Nuclear Ban Treaty Conference and Universal Nuclear Disarmament

Manpreet Sethi

A nuclear weapons free world (NWFW) has been on the global agenda since 1945. Only, it has never been a global priority. In 2009, when the president of the militarily most powerful country talked about it in Prague, there was a brief upsurge of hope. But, the moment passed all too quickly and by the time President Obama demitted office, he had been persuaded to approve an unprecedented modernisation of the US nuclear arsenal and infrastructure. President Trump is likely to stay the course. Not surprisingly, Russia is keeping nuclear pace. And, China is keeping them company with the induction of new conventional, nuclear and dual-use capabilities. All three are also experimenting with newer technologies ranging from hypersonics to underwater nuclear drones.

Ironically, it is at this juncture that a conference to negotiate a treaty prohibiting the possession, use, development, deployment and transfer of nuclear weapons is scheduled to be held in the last week of March 2017. Engaged as all the nine nuclear-armed states are in nuclear modernisation, it is not surprising that this initiative is being led by a set of non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS), mostly from Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and some from Europe. The conference is the outcome of the UNGA resolution 71/258 that was adopted on 23 December 2016. The Resolution itself arose out of three meetings in 2016 of the Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) on disarmament. The OEWG was the result of the three conferences that were held as part of the Humanitarian Initiative (HI) since 2013. The HI brought focus to the fact that any nuclear detonation would be a catastrophic disaster beyond human handling capability. It also highlighted the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons given that the NPT itself does not delegitimise these weapons, certainly not for the five recognised NWS. It only prohibits their possession by the NNWS parties to the treaty. The nuclear ban treaty plans to plug this gap.

While the organisation of a conference to conclude such a treaty is by no means a trivial event, there are still many a slip between the lip and the cup of disarmament. For one, except for North Korea, none of the other eight nuclear-armed states has accepted the idea of the treaty. While China, India and Pakistan abstained on the UNGA resolution, France, Russia, UK, US (as also NATO allies and other states under the nuclear umbrella) opposed the Resolution. One of their major reservations arises from what such a ban would mean for extended deterrence. How will NNWS that join such a treaty but are in alliance with NWS reconcile both sides? Will the treaty restrict such an arrangement? Will states enjoying the benefit of extended deterrence be forced to choose between remaining in the alliance or joining the treaty? But, for them to join the treaty and abandon the nuclear umbrella without resolving their security concerns from nuclear weapons of adversaries would not be feasible. Japan and ROK face this dilemma. North Korea may have supported the Resolution, but whether it will join the treaty that outlaws its strategic assets appears unrealistic for now. So, what do Japan and ROK, and others like them, do?

A second limitation of the treaty is that it pitches itself as a normative treaty, rather than one that is able to enforce dismantlement of nuclear stockpiles in a verifiable manner. It only prohibits nuclear weapons without worrying about what happens to the existing stockpiles. This then is a less than optimal approach and certainly of a much lesser order than the more comprehensive, proposed model Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC). The NWC obliges NWS to destroy their nuclear arsenals in five phases – take the weapons off alert; remove them from deployment; de-mate them from the delivery vehicles; disable warheads; remove and disfigure pits and place fissile material under international control, besides prohibiting production of weapon-grade fissile material. It also envisages a dedicated agency to oversee the process and ensure compliance.

A third related problem comes up on how the nuclear-armed states themselves join the treaty. The treaty makes their nuclear holdings illegal, but the possessors are under no obligation to dismantle and destroy them. To have a treaty without verified dismantlement cannot be a serious move towards disarmament since it will not provide the requisite confidence to the nuclear possessors to downgrade nuclear weapons in their national security strategies. Banning the weapon without resolving these issues of insecurity will have its limitations. In contrast to this, in fact, is a far more practical Indian proposition that calls for a ban on the use or threat of use of the weapon. So, while the possession remains legal, the weapon serves no useful purpose since its use is illegal. Such an approach undercuts the salience of nuclear weapons and can be far more effective a step towards disarmament.

Given the above limitations of the proposed instrument, India has reservations about its ability to achieve the objective of an NWFW. While India wholeheartedly supports the cause of universal nuclear disarmament, it is not convinced that this is the way to do it. In fact, India believes that the means are as important as the end and this kind of a sledgehammer approach might not be the optimal way of doing so.

Nevertheless, India is maintaining an open mind on the issue, as was evident from its participation in the organisational meeting of the conference in February. It might not be a bad idea for India to sit in on the conference too. This would not only showcase India’s credentials regarding its steadfastness in exploring all avenues that can lead to an NWFW, but also provide it with a platform to voice its own concerns about the treaty, instead of the instrument being presented as a fait accompli. Disarmament is too important a matter to either be left alone, or be left to only a few.

Forecast 2017: India-US Strategic Partnership

Chintamani Mahapatra

The nature, intensity and direction of the US' relations with friends, foes, partners and the marginalised countries entered a period of unprecedented uncertainty with Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 US presidential election.

That Trump’s foreign policy approach would be drastically different from that of his predecessors’ was amply clear from the days of the election campaign. Trump fought the election on a platform that raised questions about the relevance of long-standing alliances; portrayed possibility of redefining the country’s adversaries; and held mere hopes of continuity of policy as far as Washington’s emerging strategic partnerships with some countries are concerned. 

India fits in the last category of nations. Since the post- World War II era, US-India relations have always been marked by highs and lows, and convergences and divergences. The Cold War calculations - and not the merits of bilateral relations - shaped the US' policy towards India during the approximately four decades of the Cold War era. However, the end of the Cold War too witnessed ups and downs in the relationship. 

It was only in the early years of the 20th Century, with the then US President Bill Clinton's visit to India that a new paradigm of US-India relations began to emerge. Months after Clinton’s India visit, the Democratic Party lost the 2000 presidential election and George W. Bush of the Republican Party became the US' president. For a brief while, it appeared that the new paradigm of US-India ties would die in its inception.

However, such apprehensions were misplaced and short-lived. Eight years of the Bush White House witnessed a carefully nurtured US relationship with India that cemented a strategic partnership with the conclusion of the Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation agreement. Defence and security cooperation between the two countries too tremendously improved with bilateral military exercises, trade in sophisticated arms and ammunitions, and defense technology transfer from the US to India.

The Obama Administration picked up the thread where his predecessor had left and the Indo-US strategic partnership witnessed vertical growth and horizontal expansion. There were several hiccups in the process but those were deftly handled and the strategic relationship did not get derailed.

Significantly, there was no indication at all during the 2016 election campaign that the outcome of the election would in any way negatively affect US-India ties. After all, bipartisan consensus on sustaining and improving Washington’s relationship with India has existed in the US for years. 

