Nations That Threatened the World

L. Ali Khan

The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) come in three forms, nuclear weapons, biological weapons including toxins, and chemical weapons. Three global treaties prohibit the development and production of the WMD: Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1970), Biological Weapons Convention (BWC, 1975), and Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC, 1977).  The 1970s was a valuable decade for beginning the process of eliminating the WMD. Over the years, some nations have been reluctant to ratify the WMD treaties.

As of May 1, 2017, out of a total of 195 nation-states in the world, 191 are parties to the NPT, 178 are parties to the BWC, and 192 are parties to the CWC.  The BWC is the least subscribed WMD treaty and efforts are underway to bring more nations into its prohibitive orbit.

Ratification and accession bind a nation-state to the fullest extent under a treaty whereas mere signing a treaty imposes some obligations not to defeat the object and purpose of the treaty. International law does not require the two-step process of signing and ratifying treaties. Nations may directly ratify (called accession) a treaty without first signing it.  For example, China ratified the BWC in 1984 without first signing it.  Here I use the word ratification to include accession as well.

Nations that have not ratified the NPT are India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Nations that have not ratified the CWC are Egypt, Israel, and North Korea. And nations that have not ratified the BWC include Syria, Israel, and North Korea.

Thus, North Korea and Israel are the only two states that have not ratified any of the three WMD treaties.  North Korea has not signed any of the three treaties whereas Israel has signed the CWC but not ratified it. In the absence of international inspections, the quantity and lethality of the WMD in possession of a non-signatory state is only a matter of conjecture.

Dictatorship Doubts

North Korea is the most outlier nation as it has shown no commitment to reject the weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the political system of North Korea is highly dictatorial with an irremovable leader at the top. Even highly centralized dictatorships may have internal consultation processes and may even display wisdom in foreign policy. Yet the world feels threatened with dictators commanding the WMD.

In fact, a political dictatorship with an irremovable leader at the top undermines the value of ratification of the WMD treaties. For example, Iran has ratified all the WMD treaties. Yet, many nations and international organizations, including the UN Security Council, have been skeptical about the Iranian commitment to the NPT. Likewise, though Syria signed the CWC in 2013, the accusations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in April 2017 seem credible because President Bashar Assad is an irremovable ruler.

In 2003, the US invasion of Iraq was defended on the fabricated pretext that Saddam Hussein, a brutal dictator, had been secretly developing nuclear weapons even though Iraq had ratified the NPT in 1969. Moreover, though Iraq had ratified the CWC in 1991, the charges that Iraq used chemical weapons against the Kurds were credible. Saddam’s despotism devalued Iraq’s ratification of the NPT and the CWC. In 2009, three years after the execution of Saddam, Iraq ratified the BWC.

Democratic Forbearance

It appears that the world is willing to tolerate the WMD in the possession of democratic nations. India and Pakistan have not signed or ratified the NPT, even though both are parties to the CWC and BWC.  In 1998, India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in a tit-for-tat pattern. As compared to Pakistan, India’s nuclear program is much more acceptable to the world and many nations are willing to endorse India for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. This is so because India has demonstrated a solid commitment to democracy whereas Pakistan’s democracy has remained unpredictable and prone to military takeovers. General Pervez Musharraf roams freely in the world while Pakistan’s judicial system has been unable to prosecute him for his well-documented crimes against democracy. If Pakistan’s democracy is overthrown again, a case might be made for the de-nuclearization of Pakistan.

Likewise, the world is extremely nervous about North Korea but less so about Israel even though both nations are similar in their non-adherence to the WMD treaties. Israel has been a democracy, though the world is critical of Israel’s occupation of and settlements in the Palestinian territories.

The ideal setup for a peaceful world envisages democratic nations that have ratified all the WMD treaties. Even a better world is conceivable.  Given the historically-evidenced inclinations of the human species toward destruction, a better world without the WMD remains an elusive but a worthwhile ambition.

North Korea’s Military Gambit

Binoy Kampmark

“All options for responding to future provocation must remain on the table.  Diplomatic and financial levers of power will be backed up by a willingness to counteract North Korean aggression if necessary.”

Rex Tillerson, Apr 28, 2017

The theatre unfolding in various international forums regarding North Korea is garnering top prices for front seats.  The press corps await the next announcement by the Trump administration on what it will do to the regime in Pyongyang.  Prompt, merciless incineration?  Tactical strike applied with a surgeon’s precision?  All options, we are told with weekly and increasing urgency, are on the table.

The game being played by the DPRK’s Kim Jong-un is one of luring the unpredictable beast out of his lair, notably given the recent statements by US Vice President Mike Pence that the era of “strategic patience” was over.

The individual who is behaving erratically here is less the cruel plump man in a boiler suit than US President Donald Trump, who is forging a fictional time line of good conduct his North Korean counterpart has no interest in following.  A good argument can be made that the ploy by the DPRK is an effort to bring stability of sorts to the international system, rendering the unpredictable more evenly predictable.

The confusion here has become a constant feature of the Trump administration, and also risks pushing the DPRK into a corner of crumbling desperation. To Reuters, Trump was playing up the delightfully dangerous prospect of war with the regime.  “There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict in North Korea.  Absolutely.”  All prime time television stuff.

On April 28, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged members of the UN Security Council to inflict “painful” measures on Pyongyang.  “Failing to act now on the most pressing security issue in the world may bring catastrophic consequences.”

