The war in Ukraine is having growing negative effects on women and girl’s health and well-being. They encompass not only gender-based violence, but include all aspects of women’s and girl’s lives. Access to basic services and life-saving sexual and reproductive health care have been drastically disrupted.
Since the 2013 Maidan revolution, also known as “dignity revolution,” Ukrainian women have been increasingly engaged in the political, social, and economic affairs of the country. This engagement has led to an increase in women’s political participation, manifested by gains in parliamentary seats and in village and regional councils. As a result, Ukraine has ratified or joined most international agreements on gender equality.
In spite of these advances, however, gender inequalities persist, bolstered by traditional norms that promote systemic discrimination and biases against women and girls. These inequities have been aggravated by the war conducted by Russia in eastern Ukraine since 2014. The years of conflict since then have increased and deepened pre-existing gender inequalities and created new ones such as arbitrary killings, rape and trafficking.
The war has particularly affected marginalized and disadvantaged groups such as female-headed households, internally displaced persons, Roma people, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people. As a result, women facing multiple forms of discrimination are in need of special assistance.
Today, millions of people have fled Ukraine and million’s more –nearly two-thirds of them women and children—have been internally displaced and, as a consequence, do not have access to essential services such as health care, employment, and housing. Poverty and dependency on social assistance has increased and has pushed many women into the unprotected informal sectors of the economy.
The COVID-19 pandemic, that began in Ukraine on March 3, 2020, threatened the gains that had been made on women’s rights, economic empowerment and access to health care. Prolonged restrictions on mobility, particularly for women and young people, have increased despair and isolation, and have increased its negative effect on people with mental health challenges. Young people and children are forced to sacrifice their future so they can survive in the present.
Even in times of peace, women tend to be more food insecure than men, but the war in Ukraine has exacerbated the number of women experiencing hunger, energy insecurity and economic instability. The Russian aggression on Ukraine has provoked a redistribution of family roles, adding to the already heavy burden of women who, in addition to traditional home responsibilities are now obliged to look for additional sources of income.
Women who are caring for children face extreme shortages of essential medicines, healthcare and funds to obtain basic items, including baby food and formula. Many women face the challenge to accommodate and feed internally displaced people. This increases their unpaid care and domestic work responsibilities, often at the expense of their physical and mental health and wellbeing.
The martial order issued by the Ukraine State Border Guard Service at the beginning of the Russian invasion that led to tens of thousands of civilians fleeing to other countries decreed that those between 18 and 40 years old should stay in the country. It is estimated that 95 percent of single-parent households are headed by single mothers, who now face increased pressure to provide for their families while male family members are more directly involved in defense activities.
Despite the heavy burdens imposed by the war, Ukrainian women have shown considerable resilience and have contributed greatly to defense efforts. It is estimated that women make up 25 percent of Ukrainian armed forces. This is an almost 10 percent increase from the beginning of the Russian invasion. Women have integrated fully in the armed forces, performing duties as soldiers and holding positions of command.
The Russian military leaders didn’t expect such a strong resistance from the Ukrainian soldiers, and even less from a Ukrainian army strengthened by the participation of women, something that needs to be acknowledged and honored as a critical factor in the defense of their country.
A row is underway in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party over a soon-to-be-published review into the Prevent counter-terror scheme. It shines a light on the government’s plans to double down on the scapegoating of Muslims and speed the establishment of a state surveillance infrastructure under the cover of combatting Islamic extremism. This is combined with efforts to downplay the danger of the far-right.
Originally commissioned in January 2019, the review has been subject to repeated delays. The latest is an argument between Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Communities SecretaryMichael Gove, who will be responsible for the day-to-day administration of the scheme.
Braverman is reportedly concerned that the report is so unguarded in its denunciation of “extremist” organisations, or organisations supporting “extremist narratives”, that the government will be hit with costly libel suits. She is insisting names are redacted. Gove wants the text released in full.
This is a minor difference between two ardent reactionaries. Braverman—who does not hesitate to demonise migrants, asylum lawyers and refugee advocacy groups—intends to smooth the implementation of the review’s recommendations. Gove speaks for those who want as provocative a crusade as possible.
William Shawcross [Photo: UK Government]
The review was set up by the government to prepare an onslaught on democratic rights. It was authored by William Shawcross, a fellow of the right-wing Policy Exchange thinktank and former director of the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society. While director, he commented in 2012, “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations.”
Previously, Shawcross had described “Britain’s humiliation” at the hands of an “immigration free-for-all”and a “bullying ‘multicultural’ ideology” which has “cosseted extremist Islamist preachers of hatred”. He has referred to “Islamo-fascist” Muslims as a “vast fifth column” in Europe “who wish to destroy us.”
A fervent supporter of the illegal invasion of Iraq, his 2011 book Justice and the Enemy perverts the post-WWII Nuremburg Trials of Nazi leaders into a grotesque defence of “the war on terror”, extraordinary rendition and the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay.
Amnesty International and 16 other groups boycotted the review over Shawcross’s involvement, publishing an open letter stating that “the UK government has no interest in conducting an objective and impartial review of” Prevent.
Shawcross was appointed after the government’s first choice, Lord Carlile, was forced to step down by a legal challenge led by Rights Watch UK over his “close ties with and publicly declared support for the Prevent strategy,” in the words of rights group Liberty.
The Shawcross Review on Islamism and the far-right
Carlile and Shawcross were selected to defend and extend a discredited programme broadly seen for the attack on democratic rights. It is, and to deal with the inconvenient fact for the government—that the scheme is flagging up the growth of far-right, fascist forces.