While Trump was by and large an outsider to the beltway foreign policy consensus and was not a mainstream Republican Party leader, even his statements and remarks displayed no sign that a Trump Administration would alter the US' policy towards India in any significant way. In fact, candidate Trump had aired many views against Pakistan, China and many other countries, but not against India.

Soon after Trump’s victory, the Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrated activism to engage with the new US Administration. India's National Security Advisor Ajit Doval landed in Washington to connect with the Trump transition team. While Prime Minister Modi and President Trump exchanged views over a phone call, news leaked that they invited each other to visit their respective countries. More recently, India’s Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar visited Washington to exchange notes with various branches of the US government with a view to further strengthen the India-US bilateral. Despite all these efforts, there are critical issues that may adversely shake the India-US strategic partnership, unless handled dexterously and in a timely manner. 

First, the economic nationalism of the Trump White House should not come on the way of Prime Minister Modi's “Make in India” initiative. Second, the Trump Administration's job creation and retention measures should not excessively hit the Indian workforce employed by American and Indian IT companies. Third, the Trump Administration’s Afghanistan policy should not clash with India’s core interests in that country. Fourth, the Trump Administration should keep the Kashmir issue outside his political bargaining with Pakistan. Fifth, the Trump Administration’s disproportionate confrontation or measured cooperation with China should not outshine or overshadow Washington’s policy towards this region. Last but not least, Trump’s immigration policy should in no way hamper the interests of the Indian-American community. A series of attacks on the Indian-Americans in the US threatens to weaken the very constituency that has become a social bridge linking peoples of both the countries. 

It must be noted that the above menu of issues is for both the US Administration and Indian policymakers to work on to manage the difficult political and bureaucratic transition in Washington and ensure that the India-US strategic relationship does not get negatively impacted.

A new wave of job cuts at Australian universities

Mike Head 

As the academic year gets underway this month, students and staff at Australian public universities face deteriorating conditions. Starved of funds by one government after another, university managements are decimating full-time jobs, reducing face-to-face teaching and driving up class sizes.

Deep funding cuts imposed by the last Labor government have been compounded by multi-billion dollar cuts inflicted by the current Liberal-National administration. This is forcing universities into further restructuring as they desperately compete with each other to enrol students, particularly full fee-paying international students, and attract corporate investment.

Toward the end of last year, a new wave of job cuts began across the country, mainly via so-called voluntary redundancy or retirement programs that are used to get rid of targeted workers. These schemes have the full agreement of the two trade unions that cover university workers, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU). What follows is only a partial list:

• Last November, the Queensland University of Technology said it would “purge” about 90 “underperforming” staff “whose aspirations no longer align with those of the university” because they were “not bringing in enough money.” Employees would be offered up to a year’s salary to quit with the help of a retirement tax package.
• A week later, Curtin University in Western Australia confirmed 100 to 150 staff were expected to be axed for 2017. Blaming the former mining boom state’s economic slowdown, the management said it planned to allow fixed-term, casual and sessional staff contracts to expire in humanities to offset decreased research and contract income in the science, engineering and humanities faculties.
• Later in the month, the University of Newcastle unveiled an “organisational review” that would involve about 170 redundancies—some 10 percent of its full-time and casual workforce. It was the 15th review or restructure in three years for what the vice-chancellor called “a changing academic enterprise.”
• Meanwhile, Western Sydney University (WSU) unveiled a “voluntary early retirement” package, through which it ultimately secured the departure of more than 200 selected academics and administrative workers.
• In early December, leaked documents revealed that over 400 job cuts were being planned at the University of NSW in Sydney as part of a further revamping of the university’s business model. A document called UNSW Strategic Initiatives Operational Excellence Business Cases Summary, sent anonymously to the NTEU, outlined annual cuts of $47.3 million, with severance pays calculated to reach $30 million.
• Just days into 2017, the University of Canberra College (UCC), an offshoot of the university, released a restructure plan that would “disestablish” unspecified numbers of jobs, in order to be “adaptable” and deliver “world class quality outcomes.” The changes stem from the sale of 51 percent of UCC to private education provider Navitas in 2015. Since then, many cost-cutting measures have been implemented already, leading to redundancies, vacant positions remaining unfilled, and significant increases in workloads.
• This week, Victoria University in Melbourne confirmed it would eliminate 115 jobs throughout the year as it establishes its planned First Year College.

Over the previous three years hundreds of full-time jobs have been axed nationally with the assistance of the NTEU and CPSU. While sometimes making token protests, the unions have stifled resistance, often securing deals with management to help impose marginally fewer retrenchments.

These cuts are escalating the casualisation of the workforce. According to the NTEU’s own estimates, only 2 out of 10 recent new employees have been employed on a permanent basis. By the union’s calculations, 63.8 percent of university staff are now working under insecure conditions. By 2015, 44.2 percent of contract research staff were employed on contracts of one year or less, and more than half the academics who taught undergraduate students were casuals.

This casualisation has serious impacts on the ability of teachers and other university workers—living from semester to semester and contract to contract—to survive financially, let alone plan for their futures. It also makes them highly vulnerable to demands for increased workloads and to acquiesce to the ongoing cuts and underlying transformation of universities into corporate institutions serving the needs of business and the political establishment.

Domestic and full-fee paying overseas students all face decreased availability of staff for consultation and guidance, combined with the replacement of lectures and tutorials by on-line presentations, and larger classes. Adding to these pressures is the soaring enrolment of international students, whom the systematically underfunded universities treat as cash cows.

According to recent official statistics, 712,884 international students were enrolled in Australian universities, vocational colleges, intensive English-language courses and schools in 2016, up by 11 percent from 2015 to a new record. Higher education enrolments rose by 12.9 percent to 306,691, making up more than a quarter of the students at some universities. Universities, private education companies and related operators raked in $22 billion from these students in 2016, while slashing their workforces.

The complicity of the NTEU in these processes is typified by an email sent to its members at WSU on January 31, in which it reported that more than 200 jobs had been eliminated via the “voluntary” retirement scheme. It emphasised: “Just to remind and to clarify: the NTEU does not contest the right of WSU Management to restructure its workforce, so long as it follows the provisions of the Agreements. Effective change management requires the contribution of frontline staff in decision-making.”

In other words, the union supports the job destruction. Its only demand is that the university executives consult with it, as specified by the unions’ enterprise agreements, to ensure “effective change management.” For the past two decades, enterprise agreements have served as mechanisms to contain and suppress the opposition of university workers, with the unions continually “trading off” essential protections against job cuts and casualisation.

