4:56 p.m. Green and orange standards rise as night falls in the La Défense business district, near Paris. On one of them: “Deliver us from Total”and on another “Warm hearts, not pipelines”. On this Sunday, December 3, for an hour, spontaneous prayers, surah readings, gospel refrains and songs from the Taizé community follow one another in the freezing cold.
At the foot of the TotalEnergies group headquarters, around fifty faithful combine their spiritual and ecological convictions in a demonstration that is both liturgical and artistic, in order to denounce the oil group’s projects in Uganda and Tanzania.
Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, agnostics… They all started with a minute of meditation for members of the Jewish and Buddhist faiths, no representative of whom was present that evening, for scheduling reasons. A prayer announced as a gesture of solidarity with those who are absent, and so that this absence is not misinterpreted in a context tense by the situation in the Middle East.
A gigantic oil project
Quickly, hip-hop dancers move on, to the rhythm of “the smell of gasoline”by rapper and composer Orelsan, who proclaims: “We are fighting to be at the front in a plane that is heading straight for a crash”. Red smoke bombs are then brandished to signify the demonstrators’ concern about the climate emergency. Some line up behind the black banner which reads: “Death flows through Total’s pipes”. All denounce the climatic and human consequences of the TotalEnergies oil project in Uganda and Tanzania, called the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (Eacop).
This oil complex involves the drilling of four hundred wells, a third of which in Murchison Falls National Park, and the construction of a 1,443 kilometer underground pipeline heated to 50°C to liquefy and transport Ugandan oil to the port. Tanzanian from Tanga. “It is a climate injustice project that violates human rights and attacks biodiversity, says Martin Kopp, 36, Protestant theologian and French coordinator of the interreligious NGO GreenFaith, one of the three movements at the origin of this action linking ecological commitment and spirituality, with Extinction Rebellion spirituality and Struggle and contemplation. For GreenFaith, this project is racist and neocolonial. We would not imagine such treatment if these were territories where European and white people live. »
You have 60% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.