Two Rabbis, two Pastors, a Buddhist master and Nun, a Jesuit Priest, a Bishop emeritus, and a Muslim thinker chained themselves together from one guardrail of the Parisian walkway to the other on Thursday, May 25, 2023, to demand the immediate abandonment of TotalEnergies’ oil projects in Uganda and Tanzania.
They were among 80 believers from different traditions who blocked the Léopold-Sédar-Senghor footbridge in Paris, France, in a protest action which took place on the eve of the TotalEnergies Annual General Meeting, which held on Friday, May 26, in Paris.
With this blockage, the protesters, including the nine leading religious figures sought to denounce the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project and the new Tilenga oil field – both of which are mainly owned by the French multinational, TotalEnergies.
Arriving at about 11:30am on the bridge, the believers blocked pedestrian and bicycle traffic for 1,443 seconds (24 minutes), to symbolise the 1,443 kilometres of the future pipeline.
Some carried a banner depicting a black pipeline. It reads in large white letters: “Dans les tuyaux de Total, coule la mort” (“In Total’s pipes, death flows”), in reference to French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s famous line, “Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine (“Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine”).
Another banner stated, “Croyant·es, corps et âme contre EACOP” (“Believers, body and soul against EACOP”), to emphasise their physical and spiritual commitment against the TotalEnergies project.
This is the first time in France that religious figures have blocked a public space to denounce the EACOP and Tilenga oil projects.
Rabbi Yeshaya Dalsace said: “All men are born free, but life sometimes creates chains for them which little by little imprison and often, these chains, the human beings manufacture them themselves. We have all our own channels, and we all have a duty to regain our freedom. The biblical story breaking the chains of slavery in Egypt is founding.
“Today, as men and women of faith from diverse backgrounds and traditions, we come to express our desire to see certain chains broken: the chains of our need for profit at all costs, the chains of the unbridled consumption of natural resources, the chains of our inability to reduce our need for oil, chains our indifference to irreversible damage to the nature and men, the chains that our mode of operation imposes on populations who have no real means of defending themselves.”
*Courtesy: Environews