According to leaked material from the review, Prevent is criticised for being too weak, with the report arguing, the scheme “too often bestows a status of victimhood on all who come into contact with it”. In the words of the Guardian, shown the leaked text, “it says a more hardline approach should be taken towards Islamist extremism”.
This means widening the focus of the programme to target broader sections of the population. The Guardian writes that Shawcross is critical of Prevent having “concentrated on proscribed organisations” while, in the report’s extremely loose phrase, “ignoring Islamist narratives”.
Among these is a complained-of campaign “driven by a number of Islamist groups to undermine and delegitimise Prevent”, including by “stirring up grievance and mistrust” towards the scheme.
According to the Telegraph, the Shawcross report praises the current legal duty of school and other public sector workers to report people, including children, to the Prevent scheme as one which “works well”, and “especially… in schools.” It suggests extending the requirement to cover immigration officials and staff in job centres.
Daily Telegraph front page, December 29, 2022 [Photo: Daily Telegraph]
The report then takes aim at Prevent’s alleged “double standard when dealing with extreme rightwing and Islamism”. Shawcross writes that Islamist extremists are “severely under-represented” in referrals to Prevent because officials are putting a focus on right-wing extremism “above and beyond the actual threat it pose[s].” This is attributed to an effort to “try and fend off accusations” that Prevent is “stigmatising minority communities”.
The latest figures, for the year to March 31, 2021, show 4,915 referrals to Prevent—1,333 of which were passed to a panel for consideration, with 688 taken on as cases. Of these cases, 46 percent related to “Extreme Right-Wing radicalisation”, 30 percent “mixed, unstable or unclear ideology”, and 22 percent “Islamist radicalisation”. Far-right cases have been the majority group for each of the last three years.
Among the more serious known cases are those of neo-Nazi former army driver Dean Morrice, sentenced for 18 years for possession of explosives and encouraging terrorist offences, and Daniel Wright, Liam Hall, Stacey Salmon and Samuel Whibley, sentenced to a total of more than 30 years for possession of a 3D printed gun and encouraging terrorism.
In explaining away these facts, Shawcross complains that Prevent’s view on right-wing extremism is “so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, rightwing-leaning commentary” and that an internal report “listed a prominent Conservative politician and member of the Government as being among figures ‘associated with far-right sympathetic audiences’”.
Despite his intentions, this only confirms how the far-right are given succour by the political establishment and the media, centred on the government itself. Prevent was created with the deliberate aim of demonising Muslims while creating the apparatus for surveillance and intimidation against the working class. The idea that it is zealously overreaching against the right-wing is laughable. Rather, the extreme lurch to the right in “mainstream” politics and the media has brought it within the peripheral view of the scheme and forced a series of reluctant acknowledgements.
Boris Johnson’s leadership of the Tory Party earned it the endorsement of fascist group Britain First and fascist activist Tommy Robinson. Leading Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg had already received a promise of “protection” from Britain First members in 2018. He has spoken at the annual dinner of the Traditional Britain group, whose founder, Lord Sudeley, praised Adolf Hitler at a meeting of the Tory Monday Club, adding, “the fact may be that some races are superior to others.”
In 2020, top Tory adviser Dominic Cummings hired eugenicist Andrew Sabisky into the government, whose Social Darwinist views had been publicly expressed by senior Tory figures before.
In 2019, Rees-Mogg was one of several leading Tories to endorse an announcement by Turning Point—McCarthyite witch-hunters of left-wing students and academics—that it intended to set up operations in the UK. Its founding event was attended by the UK editors of Breitbart and InfoWars.
Preparation for state repression
Shawcross’s review is intended to help sweep all this back under the carpet and “refocus” the Prevent scheme on its intended objectives. Doing so is made more urgent for the ruling class by the escalation of social and international tensions to a height not seen for decades—an international strike wave and war with Russia.
Prevent now dovetails with the state-backed “left antisemitism” campaign, driven by the same concerns, outlawing anti-Zionism by branding it anti-Jewish hatred. A sympathy with the Palestinians will presumably be labelled an extremist “Islamist narrative”, as well as anti-Semitic.
The real guiding principles of both policies were set out in 2019—the year the Prevent review was ordered—in a report published by the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) which declared large sections of the left “extremist” in clear preparation for a campaign of state repression.
For now, this proceeds indirectly, under the cover of Prevent and combatting anti-Semitism. However, in February last year the government ordered a review of “left-wing extremism” headed by John Woodcock, Baron Walney—the former Blairite Labour MP who resigned in 2018 protesting a “left” takeover of the party under Jeremy Corbyn.
John Woodcock, Baron Walney [Photo by Roger Harris / CC BY-SA 4.0]
This is a closely coordinated state campaign, with the Labour Party intimately involved. The CCE is headed by Robin Simcox, who controls the Counter Extremism Group (CEG) think-tank which hosted Gove and Shawcross this September.
In April 2020, Shawcross was part of a consortium which bought the Jewish Chronicle—a publication so committed to slandering Corbyn supporters as anti-Semites that it has had to pay significant damages in libel suits. The consortium included Woodcock, along with former Prime Minister Theresa May’s director of communications Robbie Gibb and John Ware, the producer of the hatchet job “investigation” Is Labour Anti-Semitic?
Woodcock was rewarded by Boris Johnson for his attacks on the Labour “left” with a peerage and appointed as his Independent Adviser on Political Violence and Disruption. His political biography is near identical to that of John Mann, now leading the “left anti-Semitism” witch-hunt.
Across all these operations, planned attacks on the left are coupled with covering for the far-right—and directed by individuals with deeply reactionary political connections. Simcox, as reported by the Byline Times, has spoken at the extreme right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, which was named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, and Heritage Foundation.