Tillerson gives the impression that existential annihilation is around the corner if nothing is done, begging the question about who is the agent behind initiating that move.  Given the US record on regime change and regional destabilisation, that question is already well and truly answered, though the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was attempting to pour oil on the waters with suggestions that the crisis was no single entity’s fault.  “The more we bide our time,” warned a sombre Tillerson in tones of biblical concern, “the sooner we will run out of it.”

The smoke signals from the White House remain confused, a mixture of belligerence and doom, coupled with a desire to have talks about the North Korean nuclear program, with Pyongyang, if necessary.  This entire orientation is proving confusing to other members of the UN Security Council trying to pin down the agenda.

To that end, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, makes an important point: “If Trump and his team insist on a North Korean commitment to ‘de-nuclearization’ before talks can begin, other members of [the] council will see the US call for ‘engagement’ as unserious and will not support new… sanctions.”

Time is going nowhere, nor is Pyongyang’s surge towards security in the face of a country that refuses to reassure it.  As this takes place, countries with nuclear arsenals persist in modernising, rather than eliminating them. Other theatres of potential nuclear conflict – India and Pakistan, for instance – pose potentially a graver threat with the lowering of threshold deployments by the latter.

North Korea, by way of contrast, is treated as a supreme villain with powers of global reach, however contingent these might be.  It is treated, as Robert Wood, US ambassador to the UN Committee on Disarmament does, as the single greatest threat to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, when numerous other candidates might well step up to that plate. Take, for instance, India, Pakistan and Israel, all states with nuclear arsenals, none of whom cared to join the NPT party.

The recent test failings in the ballistic missile program are treated as confirmations that the DPRK is getting closer to its aim.  In the words of US Pacific Commander Admiral Harry Harris, “Just as Thomas Edison is believed to have failed 1,000 times before successfully inventing the light bulb, so, too, Kim Jong-un will keep trying.” (Bullies always like boosting the fighting credentials of their victims.)

Yet again, the empire warns of dangers unseen, uncalculated, and unknown, hoping that a pretext for attack might be made out. It is the same empire that deploys, along with Russia, more than 1,500 strategic warheads capable of being delivered on bombers and missiles across the globe.

Most of all, the various ballistic missile tests are timed to aggravating perfection, raising The Donald’s hair while driving Tillerson to distraction. But the true, playground bully here remains as it has always been: the United States, self-appointed global policeman and misguided guardian.

The U.S. Political Scene: Whiteness And The Legitimacy Crisis of Global Capitalism

Salvador Rangel & Jeb Sprague-Silgado

The U.S. political scene has been undergoing a facelift in an effort to restore the decreasing legitimacy of the transnationally-oriented capitalist class. This transformation has been characterized by a rightwing that has sought to portray itself as economically nationalistic in an attempt to expand support among the working class (primarily, among working class whites) whose economic stability has dwindled during the neoliberal era.

Why is this the case?

Beginning in the 1970’s, faced with declining rates of profit and accumulation, as well as rising international competition capital needed to break free from the national constraints that had been put on it during the fordist-keynesian “new deal” era. One of those “constraints” had been the responsibility of ensuring the social reproduction of its national labor force. “Going global” has allowed capitalists to do away with this concern, as they now could tap into an ever-growing global pool of marginalized workers.

Rise of Capitalist Globalization

By the late 20th century and into the 21st century new technologies and organizational advancements allowed companies to more easily operate across borders. New transnational networks of production and finance began to form.

Capitalist globalization had a major impact upon workers, not just in the global south, but in the ‘developed world’ as well.  As is often the case, the most marginalized workers feel the effects of anti-worker policies earlier and deeper than those in more stable and better-paid positions. Yet as globalization deepened it also began to undermine many of the once-stable unionized industries.

The neoliberal order resulted in a new reality for many white workers, who previously were guaranteed a set of benefits that they had come to expect (benefits that were both material and ideological). Global capitalism and neoliberal policies resulted for many of them job insecurity and wage stagnation, but also in a reduction in the “wages of whiteness”: the subjective feeling of superiority over negatively racialized groups—one of these has been rage against workers from other parts of the world perceived as the culprits.

The U.S. Political Scene

Within the U.S. political scene into the 1990s conservative and liberal establishments together developed new mechanisms of capital accumulation while chipping away at the power of labor, such as NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement).  On the conservative side: xenophobic candidates like Pat Buchanan and anti-NAFTA business leaders such as Ross Perot were sidelined. On the liberal side the remnants of strong labor voices were silenced. A grand bargain was struck between a conservative militaristic establishment and a liberal establishment espousing a sort of anti-worker multiculturalism (with its growing identitarian acceptance of peoples from different ethnicities and sexual orientations, alongside viewing workers as cogs to be seamlessly integrated into a new globalized economy).  Under these circumstances profits grew tremendously for transnational capital (aided especially by newfangled financial mechanisms).  Meanwhile workers faced stagnation, dispossession, and heightened job insecurity.

In the wake of the biggest financial crisis for generations (2007–2008) and with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging on (2001– ), the liberal establishment failed to make any substantial adjustments. Rather than alter the course (or ideology), the response of the liberal establishment has been to engage in an amplified multiculturalism under the umbrella of the system—to call on hope, to engage in some limited reforms (such as the affordable healthcare act, which while a positive first step only went a small part of the way toward the health care access that the population needs). Even these reforms (to partially offset the growing unaffordability of health care for lower income Americans) were fought tooth and nail by conservative forces. On other issues such as foreign policy, the Democrats in power largely locked arms with their Republican counterparts: promoting interventionist policies abroad and the swelling tentacles of a global intelligence apparatus.

