German carmakers withdraw from Russia

Jan Peters

A year ago, Russia was still regarded by German car manufacturers as a market with a great future. Speaking on behalf of all companies at the end of November 2013, Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn said, “For the Volkswagen Group, Russia is the number one strategic growth market in Europe.” He wanted to invest a further €1.2 billion in Russia by the end of 2018.

The opposite is now happening. The value of the Russian currency, the rouble, has plummeted due to the economic sanctions against Russia imposed in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. The cost of imports has increased massively, which has also hit the Russian auto industry. The combination of wage cuts and price increases has sharply reduced the sales of new cars. This was already apparent last year.

According to the Association of European Businesses (AEB), sales in Russia plummeted by nearly 38 percent in February. The German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) estimates that less than 1.5 million cars were sold in the entire year in Russia. The year before, it had been just under 2.5 million.

Sales of the Volkswagen Group in Russia fell by 12 percent last year. The carmaker now intends to limit production at its plant in Kaluga, Russia, and reduce staffing there, reported the broadcaster Norddeutsche Rundfunk. The contracts of around 150 temporary workers at the VW plant in Kaluga will not be extended when they expire.

GM-Opel recently announced its complete withdrawal from Russia. The General Motors subsidiary will cease production in St. Petersburg in the middle of this year. Some 1,000 employees still working there will receive severance packages. The closure will also affect 300 employees at its headquarters in Moscow. Furthermore, the contract for manufacturing Chevrolet vehicles by Russian car manufacturer GAZ will be ended. Opel expects its withdrawal to bring additional costs of around €550 million.

In September last year, production was already reduced as a result of the sanctions. Of the then almost 2,000 employees in St. Petersburg, only a quarter of the workers received a redundancy payment when they lost their jobs.

GM-Opel planned to sell about 80,000 cars in Russia this year. However, in February the brand sold just 912 cars, a monthly decrease of almost 90 percent.

Opel CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann told the business daily Handelsblatt, “We have come to the conclusion that the prospects for the Russian market were not good, not only in the short term, but in the medium and long term.” He cited the massive collapse in sales, the decline of the Russian rouble and the low degree of localization of the brand as the reasons.

Although Opel produces almost all the cars sold in Russia, this is of little use if two-thirds of the parts have to be imported; the decline in the rouble has increased production costs. This means Opel has experienced a loss on each car sold in the last months.

Experts believe that the withdrawal of Opel from Russia could be the start of a veritable exodus by international car manufacturers. They do not think the Russian car market will recover in the near future, given the Ukraine crisis, the decline in the rouble and low order books in the factories. For example, Spanish VW subsidiary SEAT announced last November it would stop selling in Russia at the beginning of this year.

Bernd Hones of the state-owned economic development corporation Germany Trade & Invest said, “The Russian car market is in free fall. The car companies must be prepared; it won’t be any better here for the next two years.”

The head of the Centre of Automotive Management, Stefan Bratzel, estimates that other carmakers, such as Peugeot and Ford, will soon follow Opel. “I can imagine that Ford will take a very close look at how long to continue”, he said.

In a study on the impact of Russian sanctions, Ferdinand Dudenhöfer, director of the CAR Institute at the University of Duisburg-Essen, writes that the sanctions mean the drop in sales in Russia up to 2017 will lead to a loss of more than €15 billion and a fall in profits of over €600 million. According to Dudenhöfer, this is a conservative estimate. Furthermore, one can assume that each job that goes due to the policy of sanctions against Russia will never return to Germany, he said.

With the sanctions also increasingly hitting the German economy, Eckhard Cordes, chairman of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, has warned of the consequences. “If it is assumed that around 300,000 jobs in Germany depend upon the export trade with Russian partners alone, a lasting 20 percent decline could lead to the loss of 60,000 jobs in the worst case.” This would especially hit the mechanical engineering and auto industries.

According to the latest data from the Federal Statistical Office, exports to Russia collapsed in January, compared to the previous year, by more than 35 percent. In January this year, exports totalled nearly €1.44 billion; the previous month it had been nearly a billion euros more. A larger fall in exports last occurred in October 2009, when the global financial crisis slowed exports, writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Imports also fell in January by one third, to nearly €2.5 billion.

According to Swedish economist Anders Åslund, the entire economy of Russia is “in free fall”. He considers the forecasts of the Russian Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Central Bank, for a contraction of the economy of between three and six percent, to be too optimistic.

Åslund’s forecast assumes that the gross domestic product will contract this year by 10 percent, according to an analysis of the economic situation in Russia by the Ostinstitut Wismar. It is now clear that it is the working class that is paying in Russia and in Europe for the Western sanctions policy.

Somali militants massacre Kenyan university students

Thomas Gaist

Somali militants reportedly linked with the Islamic fundamentalist group al Shabaab killed at least 147 and wounded at least 79 during an attack against Kenya’s Garissa University Thursday.

Arriving before dawn, the militants launched an attack lasting more than 15 hours, throwing grenades and shooting at students and staff with automatic rifles. Four gunmen were involved in the assault. All four militants killed themselves in the late evening by detonating suicide bombs while exchanging fire with government forces, local officials said.

The attack was organized by Kenyan national Mohamed Dulyadeyn, close associate of al Shabaab chief Ahmed Omar Abu Ubeyd, according to media reports. Dulyadeyn helped construct al Shabaab’s network by recruiting members out of the massive refugee camp at Dadaab, and was involved in planning the 2013 Westgate mall attack in Nairobi, according to sources cited by the Guardian.

The Kenyan government has declared a new state of emergency in regions bordering Somalia, in response to the attacks.

As with Boko Haram in Nigeria, Shabaab’s terrorist attacks will undoubtedly serve as the pretext for escalated American military intervention, as recent comments from US military leaders and pundits have made clear.

“Basically, we are witnessing the birth of a Kenyan Boko Haram,” an unnamed top Western diplomat said in comments cited by the Financial Times.

In Senate testimony this week, General David Rodriguez, head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), warned that al Shabaab “remains a persistent threat to US and regional interests,” in remarks calling for expanded US interventions in Libya, Nigeria and Somalia. 

Familiar efforts are underway to limit analysis of the Garissa massacre to discussion of “terrorism” in the service of Islamist ideology. Western media have played up reports that the al Shabaab fighters intentionally targeted Christian students, while sparing some Muslim students, and have brandished tenuous claims of links to al Qaeda and other Islamist formations.