Woodcock, on a 2017 trip to Turkey, praised President Recep Erdoğan’s “fight against terrorism” and met with members of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party.
“Uncertainty and anger” was how Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof salespeople described their mood when the first protest actions took place in Berlin, Mannheim, Heidelberg and elsewhere earlier in December. The 17,000 employees still working in 131 of the retail chain’s stores will not find out until later in January what layoffs and store closures the latest insolvency bodes for them.
Galeria Kaufhof Alexanderplatz, Berlin [Photo by Christian Liebscher / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]
In the run-up to Christmas, business was in full swing, staff scarce and overtime frequent. By contrast, in January, many Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof (GKK) sales assistants are threatened with dismissal as a “thank you,” unless they are part of the remaining stores classified as still profitable. Even here, they face restructuring, further wage cuts and an uncertain fate.
For years, GKK workers have been forced to sacrifice part of their wages, such as collectively agreed pay components, vacation and Christmas bonuses, supposedly to secure their jobs. Nevertheless, many sales assistants, logisticians and other GKK employees have already experienced at least one branch closure. For years, they have been sacrificing to keep the company alive. According to a recent estimate by the service union Verdi, an average Galeria salesperson must give up around €5,500 a year.
Nevertheless, the chain keeps experiencing new bankruptcies, store closures and liquidations, the last one just two years ago, in April 2020. Since then, no less than 40 stores with more than 3,000 staff have been closed—this despite the company twice receiving state support totaling €680 million from the Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF).
Step by step, Germany’s last major department store group is being wound down. Over the past seven years, half of the workforce has been cut. At the time of the initial takeover by real estate speculator René Benko and his Signa holding company, for example, twice as many were still working for Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof, around 35,000 employees.
In October 2022, the group filed for insolvency for a second time. René Benko and German CEO Miguel Müllenbach (who also sits on the management board of Signa Retail GmbH) plan to close “at least a third of the stores,” as reported by finance daily Handelsblatt, and “in industry circles there is even talk of more than half.” Half of all jobs are also to be cut at the company headquarters in Essen, which equates to almost 1,000 out of a total of 1,900 jobs.
In the meantime, owner Benko has delivered himself and his co-investors and speculators a massive windfall. Just six months after the last GKK insolvency, at the end of 2020, Benko-owned Signa Prime Selection AG paid out €201 million in dividends, Bloomberg reported. The holding company owns, among other properties, the department stores “KaDeWe” in Berlin, the “Golden Quarter” in Vienna, the “Oberpollinger” in Munich, the “Alsterhaus” in Hamburg, as well as shares in New York’s Chrysler Building and the luxury Park Hyatt hotel, and much more.
Forbes magazine estimates René Benko’s private wealth at $5.4 billion. In the meantime, Benko is once again under investigation for corruption and is now also charged with bribery of public officials in Austria, having already been convicted in a final judgment in a similar case in Italy in 2014. In Vienna, Benko is alleged to have bribed a senior official at the Finance Ministry to influence a tax audit in his own favour.
In October, management unilaterally terminated a collective restructuring agreement concluded with Verdi. This was supposed to guarantee that the stores survived and to exclude compulsory redundancies until the end of 2024. To secure the agreement, Verdi accepted over 3,000 voluntary redundancies and 40 branch closures.
Time and again, the union bureaucrats and their works council representatives have helped draw up the closure plans and sold out and suppressed workers’ resistance to them. This is their role now as well. After the unilateral termination of the contract, for example, Stefanie Nutzenberger, Verdi executive board member for retail, complained she had not been sufficiently involved in the “new concept for the future.”
Like a sulking child, Nutzenberger told Handelsblatt, “We don’t accept that management completely ignores its own decisions and wrong decisions, refuses to accept any responsibility for them and wants to throw employees out on the street.” At the same time, however, “intensive talks are already underway about a successor arrangement” to the restructuring collective agreement, she said, as confirmed by a management spokesman.
In Berlin, the Senate (state executive) and the Left Party have no problems working closely with Benko’s Signa holding company. Two years ago, Culture Senator (state minister) Klaus Lederer (Left Party), the party’s current lead candidate in the state election campaign, co-signed a “letter of intent” with Signa in his capacity as mayor, giving the company the green light for its controversial real estate projects. The subject of the agreement is the conversion of the Karstadt branch at Hermannplatz, a new high-rise building at Alexanderplatz and further high-rise plans for a GKK site on Kurfürstendamm, all prime locations in Berlin.
Now, in the election campaign, the Left Party is trying to cover its tracks somewhat. For example, the party’s faction in the state legislature has submitted a motion to the Senate to cease cooperation with Benko, citing the threat of redundancies. Something without any consequence, of course.
The liquidation of Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof threatens not only the existence and lives of the staff, but also the supply of various goods to entire regions, since not everyone is able to make their purchases online. The sales assistants who demonstrated last week in front of the Galeria store on Paradeplatz in Mannheim reported, “Customers ask us, ‘Are you staying here?’ But we have no answer.”
The action committees are also the basis for the necessary political offensive. In fact, workers cannot assert their interests without opposing the cartel of the trade unions, government and the Left Party, and without challenging the capitalist profit system as a whole. To do this, Galeria workers must mobilize the support of the entire working class based on a socialist program.
The Verdi union does not represent the interests of workers but those of the capitalists. It has always forced new “reorganization collective agreements” onto the sales staff. Store workers have paid for this with the loss of thousands of jobs and wage sacrifices, while Verdi functionaries have been rewarded with lucrative supervisory board posts.