During 2017, a new round of enterprise bargaining will occur, with universities demanding the further elimination of job security and other basic conditions. At WSU, where the NTEU has previously agreed to new employees being placed on two-year probation periods, the administration wants to speed up procedures for sacking staff on grounds of misconduct, ill health, poor probation assessment or “unsatisfactory” performance. At Melbourne’s Deakin University, the proposed agreement would increase academic teaching loads by up to 80 percent and require academic staff to teach every trimester. Melbourne University is demanding a “performance pay” regime for general staff.

While collaborating with university managements, the unions are stepping up their efforts to sow illusions that the return of a federal Labor government would reverse this downward spiral. In fact, it was the last Greens-backed Labor government of 2007 to 2013 that imposed the “education revolution,” laying the foundations for the intensifying assault on staff and students.

Garbage dump landslide kills over 110 in Ethiopia

Eddie Haywood 

In the early morning hours of March 11, a devastating landslide swept through the Koshe Garbage Landfill located on the outskirts of the capital city Addis Ababa, burying a number of makeshift homes under tons of refuse, claiming scores of lives and leaving many others injured.

On Thursday, emergency workers at the landfill told reporters that the death toll had reached 113 and was expected to climb. As many as 150 people are believed to have been at the site at the time of the landslide. Several days after the catastrophe, rescue efforts were still ongoing.

The landfill at Koshe has been the dumping ground for Addis Ababa for over five decades, and is home to some of the poorest residents of the city. Makeshift houses for these residents were constructed from cardboard and other debris found in the dump. On any given day, as many as 500 people make a living scavenging through the garbage dump.

The slums surrounding the massive garbage dump are home to the most economically marginalized and poorest Ethiopians.

Survivors of the landslide reported that the government was slow to organize a rescue operation. When rescue workers were finally dispatched to the landfill residents began to voice their outrage at the government’s slow response, pushing and shoving rescue workers.

“Nobody is helping us. We are doing all the digging ourselves. It is shameful,” Kaleab Tsegaye, a relative of one of the landslide victims, told Reuters.

Werknesh, a mother who had resided at the landfill for 30 years, told Voice of America that she had lost six family members to the landslide, including her pregnant daughter and three grandchildren.

“Our children are covered under the soil,” she said. “It sounded like an explosion, and then covered everyone with soil. There are bodies that have not been found until now.” Werknesh criticized the governmen’s slow response, saying, “The government didn’t even order an excavator. I had to pay for an excavator out of my own pocket.”

Excavation operations at the dump have recovered many of the dead. Tebeju Asres, a resident at the landfill observing a backhoe moving a mass of refuse, told the New York Times, “My house was right inside there. ... My mother and three of my sisters were there when the landslide happened. Now I don’t know the fate of all of them.”

The likely cause for the landslide appears to be the development of the site as a source for alternative energy. Construction of a biogas plant near the dump has involved the laying of pipe around and underneath the large landfill, causing massive destabilization underneath the location of many of the makeshift shanties where most of the landfill dwellers reside.

The city government is now moving to utilize the tragedy of the landslide to forcibly relocate the landfill’s surviving residents. Decades-long squabbles between residents and the city have resulted in occasional violent clashes between the landfill dwellers and city officials, who have given the landfill over to wealthy interests wishing to develop the site as a source for the production of methane gas as an alternative fuel for electricity.

UK-based Cambridge Industries, the corporation that owns the biogas plant, is under a government contract to develop the site as a source of methane gas, making the claim that methane produced from the dump can give electrical power to as much as 25 percent of Addis Ababa’s four million residents.

Cynically, the national government of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn declared a three-day nationwide mourning for the victims of the landslide. Desalegn, briefing members of the Ethiopian parliament, expressed his “deep condolences” to the victims of the landslide.

Koshe, which in local slang translates to “dirt,” perfectly encapsulates the government’s callous outlook toward the denizens of the landfill.

The deplorable economic conditions for the informal residents at Koshe are by no means isolated. The majority of Ethiopians live under conditions of extreme poverty, with some 78 percent of Ethiopians subsisting on $2 a day or less. According to Oxford University, Ethiopia ranks number 10 out of the world’s 10 poorest countries.

According to the nonprofit organization the Borgen Project, life expectancy at birth in the country is at an extremely low 59 years. Only about 34 percent of Ethiopia’s rural population has access to improved water sources. Preventable diseases, including malaria, account for 60 percent of all health problems. Illiteracy grips two-thirds of Ethiopians, underscoring the lack of social spending on education for the masses.

At the other end of the scale, there has been an obscene accumulation of wealth for the richest Ethiopians. Just one man, Ethiopian businessman Mohammed Hussein al Amoudi, has amassed a personal wealth of over $10 billion. Additionally, Ethiopia has one of Africa’s highest rates of GDP growth. According to the World Bank, national output grew by $60 billion between 2004 and 2014. Ethiopia, like most of Africa, is rich in vast economic resources, but those resources are controlled by a handful of the wealthiest Ethiopians.

The Ethiopian elite have been faithful servants to Washington and its agenda for the Horn of Africa, deploying the country’s military forces to wage bloody wars in Somalia and South Sudan, two countries that are integral to Washington’s aim of isolating China’s growing economic influence on the continent, which is seen as a threat by the US elites.

The landslide tragedy at Koshe demonstrates that the capitalist government in Addis Ababa is unable to guarantee safe housing, let alone provide even the paltriest relief for the victims of the latest disaster. In a world driven by capitalism’s unquenchable appetite for profit, such disasters will remain a permanent feature of everyday life for the world’s working class and poor.

Amid economic disaster, Brazilian unions promote Lula da Silva 2018 presidential bid

Miguel Andrade

On Tuesday, March 7, the Brazilian Statistical and Geographical Institute (IBGE), the country’s official demographic and economical metrics organ, published its comprehensive annual economic report on fiscal year 2016, revealing the deepening extent of Brazil’s economic crisis.

The GDP fell 3.6 percent, compounding the 3.8 percent fall of 2015, bringing the country’s economy back to its 2010 level. The two-year fall is also the sharpest since the IBGE began keeping records in 1948, confirming the current crisis as the worst in a century.

It was also the first time since 1996 that industry, agriculture and services had simultaneous declines, with a combination of a fall in international demand and severe draughts in the north as well as frosts in the south bringing agricultural output down by 6.6 percent. The 3.8 percent drop in industrial output follows a 6.6 percent drop in 2015. Against this backdrop, Brazil’s investment rate stands at 16.4 percent of GDP, the worst figure since current metrics were adopted in 1995, with a fall of 28.6 percent since 2013.

