Strike continues at Peru’s largest copper mine in defiance of government

Cesar Uco & Armando Cruz 

A strike by 1,300 workers at the Cerro Verde mine, Peru’s largest copper mine, has entered its third week, continuing in defiance of a government decree declaring the action illegal.

On March 10 the Cerro Verde workers called a one-week strike demanding a bigger share of the the mine’s profits, which have been low for the last two years, better family health care benefits and the inclusion of workers in the investigation of work-related accidents.

Within the first week of strike, the government’s Labor Regional Management declared it illegal because the union didn’t submit the dispute to the judiciary. The decree allows the owner, the US-based transnational mining company FREEPORT-McMoRan, to fire workers indiscriminately.

The communiqué declaring the strike illegal was dated March 13. But on March 11, the government entity presented its decision to the company, while waiting one more day to tell the striking workers.

This maneuver gave the company a one-day heads-up to hold discussions with the union leadership before the official announcement to the rank-and-file, a clear attempt to negotiate a settlement without the authorization of the striking workers.

But miners responded to the government’s outlawing of their walkout by turning it into an indefinite strike, while issuing calls for the nationwide miners union to call out all miners in a united strike against the government and the capitalist owners. Miners at the Milpo, Buenaventura, El Brocal, Simsa, Minera Raura and Shougang Hierro Perú mines have all staged strikes over the past 12 months.

The decision to call the indefinite strike in event of the government outlawing their action had been taken by the workers when they began the one-week walkout.

With a 22 percent share of annual national copper production, Cerro Verde is Peru’s biggest producer of the mineral. Its main shareholder is the Phoenix-based Freeport McMoRan (FMCG)—reportedly the largest publicly traded copper producer—with the Japanese Sumitomo Metal Mining and the Peruvian Buenaventura company, of the powerful Benavides family, also owning substantial shares.

According to Bloomberg News, “the Cerro Verde mine produced 500,000 tons of copper in 2016, more than double its 2015 output due to an expansion in its operations.” In 2016 it also extracted gold and molybdenum.

FMCG has a worldwide presence and a world of troubles as result of the five-year slump in the price of copper that forced down the company’s profits and left it unable to meet contractual requirements in its operations in Indonesia, Congo and Zambia. In August 2016, a Chilean miner died at Freeport’s El Abra copper mine “after an accident at its acid unloading terminal, forcing a halt to some operations,” Reuters reported.

There has been a recent rebound of copper prices which is attributed to strikes at Chile’s Escondida mine and Indonesia’s Grasberg mine, the world’s first and second largest copper mines. The financial markets have also apparently factored in President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to rebuild American infrastructure. Since Trump won the presidency, the price of copper has recovered 7 percent.

At Cerro Verde, which is located in 50 kms from Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city, the company has sent in strike-breakers and contract workers to operate “key areas” of the mine, according to Bloomberg, but it is only producing half as much as usual.

The union has asked the company to stop production during the strike and charged that the strike-breakers and contractors are being forced to work exhausting 12-hour shifts on jobs for which they are untrained and are operating heavy machinery, violating the the company’s own health and safety rules.

During the first week of strike, two strike-breakers who worked on contract died. According to Reuters “the machinist Winston Arratea Ale (27) died yesterday morning in the interior of the ammonium nitrate plant… Apparently, an electric belt cut his left arm and injured other parts of his body.Then, Frank Axel Cohen Ruiz died and Basilio Olazábal was hurt in another accident that is being investigated.”

A union representative declared to the Arequipa online journal El Búho that Olazábal has been threatened with criminal charges by the company, which is trying to frame him up for the other worker’s death. But Olazábal declared to the police that the order to operate in a dangerous area came from the top executives in the company, despite warnings from the workers.

According to the Peruvian daily La República: “The miners’ spouses came out to protest yesterday and threatened to go with their children. An average of 100 women protested against what they considered was an abuse from Cerro Verde.

“They are not giving the full work insurance to our husbands, they don’t pay overtime work, they don’t recognize rights and on top of that they cannot complain because they get fired,” said one of the protesters, Carmen Julia Alarcón.

According to Cerro Verde union leader, Zenón Mujica—a senior bureaucrat in the Federacion Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalurgicos y Siderurgicos del Peru (FNTMMSP)—all miners in the country face similar attacks on wages and benefits.

Similar struggles have unfolded elsewhere in Latin America. According to a Reuters report Thursday, “The strike at Chile’s La Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine, is ending after 43 days, when workers decided to invoke a rarely used legal provision that allows them to extend their old contract, the union said on Thursday.” The move followed another failure of talks between the union and the multinational mining firm BHP Billiton. The miners will keep their benefits, but forfeit their demand for higher pay.

“The workers said they would present their decision to the government on Friday and return to work on Saturday,” Reuters reported.

The struggles of the Cerro Verde and La Escondida miners were very similar. Both are the largest copper producers in their respective countries, capable of moving world copper prices. Both are owned by large multinationals, and both launched indefinite strikes due to their being forced to bear the burden of falling copper prices on the world market. And in both strikes, the corporations brought in strike-breakers.

The nationally-based union bureaucracies in Chile and Peru, however, did nothing to bring the struggles of these two powerful section of the world mining workforce together, even as the transnational miners very consciously attempt to pit one section of workers against another.

In the meantime, the decision to outlaw the strike by the Peruvian government of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK), a former Wall Street banker, has only served to even further discredit his administration, which unfailingly sides with foreign investors in placing the burden of the world economic crisis on the shoulders of the working class.

During the first week of the Cerro Verde strike, PPK’s government was working on “new rules that aim to turn around the three-year slump in mining investment by eliminating permit requirements for exploration projects,” the energy and mines minister told Reuters on Monday.

In 2014, the government of President Ollanta Humala came to an agreement with Cerro Verde exempting the mining company from paying taxes until 2028. But once the US company started operations in new fields that were not covered by the government agreement—production of the primary Sulphide Flotation Plant—the Peruvian Tax entity, SUNAT, came to the conclusion that Cerro Verde owed 286 million nuevos soles (US$ 88 million). The total amount rose to 800 million nuevos soles (US$ 246 million) based on legal charges before the Peruvian judiciary.

While the demand for a nationwide strike to defend wages and basic rights raised by the Cerro Verde miners enjoys substantial popular support, the mine union leadership has no intention of leading a serious struggle against the government and the mining conglomerates.