This brings us up to the 2016 Hillary Clinton candidacy and her salivating over policies of military interventionism and new supranational treaties (like the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership). This essentially set her campaign up as a defender of the status quo, a fact strategically exploited by the xenophobic come-populist rhetoric of the Donald Trump campaign.  While losing the popular vote by close to three million, the electoral arena (the best one that money can buy) played out through the country’s undemocratic Electoral College system (impacted as well by decades of gerrymandering and mass voter suppression), allowing the Republican Party’s astonishing return to power; with the flipping of only a few rust-belt districts tipping the scales in Trump’s favor.

It is important to understand how the forces behind Trump (and their ideological mechanisms) are now operating through the U.S. political scene. It is within this context that we need to make sense of the political reversals that have taken place for the Democratic establishment, and the GOP’s current domination of the country’s federal branches.

We wish to argue that the reason for which Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” and rhetoric resonated with so many white workers and middle strata is because the ideological terrain had in part already been prepared for it.  The field in which Trump planted the seed of xenophobia and hatred among white people had been tilled by neoliberalism and fertilized with money from the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch– and other ruling elites. In fact it has roots also in the nation’s formative history, through the violence against negatively racialized populations, most notably against Native and African Americans. In this sense, Trump’s slogan and campaign promise to “Make America great again” is not new or original at all, but merely the newest iteration of the Tea Party’s plan to “take the country back”, tapping into the same sentiment of aggrieved entitlement.

The Trumpian-right also mixes into this sentiment a rightist populist critique of globalization. Yet, Trump’s election has not come to represent a rupture but rather a continuation of strategies deployed by the transnational capitalist class (TCC), with a different guise.

Beneath the surface of the U.S. political system one can see how power is entrenched. Barack Obama’s inner circle was made up largely by members of the Council on Foreign Relations, while Hillary Clinton’s campaign was backed by “enlightened” finance tycoons and liberal-hawk leaning sectors of the TCC, such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and others. While the populist rhetoric of Trump’s inner circle may sound more anti-establishment, its members are blatantly ultra-elitist and are thoroughly entwined with global business interests.

With recent U.S. wars unpopular and disastrous, during his election campaign Trump criticized some of the wars and interventions launched under George W. Bush and Obama. He differentiated between what he described as “smart” and “dumb” wars. One brief sliver of hope was the possibility of detente, in which the world’s two major nuclear-armed powers could have begun to roll back tensions. Yet, criticized ceaselessly by his liberal opponents and in the mainstream media as “Putin’s puppet”, by Trump’s third month in office his foreign policy had largely fallen into line with the military-industrial-security-state apparatus.

Trump today boasts of improving the lives of U.S. workers, but there is little indication that he intends to materially improve conditions for anybody other than his ruling elite buddies—just the opposite– as his proposed plans seek to dump billions more into the Pentagon budget, while eliminating state subsidized lunches for impoverished youth, privatizing education, and striping subsidized healthcare from tens of millions of lower income people.

His electoral win in the rust belt states though was an indication of the discontent among many white workers. To hold onto this support he will need to keep them on board. Here he appears to be trying to convince capital not just by his rhetoric but also through various tax breaks and subsidies to engage in some limited labor-capital compromises in the rust belt, in Michigan, Ohio, and even Wisconsin.  Holding these states could help to ensure GOP victories on the national level for many years to come.  A South-Mid-West-Rust-Belt Electoral College strategy clearly appears to be the GOP’s best winning strategy.

Right-populism as a strategy for offsetting legitimacy crisis among aggrieved white workers

The ruling class is engaging in various ideological strategies to renew its legitimacy. Key among these are ideological mechanisms of splitting and disorganizing the working classes, including the old tried-and-true racism, jingoism and xenophobia. And as under Trump a wing of the transnationally oriented elite sings the song of protectionism to confuse and recruit.  With this in mind, his administration is attempting to make inroads with some labor unions especially those present in the rust-belt.

The pressures and structural features of the U.S. political scene bend heavily in favor of capital, and in particular transnational capital.  State leaders need access to capital, and capital is in the hands of transnational business people tied into the global economy.  Politicians must still appeal to their home audiences, through constant declaration of patriotism and other theatrics. This is the constant juggling act of major political actors in the country – attempting to hold legitimacy whilst deepening practices that will allow transnational capital’s continual profitability.

In apparent contradiction, Trump’s strategy of rejecting the TPP, has helped to varnish himself as an “economic nationalist”, a fighter for U.S. workers. This was key for his winning the Rust Belt, where so many manufacturing jobs have been lost over recent decades, many that had been held by white workers.

The TPP symbolized the most unconstrained attempt by transnationally oriented elites to impose policies on an array of countries (including the U.S.) where the major beneficiaries are transnational corporations. Does Trump’s opposing the TPP mean that he opposes transnational capital?  Quite to the contrary, it represents an alternative strategy: while a partial pump on the breaks, he extends at the same time many other factors beneficial to the TCC (lowering taxes, gutting of regulations and environmental protections, expanding military-industrial-prison contracts, while promoting a host of new bilateral agreements that can aid cross-border accumulation). All of this entails reproducing the dominant order, and under a refurbished conservative ideology.

The intensifying crisis of legitimacy has become highlighted by the emergence of various political currents, and not just on the right. Prominent amongst these new entities are the movement that evolved around the presidential candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (supported by anti-war politicians such as TulsiGabbard), which showed that a social democrat could obtain a large number of votes in the U.S.  The Sanders’ campaign was inspiring in many ways, however, he failed to make a systematic critique of U.S. militarism. Also, while he criticized “crony capitalism”, a deeper structural critique of capitalism was of course absent.
Yet the fate of the 2016 presidential election was rooted partly in the broader crisis of legitimacy of global capitalism. As Clinton and Obama were standard-bearers of the status quo, Trump was able to exploit this through his populist rhetoric and rightist critique of globalism.