In the GKK group, the union has repeatedly presented each new billionaire as the “white knight” who would save the company. First Nicolas Berggruen and the Canadian Richard Baker, finally René Benko. Each took over the company, skimmed off the profits and left the department stores to their fate. The lucrative properties in prime city locations were marketed off at a profit. Since then, the stores have had to rent back their sales areas at ever higher prices. And while the pressure on store workers is constantly increasing, only the most exclusive and profitable luxury stores survive.
Even now, a new “white knight” has emerged, an asset manager named Markus Schön. He owns online store Buero.de, which sells folders, pencils and notebooks for offices and schools and employs about 200 people. Schön also distributes a newsletter with stock market reports and supposed tips for the best investments.
Markus Schön has announced in the media that he intends to take over 47 department stores from the GKK chain with around 5,500 employees. They are to be continued under the new name “Schön hier.” Schön boldly promises that he wants to retain “the full range of products” and all jobs. “We consider the employees to be one of, if not the greatest, treasure of the company,” he is quoted as saying by the NZZ.
This should be taken with a large pinch of salt. According to financial website Capital.de, Schön plans to turn Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof into a kind of German Amazon. As it says on the site, “digital and stationary sales channels are to be merged” in order to show “Amazon and Ebay a German alternative.”
“Don’t take our jobs!” was written on the self-made signs that Galeria employees carried at the rally at Paradeplatz in Mannheim, telling broadcaster SWR that they felt abandoned by all the establishment politicians. “In principle, it’s like with nursing staff,” said one salesperson, “what use are good words and clapping if in the end they close us down.”
Workers in New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme, under which Pacific Islanders are brought into the country on temporary visas to labour in its horticulture industry, are being subjected to conditions akin to “modern slavery,” the Human Rights Commission has found.
According to a report released before Christmas by the Labour government’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner, Saunoamaali'i Karanina Sumeo, the situation is not a case of “a few bad apples” but is deeply systemic.
Pacific Islander worker picking lemons in New Zealand [Photo: Seasonal workers Vanuatu]
“When people are being told—despite being sick—‘you get in that van, and you go to the field,’ that’s forced labour. If you’re living in a regime where you fear for your safety—that is a version of modern-day slavery,” Sumeo said.
“And when you want to go home because of the way you’ve been mistreated, but you can’t go until you’ve earned your airfare to go home, there’s no freedom there. So again it’s like forced labour,” the commissioner explained.
The RSE scheme, introduced by the Helen Clark Labour government in 2007, allows for 16,000 low-paid workers annually from Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji to work in the $NZ10 billion horticulture and viticulture industries. Following border closures over the past two years because of COVID, the Ardern government recently announced that the previous “successes” of the RSE scheme will see it expanded in 2023 into the meat and seafood processing sectors.
A similar program, begun under Australia’s Rudd Labor government in 2008 and involving more than 20,000 workers, has revived comparisons with that country’s infamous “blackbirding” history. Up to a million workers from Pacific countries, many kidnapped and sold to landowners, were used as cheap indentured labour from the 1860s to the 1940s.
New Zealand’s RSE workers stay for up to seven months during any 11-month period. They are generally paid the so-called “Living Wage,” currently $23.65 per hour, for a minimum of 30 hours per week. The low pay rate, marginally above the legal minimum of $21.20, is falsely promoted by the trade unions as what workers need to survive on. It is manifestly inadequate.
Media reports into both countries’ schemes, as well as a Senate inquiry in Australia and a review by the Vanuatu government, have all highlighted atrocious conditions experienced by temporary workers. Despite repeated complaints and exposures however, nothing has changed.
Sumeo’s report emphasises that the entire program operates on a system of rampant exploitation. Her investigation was prompted by fresh complaints by workers to Stuff in August. Reporter Kirsty Johnson revealed some RSE workers were housed six to a room and charged $150 a week to sleep in freezing and damp conditions. They fell sick repeatedly and were denied paid leave when unwell.
One worker living in a crowded motel unit became so ill that he was coughing blood, but his boss initially refused to take him to the doctor, telling him to go and buy paracetamol instead. When the worker didn’t attend work he allegedly continued to have his pay docked for transportation costs.
Sumeo visited the South Island wine-growing district of Blenheim and wrote that many RSE workers “live in sub-standard, over-priced, overcrowded, damp and mouldy homes without basic amenities.” She added that some of the things she witnessed warranted criminal investigation.
Sumeo’s new report outlines instances of workers being charged $1000 per bedroom to rent accommodation where they are packed seven people per room. It includes one situation where 18 workers were packed into a large hall across nine bunk beds—each paying $160 in rent per week.
Pacific workers’ visas tie them to a specific employer which, according to Sumeo, can result in employer “over-reach” into controlling a worker’s basic rights. In one example, a female RSE worker began a sexual relationship during her employment and was then forced to present a negative pregnancy test to the employer to avoid being fired.
The report cites numerous instances of basic human rights breaches. These include workers being banned from travelling or consuming alcohol in their own time; people not being allowed to make dinner for themselves, so being forced to pay their employer for meals; workers being warned against joining a union, and ‘debts’ taken out against salaries with no explanation of how they were incurred.
Similar breaches were found by an International Labour Organisation report in June. Sumeo said the very design of the RSE scheme creates the conditions for breaches of the right to equality and freedom, just and favourable conditions at work, an adequate standard of living, freedom of movement, privacy, culture, freedom of association and the right to health.
“It would be great if it was only just one or two locations where that was happening,” Sumeo told Stuff. “But we’re hearing stories from all over the place so that suggests that there are systemic gaps in the support system that we provide for RSE workers.”
Pacific governments, which depend heavily on aid from Australia and NZ, have collaborated in implementing the brutal conditions. In a visit to New Zealand in June, Samoa’s Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa avoided laying any blame over the appalling conditions facing workers. She assured horticulture employers that her government simply wants to “raise the quality” of the RSE scheme.
