UK based Folk Roots Editor Ian Anderson has a long-term involvement with Madagascar, visiting often and playing a key role in reporting and publishing stories internationally on the Indian Ocean island nation's music and culture. Ian has been closely following the political crisis in Madagascar since December and sending afropop.org dispatches from several news soures. Here is his passionate appeal for the world's media to pay attention to this human drama that is quickly becoming an economic and health crisis too, affecting millions of voiceless people.

Friends: this is very long, but please read it and pass on to anybody who you can think might be willing to spread it further, anyone who has any influence in the news media or government - onwards and upwards.

I am beginning to be really terrified about what is now unfolding in Madagascar, completely unreported in the UK or generally internationally.

For those who don't know it, here is a precis of the story so far. In December there was an election in Madagascar (size: bigger than France, population 15 million, strategic and resource importance to the West nil). All independent observers agreed the election was widely fraudulent and that the main opposition candidate Marc Ravalomanana defeated the old corrupt dictator Admiral Didier Ratsiraka by a clear majority, more than 50%. Even Ratsiraka's own election results conceded that Ravalomanana had outvoted him, but claimed it was not by quite enough to avoid a second round, fully expected to be marred by even wider fraud, bribery and intimidation than the first.

The population went on general strike. Sometimes over a million demonstrated daily, peacefully, in the capital Antananarivo. The churches joined together in support of the demonstrators. The army refused to intervene. The people declared Ravalomanana as their new President and swore him in. Ratsiraka declared martial law and a curfew, but the people ignored it and sang and danced in the streets all night. The army and police stood aside. Ravalomanana appointed new ministers and the the people swept them into their offices. The army and police again stood aside in all but one instance (when there was a massacre at the Prime Minister's offices, barely 400 metres from where my family there live).

Meanwhile there was a similarly flawed election in Zimbabwe which got massive international attention.

Ratsiraka, unable to accept defeat, fled the capital. He is now holed up in Madagascar's main seaport of Tamatave (Toamasina) in the east, which he has self-declared as the new capital and insists he is still President. Initially, his thugs simply barricaded the main road from Tamatave to the highland capital Antananarivo, cutting off fuel and other essential supplies. However, in the past week the situation has dramatically worsened. Ratsirakistes have now dynamited important bridges on all the major roads from all serviceable ports to Antananarivo. His mercenary gangs and remaining loyal army/ police units have opened fire on peaceful demonstrators again, killing and wounding.

This is no longer simply barricades erected to try to force Ravalomanana's new government to back down, and meanwhile earn some bribery money by letting black marketeers pass. This is permanent and major damage to the Madagascar infrastructure. Ratsiraka must know he's lost, so he seems to be trying to take the whole country down with him for revenge. He has also been responsible for fermenting inter-ethnic strife, trying the old colonial trick of divide and rule, attempting to get the coastal tribes to blame everything on the Merina and Betsileo from the highlands. Local media have started to use ominous phrases like 'ethnic cleansing'. Meanwhile he rants on about being the saviour of the nation and calls the new government 'fascists'.

The central highlands - 4 million people or more - are now devoid of petrol and running out of medical supplies and many staples. Families - and we're talking of one of the poorest countries in the world - have had no income for several months as businesses have ground to a halt and the banking system has virtually shut down (earlier, before the Ratsiraka clan fled Antananarivo, his daughter Sophie was reported to have used trucks to clear millions of pounds worth of cash from the central banks, some of it apparently used to pay the gangs to cause trouble). The only thing Antananarivo has in its favour is that its power supply is hydro-electric.

So far, virtually all the deaths and injuries in the crisis have come about as a result of activities by Ratsirakistes. Last time he was defeated in 1991 he had his crack presidential troops fire on a peaceful march, killing around 100, so this is nothing new. Whatever misgivings one may have about new president Ravalomanana's close links with the church, at least this means his majority supporters have been almost exclusively non-violent.

My involvement with Madagascar has first and foremost been with its music, and a family there by marriage. When I first went there 12 years ago I was shocked by the levels of poverty of the worst off in its society, who had living standards far lower than anything I'd seen in Africa. It was immediately apparent that the Ratsiraka regime had run the country to its economic knees (he used to be allied with Russia, North Korea, Libya etc until the fall of the old eastern bloc), and it was glaringly obvious that the single most important thing which would help Madagascar develop a viable economy was to first build an infrastructure of roads and communications in this vast island.

Things had been steadily improving over the past decade, in spite of all the corruption and the siphoning off of wealth by Ratsiraka's clan since he regained power in 1996, along with his cronies and their collaborators abroad (reports in the French media have traced many Chirac connections). Undoubtedly one of the reasons why Ratsiraka and his supporters are so loathe to accept defeat is that their wrongdoings and corruption will be uncovered and exposed, meaning either flight into exile or being put on trial.

Last weekend, the European Union representative in Antananarivo, along with the local German, French, UK, Japanese and US ambassadors, pointed out that half of the grants given to Madagascar in recent times were to develop this infrastructure and pleaded for the barricades to be lifted. But with these roads now made completely impassable - and this will be long-term impassable - all the businesses that depended on them to import materials and export goods are probably finished.

To quote another report, diplomatic sources are concerned that the political situation in the country is threatening to undo six years of development and foreign investment which had created more than 100,000 jobs. The World Bank had earlier estimated that the dispute was costing the already poor island nation US $12 million a day - a huge chunk of its gross domestic product. After what the Ratsirakistes have now done, this is now doomed to be long term rather than short term. The spectre of humanitarian disaster and need for food aid is already being raised.

Meanwhile, there are no long-haul flights to Madagascar: Air Madagascar's planes are grounded in Paris, Air France have not flown for many weeks because of safety issues and the imposibility of refueling. We cannot send any assistance from Europe, either physically or financially. Just about the only thing any of us can do is put pressure on our media to report this situation properly, and so put pressure on our governments to intervene.

Only after the current political crisis is resolved and Ratsiraka is removed, as removed he must inevitably be, we can maybe turn our minds to more direct help like major benefit events for fund and consciousness raising. In the meantime please pass this on and help the world wake up. These may be small terrorists doing their awful things locally while the big ones play their international games across the oceans, but they hurt millions of ordinary people just the same, people who have no voice outside.

For more regular info:

Antananarivo daily newspapers & TV (in French) online Midi Madagascar: http://www.dts.mg/midi/

Madagascar Tribune: http://www.madagascar-tribune.com/

MA-TV: http://www.matvonline.tv/

Links to news agency reports in English (currently paltry, but the archives will trace the story)

Madagascar News: http://www.madagascarnews.com/
All Africa. com: http://allafrica.com/madagascar/