In early 2017, following Clinton’s defeat in the Electoral College, Sanders’ emboldened progressive current attempted to wrestle away the party’s leadership. Yet the establishment within the party prevailed – one that can mock Trump, but not provide even a social democratic alternative. The power-brokers within the DNC wager that growing revulsion with Trump, as his fake populism is exposed, will be enough to rejuvenate them and that fear-mongering and guilt-tripping will ward off any challenge from the likes of Sanders.

By no means accidentally, the calls to take the country back (to “make it great again”) come at the expense of already racially oppressed groups, and at the cost of women and children who will be hurt by cuts to social programs. Scapegoating is important in the U.S. political scene, especially as the transnational capitalist class will not easily reverse the policies that benefit them. The Trump-right has sought to make up for the loss in the material wages of white workers through an increase in their “public and psychological wage” (as W.E.B. Du Bois described it) —via the promotion of racism and xenophobia.

As the anti-migrant rhetoric intensifies, such as reflected in the rise of a neo-fascistic “alt-right”, the goal of increasing the value of citizenship and whiteness can be observed when we compare Obama and Trump’s immigration policies. Obama became known as the “Deporter-in-Chief” because he deported so many people. It is possible that Trump may deport more people than Obama did, but, even if not, he will do this in a much more visible and dramatic way – similarly to what he attempted with the Muslim ban. The effects of the policies will have real consequences for migrants, just as Obama’s did, but a large part of the harm will come from a more blatant normalization of bigotry.
In Conclusion
Relying upon recycled mantras of xenophobia and nationalism, the Trumpian right seeks to head off the legitimacy crisis of transnational capital. However rather than propose an alternative to transnational capital, they propose an alternative strategy for reproducing it. Also disconcerting are the growing threats of war, as neo-conservative groups (so heavily involved in the U.S. war crimes of recent decades) appear to have reasserted their influence over the white house.

Progressive, left, and social movement forces in the U.S. need to build on successes of the past as well as move beyond them, taking on, for instance, a more pro-active position against militarism and a deeper critique of capitalism. Reaching out across racial and gender lines to working and lower income people, such a movement cannot allow for itself to fall under the hegemony of corporatist political actors. Rather it must be a project that provides a real fight back to the Trumpian right and the permanent war state it now inhabits.

May Day 2017: Trample All Forms Of Sectarianism

Farooque Chowdhury

One hundred years ago, the proletariat in Petrograd celebrated the historic May Day in jubilation and honor. “Thousands of people turned out for the 1917 May Day parade. They carried […] banners and posters, which became the main elements of the decorations in Petrograd.” (Natalia Murray, “Feast in a time of plague, May Day celebrations of 1917-1918”, Baltic Worlds, vol. VI, no. 1, April 2013, Sodertorn University, Sweden)

“One of the leading artists of the World of Art movement, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, wrote, ‘[W]e have witnessed the birth of a new era: on the First of May we artists finally took our revolutionary banners out onto the streets […]!’” (Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, “Bomba ili khlopushka: Razgovor mezhdu dvumia khudozhnikami”, “A bomb or a firecracker: a conversation between two artists”, Novaia Zhizn, no. 83, 1918-05-04, quoted in Murray, op. cit.)

That was a crucial hour of proletariat’s political struggle in Russia. The proletariat was positioning to attain an epoch-making victory within months. And, sectarian trends within politics were losing foothold as whirlwind of proletariat’s political fight was getting powerful although the bourgeoisie and tsarist elements were trying utmost to fan hatred and sectarianism among the working people.

Today, around the world, working people in millions are observing and celebrating the May Day. On streets and squares in cities, workers are struggling state with violent force, in industrial areas, work stoppages are declaring labor’s power, in towns and urban areas, toilers’ demonstrations are demanding rights, and city centers are turning vibrant with working people’s marches and celebrations. And today, capital is drawing lines of divisions among the working people in countries and societies.

And, yet, condition of the proletariat is precarious. Capital’s onslaught on labor is in full force now as capital is scrambling to get out of crises it has created. The onslaught has taken forms as capital struggles to socialize its burdens it is failing to bear and profit from: from austerity measures, budget cuts, re-locating of factories and manufacturing plant, so-called out-sourcing, espionage and demobilizations to wars and interventions with varying types, from spreading of sectarianism, Nazi ideas with different appearances, “democracy”- and “rights”- mongering, defending medieval ideas and practices to seeding of confusion in the ranks of the working people. To keep labor subjugated, ultra-advanced capital is forming alliance with backward forces. Advanced capitalist countries, matured bourgeois republics are in the forefront in their business of the hour. Media carry reports of these onslaughts every day.

A news-report from Wheeling, US, said:

“Almost 23,000 retired coal miners and their dependents [recently] received official notification that they could lose their health care benefits by April 30.” United Mine Workers of America president Cecil Roberts said: “They will now have to begin contemplating whether to continue to get medicines and treatments they need to live or to buy groceries. They will now have to wonder if they can go see a doctor for chronic conditions like black lung or cancer or pay the mortgage.” Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said: “Ohio coal miners have spent decades underground to power our country, provide for their families and retire with dignity. But the promise they were made for their backbreaking work is in jeopardy, and thousands nationwide will lose the benefits they earned in weeks.” (The Intelligencer & Wheeling News Register, Wheeling, WV, “Nearly 23,000 coal miners to lose benefits, miners, families notified via letter”, April 26, 2017)

An AP report said: “Congress is close to a deal to extend health benefits for more than 22,000 retired miners and widows whose medical coverage is set to expire Sunday”. (The Pantagraph, IL, “The latest: White House blasts Dems on spending bill”, April 26, 2017) There, political struggle is casting shade of cloud over the issue of miners.