Nonetheless, most revealing is the acceleration of the fall in household consumption, from a 3.9 percent drop in 2015 to a 4.2 fall in 2016, a sharp exposure of the long-term effects of the crushing unemployment level, which officially has reached a record of 13 million workers, or 12 percent of the workforce. The category of “broad unemployment,” according to a January Credit Suisse report which includes workers who have abandoned the search for a job due to persistent unemployment, includes 23 million workers.

The fall in consumption brought inflation to its lowest level since 2000, at the end of the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC), which followed the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund, waging a class war against workers with a policy of currency devaluation, privatizations and mass unemployment that shattered wages and buying power across the board and led to the electoral victory of the Workers Party (PT) in 2002.

The dismal economic figures will almost certainly accelerate the drive by the current government of President Michel Temer to sell off the country’s assets, an increasingly difficult task in the face of the sharp drop in expected profits amid the ongoing crisis. On March 15, Folha de São Paulo reported that three companies had dropped their bids in the privatization of northeastern airports previously considered “highly lucrative” due to the possibility of concentrating the linking of flights between South America and the northern hemisphere. The public sale of management rights over four major airports was completed on Thursday, March 16.

The Temer government is compounding sweeping attacks on social rights in the form of Labor and Pension “reforms” aimed at raising retirement age and casualizing work relations with radically pro-imperialist measures, such as the sale of key energy and transport infrastructure and allowing foreign companies to own land. The Brazilian bourgeoisie is rapidly dispensing with even the pretense of the “national independence” policies touted by the Workers Party government during the heyday of the commodity boom of the early 2000s.

After breaking the monopoly of the state-run oil giant Petrobras over the unexplored deep-extraction (so-called pre-salt) oil fields off Rio de Janeiro’s and São Paulo’s coast, in late February, the Temer administration imposed upon the government of the state of Rio the sell-off of its water and sewage infrastructure under the threat of financial strangulation, later hailing the maneuver as a model for the whole country.

But as a matter of fact, virtually every measure imposed by the Temer administration had already been initiated by the Workers Party governments of presidents Dilma Rousseff and previously that of Lula da Silva.

The privatization of all the commodity-oriented infrastructure—ports, railways, channels—initiated by the Workers Party government faces challenges similar to those in the airport sector. On March 8, the influential financial daily Valor Econômico ran a lengthy interview with the former transport and ports secretary under Rousseff, Cesar Borges, in which he complained about the reluctance of the current Temer administration to include pension funds and public banks in the privatized infrastructure expansion as had previously been decided under the PT government.

The nationalist, and at times even “anti-imperialist,” pretenses of the Workers Party policies are further exposed by the fragility of the economic growth under its rule. The PT’s policies amounted to little more than putting the whole state apparatus behind a handful of “national champions”, or private Brazilian monopolies such as the building company Odebrecht and its oil subsidiary Braskem in order to beat the competition for Chinese demand and, during its heyday, in securing projects from Africa to the Caribbean and South America.

As many of these companies’ CEOs are now in jail awaiting trial on corruption charges, the combination of economic crisis following the deceleration of the Chinese economy and ongoing corruption investigations into the criminal methods employed by these companies is considered “a major risk” in several Latin American countries by the Eurasia Group think-tank, Valor Econômico reports. Local governments are now trying to compensate with their own funds for the abandonment of projects by Odebrecht, and the think-tank estimates that the impact of the Odebrecht crisis and withdrawal on Peru’s economy alone could amount to 1 percent of the country’s GDP.

A further study made public by Credit Suisse on March 7 in the wave of reports that followed IBGE’s announcement points to the fragile base of the economic growth under the PT: all the productivity gains of the Lula presidency were reversed under Rousseff, and workforce productivity in Brazil is today the same as in 1980. The annual rate of growth under Lula between 2002 and 2010 was furthermore even lower than under FHC in the 1990s, a period of mass unemployment and deindustrialization.

Nonetheless, as anger grows in the working class with the state of the economy, with the unions forced to call a one-day partial general strike on Wednesday, March 15, all the PT-aligned press has switched to full “volta Lula” (come back, Lula) mode, all but launching his 2018 presidential run. Widowed in early February after his wife Marisa Letícia suffered a stroke, Lula da Silva is now due to return as president of the PT and inaugurate his 2018 presidential bid. To that end, the whole PT-aligned apparatus is now preparing a sharp turn to the right and setting up an opposition to Temer almost exclusively along fraudulent nationalist lines.

The PT-aligned Carta Capital magazine is leading the charge. The tone of the PT’s criticism of Temer was made clear in a high profile interview published by the magazine last October with the economist and historian Pedro Cezar Fonseca, a scholar specializing in the period of the fascist dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas—often described as the Brazilian Peron—with the title “The Temer project shakes the foundations of capitalism”. The interview amounted to a recipe for the PT to “save Brazilian capitalism from itself”, to paraphrase the infamous words of former Greek Syriza finance minister and pseudo-left star Yanis Varoufakis.

Linking together Rousseff, Lula, the overthrown 1960’s president João Goulart and Vargas, Fonseca says: “the breadth of the political and economic building of Vargas shows a conscious development project”. Temer’s policies, on the other hand, are compared to the entreguista (subordinate to foreign and particularly US foreign capital) economic policies of the military dictatorship of 1964-1985 and the bourgeois opposition to Vargas in the 1940s and 1950s.

Along similar lines, on January 19, PT economist Marcio Pochmann declared that Donald Trump’s election in the US demanded the ability exhibited by the dictator Vargas to engage in “brinksmanship,” which he said Temer lacked. The references are even clearer if one considers that Lula himself has for a long period flirted with the image of Vargas and other caudillos like the Argentine Juan Domingo Perón, and has stepped up the comparison following his detention in 2016 and later Rousseff’s removal.

On the other hand, disapproving references to the 1964 coup didn’t stop the same Carta Capital from lining up with the military, on February 16, opposing the Temer government in the name of “national sovereignty” in the land owning rights debate, and later on March 3, opening up its pages to the vice-president of the São Paulo Industrial Federation (FIESP) to defend the Workers Party industrial policy.

The drumbeat reached its highpoint on March 15 when the “united front” of unions and pseudo-left parties summoned delegations of workers from throughout the state of São Paulo in a 100,000-strong demonstration after the partial general strike to listen to Lula’s demagogic speech in São Paulo city’s main thoroughfare, Paulista Avenue.

The Brazilian pseudo-left has also in this process abandoned any pretense of opposing the PT. It’s chief demand since 2016 has been a united front of the union federations tightly controlled by the PT, the Stalinist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), the Morenoite United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) and the bourgeois Democratic Labor Party founded by Getúlio Vargas in the 1940s.