The report puts forward thirteen recommendations to address the “gaps” in the system, while retaining the scheme intact. They include such measures as allowing RSE workers to switch employers, “clearer” employment contracts, better enforcement through the labour inspectorate, limiting the deductions employers can take out of workers’ wages and a process where workers can freely return home early if they want.
Even if all these measures are adopted, the RSE scheme will remain a source of permanent exploitation of low-wage workers who are brought in and out of the country for limited periods at the whim of a brutal industry and with no civil rights. The slave-like conditions are not an aberration but the labour-hire business model that the ruling elite is imposing on all sections of the working class.
Pacific Islanders in particular have a history of being scapegoated for the housing crisis, social inequality and pressure on public services. During the early 1960s, thousands of Pacific workers were recruited for menial and factory jobs, only to find themselves later victimised by racist immigration laws, and subject to infamous “dawn raids” forcefully expelling them from the country.
Underscoring the cynical neo-colonial attitude of New Zealand’s ruling elite, including the current Labour government, to the impoverished peoples of the Pacific, heavy restrictions remain on permanent immigration.
Islanders desperate to escape economic backwardness and underdevelopment by migrating to New Zealand face a bureaucratic nightmare. In a normal year, an open ballot allows for up to 1,100 residency visas to be granted to Samoan citizens, and 650 visas for other Pacific nations. Over the next two years, the quota will be increased to 5,900 to make up for two years of no visas being granted during COVID.
The ballots are hugely oversubscribed. In 2019 there were 17,000 applications from Samoa, representing 43,000 people—nearly a quarter of the island nation’s population. Overcoming the odds in the ballot is just the start—applicants have nine months to find a job that pays enough to support them and their family. They have to speak good English and there are police and health checks that require expensive fees.
The Australian and New Zealand governments boast that their Pacific immigration policies and temporary work schemes recognise a “special relationship” with their so-called “Pacific family.” It is a complete fraud. The purpose is to ensure a supply of cheap labour while tightening the imperialist grip over their Pacific colonial “backyard.” Ever more openly, this latter aim is a key aspect of the US-led preparations for a catastrophic war with China.
On Monday, demonstrations were held in Mexico City and the central state of Guerrero to protest the failure of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) to bring to justice those responsible for the killing of the 43 Ayotzinapa teaching students, or normalistas, in 2014.
Relatives of missing Ayotzinapa students; signs read "They were taken alive, we want them alive." (Photo: Thiago Dezan / CIDH) [Photo by Thiago Dezan / CIDH / CC BY 2.0]
The parents of the victims and supporters marched along the Calzada de Guadalupe avenue in Mexico City carrying posters with the words “Ayotzinapa: 8 years” and “They were taken alive, we want them alive.”
Simultaneously, normalistas from across Guerrero blocked the main avenue in the state capital, Chilpancingo, and held a rally downtown to denounce the “neglect” of the AMLO administration. “Because Ayotzinapa does not forgive or forget,” they shouted.
Melitón Ortega, spokesperson for the Parents Committee of the Ayotzinapa 43, told Jornada that the government has not met with them since the government’s “Truth Commission” announced its latest findings in late September.
“The federal government has not given due attention to the case, even though it insists that it was a state crime and claims to be committed and willing to clarify the issue. However, the facts show that the reality is completely the opposite,” he said.
Vidulfo Rosales, lawyer for the parents, explained to Aristegui Noticias: “What we’ve seen is that the report [by the Truth Commission] pretends to close the case. That has become the parameter of the president. He says that all of those who are mentioned there will be prosecuted and those who do not appear will not. That worries us.”
This continued protection of the highest ranks of the state behind the Ayotzinapa killings and cover-up exposes the reactionary character of the efforts to perpetuate the domestic deployment of the military.
These efforts include AMLO’s initiatives, approved recently by Congress, to place the National Guard, which was created by his own administration, under the control of the Army, and to extend the deployment of half a million Mexican soldiers and marines on national soil until 2028.
Having been elected largely due to their promise to send the military back to the barracks, AMLO and his Morena party now insist that these measures are necessary to halt the historic levels of homicides largely tied to the drug cartels. However, this administration saw 137,500 killings and over 30,000 disappearances in its first four years, more than any other government over the previous six years.
AMLO claims that a military trained for combat is less corrupt and less prone to abuse its force than the police. But, as of November, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) had received over 1,250 complaints against the National Guard, including over its arbitrary use of force, cruel and inhuman treatment, torture and extrajudicial killings.
Despite the known repressive character of the military, as demonstrated by the central role it played in the Ayotzinapa events, the Mexican ruling class and AMLO have only been able to continue their military buildup thanks to the pseudo-left organizations and publications in Mexico and internationally that have promoted the president’s “progressivism” and are now justifying the strengthening of the capitalist state’s repressive apparatus.
In a September 29 article, Jacobin, a publication associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the US, sought to differentiate AMLO from his predecessors. It states, “The philosophy of AMLO is fundamentally different as it seeks to address the root causes of violence—poverty, corruption, injustice, inequality—instead of attempting to keep a lid on social unrest through brute force.”
While Jacobin wants its readers to take AMLO’s demagoguery as good coin, the article doesn’t explain why his philosophy is any different. Are the economic interests and the political superstructure defended by AMLO, and for that matter Jacobin, any different?
AMLO’s most consequential policies include historic tax cuts for corporations while sacrificing hundreds of thousands to COVID-19 before the altar of capitalist profits, while unconditionally defending private property and Mexico’s place as a cheap labor platform for global finance capital. The first task directed by AMLO to the National Guard was to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of migrants, as requested by the fascistic US president Donald Trump.
