“’That Suffering Haunts Me Even Here’ - The Struggle for Human Rights of the Antandroy People Displaced by Climate Change from Southern Madagascar”, documents how Antandroy people have been forced to travel to other parts of the country in search of better conditions, with many internally displaced people (IDPs) making the arduous 1,500km journey to the northern Boeny region. The report exposes the government’s violation of their rights to freedom of movement and choice of residence within state borders, adequate housing, and an adequate standard of living.

“From insufficiently addressing the impacts of droughts in the south, to its lack of protection and support for internally displaced persons, the government has repeatedly failed the Antandroy,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa.

“To mitigate against these failures and their effects on IDPs, Madagascar must do more to improve its response to a changing climate by urgently adopting comprehensive national and local strategies to address drought-induced displacements, and by prioritizing the human rights needs of displaced Antandroy.”

Drought-induced displacements in southern Madagascar are deeply rooted in the French colonial era which introduced cochineal parasites to eradicate the opuntia monacantha, a drought-resilient cactus growing in the region. This policy contributed to the vulnerability of the Antandroy people to droughts, which the government of Madagascar and scientists have in recent years linked to global climate change.

More recently, the effects of climate change have made droughts more severe, leading to displacements towards the Boeny region in north Madagascar and other parts of the country.

“Madagascar’s contribution to global carbon emissions is negligible. Yet, the Antandroy people find themselves bearing the brunt of a crisis created, in part, by the actions of high-income historical emitting countries and French colonial rule. France must own up to its historical role in the ongoing crisis and provide reparatory justice for the colonial wrongs against the Antandroy,” said Tigere Chagutah. “High-income, historical emitting states must financially support Madagascar with grants and the transfer of environmentally sound technologies.”

To understand the plight of those displaced, Amnesty International visited six villages of Antandroy IDPs and the main arrival bus station. In total, Amnesty International interviewed 122 IDPs, and also consulted government officials, local and international organizations, academics, climate scientists, and analysed satellite imagery.

The government responded to Amnesty International, underscoring efforts to improve drought resilience in southern Madagascar. It also explained that plans for a local displacement management strategy had been delayed partly due to limited logistical and financial resources. The response, however, failed to address France’s responsibility dating back to the French colonial period, the 2021 forced evictions, or the inadequacy of the 2023 pilot resettlement site.

An arduous journey

Between 2018 and 2024, about 90,000 people from southern Madagascar, mostly the Antandroy, were forced to leave their ancestral lands due to drought-induced famines.

Those interviewed by Amnesty International described the journey from Androy to Boeny as long and difficult. In most cases, they travelled by bus, with two main routes connecting southern Androy to northwestern Boeny, which are about 1,500 km apart. Many could not afford the trip and had to borrow money, sell their belongings, take stops on the journey to do casual jobs, or call on family members to send them money. In some cases, families made stops along the way to work and feed themselves, sleeping in markets and forests before continuing their journey.

The journey put families at risk of exploitation. One woman, Lia, told Amnesty she was coerced into exchanging sex with bus drivers for a seat.

One man, Masoandro, 48, said: “I negotiated with the driver. To repay him, he employed my son as a herder for one year, and the debt to the driver amounted to 220,000 Malagasy Ariary (about US$50). My son did this because he had no choice, as the driver had threatened to imprison us if the debt was not repaid.”

Upon arrival

Once in Boeny, they received no support from the government, including access to productive land.

Boeny Governor Mokthar Andriatomanga told Amnesty International: “All available land has already been allocated to the local community.”

Rather than providing support or alternatives, from April to July 2021, the government forcibly evicted Antandroy people who had built homes or cultivated land within a designated reforestation area bordering the Ankarafantsika National Park, violating their right to adequate housing.

Betro, a 28-year-old woman, recalls how she was taken by surprise during an eviction in July 2021 as the gendarmes stormed a church where she was praying: “At that time, upon the shock of seeing them, I gave birth and then I fled [she was nine months pregnant]. The umbilical cord had not even been cut yet...The state did not do anything... They just arrested people.”