This policy is all the more criminal in face of the PT’s sharp turn to the right and the deep international crisis, which is producing gains for the far right in country after country. These gains are the direct outcome of the disorientation produced in the working class by the warfare against it carried out by the official “left”, be it the PT and the “chavista” or “Bolivarian” governments of Latin America, the Social-Democratic and Socialist parties in Europe or the pro-Wall Street Democratic party in the US.

Netherlands: Following elections, estabablishment parties shift to the right

Peter Schwarz

Leading European politicians welcomed the election results in the Netherlands as the end of the series of successes by right-wing, nationalist movements that began with the Brexit vote in the UK and continued with the election of Donald Trump as US president.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker described the result as an “inspiration.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel called it “very pro-European,” and French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron said the feared victories of the right wing could be stopped.

Others emphasized how important it was to sharply oppose right-wing populists. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader in the German parliament, Thomas Oppermann, said, “Rudeness needs to be answered with more rudeness. We must directly confront demagogues like [Geert] Wilders.” Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) leader Horst Seehofer said it was worth something when a head of government took a stand “against incitement and right-wing extremism.”

In reality, the rise of nationalism and xenophobia has not been halted in the Netherlands. It is only developing through a different form. Instead of primarily proceeding through right-wing populist parties, it is now developing within the establishment parties—both those on the right as well as those nominally on the left.

The neoliberal Peoples Party of Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of Prime Minister Mark Rutte has “defeated” the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) of Wilders by adopting its xenophobic programme. Britain’s Guardian wrote of a “pyrrhic victory”: “Rather than challenge racists, Rutte has boosted their confidence, pouring arsenic into the water supply of Dutch politics.”

Other Dutch parties have similarly moved far to the right. For example, the conservative Christian Democrats (CDA) conducted their election campaign with the demand that the school day start with the singing of the national anthem while standing. In the election, the CDA finished in third place, just behind Wilders’ PVV. It is expected to join the next government.

The ex-Maoists of the Socialist Party also supported these nationalist and xenophobic sentiments.

Even the right-wing British tabloid the Daily Mail remarked, “If this stuff had been peddled by Mr. Trump, there would have been howls of liberal anguish from the usual quarters. But it is now part of mainstream Dutch discourse.”

It is above all this shift to the right that, besides Rutte’s support for the European Union, is being met with enthusiasm and support in other European countries.

In Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung cited Rutte’s deliberately provoked conflict with the Turkish government as proof “that liberal European democracies cannot be straitjacketed by autocrats.” Rutte had shown himself to be a statesman “who sets limits on Erdogan.”

It is undeniable that Rutte’s provocation against the Turkish government was an attempt to stir up nationalist sentiments and to overtake Wilders from the right just three days before the election. He denied entry to the Turkish foreign minister and had the Turkish family minister forcibly escorted to the border to prevent her speaking to an audience of fellow Turks about the constitutional referendum in Turkey.

This deliberate provocation was greeted with enthusiasm throughout Europe, also by Greens and supposedly left-wing politicians. For example, the former German Green Party Chairman Claudia Roth spoke in favour of banning Turkish politicians: “Now it is important that we clearly define the rule of law.”

Left Party parliamentary group chair Sahra Wagenknecht called on the German government to “finally show its true colours.” Merkel and Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel had the ability to stop Erdogan’s propaganda tour, she said, “just like the governments of Austria and the Netherlands have done for their countries.”

Many observers have now concluded that after the election in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen “still has a good chance of becoming French president,” as Spiegel Online writes. “Her Front National [FN] is anchored much more deeply in many social layers in France, is politically friendlier and more capable of winning a majority than the one-man party of the shrill Wilders in the Netherlands.”

Large banks and fund managers have apparently also drawn similar conclusions, since they assess politics according to their future profit prospects. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that “global financiers line up to engage with Le Pen.”

Analysts from UBS, BlackRock and Barclays, among others, have met with representatives of the FN to discuss its economic plans. The same applies to representatives of several dozen governments, including the US, Argentina, Sweden and Denmark. The chief strategist of the FN, Florian Philippot, has spoken recently with diplomats from five European and three Asian countries.

Wilders and other right-wing demagogues are only a symptom, not the cause of the turn to the right by bourgeois politics. The cause lies in the deep crisis of the capitalist system. Decades of welfare cuts and the enrichment of a tiny minority at the expense of the majority, along with increasing global conflicts, have generated economic and social tensions that cannot be overcome by democratic methods.

This finds its sharpest expression in the collapse of parties that had earlier preached social conciliation and then organized massive social cuts. The Dutch Social Democratic Labour Party (PvdA), the former coalition partner of Rutte’s VVD, saw its vote collapse. It lost 29 of its 38 seats, and now only has just 9 deputies in the new parliament.

Those that have benefited from this collapse and the losses of Rutte’s VVD (-8 seats) include the Christian Democratic CDA (+6) and the liberal D66 (+7), as well as a number of smaller parties. Wilders’ PVV was also able to increase its seat total from 15 to 20.

With the exception of the ultranationalist Forum for Democracy (2 seats), the smaller parties all advanced social demands or opposed xenophobia. For example, the immigrant party Denk (in Dutch: Think!, in Turkish: Equality) won three seats, the Pensioners’ Party 50+ won two seats, and the animal rights party PvdD three seats.

The Greens (Green-Left) increased the number of its deputies from 4 to 10. Under its 30-year-old leader Jesse Klaver, who has Moroccan and Indonesian roots and is compared alternately with the US Senator Bernie Sanders and Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau, the Greens have sought to present a more cosmopolitan appearance.

But none of these parties has an answer to the social crisis. They all support the capitalist system and seek to prevent an independent socialist movement of the working class. The Greens might even become part of the next government, in order to lend a more “youthful” face to the right-wing policies of the old parties.

Saudi king postpones visit to Maldives

Rohantha De Silva 

As part of a month-long tour of Asia, the Saudi monarch, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, was due to visit the small Indian Ocean archipelago of Maldives this weekend, accompanied by an entourage of more than 1,000, including 25 princes and 10 ministers.

In this first-ever visit by a Saudi King, Riyadh was to announce investments of $US10 billion, three times the Maldives’ gross domestic product (GDP), underscoring the importance Riyadh places on its ties with Maldives.

The trip was cancelled yesterday on the pretext of an outbreak of influenza. The decision, however, reflects deep divisions in the ruling elite in the Maldives and mounting geo-political tensions in the region.

Sharp differences emerged over the Saudi investment, mainly between President Abdulla Yameen and the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) led by former President Mohammed Nasheed. The tensions relate to geo-political rivalry between the US and India on one side and China on the other. Maldives is strategically located southwest of India, near important sea lanes from Middle East and Africa to Asia and Australia.