In other words, just like his predecessors in the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI)—from whose ranks he emerged—his philosophy derives from the corrupt services offered by the same rotten state to Mexican billionaires like German Larrea and Carlos Slim, and to Wall Street. Such politics and philosophy are incompatible with any defense of the interests of workers in Mexico, whose poverty is the basis for the super-profits extracted by the rich.
Jacobin then cites a WikiLeaks cable indicating that as early as AMLO’s 2006 presidential campaign he called for giving “the military more power and authority in counter-narcotics operations.” Like any traditional bourgeois politician, AMLO has a long record of calling for a stronger capitalist state under the false premise that it represents an impartial arbiter between social classes.
To feed this lie, Jacobin joins the cover-up of the Ayotzinapa massacre, claiming that the handful of incomplete investigations and arrests “hardly suggests a military acting with the near-total impunity of the past.”
Such a statement is ludicrous, considering that only local military officials are being arrested. Less than two years before, AMLO exonerated former defense minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, who had been detained in the US for facilitating drug shipments. Cienfuegos was the chief of the military during the Ayotzinapa killings and famously denied any military involvement—“We had nothing to do with that”—but AMLO has continued to defend his innocence and that of the military as an institution.
“It was the Army: indeed. We are acting, but the Army is an institution,” declared AMLO in a speech on September 26. He added: “Who must be punished? We are working on that. But it’s not a question of ‘Well, it was the whole Army.’ What do you want? To weaken our Army?”
Two days earlier, Reforma reported, based on an unedited copy of Truth Commission documents, that the AMLO administration was covering up the extent of the involvement of the military leadership. The article said: “In the online chats where the murders had been coordinated, criminal figures, public and military officials discussed how they were digging out the bodies to take them to the 27th Infantry Battalion. No one would go in there. Until mid-November [2014], they were still digging out and moving the bodies.”
Arrest warrants have only been issued against two top federal officials charged for torture, forced disappearances and a cover-up: former general prosecutor Jesús Murillo Karam and the director of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón. Karam is in prison, but Zerón is a fugitive under the protection of Israel. Among all the gruesome details, Zerón had handed journalists pictures of the pyres in Nazi concentration camps, as evidence of the official lies that the bodies of the normalistas had been burned at a garbage dump.
A “state crime” by a capitalist state is a crime at the behest of capitalism—at the time, to crush the rising wave of struggles against a reactionary education reform and other cost-cutting measures embodied in the “Pact for Mexico.” How else can it be explained that the military had infiltrated the Ayotzinapa normalistas ahead of the killings, as uncovered by the investigations?
The systematic capture, killing and forced disappearance of busloads of normalistas on the night of September 26, 2014, and the cover-up coordinated at the highest levels—during which time “all information was obtained through torture” by the military, arrest warrants were falsified, and numerous key witnesses were systematically murdered—give the events in Guerrero the character of a dress rehearsal for a fascist dictatorship.
The inauguration of Brazil’s president-elect Luís Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT), set for January 1, is being prepared under the shadow of fascistic conspiracies in the country.
The growing threats of far-right violence have been made explicit in the last week with the exposure of a terrorist plot by supporters of current fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro, who has yet to admit losing the election to Lula. The stated goal of the planned actions was to prevent the transfer power to the elected government and pave the way for an authoritarian coup.
Military parade on the commemoration of Brazil’s independence, September 7, 2022. [Photo: Alan Santos/PR]
On Christmas Eve, the 54-year-old fascist George Washington de Oliveira Sousa was arrested in Brasilia after a failed bomb attack at the Brazilian capital’s airport.
Sousa confessed to having armed the explosive, which he said was planted by another man, Alan Diego Rodrigues, in a tanker truck that was heading to Brasilia International Airport (BSB) loaded with jet fuel. The bomb was removed in the vicinity of the airport by the truck driver, who identified the strange object and called the police. The survey by the Civil Police of the Federal District (PCDF) concluded that the bomb was set off but failed due to “a micro technical detail in the detonator.”
In his statement to the authorities, Sousa revealed having planned this and other actions, such as blowing up a power substation in the capital, together with other fascist supporters of Bolsonaro. He stated that their goal was to “start the chaos” that would “lead to the intervention of the armed forces and the decree of a state of siege to prevent the establishment of communism in Brazil.”
The pro-Bolsonaro activist identified himself as a gas station manager and former paratrooper (supposedly in the Brazilian army). He was arrested in a rented property in Brasilia, more than 700 miles away from his residence in the state of Pará.
Sousa, inspired by “the words of President Bolsonaro,” traveled to the capital on November 12 carrying “two 12-gauge shotguns, two .357 caliber revolvers ... a .308 caliber Springfield rifle, more than a thousand rounds of ammunition of various calibers, and five sticks of dynamite,” said the police report. He claims to have invested 160,000 reais (US$32,000) in his arsenal, equivalent to about three years of his declared income.
Sousa declared that the purpose of his trip to Brasilia was “to participate in the protests that were taking place in front of the Army’s headquarters and wait for the sign for the Armed Forces to take up arms and overthrow communism.” He said he planned to distribute part of his weapons and ammunition to other participants in this fascist mob.
This ultra-right armed movement, although it seeks to present itself as an individual and spontaneous initiative, has directly traceable connections to Bolsonaro and his entourage and to the higher echelons of the military and the police.
Over the past two months, the fascist encampment in Brasilia in which Sousa took part has been the focus of a series of actions coordinated by Bolsonaro’s allies to challenge the outcome of the Brazilian election. The idea that individuals like Sousa are independent political actors is immediately refuted by the records of these actions.