The historic record of trade union and communal protest leaders in the southern region of Peru, especially in the mining sector, has been one of consistent betrayal. In July 2015, during the Tia Maria mining conflict, the WSWS reported “the release of an audiotape in which a man identified as Tambo Valley Defense Front director Jose ‘Pepe Julio’ Gutierrez is heard soliciting a US$1.5 million bribe to be split three ways between himself, Deán Valdivia’s Mayor Jaime de la Cruz and Tambo valley farmers’ board president Jesus Cornejo.” The revelation effectively halted the ongoing struggle of the Tia Maria workers and peasants.

Union leaders in other industries—especially in construction—are engaged in corruption schemes, charging “cupos” (kickbacks for “protection” to construction companies) and engaging in a war for contracts using hitmen to eliminate rival union leaders.

The Federacion Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalurgicos y Siderurgicos del Peru (FNTMMSP) bases itself on an explicitly national syndicalist program that is oriented to the bourgeois government of Peru. In order to defeat transnational corporations in the epoch of globalization, what is required is the unity of all workers employed by the same industry regardless of nationality. The struggle of the Cerro Verde miners in Peru must be joined with those of miners in Indonesia, Congo, Zambia, Chile and the United States in a common battle against the transnational miners and the profit system.

General strike declared in French Guyana

Kumaran Ira

A few weeks before the French presidential elections, French Guyana is paralyzed by a general strike. Strikes and road blockades have been ongoing for a week in this French overseas department in South America, bordering Brazil, based on demands on health, education, economy, security and housing.

Protests by health care, transport and energy workers are demanding jobs, pay increases and improvements to the quality of public services. After a week of strikes and demonstrations, largely launched independently of the union bureaucracy, the 37 unions gathered in the Union of Guyanese Workers (UTG) union federation voted to hold a general strike starting today.

At the same time, significant protest movements are mobilizing farmers and agricultural labourers in solidarity with the workers. In recent days, they have set up dozens of roadblocks that control strategic intersections in several cities, including the entrances to the cities of Cayenne, Kourou, Rémire-Montjoly and Saint-Laurent du Maroni.

A dozen roadblocks and strike action are paralyzing the Cayenne airport. A Paris-Cayenne Air France flight had to head back to Paris after four hours flight time when the General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC) radioed that it could not land in Cayenne airport due to a shortage of staff.

Striking electricity workers, Kourou hospital workers, and workers of the Endel corporation have blockaded the entrance to the Guyana space centre in Kourou. They were thus able to prevent the launching of the Ariane 5 rocket, the heart of Guyana’s economy, scheduled for March 21. “Due to a social movement, it was impossible to carry out the transfer operations of the launcher of the Final Assembly Structure (BAF) towards the launch area scheduled for today,” Ariane-Space declared in a statement.

Strikers also blocked the commercial port, the local authorities, the police prefecture and major roadways. Farmers are blockading the Agricultural Directorate’s buildings. Guyana’s schools, junior high schools and high schools have been closed by the authorities “until further notice.” University students are reportedly joining the protests.

The strike reflects deep social anger that is building among workers and oppressed social layers after five years of austerity under the Socialist Party (PS) government of President François Hollande. In this department of 200,000 people, 22 percent of workers (18,000 people) are jobless. Youth aged 15 to 24, who make up 46 percent of the unemployed, are the worst hit.

Speaking to France-Info, Senator for Guyana Antoine Karam said there was in Guyana “more insecurity than in the major cities inside France itself.” He added, “nearly 30 percent of the population does not have access to either drinkable water or to electricity, but on the other hand we have a space station.”

He also pointed to “murder, and armed robbery” in Guyana, claiming, “People will carry out murder for 20 euros, a jewel or a mobile phone.”

Guyanese people underscored their deep disappointment with the Hollande administration and the French government. Hollande promised a Pact for the Future of Guyana, which is still not signed.

Maud, 29, a teacher at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, told RMC: “Everyone has had it. People feel that no one ever talks about them, but that the situation is truly catastrophic. The Guyanese people have the impression that they have been abandoned by metropolitan France. They do not feel they are treated equally as compared to other departments.”

A month before the presidential elections, which are taking place amid explosive social anger in France, the PS government will seek to rapidly end the strike in the overseas department, before it triggers solidarity protests and strikes inside metropolitan France.

On Saturday, the PS government sent an inter-ministerial mission composed of high-ranking administrators to try to find a compromise.

“I call for healing, I call for calm, I call for dialogue, because nothing can ever be built through disorder and confrontation,” declared French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. “We have taken measures so that dialogue can begin in Guyana, and so that we can take the measures that should be taken as quickly as possible.”

Speaking to AFP, Overseas Territories Minister Ericka Bareigts called for the ending of the blockades: “The situation is still tense. We do not have unscheduled blockades, but the situation remains complicated.” She said the inter-ministerial mission should examine protesters’ demands “in the short and medium term.”

Workers in struggle can give no confidence either to Hollande’s ministers or to the union bureaucracies negotiating with them. A class gulf separates the trade unions from the workers. Far from leading the struggle, the unions called a strike a week after the movement had begun, posturing as a friend of the movement all the better to strangle it. All the unions fear a confrontation between the working class in Guyana and across France and the deeply unpopular PS government, which the unions defend.

The delegation from Paris will try to make the smallest possible concessions to end the movement with proposals for a few administrative measures. At the same time, the security forces will try to penetrate and intervene in the movement to sow demoralization and stir up divisions, and possibly to provoke fights in order to justify police repression.

As the protests began, members of the newly created “500 Brothers” collective marched in the streets of Cayenne, dressed in black and wearing ski masks. This organization, whose identity is not clearly established, advances right-wing demands for a struggle against delinquency and advocates “the eradication of squatters” and “maintaining a unit of mobile military police as back-up.” Their spokesman is Mickaël Mancée, whom several press reports have described as a “policemen currently available for service.”

“If we did not shock people, no one would ever have heard anything about us,” Mancée replied to a question from journalists who were comparing his organization to a paramilitary militia. Speaking to Vice News, Mancée said, “A dead thief is a thief who does not steal anymore” and threatened that “if petty criminals want war, we will wage it.”

Aiming to end the movement, the PS government plans to rely on the unions to do what is needed to isolate and ultimately strangle the strike, possibly after extended negotiations. Despite the enormous social anger against austerity and the state of emergency in mainland France, the Guyanese unions are not calling for solidarity actions from workers there. They are doing everything they can to isolate strikers in Guyana, block a political struggle against Hollande, and thus force workers to accept the result of their negotiations with the PS.

