On 29 November, IQS hosted the roundtable “Burkina Faso, Haiti, and Mali: complex geopolitical situations and global dynamics,” which featured participation from Diyité, CatSya, and Ecos de Mali, three NGOs working in Barcelona on development projects in the three countries.
On 29 November, IQS hosted the roundtable "Burkina Faso, Haiti, and Mali: complex geopolitical situations and global dynamics," which featured participation from Diyité, CatSya, and Ecos de Mali, three NGOs working in Barcelona on development projects in the three countries. This meeting formed part of a Global Justice initiative led by the Barcelona City Council, through the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district, in which IQS collaborates in the educational field through "Learning and Service."
The objective of the Education for Global Justice programme is to encourage critical awareness of the causes that lead to inequalities and conflicts and by doing so, contribute to changing attitudes and practices to result in responsible and respectful citizens who are committed to social transformation. With this starting point, the three NGOs gathered at the roundtable momentarily set aside the work and development projects they carry out to focus exclusively on highlighting the social, economic, and political emergencies in which Burkina Faso and Mali, in Africa, and Haiti, in the Caribbean, find themselves.
The meeting began with a speech by Leonardo Martínez, a professor of History and Humanities. "The situation in each of these countries is not deterministic, but there are historical markers that have led to their evolution up to present and it is important to understand them," said Martínez, who gave a condensed geopolitical snapshot placing the colonial origin of the three nations as the starting point of their current situations. Thus, Burkina Faso and Mali, in Africa, and Haiti, in the Caribbean, share a common feature: their colonial origin. "In Haiti, the process of decolonization and independence was the result of a revolution, while in the two African countries, it was through a process that was integrated within a general framework, the result of the Cold War, and the functioning of the United Nations," Martínez said. And yet, although the processes were different, their evolution has led them to similar structural situations.
Maria Antonia Blasco, director of Diyité, and Gherardi Louis Jeune, a financial lawyer and collaborator with this NGO on development projects in Haiti, presented the harsh reality of a Caribbean country that has seen the balance and prosperity it was on the path towards in its first 50 years as an independent state vanish since the 1980s. This decline has been marked by corruption, social inequality, and insecurity, with an economic result of the exodus of the intellectual class and the wealthiest from a country with hardly any foreign investment, no tourist attractions, and indebtedness.
The situation is not much better with Mali in Africa. "It is one of the poorest countries in the world and 80% of the population is concentrated in the south," said Jordi Escudé, president of Ecos de Mali. The short history of this country, which achieved independence in 1960 and was founded under the burden of an initial communist government, has been marked by the alternation of semi-democratic and military governments, the intervention of France (definitively expelled with the last military coup in 2021), and by an open and armed conflict that has kept the north, with all its untapped wealth, under Tuareg control since 2012. "In Burkina Faso, the coup leader Blaise Campoaré, in power for 27 years, turned the country into a corridor for arms and drug trafficking. The new president, also a coup leader, wanted to reverse the situation, and since 2015 there have been terrorist attacks, with everything that entails economically, socially, and politically," explained Monica Ruiz, founder of the NGO CatSya.
Conflict is a common feature in all three countries and explains the difficult situation in which they are immersed. In the case of Mali, it has been in an open conflict since 2012, which has spread across the region including to Burkina Faso. In Haiti, on the other hand, there is no armed conflict labelled as a war, but there is socio-political tension with a level of violence that far exceeds 1,000 deaths per year.
Iván Navarro, researcher at the UAB School of Peace Culture, put the finishing touch to this meeting by sketching out the different peacebuilding scenarios in the three countries. The scenarios are different due to the type of conflict, the objectives, and the agents who are or aren’t involved in these negotiations. "In the case of Mali and Burkina Faso, leaving jihadist groups out of the negotiation has led to an increase in violence in the area over the past ten years," the researcher explained. It's a regular mistake by the international community to decide who gets to engage in dialogue or not."
Critical consciousness
Apart from all the information shared, the roundtable also resulted in a space for reflection. "According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Africa loses $89 billion every year, mainly in capital flight and tax evasion. And half of this figure is due to the ‘theft’ of raw materials. And I say ‘theft’ because one way to camouflage this capital flight is by declaring that you export a kilo of gold and actually take five," said Jaume Portell, a collaborator with CatSya, thus countering the idea of "scarcity" that usually pushes towards collaboration with countries such as Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest countries, yet one of the largest exporters of gold.
Portell emphasized the idea that, to talk about Global Justice, it is necessary to go further, be self-critical, and ask where much of the wealth that allows the richest countries to accumulate it comes from and consider whether they can help the poorest to open schools. "Because Burkina Faso, Mali, and Haiti are not distant and beyond the global economy. From time to time, we must remember them and how these countries are quite integrated within the global economy, so much so that without them the global economy cannot be understood," said the CatSya collaborator.