There are many other similar cases of uncertainty with health care and other essentials of life in the same country. In another country, on the other side of the Atlantic, another news-report shows state’s role against labor.

A BBC report said:

“Former miners in Wales are calling for a review of their pension fund, arguing they should be awarded a larger share of surplus money.

“Currently, the UK government takes 50% of any surplus earned by the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme (MPS) from its investments as part of a guarantee.

[….]

“About 25,000 miners are thought to be in receipt of the MPS in Wales […]

“When the coal industry was privatized in 1994, the UK government agreed to guarantee the total pension would not fall in cash terms, and that if there was a surplus it would be shared 50/50 with the scheme’s members.

[….]

“Since the deal was struck, the UK government said it had received £3.35bn from the scheme.” (“Miners’ pensions ‘should not be used as a cash cow’”, November 16, 2016)

Isn’t the state gaining 50% of surplus capital appropriated from labor? The “seed money” – miners’ contribution – was part of necessary labor, which was miners’ bare necessity for survival, and the “seed money” invested somewhere gained more “money” to have surplus from some other source, which was originally appropriated from labor in somewhere else.

The BBC report said:

Ex-miner Ken Sullivan, 64, of Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, claimed some miners are on less than £10 a week.

Less than £10 a week means slightly more than £1 or slightly less than £2 a day. How much demand is made by bread, potato and their “colleagues” daily? Forget about clothes and shoe. Theater, movie, sports, picnic? Toilers’ brains “can’t” consume those elegant “things” reserved only for the bourgeoisie! The miners, even, “don’t” possess that heart! Let them “get” lost!

Capital’s antagonistic role is evident in working people’s immediate survival areas. To capital, pensioners are not essential for regeneration of capital; so, capital likes to forget pensioners’ consumption: bread, tea, flask, shoe, blanket and some other “minor” items and expenditures including burial expenses.

There’s another story related to labor.

On June 18, 1984, a Thatcherite-time, thousands of police and striking miners clashed violently at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, UK. It’s known as the Battle of Orgreave. On a page of The Guardian, historian Tristram Hunt characterized the clash as “a brutal example of legalized state violence.” (“The charge of the heavy brigade”, September 4, 2006)

A BBC report said:

“The Thatcher government feared a ‘witch hunt’ if a public inquiry were held into policing of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, declassified files show.

“Minutes of a meeting in 1985 show Leon Brittan, then home secretary, wanted to avoid ‘any form of enquiry’ into policing of the picket lines.

“Miners say the files show successive governments ‘never wanted the truth to come out’ over the events.” (“Miners’ strike policing inquiry ‘would have been witch hunt’”, March 9, 2017)

Eighteen files have been released after home secretary Amber Rudd promised that 30 unreleased files connected with the strike would be published. The files, as the BBC report said, show:

“At a meeting held in 1985, […] Leon Brittan said he believed the ‘government should not encourage any form of enquiry into the behavior of the police’, as it would ‘turn into a witch hunt’ with an ‘anti-police bias’

“The permanent secretary of the Home Office Sir Brian Cubbon, in 1984 wrote ‘internal questions’ needed to be asked about how ‘the Home Office relay(s) to the police service the political influence on operational policy which was wanted in the early days of the (miners) dispute’

“Local government representatives told the Police Advisory Board in 1986, that the Association of Chief Police Officers, ‘were concerned less with what actually happened during the miners dispute than with what might happen in the future’

[….]

“Ex-miner Frank Arrowsmith, who was on the picket line during the year long strike, said ‘the suspicion is never going to go away that those in Number 10 [Downing Street, prime minister’s official residence] and the home secretary decided to use the police as a battering ram to defeat the miners’.

[….]

“Nicholas Jones, who covered the strike as the BBC’s industrial correspondent, said: ‘These documents really open the window on what the government and the police were thinking in 1985.

“‘There is no sign of any feeling of remorse in these files, in fact the police are quite dismissive about the event’.

[….]

“‘I find it worrying that there were immediate efforts from the very top of government to shut down any enquiry into the miners’ strike’, said Labour MP Andy Burnham who has campaigned on behalf the Hillsborough families.”

The files may unfold a part of the inner-working of that “legalized state violence”. State, yes, it’s state and state violence under the cover of law.

There’s the issue of transparency within the proud bourgeois democracy, a political question, part of an agenda capital considers a no-man’s land for the working masses. Capital and the democracy it practices are never transparent with exceptions of moments facing pressure either from its factional-fight, or in need of legitimacy and acceptability, or from the masses engaged in political action.

The sources of the information cited above are not the political literature of the proletariat, but the mainstream media; and at least a part of capital and its political power come out under sunlight from these reports.

Further look gives further findings.

On the shores of the Indian Ocean, labor’s condition is not good.

“The South African mining sector has, for more than 100 years, been […] using physically demanding manual drilling methods with blasting and cleaning on a stop-start basis, predominantly in narrow reef, hard-rock mining for gold, platinum and chrome.