This offers nothing to the workers, who can only defend their interests by taking their struggle out of the hands of the unions. Unemployment and poverty are not temporary ills due to administrative mismanagement, but the result of the bankruptcy of capitalism after a decade of deep economic crisis and of the PS’ reactionary policies. The only way forward is to appeal on a socialist and revolutionary perspective to the working class, both in France and across Latin America, for support and solidarity action in a struggle against the PS government.

Senate votes to repeal FCC internet privacy regulations

Bryan Dyne

With virtually no public discussion, the US Senate voted Thursday to repeal a set of internet privacy regulations passed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last October.

If passed by the House of Representatives and signed into law by President Donald Trump, the legislation will allow internet service providers such as AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon to sell private communications information to the advertising industry and any other buyers, unimpeded by any sort of regulatory oversight.

The repeal was passed by the Senate using powers outlined in the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which gives Congress the authority to eliminate rules and guidelines passed by federal agencies before they go into effect. The use of the CRA will also prevent the FCC from passing “substantially similar” regulations in the future, essentially giving these companies free reign in regards to the data they collect from their users.

While the CRA had only been used once before 2017, early in the George W. Bush era, it has been used multiple times by the new Congress and the Trump administration to attack other federal regulations.

The FCC ruling, set to go into effect at the end of this year, requires companies that provide internet access to receive explicit consent from their customers in order to use and share any personal information they collect, including things like financial information, browsing history and location. It would also allow customers to revoke their permission for companies to use what was deemed “non-personal” information, such as the level or types of service a given individual receives.

In theory, the ruling was designed to uphold the idea of net neutrality, that no company should have the capability to dictate what users do on the internet or to use information collected by virtue of supplying internet access for profits. However, the exceptions clause put in by the FCC was vague enough to make the measure largely toothless. In addition, without intimate access to each company’s own infrastructure, the FCC has no way to monitor and enforce what policies it adopted.

Despite this, however, the regulations were denounced by groups like the Direct Marketing Association and others in the media and advertising business for stifling growth opportunities in these various industries. They claim that since websites like Google and Facebook already collect consumer data and use it to generate advertising revenue that other telecommunications companies should be able to do the same.

Rather than being a democratic demand, this is an attempt by what were once largely phone or television companies to cash in on the revenue stream that companies like Google and Facebook make through targeted advertising. For example, Google made $17.3 billion in revenue in 2015, of which $15.5 billion was from advertising sales.

The reason Google, along with Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have made such huge amounts of money from advertising is that they are able to take the information they collect about a person’s online habits and generate ads that target said person’s interests. While the algorithms that make targeted ads are not always correct, they are far more lucrative than serving the same ads to everyone and the algorithms are constantly being improved.

A company like Comcast, however, has an advantage that a website like Google does not. Google is only able to collect data when a person is using a Google device (like an Android or Chromebook) or using an internet browser. In contrast, Comcast is able to collect every bit of someone’s internet activity. This includes if someone is using an email client, logging on to a private network, playing an online video game, getting updates to programs or operating systems, using an instant messenger and the myriad other ways people use the internet.

Moreover, Comcast also provides phone, television and even home security services. Phone calls can be recorded, and voicemails are recorded, stored and converted into text. Television viewing habits are noted. It is even possible, with the sort of data Comcast collects, to figure out someone’s work schedule. Given that it is likely that the FCC rules will be fully struck down, these companies will be able to sell all of this information, allowing advertisers to escalate targeted advertising from internet browsing to television and beyond.

What will happen to all this information if one of these companies is hacked? The amount of information they are poised to start selling is even more invasive and private than what is collected by Google, et. al. What are the guarantees that this information will not be compromised or leaked and exposed for all to see?

More importantly, however, is the relationship between these companies and the state. As exposed by the Snowden revelations, organizations like the National Security Administration collect internet traffic both by tapping into the physical infrastructure of the internet as well as asking the various Silicon Valley companies to share the data they collect. Once the FCC ruling is struck down, the US intelligence agencies will have access to even more ways to spy on the population.

Of course, such invasive surveillance by the US government could already be occurring, though the leaks of the past five years have not yet indicated this. However, knowing the history and relationships between these companies and the US government, such collusion is no doubt at least being planned as the alliance between corporations and the state strengthens.

Scandal exposes Japanese government’s ultra-right ties

Peter Symonds

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is embroiled in a widening scandal over his alleged involvement with a private elementary school project in Osaka by Moritomo Gakuen, an extreme-right educational organisation. The allegations, which also involve Abe’s wife Akie, have contributed to falling opinion polls for Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government.

In sworn testimony to the Japanese parliament last Thursday, Moritomo Gakuen head Yasunori Kagoike added further fuel to the controversy swirling around Abe. He confirmed he received a sizeable donation for the school from Abe via Akie in September 2015. “She said ‘please, this is from Shinzo Abe,’ and gave me an envelope with 1 million yen ($US9,000) in it,” he said.

Abe flatly denied making a donation. However, Kagoike declared: “Abe’s wife apparently says she doesn’t remember this at all, but since this was a matter of honour to us, I remember it quite vividly.” Akie was named as “honorary principal” of the school until she abruptly resigned after the scandal broke.

Whether or not money changed hands, Abe and his wife are clearly in sympathy with Moritomo Gakuen’s curriculum and methods. While the school project has been shelved, the organisation already operates a kindergarten in Osaka in which young children are required to recite the Imperial Rescript on Education—a 19th century edict issued by the Emperor calling for loyalty and filial piety and hailing the glory of the Japanese empire. The school has been accused of sending a letter to parents expressing hatred toward Koreans and Chinese.

The alleged donation is not strictly illegal, but the controversy first erupted in February over allegations that government influence was enabling Moritomo Gakuen to purchase land for the new school at a fraction of its worth. Kagoike testified in parliament last week he believed some sort of political intervention took place as the process began to move more rapidly after he began asking for assistance.

Kagoike later told the media he believed finance ministry officials, whom he did not name, helped in the sale, but he did not think Abe was directly involved. His organisation bought the land for 134 million yen (about $1.2 million) or about one seventh of its assessed value—supposedly discounted to cover waste disposal costs. Kagoike defended the discount, claiming it needed “a lot of money to take out the household waste in the land and replace it with good soil.”

The scandal has drawn in other political figures close to Abe, providing a glimpse of the network of right-wing nationalist organisations connected to his government. Defence Minister Tomomi Inada was forced to apologise to parliament and retract a statement that she had never represented Moritomo Gakuen in court. As a lawyer, Inada appeared in court on its behalf in 2004, and defended other extremist organisations in high-profile cases.