The leaders of al Shabaab and other Islamist militias represent dissident factions of their respective national bourgeois elites. Their anti-imperialist appeals are cynical and calculated attempts to exploit popular hatred of the US and European governments. But the horrific murder of innocents only serves the interests of imperialism, which is ultimately responsible for the emergence of such groups in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The US and European powers have sought to strengthen their military and political grip in these regions and reestablish direct colonial rule through endless military interventions and proxy wars since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. During this period, the US has fomented nearly two decades of civil war in Somalia, waged unrelenting drone and commando wars, and exploited the chaos to impose an indefinite military occupation of the country by the US-sponsored African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) force.

Prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US supported Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre as part of its strategy to counter Soviet influence in neighboring Ethiopia. Washington responded to the 1992 overthrow of Barre by tribal-based militants by deploying US ground troops to invade Somalia.

Forced to withdraw in 1994, the US has since utilized local militaries and warlord factions to maintain its political domination over the Horn of Africa.

When the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist network that developed in Somalia’s political vacuum from the 1990s onward, temporarily wrested control over the capital at Mogadishu from the US-installed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in 2006, Washington responded by organizing a new invasion of the country, led by Ethiopian forces, which displaced the ICU and returned the TFG to power in the capital.

Al Shabaab subsequently developed out of the breakup of the ICU in the wake of the 2006 invasion. Al Shabaab claims that the recent series of attacks against Kenyan targets are retribution for Kenya’s invasion and occupation of Somalia, which began in October 2011 and continues to the present under the umbrella of the US-backed AMISOM occupation force defending the TFG.

For well over a decade the US has maintained Special Forces deployments on both the Yemeni and Somali sides of the Gulf of Aden and pummeled both side of the Gulf with drone strikes in an effort to maintain control over some of the most heavily trafficked commercial sea routes worldwide. The US is now backing the Saudi-led bombing campaign and preparations for a ground assault and occupation of Yemen.

Al Shabaab is a product of the murderous intervention of US imperialism in the Horn of Africa, unfolding over two decades. Responsiblity for Garissa lies ultimately with the war planners in Washington and the numerous fake-left parties that have justified US wars in Africa under the banner of "democracy and human rights."

US faces another debacle on Pacific economic treaty

Mike Head

Having suffered a decisive defeat on its efforts to block other countries from joining the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the US government faces mounting difficulties with its most far-reaching move to dominate the Asia-Pacific region: the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In Hawaii last month, the latest round of five-year-long TPP talks between the 12 governments involved broke up without any further agreement. For the third year in a row, the White House’s deadline for a final deal looks set to be breached in 2015.

Significantly, the main reported stumbling block this time was not ongoing differences between the US and Japan over auto and agricultural markets, but doubts over President Barack Obama’s capacity to get congressional approval to sign off on the pact.

Falsely presented as a “free trade” deal, the TPP is the opposite. It is aimed at creating a vast US-controlled economic bloc. In return for favoured access to the US market, which is still the largest in the world, the TPP requires its members to scrap all legal, regulatory and government impediments to American investment and corporate operations.

The TPP is an essential component of Washington’s military and strategic “pivot” to Asia to establish unchallenged hegemony over the region, including China, which has thus far been excluded from the treaty. The “partnership” seeks to restructure every aspect of economic and social life across the Asia-Pacific in the interests of Wall Street finance capital and the largest US corporations, particularly the IT, pharmaceutical and media conglomerates.

A similar drive is underway to incorporate the European Union into a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) bloc. Like the TPP, the European treaty is being negotiated amid tight secrecy, with hundreds of the world’s largest corporations taking part, behind the backs of the international working class.

Obama has resorted to blatant anti-Chinese rhetoric in a bid to overcome opposition to aspects of the TPP from sections of the Democratic and Republican congressional leaderships. In one recent interview, the US president declared:

“If we don’t write the rules out there, China’s going to write the rules and the geopolitical implications of China writing the rules for trade almost inevitably means that we will be cut out or we will be deeply disadvantaged. Our businesses will be disadvantaged, our workers will be disadvantaged.”

Washington is concerned that other imperialist powers, such as Germany, Britain and Japan, could strengthen their positions in China, at the expense of the US, unless America “writes the rules” for world trade in the 21st century.

Global financial commentators are drawing attention to what is at stake. Under the headline, “Round two in America’s battle for Asian influence,” David Pilling wrote in the London-based Financial Times on April 1: “Washington’s attempt to lead a boycott of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank ended in farce after Britain broke ranks and other nations from Germany to South Korea fell over themselves to join. If round one was a defeat for America, round two hangs in the balance.”

Pilling noted that the TPP’s exclusion of China, on the grounds that its economy was state-owned and centrally planned, was obviously concocted. “In a peculiar display of diplomatic contortion,” he wrote, “Vietnam—a country whose economy is as centrally planned and as rigged as the best of them—is somehow considered fit for entry.”

The Financial Times Asia editor pointedly added that the TPP was “just as likely to annoy America’s allies in region as reassure them,” because of its intrusive demands, which include the dismantling of state-owned enterprises, tendering restrictions, financial regulations, data protection rules and intellectual property laws.

Washington’s aggressive drive to establish the TPP and TTIP economic blocs marks a reversal of its post-World War II role, when the ascendancy of American industry permitted it to champion the reconstruction of its Japanese and European rivals, albeit always for its own benefit, including via the expansion of markets for its exports.

Today, amid the ongoing decline of US industry, its ruling elite depends increasingly on the parasitic activities of Wall Street, the exploitation of patents by Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the drug companies, and contracts for the supply of military hardware. These rapacious interests will most directly benefit from the TPP.

Many details remain secret, but pro-TPP lobbying efforts highlight the anticipated profit bonanzas. Mireya Solis of the Brookings Institution think tank stressed advantages such as “internationalisation of financial services, protection of intellectual property and governance of the Internet economy.”

US technology firms would benefit from a ban on requiring companies to house customers’ data within a specific country. “If we’re going to serve the customer of Malaysia from, say, a data center in Singapore, the data has to be able to move back and forth between those two countries,” Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, told the Wall Street Journal .

Central to the treaty are punitive Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) clauses, which permit transnationals to sue governments for losses allegedly caused by official policy decisions. WikiLeaks last month published a chapter of the TPP treaty showing that firms could bypass a country’s courts to obtain damages for changes in “environmental, health or other regulatory objectives.”

Apart from the US and Japan—the two biggest partners by far—the other TPP participants are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

The willingness of many of these countries to make the required concessions to the US has been undermined by Obama’s failure to secure support for a Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill, so that he can sign the TPP and then have it ratified by Congress with a single “yes” or “no” vote. Without TPA, Congress could force amendments to the negotiated pact, effectively rendering the agreement void.

