.
However, while the military
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International Viewpoint #214 • October 14, 1991 and apparatchiks have been recycling themselves into the private sector, and while Paris has resumed sending aid, the population has had to pay the bill both for the state and for the liberal reforms. The IMF's medicine has had its customary effect; spending reductions have meant a 40% fall in health spending, real wages have fallen by 50% in ten years, while the prices of basic necessities have shot up. The shops are no longer empty, but the products, now often imported from South Africa, are beyond the reach of the great majority of the island's inhabitants. The minimum wage is about 100 French francs ($16.50) a month and the enterprises in the Free Trade Zone pay a few francs a day. The middle classes and the state employees, who had for a long time benefited from the system, have also been hard hit, as have the lower levels of the army. And this is not to mention the peasants, who have never been taken into consideration by the regime, and who have become the prey of the dahalc, organized bands of zebu rustlers who have links with high placed people.
Determination of demonstrators
The determination of the anti-government demonstrators in recent months reflects the depth of the crisis. However strictly social demands are not at the forefront of these mobilizations. Indeed, the opposition leaders are concerned to limit their expression. All share the IMF outlook and are little interested in its social consequences. However, under pressure from below, the opposition has adopted a more radical tone and proposals for action. Thus the Committee of Living Forces has set up a transitional government headed by a doctor, Albert Zafy, who is leader of a small Christian Democrat group, as prime minister and by General Rakotoharison as president.
This latter is a former chief-of-staff of the army who was thrown out by Ratsiraka in 1985 for refusing to round up young members of a Kung Fu club in the capital — the latter were close to the opposition and had, a little while previously, killed a government militiaman. Ministers of this shadow government have even been installed in various government offices with the agreement of the strike committees. However, the presidential palace, the prime minister's offices and the main banks remain inviolable. Beyond this line, the army is ready to intervene.
This demonstrates the limits of the "peaceful revolution" and of the power won by the population. In fact, the ministries on strike have rapidly become deserted; real power in any case resides elsewhere in a presidential dictatorship with military support. When on August 10 the opposition called on the population to 1. See International Viewpoint 204, April 15, 1991.
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march towards the presidential palace, a regiment charged with protecting the head of the state, the RESEP, trained by French instructors, fired on the crowd several kilometres away from its objective. The official total was 32 dead, but opposition and some medical sources claim that over a hundred more died. Thus, the Malagasy revolution has ceased to be peaceful.
For the opposition leaders, this vast protest movement is nothing more than a means to further their own political ambitions. Such a power struggle in the most trivial sense of the term makes it hard for genuine popular leaders to emerge, that is, leaders free from the verbal, demagogic and mystified populism that is the stock in trade of the leaders of the Committee of Living Forces.
These latter are playing a double game: in the May 13 Square they make impassioned speeches, while at the same time they engage in discreet negotiations with the regime. Christian churches Influential
Apart from the Christian churches, who are very influential and are the only ones to show an interest in the social misery of the majority, the opposition parties fall into two main categories: former allies of president Ratsiraka who have fallen out with him; and people from the First Republic, that is, supporters of the neocolonial regime of Philibert Tsiranana, overthrown in 1972, or sons of bigwigs from that government.
In the first category is the MFM (Movement for Proletarian Power), which first appeared at the beginning of the 1970s as a far left formation among school students, and whose leaders, among them Manandafy Rakontonirina, were repressed by the military after the Malagasy May of 1972. It then rallied to the "red book" of President Ratsiraka and agreed to join the National Democratic Front of the Revolution. The group's leaders took up posts of responsibility in this regime and participated in the dragooning of the population behind the president.
At the start of the 1980s they too backed the turn towards economic liberalization, only to break with the regime because, in their eyes, the economic programme was not being applied seriously enough. The MFM has continued its drift to the right and has now become the main defender of the liberal credo. The group's leaders now have close ties to some of the local employers, who, after benefiting from the economic protection of the nationalist epoch, now want to speed up the opening to the world market.
The AKFM-Renouveau (Renewal) of Pastor Richard is another group that supported the regime in its time. A nationalist petty bourgeois current with an electoral base in the capital among the Merina (the ethnic majority originating from the high plateaux), it has sometimes been seen as a
Stalinist group owing to its relations with Moscow. Today this party has split in two, one part remaining with Ratsiraka, the other going into the opposition.
The Social Democratic Party (PSD) sees itself as the inheritor of the mantle of former president Philibert Tiranana. It is led by former partisans of the neocolonial regime or by children of former notables of that regime - Tsiranana's son is a member. Its leadership is made up of doctors, businessmen and high-level state functionaries. Furthermore some of its officials are from the Merina aristocracy and have many family and business connections with some figures in the regime.
The island's trade unions are not capable of compensating for the limits of the movement's leadership, being both too fragmented and too closely dominated by the political parties. The more radical elements, who remain in the MFM or the Monima party — an old populist group with an implantation in the south — are today completely at sea, or even swimming in the opposite direction to the masses.
Some of them, out of opposition to the liberal trend of their leadership, have been THE won back over by Ratsiraka in recent times, providing him with his "left wing" Today they find themselves heading up institutions rejected by the population. Thus in the short term it does not seem likely that the mass movement can give rise to anything more than a change in the government.
### Paris backs
"democratization"
France is the main supplier of bilateral funds for Madagascar. For this reason, Paris has maintained privileged relations with president Ratsiraka, now considered to have shown himself a graduate in the "democratization" of Africa currently in vogue in the French administration.
Thus French diplomacy at first observed a discreet silence on the events, which it has been finding increasingly embarrassing. The official French position is that the only solution is a new election. Paris has never supported the demand for a national agreement to revise the constitution and continues to offer the president an escape route.
After August 10, 1991, France felt obliged to make some noises. However it soon returned to the idea of a compromise solution which its ambassador is trying to sell to the opposition in the form of a "Committee of Public Salvation" bringing together equal numbers of regime supporters and opposition representatives. This committee would oversee the runup to the elections.
These prevarications have made life easier for Ratsiraka, who is now trying to claim that the only alternative to him is chaos. *