Three other politicians—two from the LDP and one from the ultra-nationalist Nippon Ishin—denied assisting Moritomo Gakuen after being named in parliament last week. In Osaka, the organisation asked the prefectural government to relax the restrictions on setting up private schools, which was granted in April 2013 when Ichiro Matsui, a close political ally of Abe, was governor.

Abe and the overwhelming majority of his cabinet, including Defence Minister Inada, are members of Nippon Kaigi, an extreme nationalist organisation that seeks to re-establish Japan as a “proud nation.” It promotes the necessity for a strong military, the writing of the constitution to remove restrictions on the armed forces and patriotic education, whitewashing the crimes of Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Moritomo Gakuen head Kagoike was a member of Nippon Kaigi but claims to have left in 2011. He boasted that the school he planned to establish would be the first Shinto primary school in Japan with a shrine housed on the grounds. The organisation claimed the shrine would help connect the school and “the roots of our country.” Shintoism was the state religion of the pre-World War II militarist regime in Japan that revered the emperor as a god.

The Imperial Rescript on Education was a key element of this militarist ideology, read in schools and enshrined alongside a portrait of the emperor until after the war. The document refers to the people of Japan not as citizens but “subjects of the emperor” and declares: “Should an emergency arise, muster your courage under a cause and dedicate yourselves to the good of the Imperial state.”

During the post-war US occupation of Japan, the parliament officially repudiated the rescript as incompatible with the country’s democratic constitution. Successive governments have held that the imperial edict was invalidated by the adoption of the Fundamental Law on Education. The promotion of the rescript is part and parcel of efforts by government-linked organisations such as Moritomo Gakuen and Nippon Kaigi to whip up patriotism and militarism.

Since coming to power in 2012, Abe has taken significant steps to remilitarise Japan. These include boosting the military budget, removing constitutional constraints on “collective self-defence”—that is, participating in US-led wars—and establishing a US-style National Security Council to centralise military strategy, planning and operations in the prime minister’s office.

Abe has also encouraged an ideological offensive designed to cover up the past crimes of Japanese imperialism and stir up militarism, particularly among young people. Significantly, Defence Minister Inada has repeatedly defended the use of the imperial rescript in schools. Asked about it in parliament in February, she declared: “I don’t agree with the education ministry saying that there’s a problem having students memorise the rescript by heart.”

The revival of Japanese militarism is another sign of the deepening crisis of Japanese and global capitalism, which is fuelling geo-political tensions and the drive to war. The Abe government’s determination to rearm reflects the sentiment in ruling circles that Japanese imperialism must be able to use all means, including military, to prosecute its economic and strategic interests against its rivals.

Growing divisions, war threats loom over EU summit in Rome

Alex Lantier

On Saturday, European Union (EU) heads of state met in Rome, celebrating 60 years of the 1957 Treaty of Rome that founded the European Economic Community, in an exercise designed to highlight the continuing unity of continental Europe despite Britain’s vote to leave the EU last June.

In the event, the summit highlighted instead the growing international conflicts and class tensions that are tearing the EU apart. The 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome could very well be its last. Amid growing concerns that France could elect a neo-fascist president in May and then leave both the EU and the euro currency, leading European officials of all political stripes pointed to the rising danger of war and collapse of Europe. Nonetheless, none of the EU leaders can formulate a clear plan to avoid plunging into the abyss.

Thousands of Italian troops put central Rome on lock-down over the weekend amid official fears of mass protests against the EU, whose austerity policies have devastated Italy. Moreover, differences between EU, Polish, and Greek officials forced EU officials to water down the final communiqué, to avoid the humiliation of having it repudiated by EU member states.

Poland’s far-right Law and Justice (PiS) government opposed references to the formation of a “two-speed Europe,” split between wealthier countries and a periphery of southern or eastern states. The EU has threatened to suspend Poland’s EU voting rights over the PiS’ attempts to emasculate the judiciary, amid a bitter struggle for influence between Berlin, London and Washington in Poland. The PiS apparently feared calls for a “two-speed” EU would be used to marginalize it.

The Coalition of the Radical Left (“Syriza”) government in Greece briefly demanded that the draft communiqué contain provisions on social rights and on handing back power to national parliaments. This was apparently a temporary tactic by Syriza, which faces strikes of port and public sector workers against it in Greece, as well as EU threats to withhold loans to Greece unless it accelerates its austerity measures against the population.

In the event, the communiqué that was adopted epitomized the EU’s response to Brexit: the EU is trying to survive as a coalition of nationalist, anti-immigrant regimes held together by aspirations to become an aggressive military bloc rivaling the United States.

On military policy, it called for a “stronger Europe,” “creating a more competitive and integrated defence industry” and “strengthening [the EU’s] common security and defence.” It also called for continuing EU anti-immigrant policies—which have seen thousands drown in the Mediterranean, as millions flee imperialist wars in Africa and the Middle East—so that EU “external borders are secured, with an efficient, responsible and sustainable migration policy.”

Perhaps most significantly, the EU signaled that it would move away from trying to secure unanimous agreement on policy among EU member states. While the formal endorsement of a “two-speed Europe” arrangement was eliminated at Poland’s insistence, it was replaced with a vague proposal to “act together, at different paces and intensity where necessary, while moving in the same direction.”

However euphemistically formulated, the adoption of a “two-speed” Europe policy marks a major step in the disintegration of the EU, with vast and unforeseeable implications.

The limited post-World War II integration of capitalist Europe was the European bourgeoisie’s response to fascism and two world wars that had claimed tens of millions of lives, leveled much of the continent, and discredited capitalism in Europe. Prosperity from increased trade within Europe was intended to fend off the political challenge posed in the working class by communism, exemplified in the continued existence of the USSR. At the same time, the bourgeoisie saw the pursuit of a united European policy, financed with US aid, as critical to avoiding new wars in Europe.

The preamble to the 1957 Treaty of Rome signed by Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg reflects this long-abandoned strategy. Calling for “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe,” it pledges to ensure the “economic and social progress ... by common action to eliminate the barriers which divide Europe” and “the constant improvement of the living and working conditions” of European people.

Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the EU’s establishment in 1992 in the Maastricht Treaty, the EU has repudiated these conceptions. The NATO wars in the Balkans in the 1990s and above all the latest war drive against Russia, after the announcement of German re-militarization in 2014, went hand with accelerating austerity measures targeting basic social rights won by the working class in previous decades of struggle.

These took the sharpest form in Western Europe with EU austerity measures imposed after the 2008 Wall Street crash that devastated Greece and led to threats to expel Greece from the euro zone.