The authorities’ failure to address the Antandroy’s plight and its root causes, including historic neglect by central government, has resulted in families being separated, with no support from the government or aid organizations for reunification.

Reny, 46, said: “Those strong enough to work and earn money are the ones who leave [for Boeny]. Those with children, and those who are weak, stay behind.”

Amnesty International calls on the Madagascar government to ensure all evictions comply with international human rights law.

Placed in an open-air prison

A resettlement site constructed by the Boeny regional government lacks essential services. It consists of 33 tiny huts with leaky walls, which let in rain, wind, and sweltering heat. During the rainy season

the nearby Kamoro River swells dangerously, encircling the site with fast-flowing and crocodile-infested waters cutting access to essential services such as markets, chemists, hospitals and schools. In 2023, one man was killed by a crocodile and another drowned while trying to cross.

Mandry, a mother of eight, expressed her frustration: "What can we say? There’s not much we can do. If we fall ill, it’s death because we can’t cross this body of water – we don’t have money for a pirogue (small boat).”

In January 2025, a newborn, Anakaondry, died after her mother, weakened by hunger and thirst, could no longer breastfeed.

Despite these conditions, the regional government estimates that around 100 Antandroy IDPs enter the region each week.

“Responsibility for the support and protection of the Antandroy IDPs goes beyond Madagascar - regional and international partners including the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU), the United Nations, as well as humanitarian organizations, must mobilize resources to speed up adaptation efforts,” said Tigere Chagutah.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

On January 30, a judge charged Cello with spreading false news and undermining national security and placed him in pretrial detention in Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo’s Antanimora prison, one of Cello’s relatives told CPJ, on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisals.

“Fernand Cello should never have been arrested based on a warrant issued in October 2023 for a social media post that he apologized for soon after publication,” said Moussa Ngom, CPJ’s Francophone Africa representative. “Rather than criminalizing journalists, Malagasy authorities should free Fernand Cello and drop all charges against him.”

Cello’s September 15, 2023, Facebook post inaccurately said that Rajoelina had left the country on a flight that included the High Constitutional Court president Florent Rakotoarisoa.

Days earlier, the court had dismissed opposition appeals to void Rajoelina’s candidacy on the grounds of his dual French-Malagasy nationality. Rajoelina won a third term in November 2023.

On September 16, 2023, Cello published a video “explaining and apologizing” for his mistake. In March 2024, he published another video apology and asked Rakotoarisoa to “end his persecution.”

Cello, who was arrested at home, had been in hiding since the warrant, the family member told CPJ. The journalist continued to work for the privately owned newspaper Basy Vava, a second relative said. He also posted daily news and comments on Facebook.

In 2017, Cello was detained for four months, before receiving a two-year suspended sentence for cheque theft, in a case that he said was in retribution for his work at the local station Radio Jupiter, which broadcast allegations of an electricity firm’s financial irregularities and illegal sapphire mining. He was acquitted on appeal in 2019.

CPJ’s calls to the communication and justice ministries to request comment were not answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Photograph Source: thierry ehrmann – CC BY 2.0

The search across the globe and in history for egalitarian societies turns up some strange finds. One anthropologist, the well-known, radical, recently deceased, best-selling author and a founder of the Occupy movement at Zuccotti Park, David Graeber, discovered such a world in Madagascar, in the settlements of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirates, recording his observations in a posthumous book, Pirate Enlightenment, Or the Real Libertalia. This portrait of a vanished almost-utopia is no idealization; Graeber lays it out in detail, but the conclusion is unavoidable: citizens of these pirate port towns had far more freedom than your average twenty-first century American prole moiling long hours for monopoly corporations. They also appear to have enjoyed a lot more happiness, you know, that thing we Americans are supposedly free to pursue.

They had more democracy as well: decisions were debated and the majority ruled, unlike this country, where citizens express their preference through the franchise, but somehow when their representatives arrive in the capital the only people they listen to are their donors, and only the richest ones, at that. The pirates off the coast of Africa had no such problems. Had any such tyrannical oligarch of the sort who rule the world from Washington appeared in Madagascar, the pirates would have cut his throat. When they made a choice democratically, it was carried out.