According to a Japan Times report: “Several negotiating partners, including Canada and Japan, have publicly stated they will not put their final negotiating positions on the table until Congress grants TPA for the Obama administration. With a presidential election looming in the United States, further delay creates a real risk of TPP being delayed until 2017.”

Much of the US congressional resistance is bound up with protectionist lobbies, based on national-based industries and their trade unions. In response, the Obama administration is ramping up a campaign that explicitly spells out the expected benefits to corporate America.

On March 30, the White House published letters from former senior economic officials, including 10 ex-commerce secretaries representing every administration, Democratic and Republican, since 1973, urging congressional leaders to give Obama TPA authority.

The commerce secretaries stated: “Once completed, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) will give the United States free trade arrangements with 65 percent of global GDP and give our businesses preferential access to a large base of new potential customers.”

This demand for “preferential access” by US imperialism threatens to fundamentally break up the world economy into the kind of rival blocs that preceded World Wars I and II.

March US jobs growth slowest since 2013

Andre Damon

Jobs growth in the United States slackened in March, the Labor Department said Friday, adding to a growing body of data indicating that the US has economy slowed significantly in the past six months.

The US added only 126,000 jobs last month, less than the number needed to keep up with population growth. This was almost half as many new jobs as had been predicted by a Bloomberg survey of economists, and marked the lowest monthly job growth since December 2013.

The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.5 percent, after hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the labor force.

Job losses were concentrated in core export and production industries, which were hit hard by the recent fall in oil prices and the rise of the dollar. The manufacturing and construction sectors lost 1,000 jobs each, while the mining sector, which includes oil production, lost 11,000 workers.

The Labor Department’s figures tracked a surge of recent mass layoffs in these sectors. On Tuesday, US Steel announced 680 layoffs with the idling of part of its plant in Mt. Iron, Minnesota. The week before, the steelmaker announced plans to lay off 2,080 workers at its Granite City Works plant in Illinois.

Also Tuesday, Houston-based oilfield services company Franks International announced 600 layoffs, amounting to 13 percent of its nationwide workforce. In recent months the four largest oilfield services companies—Weatherford International, Baker Hughes, Halliburton and Schlumberger—announced more than 30,000 layoffs.

Sections of the US retail sector were hit as a wave of mergers and consolidations continued to hemorrhage jobs. This week a bankruptcy judge approved a deal between RadioShack and hedge fund Standard General that would keep open only 1,700 of the electronics retail chain’s more than 4,000 stores. The deal will mean the elimination of some 20,000 positions.

While the unemployment rate has fallen significantly over the past year, even mainstream economists have been forced to admit that the official unemployment rate, currently at 5.5 percent, has only the most tangential relationship to the true state of the labor market.

According to the Labor Department, 277,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month, twice as many as the number of jobs that were added. As a result, the labor force participation rate fell to 62.7 percent, matching its lowest level in nearly four decades.

New jobs, meanwhile, have been mostly low-wage and disproportionately part-time. Compared to December 2007, the US economy has added more than two million part-time jobs, while the number of full-time jobs in the US is actually lower today than it was eight years ago, before the start of the recession.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, there are some 3.3 million “missing workers” who have given up looking for work because it is not available. If they were included in the official unemployment rate, it would be at 7.4 percent, as opposed to the nominal rate of 5.5 percent.

Workers’ wages, having stagnated and declined for years, grew by only 2.1 percent over the past twelve months. While hourly earnings ticked up slightly last month, average weekly earnings actually fell as employers cut back on hours.

The lackluster jobs figures came amid a slew of other indicators showing a slowdown at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015.

On March 27, the Commerce Department confirmed that the US economy grew at a rate of 2.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, down from an earlier estimate of 2.6 percent and half the growth rate of the previous quarter. On March 25, the Commerce Department said that durable goods orders fell by 1.4 percent in February.

These figures led analysts to slash their predictions for growth in the first quarter of this year, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta cutting its estimate to just 0.2 percent.

In the short term, the slowdown is partially a result of the continuing slump in oil prices and the run-up in the price of the dollar. Oil prices have fallen by 50 percent over the past year, prompting tens of thousands of layoffs in the US, particularly in high-cost hydraulic fracturing operations that have become unprofitable amid low oil prices.

The US dollar, meanwhile, has risen significantly against other currencies, shrinking demand for US manufacturing exports overseas.

These contingencies have weighed down US corporate profits, which the Commerce Department said fell by 0.8 percent over the past year—the first annual fall in US corporate profits since 2008.

US corporations in recent weeks stepped up their demands for the US Federal Reserve to keep interest rates at zero in order to lower the value of the dollar and prop up their profits through cheap credit.

The Federal Reserve has responded to these demands by hinting that it would likely delay raising the federal funds rate, which has been at zero for six years, while slowing the increase in the rate when it is raised.

Speaking in San Francisco earlier this month, US Fed Chair Janet Yellen stressed the need to be “patient” in raising rates, while Fed officials lowered their estimate for where the federal funds rate will be at the end of this year to 0.625 percent, compared to their December estimate of 1.125 percent.

Six years of near-zero interest rates, together with the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” money-printing policies, have fueled a massive run-up in stock prices, in the process enormously enriching the financial oligarchy, even as workers’ wages have stagnated or declined.

The response by the Federal Reserve to the latest series of negative economic figures, together with continued mass layoffs throughout the economy, make clear that the US financial elite plans to respond to the continued economic stagnation by intensifying the policies it has pursued since the 2008 crash: unlimited cash for the banks and corporations, combined with austerity and mass layoffs.

“Religious freedom” and the assault on democratic rights in America

Eric London

The two statutes passed in recent days by the legislatures of Indiana and Arkansas are milestones in an anti-democratic effort to legalize discrimination in the US under the false banner of religious freedom.

The laws in the original form passed by the state legislatures overtly establish a special legal privilege for business owners to invoke their religious beliefs in court as justification for discriminating against clients or employees. Though media coverage has focused exclusively on the impact of the statutes on same-sex couples, the laws have far broader implications for the population as a whole.

At the urging of Republican Governor Mike Pence, the Republican-dominated Indiana legislature met Thursday to approve an amendment to its Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), including language stating that the law “bars discrimination based on factors that include race, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or United States military service.”

Pence had signed the original version of the bill into law on March 26, but was forced to backtrack after he came under pressure from corporations and business organizations demanding that modifications be made.

In Arkansas, an initial bill passed this week was held up by Republican Governor Asa Hutchison, who, having received his marching orders from Arkansas-based Walmart, announced he would veto the legislation unless it was modified. The Arkansas legislature subsequently added a clause prohibiting businesses from using the statute as a legal defense when sued by individuals for discrimination. The amended Arkansas bill does not include specific anti-discrimination language.