On November 30, Sousa and Alan Diego Rodrigues, his currently fugitive accomplice, attended a Senate hearing organized by politicians linked to the fascistic president as a platform to promote their conspiratorial narrative of electoral fraud and openly advocate a military coup.
George Washington Sousa (marked in red, on the left) and Alan Diego Rodrigues (marked red, on the right) attend Brazilian Senate's audition on November 30, 2022. [Photo: Tv Senado]
On social media, Rodrigues displays personal photos alongside the politicians who organized this action in the Senate, such as congressmen Zé Trovão, from Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL), and Daniel Silveira from the ultra-right Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), who was given amnesty by the fascistic president after being convicted of agitating for a coup d’état.
On the eve of the Senate hearing, on November 24, Congresswoman Carla Zambelli (PL), one of Bolsonaro’s main allies, visited the fascist camp at the gates of the Army’s headquarters along with her husband, Col. Aginaldo de Oliveira, the head of the National Public Security Force until March of this year.
Speaking to the crowd, Zambelli, who is also charged with political violence during the October election, claimed she was organizing “an action in the Senate that will shake the structures of the Senate.” She added: “Count on us. While you are here, know that you have people working sometimes behind the scenes ... and I won’t rest for a second until we achieve our freedom.”
On December 12, two weeks before the action that led to Sousa’s arrest, the members of this fascist encampment staged violent protests in Brasilia against the event officially confirming Lula’s victory. Facing virtually no police intervention, the small group of far-right protesters attacked buildings and set fire to more than a dozen cars and buses across the capital. Videos show Rodrigues present at different moments of the day, sometimes walking among police officers, sometimes on barricades or next to burning vehicles.
The violent actions enacted by these fascist foot soldiers, both on December 12 and 24, can be directly linked to the political orientation provided by Bolsonaro in previous days.
In his first extensive political speech since his electoral defeat on October 30, Bolsonaro addressed his supporters in Brasilia (likely Rodrigues and Sousa among them) just three days before the official confirmation of Lula’s victory. His speech instigated and gave legitimacy to the fascist violence carried out in the days afterward. Bolsonaro said:
“I am sure that, among my functions guaranteed by the Constitution, is being the supreme chief of the Armed Forces. ... I have always said, throughout these four years, that the Armed Forces are the last obstacle to socialism. The Armed Forces, be sure, stand united.”
He added: “Today we are living a crucial moment, at a crossroads, a destiny that the people have to take. It is you who decide my future and where I go. You are the ones who decide where the Armed Forces go. Who decides where the Congress, the Senate go, are you too.”
Bolsonaro’s silence after the violent acts committed by his supporters, as on previous occasions, is an indisputable sign of approval.
The Armed Forces, to which both the president and his fascist supporters appeal, have also remained silent on these events. That silence is even more ominous in face of an extraordinary statement given by the Armed Forces Command about the fascist demonstrations demanding a military coup. On November 11, the commanders issued an official note characterizing this movement as “popular demonstrations” and affirming the military’s “unshakable commitment to the Brazilian people” and its historical role as a “moderating power.”
The exacerbation of political tensions in recent days led Lula’s team to make unprecedented preparations and agreements for Sunday’s ceremony.
The team has demanded the closure of the Esplanade of Ministries starting Friday for bomb screening, the employment of the National Public Security Force and the mobilization of 8,000 security agents for Inauguration Day. It is still under discussion whether Lula will ride to the ceremony in a convertible car, as is customary in Brazil, or in a bullet-proof vehicle.
The changes in protocol were motivated not only by fears of individual actions of terrorism, but of the direct participation of state agencies and the military in a possible coup in Brasilia.
Lula’s team decided to take his personal security out of the hands of the Cabinet of Institutional Security (GSI) and to drastically reduce the GSI’s traditional participation in the inauguration ceremony. The GSI is currently commanded by Gen. Augusto Heleno, who recently lamented in public the fact that the president-elect, Lula, “is not sick ... unfortunately.”
In another extraordinary decision, the defense minister pointed by Lula, José Múcio Monteiro, negotiated the moving up of the change of command of the Navy and Army, traditionally held after the presidential inauguration. The action was a preemptive maneuver aimed against the growing threats of insubordination by the military chiefs toward the new government.
The possibility of accelerating the change of command initially emerged as a threat to the elected government by the military chiefs themselves. Lula’s choice of the generals’ favorite, Múcio, for the Defense ministry, praised in the press as a gesture of subordination of the PT government to the military, had supposedly made the proposal recede.
However, the decision, taken hastily on Monday amid rumors that the Navy’s commander Almir Garnier was inclined to resign his post, made it clear that the PT government’s crisis with the military is far from resolved.
The attitude Bolsonaro will take on Inauguration Day remains unknown. The media has announced that, according to his allies, the president will not attend the ceremony, breaking the basic protocols of Brazilian democracy and manifesting his persistent challenge to the election result.
Instead of attending the event, there are reports that the fascistic Brazilian president intends to travel later this week to Florida, where he would spend the next few days at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago complex. The links between Bolsonaro’s coup plots in Brazil and Trump’s allies, who promoted the attempted coup at Washington’s Capitol on January 6, 2021, have long been established.
Bolsonaro has only stated in an interview with CNN that the reports that he would hold a farewell meeting of his government in Brasilia and then embark to Florida were “fake news.”
Just before 11 a.m. on December 23, a man identified by police only as William M. shot dead three Kurds and injured five more on d’Enghien street in central Paris. The attack began outside the Ahmet Kaya Kurdish cultural center, before the gunman moved into a hair salon and a restaurant nearby.