Deep political shocks are exposing the underlying bankruptcy of the EU and the unviability of attempts to unify Europe on a capitalist basis. With Brexit and the coming to power in Washington of the Trump administration, which has denounced the EU as a tool of German domination, the crisis of the EU has reached a new level of intensity. Even those sections of the European still defending the EU now aim to divide Europe in order to sideline, or even expel from the EU, those European countries that they see as an obstacle to their plans for war and austerity.

Significantly, while figures from all sides are warning of war, no one is trying to articulate a policy to maintain European unity and halt the rapid drive towards war. Instead, the gloomiest predictions prevail. Last week, pro-EU French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron predicted an era of war and pledged to bring back the draft in France, before enthusiastically endorsing a “two-speed Europe” proposal and declaring his alignment on Berlin.

Several EU heads of state met prior to the summit with Pope Francis, who declared that Europe faces a “vacuum of values. … When a body loses its sense of direction and is no longer able to look ahead, it experiences a regression and, in the long run, risks dying.”

Prior to the summit, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker gave an interview to the Financial Times of London to denounce the Trump administration and warn of war in the Balkans. He called Trump’s support for Brexit and Trump’s calls for other countries to leave the EU in order to escape German domination “annoying” and “surprising.”

“I told the [US] vice-president [Mike Pence], ‘Do not say that, do not invite others to leave, because if the European Union collapses, you will have a new war in the western Balkans,’” Juncker said. He added that the prospect of EU membership was one of the few elements preventing a new war in the Balkans: “If we leave them alone—Bosnia Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, Macedonia, Albania, all those countries—we will have war again.”

In the UK, leading pro-EU Conservative Michael Heseltine issued a denunciation of Brexit, warning that it would only pave the way for German domination of Europe.

Heseltine said, “Our ability to speak for the Commonwealth within Europe has come to an end. The Americans will shift their focus of interest to Germany. And if I can put it to you, for someone like myself, it was in 1933, the year of my birth, that Hitler was democratically elected in Germany. He unleashed the most horrendous war. This country played a unique role in securing his defeat. So Germany lost the war. We’ve just handed them the opportunity to win the peace. I find that quite unacceptable.”

The UK Independence Party asked if Heseltine had “lost his marbles” and called his statements extraordinary. “If I was German I would be deeply offended,” a UKIP official said. “I never realised the purpose of Britain’s membership of the EU was to stop German domination of Europe.”

G20 conflict over protectionism: From post-war to pre-war capitalism

Nick Beams

While the dispute was over the words to be included in a communiqué, the decision by the G20 finance ministers meeting last weekend, at the insistence of the United States, to drop a previous commitment to “resist all forms of protectionism” has more than symbolic significance.

Following the meeting, the general consensus among the other powers was to downplay the significance of the split, at least publicly, in the hope that the situation could change by the time of the G20 leaders’ summit in July, by which time the Trump administration would have had sufficient time to “learn.” But given the US president’s strident assertions of “America First” and his denunciations of the present trading system as unfair to the US, that hope seems like whistling in the dark.

Summing up the meeting, the Financial Times pointed to the longer-term implications of the protectionism decision, saying that the rest of the G20 will be hoping in July that “the US has decided what it wants to do with its role in a world order it has done more than any country to shape.”

The FT here points to the broader significance of the events of last weekend. The post-World War II economic and trading order, constructed in the main by the US, as the newspaper noted, was the product of a concerted push to prevent the kind of protectionist and trade war measures that produced such devastating consequences in the 1930s, contributing to the conditions that led to World War II.

As the war drew to a close, with the victory of the Allies only a matter of time--not least due to the enormous blows inflicted on the Nazi regime by the Red Army of the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the fighting on the European continent--the most important economic issue confronting the US ruling class was how to prevent a return of the conditions of the 1930s.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the ruling classes of Europe had barely avoided being overturned by socialist revolution. This was due in the initial period to the lack in the rest of Europe of the type of revolutionary leadership provided by the Bolsheviks in Russia, and then subsequently to the betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Germany, Spain and France.

There was a recognition in ruling circles in Washington that if Depression-type circumstances returned after the economic boost provided by war spending wore off, the conditions would emerge for social revolution in Europe and the US itself.

The establishment of the post-war order, which led to a capitalist boom, rested on two foundations--one political and the other economic.

Political stability was provided by the Moscow bureaucracy, which, in return for recognition of its control of the buffer states of Eastern Europe, guaranteed that the imperialist powers would remain in control in the West. Acting on the orders of Moscow, the Communist Parties of France and Italy, both of which had a mass following, opposed socialist revolution on the grounds that after fascism the task was the restoration of bourgeois democracy.

Having contained the post-war upsurge, US imperialism was able to use its great economic strength--at one point it was responsible for half the world’s industrial output--to establish the foundations for capitalist expansion.

The Marshall plan, initiated 70 years ago this June, which provided funds for the reconstruction of Europe, and the establishment of an international monetary system based on the US dollar, agreed to at Bretton Woods in 1944, restabilised the world capitalist economy.

A no less important component was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which came into effect at the start of 1948. It was based on the recognition that international economic stability above all required the end of the tariff and currency wars of the 1930s.

While it did not initiate a regime of completely free trade, the basis of GATT was that trade arrangements had to be multilateral and that exclusivism had to be eschewed at all costs, lest it lead to the formation of rival currency and trade blocs. Tariff concessions had to be made across the board, with concessions offered to one country extended to all.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were a series of trade rounds in which tariff barriers were reduced, and the GATT system played no small role in ensuring expanding trade and markets.

The first shock to the system came on August 15, 1971, when the US, in response to a worsening balance of trade, removed the central pillar of the Bretton Woods monetary arrangements, declaring that henceforth it would no longer redeem US dollars for gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. Responding to the shock this display of unilateralism produced, US Treasury Secretary John Connally famously told Japan and the European powers that the dollar may be “our currency, but it’s your problem.”

The ending of the Bretton Woods system was a reflection of deeper problems within the global capitalist economy. It marked the end of the post-war capitalist boom, and the 1971 decision was followed in 1974-75 by the deepest global recession to that point since the 1930s, followed by a further recession in 1981-82.

Political stability was shaken by an upsurge of the international working class, beginning with the May-June 1968 general strike in France, which extended until 1975. Capitalist rule was restabilised only by the betrayals of the working class by the Stalinist Communist Parties, together with the social democratic and trade union apparatuses.

On the basis of these betrayals, international capital was able to carry out a vast restructuring of economic relations. It sought to overcome the downturn in profitability, which had brought the end of the boom, by what has now become known as the globalisation of production, in which capital, using the vast developments in computerisation and information technology, exploited cheap sources of labour around the world.