The supposed “fixes” being incorporated into the new versions of the bills do not address the more fundamental assault on democratic principles involved in the legislation. At bottom, the statutes rely on a legal principle that was rejected by the Supreme Court in decisions such as Heart of Atlanta Hotel v. US (1964) and Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), which banned racially segregated businesses in the South.

Relying on the same basic argument as the proponents of segregation, the Indiana and Arkansas statutes implicitly revive the claim that private property rights allow business owners to refuse to provide service to people on the basis of their race, religion or sexual orientation. The underlying premise and logic of these bills, even in their amended form, constitute a fundamental attack on democratic rights.

The thinly veiled use of “religious beliefs” by the framers of the Indiana and Arkansas statutes to justify discrimination not only contradicts the Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s, it flies in the face of the legal secularism on the basis of which the American Republic was founded. The separation of church and state enunciated in the first sentence of the First Amendment proscribes legislatures from establishing two-tiered legal systems, where special rights and privileges are made available to the religious. The attack on anti-discrimination laws is part of a broader attack on the gains made through the social struggles of the 1950s and 1960s against segregation. When the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down the enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—passed to ensure that the rights of African American voters in formerly segregated states were protected—the Democratic Party made no serious attempt to pass legislation restoring the critical provisions of the act.

In fact, the political soil out of which the Indiana and Arkansas statutes grew was cultivated by the Democratic Party. It was President Bill Clinton who sought the passage of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and signed it into law in 1993. The federal RFRA was sponsored by Democrats Edward Kennedy and Charles Schumer and supported by a conglomerate of religious groups, including the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Legal Society, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the National Association of Evangelicals. President Obama’s term in office has been marked by repeated concessions to religious organizations. In 2011 and again in 2013, the administration waged a campaign to prevent young women from accessing emergency contraceptives.

In 2012, Obama exempted churches from the requirement that employers provide contraceptives as part of their health insurance plans under Obamacare, and in 2013 he extended the exemption to all religious non-profit entities. It was, in part, based on the administration’s repeated extension of the contraception exemption that the Supreme Court, in its 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. ruling, broadened the exemption further to include closely held for-profit corporations.

The Indiana and Arkansas statutes are the direct products of the Hobby Lobby decision. By opening the doors to for-profit corporations to assert “religious liberties” claims, the decision paved the way for corporations to drastically expand their powers over consumers and employees.

The opposition of corporations such as Walmart, Apple, Microsoft and others to the original Indiana and Arkansas laws was not motivated by a commitment to democratic rights. These corporations, along with sections of the media and Democratic politicians, opposed certain elements of the RFRA statutes solely on the limited grounds that they targeted gay marriage and same-sex couples. The laws are certainly a reactionary attack on the democratic right to marry whomever one chooses, but the nearly exclusive focus on the issue of gay marriage obscures the broader and more fundamental assault on democratic principles contained in the laws.

The corporate opposition on this question reflects the degree to which gender and identity politics have been incorporated into the ideology and modus operandi of capitalist rule, and are used to cover over the more fundamental class divisions in society—as well as providing a political cover for the corporate and government assault on the social conditions and democratic rights of the working class.

Much of the corporate and political establishment is fixated on issues such as gay marriage that affect a very small and generally more privileged social layer, but they fail to bat an eye over the effective suspension of habeas corpus, the indefinite detention of prisoners without trial, the state assassination of US citizens, the attacks on journalists and on free speech and assembly, the massive spying conducted by the National Security Agency, the jailing and persecution of whistleblowers, the de facto legal immunity granted government officials guilty of torture, the transformation of cities into militarized zones, and the impunity with which police brutalize and murder workers and youth

The fundamental lesson that must be drawn is that no democratic right is secure in a society as riven by social inequality as the United States. This essential fact of political and social life is underscored by another event that recently took place in Indiana. On Monday, a judge sentenced a 33-year-old woman, Purvi Patel, to a 20-year prison sentence for feticide. Patel, who had a miscarriage in 2013, was arrested after her doctor informed police that she may have procured abortifacient medication to terminate her pregnancy. She was hauled out of the courtroom in chains to begin her prison term.

Democracy is incompatible with a society dominated by an unaccountable financial aristocracy and characterized by massive and ever widening levels of social inequality.

The fight to defend democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the very corporations and political parties responsible for transforming the United States into a militarized wasteland of poverty and inequality. Such a struggle can be waged only by the working class, in direct opposition to the entire political establishment, through the struggle for socialism.

Israel As The Crashed Germanwings Airbus A320

Alan Hart

Though it is provocative and contentious I think my headline is appropriate for an article about an Israel in the process of committing suicide. I'd also like readers to know that the inspiration for my headline was an observation made by Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement. In a post which called for the formation of an Israeli Salvation Front, he wrote: "The country is in existential danger. Not from the outside, but from the inside." (That's the way it was for the passengers and crew on Germanwings Flight 9525).

Another widely respected (Jewish) Israeli writer I want to quote is Akiva Eldar. He opened a recent article for Al-Monitor with one of the most witty and illuminating sentences ever written by anybody since the beginning of Zionism's ethnic cleansing of Palestine 68 years ago. Here it is. "It seems that for the first time in a long while, US President Barack Obama believes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."

Eldar was commenting on Obama's response to Netanyahu's pre-election admission that an independent Palestinian state would not be established on his watch.

In the course of an interview he gave to The Huffington Post Obama ignored Netanyahu's disingenuous. post-election back-tracking and said he believes that Netanyahu is opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state. He, Obama, put it this way:

“We take him at his word that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region."

Eldar's main point was that Israel also has to evaluate its options. If it continues the occupation, he wrote, "the demographic balance will force it to choose between becoming a BI-NATIONAL STATE or an APARTHEID REGIME."

Israel's problem, entirely of its own making, is that it has to continue the occupation. Why?

Any Israeli government that attempted to withdraw from the occupied West Bank to make the space for a viable Palestinian state would trigger a Jewish civil war - a certainty that was described to me way back in 1980 by Shimon Peres. (At the time he was the leader of the opposition to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's ruling Likud and I was acting as the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between him and Arafat.).

As I reveal in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Peres said he feared it was "already too late" for peace based on two states. When I asked him why, he replied: "Begin knows exactly what he's doing. He's stuffing the West Bank with settlers to create the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli prime minister is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot large numbers of Jews" (to get them out of the West Bank dead or alive).

At the time Peres spoke those words to me there were only about 70,000 illegal Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank and in and around occupied East Jerusalem. Today there are about 600,000. If it was too late in 1980 because of the numbers, how much more too late is it today?

