On Friday night, September 8, at 11:11pm local time, a devastating earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale struck southern Morocco, near Marrakech. The death toll has already exceeded 2,800, many of them in small, isolated towns in the High Atlas Mountains, where the epicenter was. At least 3,000 people are injured, many in critical condition, and time is quickly running out for many more who remain trapped under collapsed buildings.
Eighteen people died in Marrakech, a global tourist hub with a population of about 1 million people, but most were in mountain villages where old, fragile mud-brick houses collapsed in the quake. In the village of Tafegafte, 90 of the 200 residents were confirmed dead, with dozens more missing and feared dead or trapped under rubble.
The few reports that have come out of these villages indicate that the Moroccan government has largely left the earthquake victims to fend for themselves. Civilians in Agadir, Marrakech, and other areas less severely affected by the earthquake must buy food, water, and other vital supplies and transport them to their villages in private vehicles.
“There is no sign of the authorities so far. We are very isolated here. If we didn’t have support, we would starve,” said Mustafa, one of the residents of the quake-hit village.・El Makmoum told AFP. “Yesterday we asked the authorities for tents, but nothing has arrived. We are sleeping on the ground in the cold. Adults can cope with this, but children cannot.”
Like the Turkey-Syria earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people last February, Morocco’s earthquake is not just a natural disaster. Knowledge and techniques exist to significantly limit the impact of such events. Their dire consequences are completely tied to existing economic interests and social conditions. Under capitalism, policy is dominated by corporate profits and the pursuit of personal wealth by a ruling elite with a disregard for the lives of the masses.
The effectiveness of modern earthquake-resistant houses and the need to build them are well known to scientists. The 2021 Fukushima earthquake in Japan, one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, exceeded a 7 on the Richter scale. However, thanks to heavy investment in earthquake-resistant housing in Japan, only three people died and 16 were seriously injured.
In 2021, International Journal of Disaster Risk Science It turns out that 1.5 billion people around the world live in earthquake-prone areas.a forbes The list of the top 10 most earthquake-prone cities includes Kathmandu, Istanbul, Delhi, Quito, Manila, Islamabad, San Salvador, Mexico City, Izmir, and Jakarta, most of which are large cities with a population of several million people. It consists of 1999 Nature But the article warned that earthquake-resistant housing is a “low priority”, adding that “future cities will be indefensible without earthquake-resistant structures.”
The capitalist class that controls all central governments has rejected the necessary spending on safer housing as an intolerable drain on profits. Instead, since 1990, trillions of dollars have been spent on bank bailouts and American and NATO wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, and Ukraine. The eight richest people in the world currently own assets equal to half the world’s population. But in areas prone to countless earthquakes, large numbers of people live in housing that could be a death sentence if a major earthquake were to occur.
Morocco is located along the fault between the African and Eurasian plates, and has been prone to major earthquakes, including the 1960 Agadir earthquake and the 2004 Al Hoceima earthquake. However, Moroccans are not only stranded in unsafe adobe homes, but also unprepared for a full-scale disaster response.
King Mohammed VI of Morocco, a long-time ally of US and French imperialism, was vacationing in an 80 million euro mansion next to the Eiffel Tower in Paris when the earthquake struck. He has not made any statements since returning to Morocco, only releasing short clips without audio of him speaking with security and health officials. “No official has been able to make a statement yet because there are unspoken rules but unwaveringly followed,” Moroccan journalist Omar Bourqusi said. [that] It stipulates that “no official may speak or appear in public before the sovereign.”
The King of Morocco was surpassed only by France, Morocco’s former colonial power, in its callous indifference to the plight of earthquake victims. The number of Moroccans in the French diaspora exceeds 1.5 million, and Marrakech is a very popular holiday destination in France. However, President Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced that Moroccan rescue and aid organizations will be given only a small amount of money after the Moroccan monarchy indicated it would prefer to invite rescue teams from Spain, the United Kingdom, Qatar and the UAE over those from France. announced a donation of 5 million euros.
This means that Macron is only donating to Morocco the cost of one of the 30 Caesar heavy artillery systems he sent to Ukraine for the NATO war against Russia.
The indifference of capitalist governments to the essential social needs of the working people, which capitalist governments view with horror and hostility, inevitably seems to have surpassed the current Marrakesh earthquake in the last Moroccan earthquake. It reminds me of a big earthquake. In November 1755, twin earthquakes devastated the Portuguese city of Lisbon and the Moroccan city of Meknes.
in the aisle of candide The Enlightenment writer Voltaire, in his dedication to the Lisbon earthquake, mocked the defenders of the absolute monarchies that ruled Europe at the time. The devastation of the Lisbon earthquake tore apart their smug claim that “everything is for the best possible world.” Thirty years after Voltaire published his work, absolute divine monarchy was wiped out by the French Revolution.
More than two centuries later, the Moroccan earthquake exposed the bankruptcy of the capitalist order, but like the French absolute monarchy of Voltaire’s time, it was corrupt and short-lived.
In Libya, large parts of the city of Derna were washed away by floods and a dam collapsed, leaving 2,000 people dead and more than 5,000 missing, Libyan National Army (LNA) officials reported yesterday. The LNA controls the eastern half of Libya, which has been divided between rival militias fighting a bloody civil war since the 2011 NATO-Libya war.
In Turkey, countless thousands of victims of February’s earthquake are still living in tents, but the Turkish government is overseeing the construction of more non-earthquake resistant housing and workers are once again forced into Thousands of people would be forced there to die again the following year. earthquake. Is there no question that if we leave this problem to the bank stooges like Mohammed VI and Macron, they will be setting themselves up for the next avoidable seismic catastrophe?
Around the world, the working class is faced with the reality that a small, irresponsible ruling elite squanders vast social resources that are essential to the welfare and even survival of its people. Unaffected by demands for change, it clings to militarism and its own ignoble pursuit of wealth. This is true both in former colonial countries like Morocco and in imperialist “democracies” like France, which this spring staged mass protests in riot gear against President Macron’s overwhelmingly unpopular president’s pension cuts. was brutally oppressed.
The way forward for the working class is to wrest from the hands of the bourgeoisie the essential resources of world industry and trade and use them to meet basic social needs, including earthquake safety. As anger erupts across Europe and Africa, with many workers and young people demanding the withdrawal of French troops from countries such as Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, the objective conditions for such a struggle are emerging. It requires the unity of African, European and international workers in the struggle against capitalism and socialism.