According to unconfirmed reports, the Saudi government plans to buy one of Maldives’ atolls, Faafu—a collection of 19 low-lying islands, 120 kilometres south of the capital Malé and home to 4,000 people. Since a constitutional amendment in July 2015, foreigners can buy Maldivian land, rather than lease it for up to 99 years, if the investment is at least $1 billion. Yameen has denied selling an entire atoll to the Saudis, but no details of the negotiations have been released.

With US imports of oil from Saudi Arabia declining by 40 percent during past 15 years, Riyadh is keen to boost its sales of oil and gas to China and other East Asian countries, and increase the security of the trade route. Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and China were also part of the king’s Asian tour.

To placate Riyadh, Malé severed ties with Iran last May and joined the Saudi-led Islamic military alliance. Riyadh plans to develop a Special Economic Zone in Faffu, to help reduce its dependence on oil revenues. The projects reportedly include a sea port, airports, state-of-the-art facilities, sophisticated medical infrastructure, educational institutions and tourism-related centres to attract thousands of tourists from the Gulf States.

With these investments, Yameen is trying to strengthen his hand against his political rivals, including Nasheed and Yameen’s half-brother and long-time Maldives ruler Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Though they were bitter enemies a few years back, Gayoom and Nasheed joined hands last September against Yameen.

Nasheed, working as a stooge of the US and other Western powers and also India, criticised the Faafu deal, saying it was “disturbing.” Saudi Arabia wanted “a base” in the Maldives, he said, to safeguard its trade routes and locate “strategic installations.”

Having been ousted in 2012, Nasheed is trying to return to power by overthrowing Yameen with the support of the US, UK and India. The US and its allies are hostile to Yameen because of his close ties to China, not his anti-democratic record.

In 2015, Nasheed was sentenced to 13 years in jail for arresting a criminal court judge while in office. He was released in January last year under pressure from the US and Britain. After travelling to London, supposedly for medical treatment, Nasheed launched a campaign against Yameen, mainly denouncing his links to China.

Still in exile, Nasheed plans to contest the 2018 presidential elections. In an interview with the Times of India on February 19, he said: “We believe that India has a moral obligation to facilitate inclusive, free and fair elections in the Maldives.”

Though New Delhi is concerned about the increased Chinese presence in the region, it is moving cautiously, worried that more pressure may push Male closer to Beijing. On a visit to Maldives on February 22, Indian Minister of State M. J. Akbar voiced his appreciation for the Yameen government’s “India First” policy.

Sections of the Indian capitalist class are concerned that Saudi Arabia’s relations with Maldives will cut across its interests. A report by Fristpost.com analyst Shantanu Mukharji on March 6 noted: “Saudi-Maldives collaboration leads to suspicion that Islamic forces may see a visible reinforcement or there may be a renewed radicalisation within the Maldives.”

Published by the industrial conglomerate Indian Reliance Industries, Fristpost proposed: “Perhaps a time has come for Maldives to accept one who can oversee the issues and whose advice comes handy to address matters of security,” as in Mauritius, which “has an Indian national security advisor with an intelligence background.” Mukharji added: “Nasheed is the only pro-India leader who can scuttle such deals and keep Indian interests paramount, but chances of his coming back to the political arena look remote.”

Relations between India and Maldives were strained when in 2012 Male cancelled a $271 million contract granted to Indian company GMR group to develop and operate the Ibrahim Nasir International Airport, saying it compromised national security and sovereignty. The contract was granted by Nasheed’s government in 2010 for 25 years, extendable for another 10 years.

India first tried to work with Yameen and signed a military pact, “Action Plan for Defence Cooperation” last April. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi then boasted about India’s role as a “net security provider” in the Indian Ocean region, but New Delhi’s attempt to bring Maldives into its orbit failed.

While trying to maintain diplomatic ties with the US and India, Yameen’s government is more oriented toward Beijing, and depends heavily on Chinese investment and concessionary loans. Chinese firms leased the Feydhoo Finolhu Island for 50 years for $4 million to develop a tourist resort, close to Malé, with plans to increase annual tourist numbers to 1.5 million.

Chinese Exim Bank granted a $373 million loan to develop Malé airport in 2015 and build a bridge between Malé and the Hulhulé islands, to be completed in 2018. The $210 million project is being constructed by Chinese CCCC Second Harbor Engineering Company, despite protests that it could destroy waves in this popular surfing area.

Chinese ambassador Wang Fukang told a New Year news conference in Malé: “Maldives is an important partner in the Maritime Silk Route project.” He added: “Maldives supports the ‘One-China’ policy and Chinese policies regarding the South China Sea.”

Beijing sees Maldives as part of its “String of Pearls” strategy that, together with the land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt,” seeks to link the Eurasian landmass, as well as Africa, both by land and sea, to counter the US strategic offensive against China.

The principal US Indian Ocean base, Diego Garcia, lies 1,000 kilometres south of Malé, making Beijing’s growing influence a serious concern in Washington. With these tensions aggravated by President Donald Trump’s belligerent “America First” program, the region has entered into an explosive situation.

Assault on boat off coast of Yemen kills over 40 Somali refugees

Niles Niemuth

An Apache gunship opened fire on a boat carrying Somali refugees off the coast of Yemen early Friday morning killing at least 42 people and wounding dozens of others.

The boat, which came under attack 30 miles off the Yemeni coast, was reportedly ferrying more than 100 men, women and children to Sudan.

Bullets from the attack helicopter riddled the boat ripping through the passengers, many of them women and children. Pictures posted online show the bloodied bodies of the victims being brought ashore. A number of the wounded taken to hospital were missing arms and legs.

Al-Hassan Ghaleb Mohammed, the boat’s pilot, told the Associated Press that the panicked passengers scrambled to hold up flashlights in order indicate that they were migrants and stop the surprise attack. All of those on the boat had official documentation from the UN Refugee Agency certifying that they were refugees.

As of this writing, no government has claimed responsibility for the attack, but it was most likely carried out by the Saudi-led coalition which has been waging a brutal war against Yemen for the last two years. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are currently the only militaries flying Apache helicopters in the region, and there were reports of intensified airstrikes in Hodeida Thursday night.

Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, with direct military support from the United States, have been waging a brutal war against Houthi rebels who seized control of much of western Yemen in 2015 and ousted the US and Saudi-backed president Abd Rabbu Hadi.

The Saudi-led offensive has so far killed more than 10,000 civilians, targeting hospitals, schools, factories, market places, farm fields and social infrastructure with airstrikes in an effort to break the Houthi’s resistance. A naval blockade of Yemen by the coalition, enforced with the support of the US Navy, has pushed the country, which imported 90 percent of its food stock prior to the war, to the brink of famine.