It's possible that if an American president read the riot act to Israel and said that it would be subjected to boycott and sanctions if it did not end its defiance of international law, perhaps as many as half the total number of illegal Jewish settlers would be prepared to abandon the West Bank in exchange for generous financial compensation; but that would still leave very many who would fight.

As I also reveal in my book, Israel's Defense Minister of the time, Ezer Weizman, told me that Sharon had convened a meeting of senior military personnel at which a blood oath was signed. Those who signed it committed themselves to making common cause with the settlers to "fight to the death any Israeli government which sought to withdraw from the West Bank".

The background outlined briefly above explains why the two-state solution has long been dead (was it ever really alive?) and, more to the point, why Akiva Eldar is right when he says that Israel remaining in occupation has a choice of only two options - bi-national state or apartheid regime.

Israel as a fully exposed (totally naked) apartheid state would at some point be boycotted and sanctioned by the international community, governments and all. At some point, as was eventually the case with South Africa, even an American president and a British prime minister would have to tell apartheid Israel that enough was enough.

My speculation about what would then happen is the following.

Some and perhaps many Israeli Jews would pack their bags and leave to make new lives in Europe, North America and elsewhere. India would be a first choice for some. And those who did not abandon the walled-in, nuclear-armed fortress would tell the whole world to go to hell.

In that context what Prime Minister Golda Meir said to me in one of my interviews with her for the BBC's Panorama programme bears repeating, over and over and over again. In answer to one of my questions she said that in a doomsday situation Israel"would be prepared to take the region and the world down with it." About an hour after that was broadcast The Times of London, then a seriously good newspaper, not the Murdoch product it is today, changed its lead editorial to quote what Golda had said to me. It then added its own opinion. "We had better believe her." I did then and I still do.

Because the time is approaching when the Arabs of Israel-Palestine will outnumber the Jews unless Zionism resorts to a final round of ethnic cleansing, a bi-national state, one in which all of its citizens enjoyed equal political and human rights of every kind, would lead to the de-Zionization of Palestine. But the security and wellbeing of those Jews who opted to remain in the bi-national state would be assured provided the Palestinians were not subjected to a Zionist terrorist campaign.

In my analysis the transformation of Israel-Palestine into a bi-national state with equal rights of every kind for all of its citizens offers the only hope for stopping the countdown to catastrophe for the occupied and oppressed Palestinians and, ultimately, the Jews of the world. I say that because if Zionism did resort to a final ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Jews of the world would be judged by many to be complicit by default, and the transformation of anti-Israelism into ant-Semitism would be completed and that monster would go on the rampage again.

Question: Is there a possibility, even a very remote one, that a majority of Israel's Jews could have their brainwashed and closed minds opened to the idea that the creation of a bi-national state with equal rights for all is in their own best interests?

I fear the answer is probably "No" but much could depend on how the case for a bi-national state with equal rights for all was presented.

In my view the greatest need is for activist groups of all faiths and none everywhere which campaign for justice for the Palestinians to put their act together and concentrate on making the case for a one state solution. In other words I am calling on them to start speaking with one voice.

I would also urge them to be positive and promote what I believe to be a liberating truth. It is that the Jews are the intellectual elite of the Western civilization and the Palestinians are the intellectual elite of the Arab world. As I have previously written and said, together in peace and partnership they could change the region for the better and give new hope and inspiration to the whole world.

That, in my view, is the best sales pitch for one state.

So much for what could be.

At the time of writing, and as my headline indicates. I see an Israel piloted by Netanyahu on the same course as Germanwings Flight 9525.

The Ambiguities of the Nuclear Framework Deal

Gareth Porter

The framework agreement reached on Thursday night clearly gives the P5+1 a combination of constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme that should reassure all but the most bellicose opponents of diplomacy. It also provides the basis for at least a minimum of sanctions relief in the early phase of its implementation that Iran required, but some of the conditions on that relief are likely create new issue between Iran and the Western powers over the process. The agreement’s dependence on decisions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the penchant of Israeli intelligence for discovering new evidence of illicit Iranian activities will encourage moves to delay or obstruct relief of sanctions.

US and European officials had been telling reporters that they would phase out their sanctions on oil and banking in return for Iranian actions to modify its programme only gradually over several years, and made it clear that the purpose of this strategy was to maintain “leverage” on Iran.

Iran, however, was demanding that those sanctions be lifted immediately upon delivering on their commitments under agreement. And a source close to Iranian negotiators told Middle East Eye that Iran was confident it could deliver on all of the actions related to its enrichment programme and Arak within a matter of months.

The same diplomatic conflict was being fought over UN Security Council sanctions: Iran wanted them to end as soon as they have fulfilled its commitments; the US and its allies were insisting that those sanctions could only be suspended gradually on a schedule that would extend through most or all of the initial ten-year period. And the P5+1 was also demanding that, in order to get those sanctions lifted, Iran would have to fully satisfy the IAEA that it had cooperated completely in regard to the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) of its programme, and wait for the IAEA to give Iran a clean bill of health that its nuclear  programme is for peaceful purposes only.

Figuring out how those pivotal issues were finally resolved requires sifting through evidence that is not entirely clearcut.  The two sides apparently agreed that they would not release any official text of the agreement. The joint statement by EU foreign policy chief Frederica Mogherini and Iranian foreign minister Zarif, which is the closest thing to an official statement, was very brief and general and failed to clarify the provisions on sanctions removal. And the only available text of their statement, a transcript of the English language translation of Zarif’s Farsi language version of the statement, which was published in theWashington Post, unfortunately fails to complete the one sentence on how the issue of sanctions removal was removed, because it was partially inaudible.

The fact that no official text was released has meant that press coverage of the content of the agreement has relied primarily on the much more detailed summary of the agreement by the US State Department and on remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry. The US interpretation of the agreement, however, is ambiguous on some aspects of the sanctions removal issue, raising serious questions about what was precisely agreed on.

On US and European unilateral sanctions on oil and banking, which are of greatest short-term importance to the Iranian economy, the documents says those sanctions “will be suspended after the IAEA has verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear-related steps.” That wording appears to suggest that the sanctions would be suspended immediately upon the verification of the last step taken by Iran.

The US text thus seems to indicate that the Iranians won their demand that the Western powers give up their scheme for a “gradual” or “phased” withdrawal of sanctions.   But the Iranians had wanted some of the sanctions removed each time they completed the implementation of a commitment, and instead the payoff comes only after the final step taken.