Globalisation, however, had major political consequences. The development of the productivity of labour it entailed made completely unviable the nationalist economic program of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, based on the dogma of “socialism in one country,” leading to their dissolution in 1989-91.

The international bourgeoisie greeted the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the historic and final victory of capitalism and liberal bourgeois democracy. But, as the International Committee of the Fourth International alone explained, the demise of the USSR removed one of the key pillars of the post-war order.

The Stalinist regime in Moscow, with its ingrained hostility to socialist revolution, had functioned as a key component of the mechanisms of the capitalist world order. Its dissolution, arising from the autarkic conditions bound up with the Stalinist bureaucracy’s anti-Marxist and nationalist program of “socialism in one country,” was an initial and concentrated expression of the intensifying conflict between world economy and the nation state system. That contradiction would exert itself with increasing force on the entire capitalist world.

The 25 years since the dissolution of the USSR have not brought a new era of capitalist peace and prosperity, but an endless series of wars and mounting instability and crisis in the world economy, leading to the financial breakdown of 2008.

Post-war stabilisation rested on the economic dominance of the United States. But the past half century has seen American capitalism’s ongoing economic decline relative to its rivals and a weakening of its global position.

This has found its reflection not least in the sphere of trade. In 1995, GATT was replaced by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the establishment of a series of rules and mechanisms for resolving disputes. The intention was that the global rounds, initiated under GATT, would continue.

But growing tensions, arising not least from perceptions by the US that the system was increasingly working against it, have made that impossible. The so-called Doha Round, begun in 2001, has collapsed, with no prospect of being revived.

In the past quarter century, global trade agreements have been replaced increasingly by multilateral or bilateral agreements, raising the ever greater threat of the fracturing of the world market. The inherent logic of such agreements was expressed by the Obama administration, which maintained that its 12-member Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which excluded China, was aimed at placing the US at the centre of a “web” of trade and investment. Such an American-based system was already a far cry from what the US had sought to establish after the war. Its stated objective, according to Obama, was to ensure that the US, not China, would write the trade rules of the 21st century.

But even as it pursued this exclusivist policy, the Obama regime continued to adhere, at least verbally, to the previous framework. Now, confronted with the steady loss of American economic dominance, the Trump administration has gone a step further. While it has scrapped the TPP, it has taken its essential logic to a new level by threatening to overturn the entire system and resort to “America First” policies based on bilateral agreements.

No one, of course, can predict the exact course of events. But there is no question that the intransigence with which the US representative at the G20 meeting, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, opposed the commitment to “resist protectionism,” in the context of Washington’s strident denunciations of the trade and monetary policies of Germany and China, is a major shot in an ongoing and deepening economic war. The consequences threaten to be even more devastating than in the 1930s.

Canadian Armed Forces’ document calls for “heavier weapons” to confront child soldiers in Africa

Laurent Lafrance

A Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) directive, published at the beginning of the month, calls on the military to better prepare personnel—both psychologically and in terms of equipment—to confront child soldiers. The paper has been prepared as Canada’s Liberal government prepares to send hundreds of troops to Africa to participate in counter-insurgency operations.

The “joint doctrine note,” drafted in collaboration with Roméo Dallaire, a retired CAF Lieutenant-General and well-known proponent of “humanitarian” military interventions who served in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, is the first time the Canadian military has produced a document specifically outlining strategic guidelines concerning child soldiers.

The document begins by warning that "Encounters with child soldiers during operations can have significant psychological impacts for the personnel involved” and that Canadian soldiers “must be prepared for the possibility they will have to engage child soldiers with deadly force to defend themselves or others,” i.e. to kill them.

The directive then explains that troops are likely to face child soldiers “on an increasing basis” in future UN or NATO-led missions. Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 300,000 child soldiers—recruited as suicide bombers, fighters, spies, manual labourers or sex slaves—are involved in conflicts around the world. They are widely used in African countries such as Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Mali.

In the case of Mali, the children’s rights group Humanium reported in 2014 that children make up more than half of the country’s population and that “their recruitment has been coupled with the destruction and closure of schools” resulting from the bloody war that has raged in the country between Islamist forces and the US and French-backed Malian government since 2012.

But the directive argues the Canadian Army should not be disturbed by such a reality and, on the contrary, should respond with more brutality. Dallaire declared, “These kids are under duress, a lot of them are drugged up, a lot of them are indoctrinated … You may in certain circumstances still have to use lethal force.” Dallaire went on to say, “Pulling away ... has been so much the norm and gives the advantage to the guy who is recruiting these kids.”

The document also underlines that if soldiers are not sufficiently armed they could be vulnerable to “human wave attacks” using child soldiers, i.e. frontal assaults where the target is overrun. It therefore concludes that “consideration should be given” to providing Canadian troops with “heavier,” i.e. more deadly, weapons.

The doctrine says child soldiers taken prisoner should be handled differently from adult combatants, such as by placing “greater focus on rehabilitation.” The real concern of the ruling class and the military brass, however, is not the fate of the child soldiers, but the potential loss of Western troops and fears that the Canadian military’s implication in atrocities will fuel antiwar sentiment at home.

“What caught a lot of these guys by surprise—the Dutch, the Germans and the Italians and the Chadians—in Mali was they were facing these Boko Haram kids and they didn’t know what the hell to do,” said Dallaire.

As Shelly Whitman, executive director of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, told the Globe and Mail, South African soldiers deployed to the Central African Republic a few years ago “were not at all prepared for the fact they were facing a field full of children.” They lost 16 soldiers, said Whitman, “because they were not mentally prepared for that.”

While government officials have not yet confirmed where the next Canadian deployment to Africa will be, Mali is high on the list of potential locations. France has been pressuring Canada for military support in Western Africa, including in Mali, where France, the United States and Germany are seeking to eradicate Islamist rebels they themselves armed and financed back in 2011 to oust Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

The UN had held open command of its “peacekeeping mission” in Mali for a Canadian officer, but the UN planners, impatient and uncertain about Canada’s involvement, recently announced that Maj.-Gen. Jean-Paul Deconinck of Belgium will take over.

Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has made two separate trips to Mali in the last year. An anonymous source recently told the Toronto Star that personnel from the Defence Department and Global Affairs Canada have made “non-stop” visits to the African country in recent months. The most recent visit came several weeks ago when officials attached to the newly formed Peace and Stabilization Operations Program in Global Affairs Canada spent several days in Bamako.