The US has been waging its own war in southeastern Yemen since 2009, launching drone strikes against targets and individuals purportedly affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Trump administration has ramped up the offensive begun by Barack Obama which has already killed hundreds of people, including women and children.

Friday’s attack highlights the historic humanitarian crisis which is engulfing a significant portion of the African continent and Middle East, stretching from the Lake Chad region in West Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. The UN warned earlier this week of the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II as 20 million people in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria face imminent starvation.

Civil wars stoked by the US government and its European allies combined with historic drought conditions are pushing millions across the Africa continent to flee their homes. It is estimated that at least 5.5 million African are refugees in other countries, and another 11 million are displaced within their own countries.

Even with the ongoing war, which has pushed the country to the brink of a famine, Yemen remains one of the most popular destinations for refugees fleeing war and famine in Somalia. At the end of February there were nearly 256,000 UN recognized refugees from Somali living in Yemen; this was second only to the more than 317,000 in Kenya.

Tens of thousands of people from across the Horn of Africa transit the Bab el Mandeb strait every year in order to reach the poorest country in the Middle East. Many of those who flee to Yemen end up in the Khazar refugee camp, a former military barracks located in a hot, desolate desert region two hours north of the southern port city of Aden.

While most intend for Yemen to be a temporary transit point, many thousands have been stuck at the Khazar camp for years on end. The camp currently holds 16,000 people, mostly from Somalia and Ethiopia.

With few employment opportunities for African refugees in Yemen, those who are physically able make the increasingly treacherous trek onwards to Europe. Hundreds of Somali refugees drowned in the Mediterranean in 2016 desperately trying to reach Italy.

Trade talks in Chile on continuing TPP without the US

James Cogan

Talks were held over March 14 and 15 in the Chilean city of Viña del Mar over whether the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) can be renegotiated and proceed without the United States. In one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump announced that the US was withdrawing from the proposed trade bloc.

Under the terms of a February 2016 agreement, the TPP could only continue with the participation of at least six of the 12 countries that signed up to it, representing at least 85 percent of the combined Gross Domestic Product of the original prospective members. As the US represents 61 percent of the collective GDP, the actions of the Trump administration effectively killed the pact.

Representatives of the other 11 intended founding members—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam—nevertheless gathered on the basis that years of negotiations should not be cast aside. In most cases, the states sent senior trade or economic ministers, and sizeable delegations of officials. South Korea and China were invited to participate, though China sent only its “special representative” to Latin America, not a high-ranking trade official.

The Trump administration contemptuously sent Carol Z. Perez, the US ambassador to Chile who has no background in trade negotiations, to observe the proceedings.

None of the governments involved expected a definite outcome and none was achieved. The talks concluded with only a general agreement that there should be further negotiations in May, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Vietnam.

A statement issued after the talks expressed mutual “concern with protectionism in many parts of the world”. This was an implicit but clear reference to the Trump administration’s threats to wage an “America First” trade war against major US competitors and to possibly ignore future decisions of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

For all the profession of concern over protectionism, however, the most obvious feature of the Chile summit was the manner in which it was used by various states to pursue their own national agendas.

Tim Groser, New Zealand’s ambassador to the US and former trade minister who represented it in initial TPP talks, summed up the standpoint of all participants. He stated bluntly: “At the end of the day we’re all economic nationalists. Our responsibility is to look after our own country’s economic interests.”

In January, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull floated the possibility that if China and other major economies, such as South Korea, agreed to join, then a revamped TPP could be formed.

The Chinese government has made clear that it has no interest in Turnbull’s suggestion as it opposed the sweeping provisions of the TPP that stipulate the privatisation of state-owned assets, lifting limits on foreign ownership, enforcing intellectual property rights and opening up financial and service sector markets.

Ahead of the Chile talks, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop commented: “The TPP set a very high standard in terms of a free trade agreement and I don’t think we should expect that China is currently in a position to meet that standard.”

Chinese representatives in Chile instead promoted the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a proposed Asia-Pacific trade agreement that does not contain many of the TPP’s provisions and which excludes the US. Talks on the RCEP, involving China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India and all 10 member-states of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), have dragged on since November 2011.

Japan appears to have been primarily concerned with arguing that countries should not sign up to the Chinese-initiated RCEP until Beijing agrees to incorporate a range of the measures required for TPP membership. Japanese officials displayed far more interest in sideline talks on bilateral free trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and the South American states present.

Canada, for its part, used the meeting not only to pursue a free trade agreement (FTA) with Japan, but to further talks toward a possible agreement with China.

With the TPP effectively dead in the water, Australia’s trade minister likewise focussed on talks toward  bilateral agreements with the Pacific Alliance states—Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru. Australia already has bilateral free trade agreements with New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, Japan, South Korea, China and a more limited pact with ASEAN. It is pursuing agreements with India, Indonesia and the European Union.

Politico commentator Adam Behsudi drew attention on March 14 to how the US withdrawal from the TPP—on the eve of it being enacted—will allow other countries to expand their market share in Asia at the expense of American-based producers, particularly in areas such as agriculture.

New Zealand dairy exporters, for example, will increase their already significant competitive advantage over US rivals through a soon-to-be-finalised free trade agreement with ASEAN. Under the Australia-Japan FTA, tariffs on Australian beef will be slashed this year by another 10 percent, but not for American beef as it would have through the TPP. According to estimates by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the TPP could have enabled US exporters to win some $4.4 billion in new markets.

Even in more strategic economic sectors, such as finance, service industries and manufacturing, the nationalist agenda of the Trump administration may prove highly costly to American corporations. Its stated goal of “renegotiating,” in US interests, the terms of its trade relations with Canada and Mexico, Japan, South Korea, China and the European Union, and possibly even countries such as Australia and New Zealand, implies protracted negotiations that may well break down.

Politico cited the observation of Carlo Dade, of the Canada West Foundation economic think tank, on the possible consequences. “We are not trying to take market share from the US,” he stated. “It’s more like you are putting money on the table and pushing it towards us.”

The inevitable heightening of trade conflicts over market share and sources of profit, above all between the US and the other major powers, will only fuel antagonisms and accelerate the descent of world capitalism toward military conflict and war.

India: Framed-up Maruti Suzuki workers sentenced to life imprisonment

Keith Jones

Thirteen Maruti Suzuki autoworkers were sentenced to life in prison by an Indian court on Saturday. Four others have been given five-year prison terms, and 14 more sentenced to three-year jail terms.