The US document also makes it clear that the “architecture of sanctions” regarding US unilateral sanctions – meaning the legal and bureaucratic systems underlying the sanctions – “will be retained for much of the duration of the deal and allow for snap back of sanctions in the event of significant non-performance.” The Iranians have complained that suspending sanctions while leaving the threat of future sanctions in place has an intimidating effect on banks and businesses regarding resumption of relations with Iranian entities.  But they didn’t have much leverage  over that question.

The UN sanctions issue was resolved in a distinctly different way. According to the US text, all the UN Security Council resolutions on Iran, which impose various sanctions on Iran, “will be lifted with the completion by Iran of nuclear-related actions addressing all key issues (enrichment, Fordow, Arak, PMD and transparency).”

The implication of the US summary is that Iran would get some sanctions relief from the UN Security Council each time it has completed the implementation of one of its key “irreversible” commitments, as Iran had been demanding – not only at the end of all of its performance on all of the commitments. The inclusion of the PMD (“possible military dimensions”) of the Iranian nuclear programme as an issue on which Iran would have to satisfy the IAEA introduces a potential obstacle to early sanctions relief, because IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has said it could take several years to complete its assessment of the issue.  But at least a delay by the IAEA would not prevent Iran from obtaining relief upon completing the other actions it would take.

Further confusing the interpretation of the agreement, Secretary of State John Kerry referred to the United States and its “international partners” providing sanctions relief “in phases” – a statement that appears inconsistent with the State Department text. In a tweet on Thursday, Zarif cited the Iran/P5+1 joint statement as saying the US would “cease all application of ALL nuclear-related secondary economic and financial sanctions”, and asked rhetorically, “Is this gradual?”

Judging from the US interpretative statements, Iran could get the bulk of the sanctions relief in the initial period of implementation – much of it within the first year or so. But that prospect would depend on the good will of the Obama administration and the IAEA. The Obama administration may well be inclined to facilitate the provision of early sanctions relief. But the political dynamics swirling around US and IAEA policies toward Iran suggest that the processes of IAEA assessment and delivery of sanctions may not go as smoothly as Iran would hope.

Looking even further ahead, Iran is certainly concerned about how a future US administration could and would implement the agreement. Iran was insisting that the UN Security Council resolution repealing previous resolutions with a new one reflecting the comprehensive agreement be passed before the change in administration in Washington in 2017, according to the source in contact with the negotiators. It remains unclear whether the P5+1 agreed to that demand.

One thing the US text makes clear is that the issue of Iranian research and development on advanced centrifuges research & development (R&D) remains unresolved. The US statement says that for the first ten years of the agreement, enrichment R&D will have to be consistent with maintaining breakout timeline of at least one year – obviously based on further understandings that have not been revealed or are yet to be negotiated. And beyond that period, the Iranian R&D plan will be “pursuant to the JCPOA”, meaning the final Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action” is still to be negotiated.

A Path Toward Hamas-Fatah Reconciliation

Franklin Lamb

Shatla camp, Beirut

One imagines that few would question that intra-Palestinian divisions and rivalries have exacted a heavy toll on a majority of the more than 3.8 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants who are registered with the United Nations. These refugees out of the current nearly 12 million Palestinians whose country was illegally occupied in 1948 and each of whom possess, under international law the Full Right of Return to their country. As physical and social infrastructures in the camps continue to deteriorate, all refugees suffer and particularly students among whose ranks ever fewer attend ill- equipped classrooms sometimes with untrained teachers with outmoded curriculum obsolete in the modern marketplace. The Hamas-Fatah conflict is letting down the Palestinian youth when they seek advice and practical options and are failing to give youngsters who are Palestine’s future the entrepreneurial spirit and potential of the private sector. This obtains because we have not to date successfully challenged the outlawing of Palestinian refugees right to work and earn a living in Lebanon.

The continuing Hamas-Fatah divisions are a particularly sharp detriment to the more than 1.8 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the approximately 249,000 remaining in Lebanon in addition to approximately 44,000 who have so far reported to UNRWA’s field office in Lebanon, opposite Shatila camp, having fled the nearly two year siege of Yarmouk camp in Damascus. Today, the Hamas-Fatah divisions are exhausting and diverting the energies of these two key Palestinian pillars and they are disrupting progress toward ending the Zionist occupation of their homeland. The split is causing a perceptible decline in international support for the just Palestinian cause and the longer it continues it causes yet more hardships in the camps.

This bleak situation despite earlier efforts at Palestinian reconciliation including the Cairo Agreement of 2005, the National Reconciliation Document of June 2006, Fatah–Hamas Mecca Agreement (February 2007), the 2011 Cairo Accords ( May 2011), the Fatah–Hamas Doha Agreement (2012) and the most recent proposals for a Hamas-Fatah “unity government” (April 2014) and the urging of a Hamas-Fatah “unity government” (March 2015).

A member of the Hamas political bureau advised this observer at a Beirut conference a few days ago that the movement accepts in principle a Swiss proposal of March 2015 to resolve the crisis facing Palestinian Authority employees in the Gaza Strip.

But with one condition.

Hamas wants the Swiss proposal to be addressed in the context of a definitive Palestinian reconciliation agreement. And with good reason, as the gentleman elaborated that so far the international community will not accept a Palestinian Authority in which there is Hamas participation, even though the Islamic movement won the election in 2006. Hence, for example, it is difficult for international donors to contribute towards the salaries of workers who have been employed by Hamas in Gaza since 2007. Moreover, the EU has this month kept Hamas on its terrorism blacklist despite a court decision ordering Brussels to remove the Palestinian group from the register. Brussels has lodged an appeal against a December ruling by the bloc’s second-highest court that Hamas should be delisted for the first time since 2001. The appeal process is expected to take about 18 more months.

Despite the above-noted efforts for a Fatah-Hamas accord over that past nearly half-century, problems of language interpretation, sharp political differences, periodic obstructionism from both sides, external interventions by Israel and the US, moves by some regional powers to impose their own visions of reconciliation, as well as selective implementation have prevented much substantive progress.

It is against this backdrop that an important and refreshingly substantive conference on Palestine was held this month in Beirut on the subject of Prospects and Challenges for Palestinian Reconciliation. It was jointly sponsored by two well respected think-tanks, the Johannesburg- based Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC) (www.amec.org.za) and Lebanon’s Al-Zaytouna Center for Studies and Consultations (www.alzaytouna.net/), the latter now in its 1lth year.

The conference was attended by an impressive assembly of academics, policy makers and officials from Hamas, Fatah, the Population Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Palestinian National Initiative, and Hezbollah among others. The two day gathering included concentrated discussions and proposals from the Palestinian factions concerning their stances towards reconciliation and its activation, the utility of international paradigms for transnational justice, internal and external factors affecting reconciliations and concrete proposals for solutions and future prospects.