One of the reasons for the delay in finalizing a new Canadian military intervention in Africa is that the Trudeau government wanted to make sure the Trump administration approved of the deployment. According to the Globe and Mail, the Trump administration has now given the “green light” to Canada to dispatch troops to Mali. However, the Trudeau government, which seeks to camouflage an aggressive imperialist foreign policy in “humanitarian” rhetoric, has become concerned that the CAF’s implication in atrocities that involve children will alienate the population, expose the real, imperialist character of such “peace-keeping” missions, and undermine it plans to hike overall Canadian military spending.

As the CAF directive notes, if an engagement with child soldiers “is not well-handled, and communicated effectively, there is strong potential for significant negative impact on the mission, locally, in Canada, and at the international level.”

The Liberals are also concerned over how to sell to the public a combat mission that will likely involve a high number of civilian and Canadian casualties —more than 110 UN “peacekeeping” troops have been killed in Mali during the past four years—and one that is likely to prove only the prelude to a far broader military adventure across the region.

The intervention in Mali, where 13,000 troops and 2,000 police from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and various other countries are active, is being conducted under the United Nations umbrella. But it is also part of the broader French-led Operation Barkhane, which includes missions in Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger.

Although the various African missions, whether under the banner of the UN, France, or the US-led AFRICOM, are presented as counter-terrorism or even peace-keeping missions, they are part of a new scramble for Africa, in which the major powers are seeking to gain control over resources, markets and strategic countries.

Canadian imperialism is determined to have its share of the spoils. Canadian businesses, most of all the mining companies, have billions of dollars in investment throughout Africa and are eager to see the CAF increase its presence on the continent. The Canadian Army has been increasingly involved in West Africa. In 2011, Canadian Special Forces began attending the annual US-led Operation Flintlock exercise in West Africa, which brings together Special Forces from a number of neighbouring countries to undergo training.

When France sent troops to Mali in 2013, Canadian military transport planes were sent to ferry in French weaponry and supplies. The Liberal government agreed to similar assistance following its election in 2015.

A small contingent of 25 Canadian soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Royal 22nd Regiment, based in the French-speaking province of Quebec, will soon take part in a revamped Canadian Armed Forces’ mission to train security forces in Niger, which shares a border with Mali. These new forces will take over from an ongoing deployment, known as Operation Naberius, that was kept secret for almost three years and involved Canadian Special Forces providing similar training.

To fund increased military deployments, the Trudeau government is significantly hiking military spending. In its first budget it maintained the commitment of its Conservative predecessors to increase defence spending by 3 percent annually for a decade. More recently, it has repeatedly signaled, including in Wednesday’s budget, that bigger increases, aimed at moving Canada far closer to the NATO goal of a military budget equivalent to at least 2 percent of GDP, will be announced once the Liberals complete a year-long “defence policy review.”

Spanish dockworkers’ unions accept wage cuts and job losses

Alejandro López

Less than one week after the Spanish government saw its decree attacking the working conditions of the country’s 6,140 dockworkers resoundingly defeated in parliament, the unions and employers are pressing ahead with wage cuts and job losses.

The decree, which would have opened the door to mass redundancies, wage cuts of up to 60 percent, the use of low-paid contract agency workers, and the destruction of safety conditions was defeated by 175 votes to 142 with 33 abstentions.

Its failure was the result of divisions within the ruling class over how best to implement attacks on the working class.

The minority Popular Party (PP)-led government preferred to unilaterally implement a reform without any previous agreements with the unions, the National Association of Stevedoring and Ship Consignment Companies (ANESCO), and the opposition parties. It claimed it was urgently required to abide by a two-year-old resolution of the EU Court of Justice rule demanding Spain liberalise the dockworkers sector or face sanctions.

The social democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and Unidos Podemos (comprising the pseudo-left Podemos and Stalinist United Left) opposed this line, fearing that such measures undermine the unions’ authority to straitjacket the working class in future workers struggles.

PSOE regional premier Susana Díaz criticized the decree for not seeking “consensus and understanding between employers and workers.” Unidos Podemos spokesman Félix Alonso made the claim that the PP was not “aware of the economic and social repercussions of a solution that has not been agreed upon” by the unions and port companies in the long-term, adding that the PP’s unilateralism would mean future agreements involving the unions would become “a dead letter.”

The PP, of course, was aware of the repercussions of its draconian solution—it had the full measure of the PSOE and Unidos-Podemos knowing they would come to its rescue and respond with a slightly less draconian solution. As the World Socialist Web Site warned on February 27, “the PSOE and Podemos may try to delay and manoeuvre, in order to better impose attacks on the workers without provoking a major strike against Spain’s minority PP government, which is very weak and unpopular.

“They fear that a major port strike could trigger far broader struggles in the working class—ending the ‘social peace’ overseen by the unions, potentially bringing down the PP government and doing irreparable damage to their economic and political interests.”

This scenario is now unfolding.

Following a meeting with the employers association and government officials, the State Coordination of Sea Workers union (CETM) announced it is willing to cut wages by 6 percent. Of this, 1 percent is intended to facilitate early retirement and another 5 percent to increase productivity by upgrading infrastructure in the ports. This represents around 25 million euros annually for early retirement, a measure that had already been proposed by the PP government.

The unions, working with ANESCO, aim to convince older dockworkers—some 1,300 are over 50—to join early retirement schemes with 70 percent of the wage. The aim is to open the floodgates to “precarious” contracts condemning new, younger workers to lower wages and worse conditions.

CETM spokesman, Antolín Goya, made it clear the union’s commitment to enforcing an unending assault on the jobs, wages and conditions on dockworkers, stating that it was “willing to contribute every worker to energize the sector” in the face of “the government’s immobility”.

The government has welcomed the proposal and is reviewing it. However, according to daily La Razón, it will present another Royal Decree even if it does not have parliamentary support in the hope that “the PSOE reconsiders and does not block the reform”.

The treacherous role played by the unions has facilitated a situation where workers have been isolated and their ability to block Spain’s ports severely weakened.

Ever since it was reluctantly forced to call strike action last month, the CETM sought to prevent the mobilization of the full force of the dockworkers which could have paralyzed the Spanish economy. Instead, they set out to isolate the struggle—calling the strikes on alternate days in each port, refusing to link it with other struggles in Spain and stopping it from becoming a global battle against the privatization of ports and the destruction of dockers’ jobs and living standards internationally.

Three times the unions called off proposed strike action. That, in turn, provided the International Dockworkers’ Council (IDC) with the opportunity to cancel their own paltry “mobilisations” scheduled at selected ports internationally amounting to token “actions” of between one and three hours, none of which would have had any effect.