“Working conditions are generally characterised by abrasive rock, steep gradients and seismicity. And with increasing depth, the virgin rock temperature continues to rise. On the Witwatersrand Basin, which is host to the world’s largest gold resource, the virgin rock temperature at depths of 2,000 meters below surface can be as high as 40ºC. On the Bushveld Complex, which is host to 80% of the world’s platinum reserves, these temperatures are even higher, reaching 70ºC.” (Chamber of Mines of South Africa, Modernisation: Towards the Mines of Tomorrow, Fact sheet 2017)

“Stupid” labor, with a “cursed” life, goes down to the hot-depth daily, works for hours throughout an entire working-life, and there pulls up riches from that depth. Labor has “no” way at the moment. It’s now chained by starvation and fear. Michael Yates, in his “Class: A personal story” (Monthly Review, vol. 58, issue 3, July-August 2006) essay explains in an excellent way the issue of fear in working people’s life.

What follows beastly toil in the mines?

In July 2016, UNCTAD report Trade Misinvoicing in Primary Commodities in Developing Countries: The Cases of Chile, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia pointed to a systematic practice of mis- and underinvoicing among mining companies in these countries. It alleged that the mining industry has been engaging in this practice with the direct objective of avoiding taxes, or at the very least reducing tax burdens in producing countries.

The report stated:

Mining and oil companies have misappropriated 67% of export revenue in the countries studied.

For South Africa, the report calculated cumulative underinvoicing over the period 2000-2014 to have amounted to US$ 102.8 billion (2014 US dollars): US$ 600 million for iron ore; US$ 24 billion for silver and platinum; and US$ 78.2 billion for gold.

Key conclusions of the report include “substantial export misinvoicing − both underinvoicing and overinvoicing – in all five countries, with a clear preponderance of export underinvoicing, except for copper exports from Chile”.

However, an “independent” review by a Johannesburg-based firm “narrowed the gap in measuring exports […] from USD 78.2 billion to USD 19.5 billion”, and found “most of the USD 19.5 billion discrepancy can very likely be attributed to errors in the reported gold imports of South Africa’s trading partners, not in South Africa’s reported gold exports.” (Letter of the managing director of the firm, February 7, 2017) The review claimed that the UNCTAD report’s methodology was flawed. [Findings of the report still stand even if it’s accepted that the entire S A-business was miscalculated as there are other countries.]

However, UNCTAD in an “Accompanying note for the revised version of the Report” said: “The revised report provides a more detailed exposition of the methodology and the concepts used while further stressing the main messages from the analysis.” (December 23, 2016)

The reality for labor appears in full “bloom” with the information cited above: hard labor in inhuman condition, uncertain life, deception, non-transparency, trick, a wage difficult to live on, in cases, less than £10 a week, and billions of dollars “miscalculated”, a “simple error”. Deep in mines workers have to option to err, as that’s a question of their life and death, which demand a small sum of dollar. It’s also a question of profit and loss for mine owners: amount of gold and size of diamond extracted at the cost of “cheaply expendable” lives to build up mountains of profit.

The reality that gets constructed makes labor perish here and there. A glimpse finds: how cheap is labor’s life! It’s like How Green was My Valley. Labor’s lost life is not always properly counted, even.

A methane gas explosion in a coal mine in Ukraine killed at least eight miners. There was confusion over the exact number of miners killed. (AFP, “8 killed in gas explosion at Ukraine coal mine”, March 2, 2017”)

In a collapsed coal mine in Jharkhand, death toll rose to 10. The cave in buried at least 23 miners. (AFP, “10 Dead in Jharkhand mine cave-in, many still missing”, December 31, 2016)

A gas explosion killed 18 coal miners in China. (AP, “Rescuers try to find 15 still trapped by mine blast in China”, November 1, 2016)

Similar death-news are many. Number of deaths increases as tomorrow replaces today, misinvoicing multiplies, profit proliferates.

“The rate of fatalities, injuries, disease, and potential effects of acid mine drainage present the gruesome face of a killing industry. For example 69,000 mineworkers were killed due to mine incidents between 1900 [and] 1993 [while] one million had been injured in this period. [….] “An Oxford led [study] suggested that the mining industry in Africa could possibly be linked to almost 760,000 new TB infections per year […].” (Mike Fafuli, Genocidal Effects of Dereliction of Duty by Mining in SA, National Union of Mine Workers, May 3, 2012)

Sometimes capital needs dead bodies for political, propaganda, etc. purposes, but not always. Today’s Venezuela is a burning example. But, “confusion” with number of miners dead is a case of “error” with miners’ life as it was also an “error” with billions of dollars! The former is related to cost and investment while the later is related to profit. The fact is: with a “soft” touch of err minimum wage can’t reach the “dangerous” ceiling of $15, but billions of dollars are “erred” as the $15 is needed by a starving stomach of a disorganized laborer while the billions of dollars are demanded by powerful persons in Copenhagen and Zurich. Substantial amount of dollars still remain in chests of the misinvoicers even after subtracting the “erred” amount of dollars. It’s part of profit, and the profit was created by labor only to be appropriated by capitalists, the mine-owners, the bankers, and their cousins and nephews. So, the amount mirror a part of the size of surplus labor produced by working at depths of 2,000 meters below surface with 40ºC-70ºC temperature for hours, for days, for an entire working-life, for generations. It’s not only the story from mines in five countries the UNCTAD report mentioned; it’s the story of all mines, of all manufacturing plants, of all artisanal industries and the “loving” SME – small and medium enterprise – in all lands.