The American attendees sitting at the same table with Hezbollah’s delegation sought the former’s commitment and partnership in a reinvigorated civil right to work campaign in Lebanon to remove for every Palestinian refugee in the 12 camps the outlawing of working in more than 50 professions in Lebanon and to grant Palestinians the civil right to purchase a home should they have the money.

In summary the American participants argument to Hezbollah and others in attendance included their belief that such an important and long sought victory for Palestinian refugees here would transfer substantive hope and energize every Palestinian and reignite the Palestinian revolution of days past and that this realistic and imminently achievable victory would be to the credit of Hamas-Fatah and their supporters joining ranks, discussing peaceful civil rights campaign tactics, negotiating, compromising and working together. The right to work campaign would give both groups ample mutual contacts and ‘break the ice’ for working closely together for more shared victories to the benefit of their people along the lines of what is envisage by the earlier proposals for unity.

It is doubtful that there was one delegate attending the al- Zaytouna-Amec conference on Palestinian Reconciliation whose gut does not churn when the person reflects on the fact that for 67 years, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon continue to be denied the most elementary civil right to work and to own a home. A right that under the 1953 Refugee convention, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, countless international humanitarian law treaties, principles, standards and rules and international customary laws which bind all countries and that are granted to every other refugee in the world, including those suffering under Zionist apartheid occupation and the colonists who are still living on their family homesteads in Palestine. Palestinian refugees are today barred from dozens of jobs and professions outside the squalid camps, including engineering, law and medicine, nor are they allowed to buy property in Lebanon. In cases where Palestinian refugees are able to find employment, often “illegal,” their salary is less than half that of their Lebanese counterparts and they are not eligible for medical insurance or severance pay.

There are prevailing myths here in Lebanon about dark consequences that would ensue the granting the most basic of civil rights to Palestinian refugees until they can return home. From across Lebanon’s poisoned sectarian political spectrum- recently fueled also by the spreading Sunni-Shia Bellum Sacrum, were Lebanon to comply with its legal, moral and religious duty and treat Palestinians as humans these ‘the sky is falling’ shrieks would likely dissipate.

Granted, the idea of Hamas-Fatah reconciliation is yet another existential nightmare for the Zionist regime still occupying Palestine. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman sarcastically announced this month that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas must decide whether he wants peace with Hamas or with Israel. Lieberman said it would be impossible for Fatah to have peace with Israel while simultaneously being joined with Hamas. Likewise, Benjamin Netanyahu gave Mahmoud Abbas, an ultimatum: either reconciliation with Hamas or negotiations with Israel.

In summary, while many political factions in Lebanon, alongside their internal and external sponsors, continue to play the Palestinian card and pledge “Resistance”, none are doing what their frequently claimed religious and political principles would require.

It is submitted that if Hamas and Fatah were to put aside their political differences, even just long enough to help their fellow refugees in Lebanon achieve dignity and elementary civil rights this mutual reconciliation effort would likely soon lead to wider Hamas-Fatah unity and intensify solidarity among the Palestinian refugee community and accelerate return to their homeland, Palestine.

No Exit: Pain and More Pain

Charles R. Larson

How do you bring a person back from such pain, such horror, that that person can live a normal life? How do you convince a person who believes that he is the source of such disgust, of such self-loathing, that it is others who are the cause of that defilement and not that person himself? How do you convince a person with such dark fears that inflicting more pain on himself, that punishing himself, is not the appropriate cure or path toward improvement? These are some of the many questions in the netherworld, under the surface, of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a novel about a man who believes that he does not deserve life, even a little bit of it, because of actions that happened to him many years earlier when he was still a child. An abused child, which should be obvious, though the abuse here is much more horrific than I have ever read before—so vile that I fear that many readers will reach a point of repulsion and toss the book aside before the final sections which offer a kind of redemption, possibly even hope, though the getting there is such an arduous task.

There are four main characters—once college roommates—at the center of Yanagihara’s story, though one of them, Jude, is the most important. We follow these men from their early years after college, through their careers, their relationships with others, but especially with one another, until they are all in their early fifties. There’s JB, an artist; Malcolm, an architect; Willem, an actor; and Jude, who is a lawyer. By the end of the story, all have become successful in their careers, but not so much with other people. Ostensibly straight, they have also engaged in occasional sexual activities with other men (JB considers himself gay). Their closeness to each other becomes somewhat fluid down through the years, though it is the bonding of the group that is the deepest emotion most of them will ever feel. Interestingly, though the author is a woman, women play only minor roles in their lives, which tells you how strong their loyalties are to one another.

As undergraduates, they learned about each other’s idiosyncrasies and their pasts—except for Jude who, whenever asked about his childhood, would respond that it was too boring, too plain for elaboration. Nor did the others ever see him undressed. He always wore long-sleeves and trousers. The fact that Jude was a cutter, that he cut himself, was largely concealed and continued to be disguised because of Andy, his doctor of many years—who genuinely tried to help him but also enabled him to keep injuring himself.

The lengthy narrative, with multiple of time shifts, slowly reveals what happened to Jude as a child. He was a foundling, left at a monastery in Montana and raised by the brothers. The physical abuse started there, beatings especially, but later sexual. Jude would pick up objects he discovered unattended: pencils, buttons, and food, mostly items of no value. But one day he pocketed one of the brothers’
cigarette lighters, and when it was later discovered with his meager possessions, the worst of the physical abuse began. Father Gabriel rubbed olive oil on the back of one of Jude’s hands and then took the lighter and lit the oil. The Sharia-like mentality of the brothers at the monastery regarded punishment as one of its core preventive controls. The brother remarks, “This is what you get. You’ll never forget not to steal again.” If it were only that simple.

Things get much worse when Brother Luke—the one brother Jude believes he can trust—runs off with him and uses the ten-year-old boy as their source of income by prostituting him to hundreds of men. That is also when Jude begins to believe that he is the guilty party, that he is the source of his disgust. Brother Luke’s own sexual abuse of the boy further eliminates whatever iota of dignity Jude might have had. The result is that later in his life, as an adult, Jude can’t stand to be touched by anyone. Any sexual activity with people who actually care for him becomes impossible. And the cutting—and attempts at suicide—resurfaces in moments of tension throughout his life, even though his three college roommates do their best to protect him from the world.

Pedophilia is at the center of A Little Life, as it was in Yanagihara’s earlier novel The People in the Trees (2012). I thought that novel was extraordinary when I reviewed it two years ago, but also rough going because of decisions that characters make that are ethically questionable. My hunch is that A Little Life was written before People in the Trees and that no publisher would tackle the current book until the other one became such a success. One wonders what has provoked Yanagihara to write about pedophilia in both of these novels, and one can’t help being curious about the absence of females in both stories. I doubt that there will be answers to these questions.