IDC General Coordinator Jordi Aragunde duly stated that the defeat of the decree was “a step forward, but also a great opportunity given to us by the opposition parliamentary groups.” This was not a rallying call for the defence of dockworkers against the attacks of global capitalism and the downward spiral in wages and conditions internationally. Instead, Aragunde called for the unions, government and employers in Spain to “come to an agreement on the best conditions for restructuring the Spanish port model and for complying with the ruling of the European Court of Justice.”

At the same time Aragunde claimed the defeat of the decree would never have happened without the “constant show of support” and “actions” from IDC affiliates around the world, which “helped to convince public opinion that the unilateral Royal Decree was reckless, dishonest, and harmful to the interests of the working class—interests which we proudly represent.”

The whole fraternity of pseudo-left organisations that orbit around Podemos also stand exposed. Throughout the struggle, they have intervened to support the unions’ stranglehold over the struggle and prevent any independent mobilization of the dockworkers. They proclaimed the defeat of the decree a great victory.

Izquierda Revolucionaria, the Spanish section of the Committee for a Workers’ International, described it as “a first triumph.” Clase contra Clase, the Spanish section of the Trotskyist Fraction—Fourth International, declared that the “sole threat of a strike” was enough to force the PSOE and Unidos-Podemos to vote against the decree. “One of the most concentrated, unionized and coordinated sectors of the labour movement has shown ‘muscle’ and this time it has been enough to prevent several parties of the Regime from voting with ‘state responsibility’ that has characterized them at other times,” it added.

No sooner has the ink dried on these articles than the CETM announced its proposals for wage cuts and job losses.

Like the PSOE and Podemos, the main concern of the pseudo-left is that the unions, in which they play an integral part and constitute the bulk of its well-paid leadership, will lose their authority under conditions in which the ruling class relies all the more on the trade union’s role of policing workers.

The lessons of the dockworkers dispute, which has still to say its final word, sharply poses the need for workers to establish new forms of organisation independent of the unions and a new leadership in the struggle against the pseudo-left and the interests of the privileged middle class layers for which they speak.

Casualties soar in Iraqi city of Mosul

James Cogan

An air strike on western Mosul on March 17, carried out by either the United States or one of its allies, resulted in the destruction of homes and the slaughter of as many as 200 civilians.

According to an eyewitness, the attack in Baghdad Street, in the suburb of Aghawat Jadidah, appears to have been called in to dislodge a lone Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sniper who was holding up the advance of Iraqi government forces. Unnamed American officials told the Los Angeles Times a truck containing fuel or explosives may have been “inadvertently hit,” causing a massive explosion.

LA Times correspondents in Mosul reported on Friday: “Bodies were still pinned under houses; blackened hands and a pair of feet in yellow high-top sneakers protruded from one place in the rubble.” A woman, Munatha Jasim, who lost a seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter in the attack, said: “Just because one Islamic State [fighter] was on our house, the aircraft bombed us.”

Before news of the latest carnage broke, the US military had already announced that it carried out four air strikes in Mosul on March 17, boasting that it destroyed 25 ISIS “fighting positions” and 56 vehicles. US Army spokesperson Joe Scrocca told the LA Times it will “assess the allegations and determine what, if any, role a coalition strike may have had in that area.”

The countries whose air forces and ground units are involved in bombing Mosul, and could be responsible, are the United States, Britain, Australia and France, as well as the Iraqi government itself. According to US figures, its “coalition” has unleashed over 18,000 bombs and missiles on the city since October 17.

The reported atrocity in Mosul follows the report on Tuesday that US air strikes against alleged ISIS targets in the Syrian city of Raqqa struck a school occupied by hundreds of civilians. Unconfirmed estimates placed the death toll at 30, though it may have been far higher. An earlier attack on a mosque in the Syrian province of Idlib reportedly killed at least 42 people.

There are no credible figures on the civilian death toll in Mosul. Hundreds of people are believed to have been murdered by ISIS, with thousands more killed or wounded by gunfire, artillery shelling and air strikes. Large parts of the city lie in rubble.

The US and its allies have dramatically intensified attacks on the city over recent weeks, as Iraqi troops push deeper into the western suburbs that are still held by ISIS. Iraqi government representatives claim that their forces are now just 500 metres from the 1,000-year-old al-Nuri mosque, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed an Islamic “caliphate” after ISIS captured Mosul in July 2014.

Bloody fighting is reportedly taking place in densely-populated residential areas. An estimated 400,000 civilians are trapped in the ISIS-controlled suburbs. A resident reached by Agence France Presse reported: “It’s been four months that we haven’t eaten fruit and vegetables. The kids ask for just a piece of chocolate, but there are only lentils, and even these are running out.”

Another resident declared: “When the planes strike, one Daesh [ISIS] dies for every 20 civilians. The homes are old, so if an air strike hits, it destroys more than one.”

Unknown numbers of ISIS militants have been killed. Last October, when the siege began, as many as 10,000 ISIS loyalists were said to be in Mosul. It is believed a number escaped, including key leaders of the organisation, and crossed the border to its stronghold in Raqqa, Syria. A recent estimate, published by the Wall Street Journal, put ISIS’s remaining strength in Mosul at barely 1,500 to 2,000 fighters, of whom 70 to 90 percent are from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, China, the Central Asian republics, France and the Chechnyan region of Russia, along with small numbers from other West European countries, the US, Canada and Australia.

Some ISIS fighters have surrendered to Iraqi forces. The majority, however, are allegedly “fighting to the death”—a claim generally made during war time to justify the summary execution of captured or wounded opponents. Iraqi commanders have made little secret of their desire to exact vengeance for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi Army in 2014, when tens of thousands of its troops in the Mosul area abandoned their equipment and weapons and fled from an ISIS force.

The Iraqi government refuses to release statistics on the casualties suffered by its forces. The total was estimated at over 2,000 more than three months ago, well before the intense fighting for control of western Mosul began.

As the fighting and destruction has escalated, the number of civilians fleeing Mosul has risen exponentially. In just 10 hours on Thursday, the Iraqi military reported that some 15,000 new refugees passed through one transit point. Tens of thousands more are expected to flood out of the city over the coming days and weeks.

It is now estimated that 200,000 people are sheltering in desperately under-resourced refugee camps. Hundreds of thousands more have remained in their homes in the city’s eastern suburbs, which were retaken several months ago by government forces.

An Oxfam representative told Reuters that people are arriving in camps “traumatised, hungry, dehydrated and completely exhausted.”

Aid agencies are struggling to cope. United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Lisa Grande, warned this week that if numbers continue to grow at the current rate, “it’s going to stretch us to the breaking point.”