What this book shows is how anemic our so-called freedom and supposed democracy actually are. It does so by barely mentioning our present tribulations but instead conjuring a world that existed centuries ago without those travails, and though it does so with the tools of anthropology and history, it also deploys the descriptive powers of the novelist. The characters in this account, however, actually existed, and they had an expansive sovereignty and independence of action that we wage slaves can only envy.

This pirate culture enchanted Graeber, and given his accomplishments, that’s not surprising. Graeber’s cultural and political contributions were enormous, something highlighted by his untimely 2020 death in Venice at the age of 59. His insightful writings on debt and his Occupy activism influenced people over the globe. With Occupy he helped start a worldwide leftist movement against inequality. And this new, posthumous book reveals some of the origins of his uncommon thinking, which, in turn, shows the rigor of the anthropologist doing field work and the historian steeped in Enlightenment documents.

Graeber regards the past Madagascar society he examines as a home for Enlightenment political experiments, so that his aim is to “consider the history of pirates in Madagascar…in this light.” He notes that “the pirate settlers had since 1697 become increasingly hostile to the slave trade” – no surprise, considering the pirates’ mode of governance, as opposed to their legends. “On pirate ships, it was convenient to develop the reputation of all-powerful and bloodthirsty captains to overawe outsiders, even if, internally, most decisions were made by majority vote.”

The anthropologist admits to being entranced by this society. “One might call pirate legends, then, the most important form of poetic expression produced by that emerging North Atlantic proletariat whose exploitation laid the ground for the industrial revolution.” Graeber also notes enthusiastically that pirates’ “democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented.” Combine that with an ambitious, assertive and indeed aggressive local female population, and something quite unheard of was bound to develop. Though Graeber doesn’t use the term feminism, that’s clearly part of what he’s talking about, because that’s always involved when women seize their destiny and grab control of their lives for their own purposes. Such women did not appall the pirates. Quite the contrary.

These women wanted to trade freely, to intermarry with foreigners and to use their children to create a new aristocracy, and the arrival of the democratically inclined pirates enabled them to do so. “The first result of the appearance of the pirates,” Graeber writes, “was to allow a large number of ambitious women, most apparently of prominent lineages…to essentially take control of their wealth and connections, and, with the pirates, effectively create the port cities that were to dominate the subsequent history of the coast.” (This involved crushing the power of the previous intermediaries, the Zafy Ibrahim.) The children of such intermarriage between pirates and local woman were critical to this effort, “and the key to success would be to ensure that they largely marry one another (or other foreigners).” This is what happened.

So, ambitious local women, egalitarian pirates and some knowledge of European Enlightenment trends generated a rare culture and society. But how did all three intertwine? First and foremost, for Graeber, throughconversation. Pirates “on board ship…conducted their affairs through conversation, deliberation and debate.” Madagascar and Enlightenment society also featured this approach. So Graeber then posits Madagascar as a home for Enlightenment political experiments. Madagascar settlements “seem to have been self-conscious attempts to reproduce that model [pirate democracy at sea] on land, with wild stories of pirate kingdoms to overawe potential foreign friends or enemies, matched by the careful development of egalitarian deliberative processes within. But the very process of the pirates’ settling down, allying themselves with ambitious Malagasy women, starting families, drew them into an entirely different conversational world.”

Pirates aren’t the only ones who conducted political experiments. Graeber did too, with Occupy, when he and others jolted a conversation about economic inequality into the global mainstream. That conversation inspired the fight in the U.S. for a $15 per hour minimum wage, among other things. According to Michael Levitin, in the Atlantic in September 2021, though the movement vanished, “its legacy is everywhere.” The Zuccotti protestors announced: “We are the 99 percent,” and most Americans agreed, according to polls which showed wide support for Occupy, despite the Obama’s contempt and his administration’s crass encouragement of official assaults on it. Americans, by and large, agreed with this turn in the national conversation, which an enthusiastic anthropologist helped spark, an anthropologist whose doctoral advisor was the renowned Marshall Sahlins and who did his field work investigating the roots of egalitarianism, feminism and democracy in Madagascar.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.