A Little Life contains some of the tenderest depictions of platonic love between men that I have ever read. These are the relationships in the novel that redeem the horrific incidents of Jude’s childhood. But I can’t imagine any subject that is more unsettling than children who are abused by predatory men, emotionally crippled for life, and then—as the coup de grace—these children, once they become adults, believe that they are responsible for what has happened to them. It’s a terrifying result.

Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life

Doubleday, 736 pp., $30

Pakistan: MQM Under Siege

Rana Banerji

Not since Pakistan’s former Interior Minister, late Nasrullah Khan Babar’s, crackdown in mid-1995, has the Mohajir/ Muttahida Quami Movement – Altaf (MQM- A) been subjected to such a relentless siege by the Pakistan Rangers and the Sindh Police in Karachi. On March 11, 90, Azizabad, or `Nine Zero’, the home of Altaf Hussain in Federal B Area, the sanctified MQM headquarters, was raided by Pakistan Rangers. Several MQM-A party workers were arrested, arms and ammunition allegedly stolen from NATO containers seized, and five criminals wanted in the January 2011 murder of journalist Wali Khan Babbar were apprehended. The current operations in Karachi have been ongoing since August 2014.

The effort of the law and order authorities, assisted by the para-military Pakistan Rangers, has been to attempt to cleanse the greater metropolitan area of Karachi from the endemic violence, a peculiar mix of drug mafia-related crimes, extortions, kidnappings, sectarian reprisals and even `gang-warfare’, which has plagued the city for the past two decades, causing a systematic outward flow of business capital and investments from what used to be the economic hub of Pakistan.

This has also gotten entangled with the `war on terror’, as a lot of besieged Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) cadres escaping the army dragnet in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have been seeking safe havens in mosques and new Pashtun settlements in Karachi’s outlying suburbs.

Recent exposures about involvements in criminal activities revealed in the confessions of Sualat Mirza who faces death penalty for killing Karachi Electric Supply official, Shahid Hamid in May, 1999, and extortion of the worst kind brought out in the Pakistan Rangers report on the September 2012 Baldia Factory fire, have badly damaged the image of the party.

The MQM-A’s dilemma has been particularly acute, as the ebb in its fortunes coincides embarrassingly with the fall from grace of its leader in exile, `Quaid-e-Qiwan’ Altaf Hussain, in London. Altaf came to the adverse notice of the Metropolitan Police on two accounts: first on suspicion of involvement in the 2010 killing of the MQM-A’s second in command, Imran Farooq, outside his East London home. Altaf’s nephew, Iftikhar was detained by the authorities in June 2013 but was released shortly. Two other suspects, Mohsin Ali Syed and Mohammed Kashif Khan Kamran, fled to Pakistan and are now believed to be in the Inter-Services Intelligence’s (ISI) custody.

The second reason for Altaf Hussain’s predicament was the discovery of large amounts of unaccounted-for cash in his Edgware house in North London,fuelling suspicions of money laundering. Altaf was detained for questioning but has not been arrested so far even as investigations continue.

Although former Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf’s 2009 National Reconciliation Ordinance dropped 72 criminal cases against Altaf Hussain, the Pakistan army is unlikely to have forgotten the June 1991 incident where servig army officer Major Kaleem was tortured to death while in MQM custody. In particular, Lt Gen Rizwan Akhtar, currently Director General, ISI, and erstwhile DG, Pakistan Rangers, Sindh, appears convinced that this is the way to go if Karachi has to rise from its perpetual condition of `ordered disorder’, (phrase used by Laurent Gayer in his 2014 book, 'Karachi').

The current crackdown on MQM's violence-prone cadres was started by current DG, ISI, Lt Gen Rizwan Akhtar, in his previous incarnation, as DG Pakistan Rangers, Sindh. The Pak Rangers, under its new DG, Maj Gen Bilal Akbar and V Corps Commander, Lt Gen Naved  Zaman, formerly DDG, Counter Terrorism, ISI, continue to work on the script crafted by Akhtar and endorsed by incumbent Army Chief, Raheel Sharif. This is evident also from the recent gallantry award citation of `Hilal-e-Shujaat’, bestowed on Akhtar, which mentions his role as DG, Pak Rangers, in the recent Karachi operations.

The party’s second-string leadership in Karachi has begun to squirm and squeal. They organised protest demonstrations outside Nine Zero even as the Pak Rangers’s 11 March raid was underway. This forced the Pakistan Rangers to file a case against Altaf Hussain and his party, under the Anti-Terrorism Act, for criminal intimidation.

When Pakistan’s incumbent Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Karachi few days later, their request for an audience went unheeded. A delegation led by Farooq Sattar, including Haider Abbas Rizvi, Faisal Sabzwari and Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, was later able to meet him in Islamabad. They complained against the police/Rangers’ high-handedness in repressing their cadres’ legitimate political activities.

Though the party has dominated the Karachi political scene since 1988, in recent months, a perception has grown that the MQM-A is losing ground, even politically. In the May 2013 elections, though it was able to win 17 out of 20 Karachi seats in the National Assembly and 34 of 42 Provincial Assembly seats from Sindh, its vote share declined by 4 % as Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf (PTI) was able to make a sizable dent.

The PTI has replaced the Awami National Party (ANP) as the bigger party in Pashtun dominated-new settlements in the SITE Industrial area and Sohrab Goth. It has complained, alleging involvement of MQM hit men after its popular politician, Zahra Shahid Hussain, was killed in May 2013. PTI chief Imran Khan harbours a visceral dislike of Altaf Hussain, a sentiment heartily reciprocated by MQM leaders. In fact PTI and MQM-A workers clashed in Karachi as recent as 30 March.

The army-backed crackdown has fuelled speculation about a possible change in MQM-A leadership. Names of Mustafa Kamal, former Nazim, who did a lot to improve the city’s infrastructure but had to go into exile in Dubai after having crossed the leaders, and Dr IshratulIbad, MQM’s durable and longest-serving Sindh Governor (since 2002) have been mentioned. There is even some talk of Musharraf emerging again in a political role to inherit his `natural’ Mohajir mantle, though this may not be quite palatable just yet, either to Sharif or to the army leadership, whose main concern is limited to see that he is absolved from State sedition charges.

At present, it appears that the purpose of the army/ ISI/ Pakistan Rangers operation is not to totally demolish the party but to significantly curb its criminal mafias and de-fang capacity to hold the State and Provincial Administration to ransom, so that Karachi can slowly limp back to a tolerable state of `ordered disorder’ again.