The workers are victims of a monstrous frame-up mounted by the automaker, the police and judicial authorities, with the full complicity of India’s principal political parties—the Congress Party and the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The 13 workers condemned to life in prison include the entire leadership of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU). The MSWU was established by workers at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar, Haryana car assembly plant in opposition to a stooge union that had connived with the company in their brutal exploitation.

The workers have been framed for a 2012 company-provoked altercation and fire that resulted in the death of a company human resources manager.

“The victim Awanish Kumar Dev was beaten brutally and he could not escape from the fire because of the injuries inflicted by the accused,” claimed prosecutor Lal Singh at a sentencing hearing Friday, at which the prosecution demanded capital punishment for the 13.

Justice R.P. Goyal did not condemn the 13 workers to execution—a penalty the prosecution itself said should be reserved for the “rarest of the rare cases.” But a life sentence in an Indian prison, where living conditions are deplorable and prisoners are routinely beaten and otherwise abused, is tantamount to a slow death.

Many of the workers were previously subjected to torture, including severe leg stretching, electric shocks and water immersion, carried out in an attempt to extract forced confessions.

All 31 workers are the victims of what an MSWU press release has aptly described as “class justice.”

The Indian state and political establishment were determined to impose savage punishments on the Maruti Suzuki workers to intimidate workers in the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt and across India and reassure investors that the Indian elite will ruthlessly enforce sweatshop conditions.

In 2011, the Manesar assembly plant emerged as a centre of militant opposition to low wages, a brutal work regimen and the widespread use of contract and temporary labour—conditions that prevail throughout India’s new, globally connected industrial sector.

In defiance of the government-recognized stooge union and against the counsel of the traditional labour federations, the Manesar assembly plant workers mounted a series of walkouts and sit-down strikes in the summer of 2011. Their determined stand galvanized support from workers across the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, a huge auto-making and manufacturing centre located in Haryana state, on the outskirts of Delhi, India’s capital and largest city.

Little more than a year after the first strike mounted by the MSWU’s short-lived predecessor, the MSEU, Maruti Suzuki and the state combined forces and used the July 18, 2012 altercation and fire to launch a vendetta against the most militant workers. While police arrested MSWU leaders and other militants on the basis of company-supplied lists of “suspects,” Maruti Suzuki management, with the explicit backing of the Congress Party-led Haryana state government, purged its workforce. Prior to reopening the plant, which was partially destroyed by the fire, the Japanese-owned automaker dismissed and replaced more than 2,300 permanent and contract workers.

On March 10, more than four-and-a-half years after their arrest, a Gurgaon District court pinned criminal responsibility for the July 18 events on the 31 workers. All 12 members of the MSWU executive and the worker whose abuse by a Maruti Suzuki labour contractor triggered the altercation on the plant floor were found guilty of “culpable homicide” (murder), attempted murder and other offences. The 18 others were convicted on multiple charges, including intentionally causing hurt, rioting and destroying property.

In reaching these verdicts, the court had to wilfully ignore its own finding that there had been collusion between the police and Maruti Suzuki management and fabrication of evidence.

So transparent was the frame-up, the court had to exonerate 117 other workers in its March 10 judgement, declaring all the charges against them without foundation.

Prosecution witnesses repeatedly failed to identify those against whom they had given evidence.

Moreover, defence lawyers showed that 89 of the workers had been arrested on the basis of names provided police in alphabetically organized allotments by four Maruti Suzuki contractors and ostensible eye-witnesses to the July 18, 2011 events. Thus, all the “rioting workers” that one witness reputedly saw had names with a first letter from A to G. Another only “saw” rioters with names in the G-P range, and so on.

There were another 11 workers against whom there were no witnesses whatsoever.

The 117 exonerated workers spent years in jail, because the prosecution, in flagrant contradiction to standard Indian practice, vehemently opposed their bail applications. Up to their acquittal earlier this month, the prosecution continued to insist that they were all guilty of grave crimes.

The evidence against the 31, including the 13 now condemned to life imprisonment, is not of a qualitatively different calibre. It too is full of inconsistencies, holes and obvious fabrications.

But from the start, what has motivated the company-state vendetta against the Maruti Suzuki workers is base class interests. With the prosecution case in tatters, the court acquitted some of the workers in the hope that it would thereby be able to enhance the legitimacy of, and move forward with, the frame-up against the MSWU leadership.

The pivot of the state’s case is the fire. But the prosecution was not able to provide any direct evidence linking any worker, let alone any of the 13 convicted of murder, to the lighting of the fire. They have never conclusively established where the fire began or how it was lit. Hours after the initial search of the fire site, investigators claimed they had found a match box that was mysteriously unscathed by the flames that had consumed all around it. This match box, in any event, has never been tied to any worker.

Underscoring the unstinting support of the political establishment for Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest automaker, the frame-up of the Manesar Maruti Suzuki workers was begun under Congress Party-led Indian and Haryana state governments, and has seamlessly continued under the BJP-led governments that later replaced them.

There is broad support and sympathy for the victimized and persecuted Maruti Suzuki workers in the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt. On Saturday, just hours after Judge Goyal delivered his punitive sentences, workers in four major Manesar factories, including Maruti Suzuki’s Powertrain plant and a Suzuki Motorcycle plant, staged a one-hour “tool-down” strike.

Fearing mass worker protests against the frame-up, the Gurgaon District authorities have invoked Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code, illegalizing all gatherings of five or more persons until next Saturday, March 25.

On Thursday, during a brief period when Section 144 was not in effect, up to a 100,000 workers in the Manesar-Gurgaon industrial belt boycotted lunch and dinner at over 50 plants in a show of solidarity.

While the Indian state and political establishment have stood four-square behind Maruti Suzuki and the frame-up of the militant Manesar workers, the union federations have systematically isolated the Maruti Suzuki workers.

The Stalinist-led All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) have maintained, for the past four-and-a-half years, a criminal near-silence about the state-company vendetta. They have urged the MSWU and the victimized workers to expend their energies appealing to the big business politicians and courts for “justice,” and have vehemently opposed a strategy for their defence based on the mobilization of the industrial strength and independent political power of the working class.

The frame-up of the Maruti Suzuki workers exemplifies the worldwide assault on autoworkers and the working class as a whole. With the support of the big business politicians and the state, the transnational auto companies are imposing sweatshop conditions, and not just in their newly opened plants in India and Mexico, but also in the traditional auto centres of North America and Europe.

Workers across India and around the world should come to the defence of the framed-up Maruti Suzuki workers, to force their immediate release, the vacating of all guilty verdicts and the reinstatement of all the workers purged in 2012.

The building of an international defence campaign can be a powerful step in developing a united global struggle of autoworkers against the transnationals to secure the jobs and basic rights of all workers.