Average earnings of miners come out to $21.55 per hour in the US, a coal miner earns an average wage of $23.04 per hour. A miner in South Africa earns an average salary of R221,610 per year. (updated March 25 and 24, 2017 respectively, www.payscale.com) The average salary for mining jobs in Wales, UK is £42,500. (www.totaljobs.com) In countries in the periphery, the wage figures are unloveable and crude joke. Living wage? Minimum wage? All. In comparison to price index? Not comfortable. A harder life it’s. A life turned intolerable. Look at the wage laborers in India or Myanmar, in Indonesia or Pakistan, in Senegal or Jordan, Brazil or some other country tangled in the world capitalist system.

Are these figures related to wage comparable to the “erred” figures of billions of dollars? And, are both of these figures, of wage and of “error”, comparable to the figures related to death of laborers? Mainstream mentors have the answer, probably.

With this condition of labor, a wave of sectarianism in the name of opposing sectarianism is gaining ground. Certain “rights” activists are over-active in voicing “rights” of only one sect as if rights of the rest are not denied and violated. These sound like a South Africa-story, like a Nazi-story.

Luli Callinicos in her famous A People’s History of South Africa details:

The mine-owners were careful not to give the black and the white workers a chance to act together against management. One mine-owner wrote: “The combination of the working classes will become so strong as to be able more or less to dictate, not only on the question of wages, but also on political questions by the power of the vote.” Mine-owners felt it was important to distance white miners from the black workers, and to place one above the other. Most white South Africans were brought up to believe that they were better than another. Racism was used by the mine-owners. Few black workers felt any sympathy for the whites’ struggle for trade union rights. It was like “We are fighting our own battles and the white man is fighting his own battle. He does not consider us and we do not consider him in this respect.” (shortened, vol. I: Gold and Workers 1886 – 1924, chapter 17, “The Divided Workers”, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1980)

These tactics were to safeguard profits and system of labor control, observes Luli Callinicos.

Who was gaining from this division among the toilers? The coterie of writers presenting sectarian, communal arguments with progressive-posture to facilitate capital’s divisive tact know answer to the question. Yet, they carry on their divisive propaganda. Capital needs pals in its days of crises.  Concern of these chums of capital is not the entire working people, but only a single group as if no other people are facing onslaughts by capital and state. It’s a completely hatred-filled, divisive Nazi-tact. Recollect the way Hitler began spewing his hatred-politics: it was “we are the supreme”, it was “we are the purer of the pure”, it was “we are the herrenvolk, master race”, it was “we are the victim of conspiracy”, it was “we need Lebensraum, living space”; so, “hate everything other than we, hate all people other than we, hate all arts-literature-science other than Nazi-physics, Nazi-etc., Nazi-etc.”. The corporal leading a gang of murderers made division among people. A defeated, shattered Germany prepared a perfect stage for the hatred-monger.

Today, that divisive tact is being steamed. So, the present situation requires the task of trampling all forms of sectarianism as it harms working people’s struggle. On this May Day, toilers have to intensify this task as unity of all the working people crossing all types of delimiting lines is in their interest, as unity of the working people takes away all steam from engine of reactionary, factious politics, and the politics will lose the biggest chunk of its present constituency. So, the toilers are to trumpet: Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Researchers claim evidence that humans were in the Americas 130,000 years ago

Matthew MacEgan

A new archaeological claim being put forth by a group of researchers in southern California is stirring up tremendous amounts of controversy within the discipline. Last week, Nature published their article which purports to show evidence that humans were in the New World 130,000 years before the present (BP). This claim is receiving wide attention because the earliest evidence archaeologists have agreed upon for the peopling of the western hemisphere to date is approximately 15,000 BP, and even that is still debated.

It is important to note that finding a new date for the peopling of the Americas is the holy grail of New World archaeology. It is akin to finding a new hominin specimen in Africa that sheds more light on the evolution of humans. Similar to the situation in Africa, there is fierce competition between researchers to determine who has the earliest find and what types of technology are associated with it. It is therefore not a surprise that a new claim in Nature, which is one of the most highly respected research journals, that pushes back the movement of humans into the New World by a factor of more than eight, would be strongly contested.

The evidence presented in Nature by Steven R. Holen and colleagues comes from a museum collection that was excavated more than 25 years ago. The authors were not the excavators of the material but have made observations about materials stored in their museum. The materials in question come from the Cerutti mastodon site, which has been adequately dated to the Pleistocene epoch (2 million to 11,000 BP). Mastodons are extinct elephant-like animals that lived in North and Central America until the end of the Pleistocene.

Uranium dating on the specimens in question has returned an approximate date of 130,000 BP, which is significant not only for the peopling of the Americas but for the dispersal of hominins prior to Homo sapiens. It is generally agreed that Homo sapiens did not leave Africa until approximately 50,000 BP, but Homo erectus and other contemporary hominins such as the Denisovans and Neanderthals had already moved into Asia by this time, so it is plausible that some of these did make their way into the western hemisphere.

The materials used as evidence include mastodon bone and molar fragments that the researchers suggest were broken when they were “fresh,” meaning before or soon after the animal died. Holen and colleagues argue that the distribution of bone, molar, and stone recovered from the site suggests that the bones were broken at the site of a burial. They present as evidence of human interaction five large cobbles, which they describe as hammerstones and anvils—two types of stone tools that archaeologists associate with human activity—which they claim show signs of “use-wear” that could only have resulted from human activities.

Bone recovered from the Cerutti Mastodon site

The basis for these claims is a set of experiments performed by the researchers to show that human use indeed resulted in the way the bone was broken, in addition to the use-wear that they argue is present on the associated stones. For the experiment, they took a modern elephant femur and positioned it on top of a stone that would serve as an anvil and used another stone as a hammer to show that the way the bone was broken could have resulted from this type of human activity.