Fire brigade medics evacuating on a stretcher a wounded demonstrator during a protest against the recent shooting at the Kurdish culture center in Paris, Saturday, December 24, 2022. [AP Photo/Lewis Joly]
Those killed in the attack were Emine Kara, Mîr Perwer and Abdurrahman Kızıl. All three were well known Kurdish activists. Kara, age 48, was a longtime member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and of the Kurdish Women’s Movement of France. She fought in northern Syria between 2014 and 2018 before being wounded in the battle of Raqqa, which led her to move to Europe for surgery.
Perwer was a 29-year-old Kurdish singer from Eastern Anatolia who was arrested in Turkey in 2015 and served several years in prison. He fled Turkey in 2021, just before being sentenced to 28 years in prison for being a PKK member. Kızıl was a pensioner who had been a “lifelong activist for the Kurdish cause,” according to the Kurdish Democratic Center of France.
The shooting took place almost exactly 10 years after the murder of three other PKK activists in Paris, including PKK co-founder Sakine Cansız, in January 2013.
Hours after Friday’s attack, French Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin denied that the attacker targeted Kurds, stating it was “not certain [that] the gunman was specifically targeting the Kurdish community,” but more likely “foreigners in general.” French police have denied any links between the attacker and far-right movements in France or internationally. Official accounts present the gunman as an isolated racist lunatic with an unexplained hatred of foreigners who repeatedly slipped through the fingers of police.
The individual workings of the mind of a racist murder do not suffice, however, to identify the political causes of such a mass killing. The PKK is engaged not only in an ongoing conflict with the Turkish state, but in the Kurdish nationalists’ collaboration with US and NATO imperialism in the proxy war in Syria. These wars, and the relentless stoking of xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment by the French political establishment, are what created the conditions for the attack to go ahead.
The perpetrator, William M., was well-known to police and had just been released from pretrial detention after a botched attack against refugees just one year ago. On December 8, 2021, he attacked a refugee encampment in Paris’s Bercy Park, wielding a sword and shouting “death to migrants.” Before being restrained by four adult refugees, he slashed a minor and an adult, who both survived. Due to his injuries, however, the adult victim has been unable to work since the attack.
Despite a clear racist motivation for the 2021 attack, William M. was not charged with any terror offense. He was only charged for violence with a weapon, which can carry up to 10 years in prison. He was released on December 12, without having been put on trial.
In the 11 days between his release and the attack, William M. was allowed to acquire the gun used in Friday’s attack. French police have so far provided no information on how and where he acquired a firearm, the trading of which is heavily regulated in France.
French authorities appear determined to prevent the details of how William M. came to commit this murder from ever becoming known to the public. In a preliminary hearing on December 27, William M. was offered a closed-door trial on account of his fragile mental health. His lawyers accepted.
French prosecutors said that after being taken into custody, William M. declared that his own hatred of foreigners was “totally pathological,” and that he aimed to kill as many “non-Europeans” as possible.
This only raises the question, however, of what forces created a political atmosphere in which a pathological hatred of foreigners and people of Middle Eastern origins could flourish. Indeed, while French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “heinous attack on the heart of Paris,” it is his own government’s promotion of anti-Muslim sentiment and passage of the discriminatory anti-separatism law that has stoked far-right xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Macron’s record is well known. His government—which twice campaigned for and won the presidency as a “republican” alternative to far-right candidate Marine Le Pen—passed an anti-separatism bill with her support in 2021 which encodes discrimination against France’s 8 million Muslims into law. Macron has also continuously worked with the EU to enforce a vicious anti-immigrant policy which has led to over 25,000 drownings in the Mediterranean since 2014.
After the shooting, anger against the French political establishment’s constant promotion of xenophobia boiled over into large demonstrations by Kurds and other immigrant groups in central Paris, denouncing the government for failing to protect them from far-right attacks. On Friday evening, protesters were violently attacked by French riot police using tear gas and batons, who tried to block them from reaching the Kurdish cultural center where the attack took place.
Protesters accused the Turkish government of playing an active role in the attacks. Both Kara and Perwer were well-known PKK activists actively sought by the Turkish government, and Kurdish nationalists have long accused Turkey of involvement in the 2013 murders of PKK activists in Paris.
Unsubmissive France leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon appeared to endorse such allegations on December 24, saying: “We believe that there is no coincidence and that what happened was a terrorist act which targeted political activists.” Mélenchon did not, however, pose the obvious question this raises: why would French police play a central role in carrying out the targeted assassination of individuals wanted by Turkey?
The Turkish government has not acknowledged any direct role in the murder. By its response, however, Ankara has made it clear that it was not angry at the mass killing in Paris. Instead of denouncing the Macron government for failing to protect the victims of Friday’s attack and for attacking protesters, Ankara summoned the French ambassador to Turkey on Monday to complain that PKK flags had been present at the protests after the shooting.
Imperialist-backed Kurdish nationalist politicians made an essentially similar response, supporting French police and denouncing protesters while disregarding the role of Macron’s police in the attack and Macron’s broader policies of imperialist war in Syria and anti-Muslim hysteria at home.
Speaking to the Kurdish-nationalist website Rudaw, Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani thanked Macron for his response to the attack and called on Kurdish protesters to “exercise restraint.” He absurdly said: “I trust our French partners will spare no effort to protect the Kurdish communities.”
Other Kurdish nationalists cynically used the attack to call for closer coordination with French or NATO imperialism. Mazloum Abdi, general commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), told Rudaw the attack showed that “Support for us in the fight against terror should be expanded.”
These comments expose the hypocrisy of the bourgeois nationalists, who thrust aside the well-being of the Kurdish diaspora in France or of Kurds in the Middle East in order to obtain imperialist financial and military support in the wars now devastating the Middle East.