There are a number of problems that have been raised by other archaeologists that are valid and worth considering when reading these arguments.

First is the issue of bone marrow extraction. One argument made by Holen and colleagues is that these femurs were being broken so that bone marrow could be removed for use by humans. We would presume that a group of human foragers would have extensive knowledge about the anatomy of their target species, and if the mastodon skeleton is like a modern elephant skeleton, they would have known that bone marrow is concentrated in the pelvis. Long bones like the femur have virtually no marrow to extract. We would not, therefore, expect experienced foragers to spend time breaking open femurs for this purpose.

Stones from Cerutti purportedly showing use-wear

A second issue is whether the stones in question are actually tools used by humans. One of the problems with use-wear analysis is that there are many other processes that can lead to stone looking like it has been used, and some of these are indistinguishable from human activity. There are other ways that rocks can be pushed together by other natural forces without any interactions from humans. The same goes for the bones in question. Once these materials were in the ground, anything heavy moving over the top—say, another mastodon—could have pushed these objects into each other or crushed them in other ways.

Third is the use of experimentation as evidence. While the authors showed that human activity could create the type of break that is apparent on the mastodon femur, the experiment should also show that the same break could not have been made by some natural process. The authors did not test this in their experiments—they only showed one way that the breaks could have occurred.

A fourth concern is the uranium-dating technique, which is typically used to date samples that contain uranium as their primary substance. These include inorganic cave carbonates or corals, which take in uranium as they remove calcium from seawater. Holen and colleagues are applying this theoretical process to bone, which is problematic since bones do not contain significant amounts of primary uranium. The uranium does not get taken into the bone until after it is buried and water in the soil interacts with it.

A final issue is the excavation context. The materials were excavated in the early 1990s as part of a salvage project that took place during highway expansion in the area. This meant that detailed information was not collected on the context or positioning of the bones and stones in the ground together. The only information available shows that the materials were found somewhat near each other, but there are too many post-deposit processes at work that could have brought together materials that entered the ground during different millennia.

Researchers attempt to re-create the break on modern elephant bone

These concerns need to be addressed, because the claims of hominin entrance to the Americas more than 100,000 years earlier than currently believed are of utmost importance. It is not implausible that earlier hominins entered the Americas. It could even be the case that American archaeologists have not previously found evidence of this because they do not expect to find material remains that date back to earlier hominin dispersals. There could have been evidence that was passed over or explained using other assumptions. If anything, this case should result in more caution used by archaeologists when applying what is “already known” to the archaeological record.

However, one should also reasonably expect extraordinary claims such as these to come with very strong evidence, and this has not been made available by the authors or the journal. A lot more evidence will be necessary for the claim of much-earlier hominins dwelling in the New World to be accepted in the future. This controversy is a good example of how science should be done. There have been other instances where the dating of the first arrival of humans in the New World have been debated. Some were accepted and others were not. This is a dialectical process normal to scientific inquiry.

Amnesty report highlights companies profiting from Australia’s refugee camps

Max Newman

An Amnesty International report released last month, Treasure I$land, details the vast profits made by the companies overseeing the operations of the Australian government’s inhuman offshore refugee detention centres on Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Manus Island and the tiny island nation of Nauru.

The report states that the so-called Regional Processing Centres (RPCs) subject “refugees and people seeking asylum to a daily diet of humiliation, neglect, abuse and poor physical and mental health care.” In fact, the Australian government “proudly acknowledged that its offshore processing system is harsh and cruel, saying that this is necessary to deter people from trying to enter the country irregularly.”

However, the government has “also created an island of profits.” The report focuses on the three main companies that benefit from the misery inflicted on the asylum seekers. The leading private contractor is Broadspectrum, formerly Transfield, which runs the RPCs under a three-and-a-half-year contract with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) worth around $2.5 billion ($US1.9 billion). Broadspectrum sub-contracts most of the security work to Wilson Security. In April 2016, Broadspectrum became a subsidiary of Spanish-based transnational Ferrovial.

Broadspectrum was awarded the contract for “garrison” services on Nauru by the Gillard Labor government in 2012 when it reopened the off-shore prison camps. This lasted until March 2014 when the Liberal-National government expanded the contract to include Manus Island. This contract, amended several times to expand Broadspectrum’s control, is due to expire in October.

The actual profits these companies garner from their government contracts are veiled in secrecy. Broadspectrum and Ferrovial can “hide the exact profit they make from an abusive context,” the report notes. The secrecy arrangements also allow the government to hide exactly how much money is being spent on these criminal enterprises.

The Amnesty report utilised the available public material to paint a picture of the profits accumulated by Broadspectrum. According to Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) estimates, the current contract with Broadspectrum costs over $573,000 per detainee, per year. This estimate fits with information from the Australian government’s contract web site, which puts the combined total of contracts for “welfare” and “garrison” services over three-and-a-half years at $2.5 billion.

Broadspectrum claims the value of the contract is $1.2 billion. The report notes that, “even taken on its own, this is an outstandingly large amount of money.” The DIBP contract falls into Broadspectrum’s most profitable business sector, the “Social” sub-category of its Defence, Social and Property (DSP) group.

According to the report, in 2016 the DSP group contributed $1.646 billion of Broadspectrum’s total operating revenues of $3.692 billion, or 45 percent of its overall income. Moreover, 69 percent of the DSP income was derived from the “Social” subsector, which includes the DIBP contract. The DSP profit margin, 17.8 percent, far exceeded the company’s other sectors—Infrastructure, 2.8 percent, and Resource and Industrial, 1.6 percent.

The report states “the vast amount of money that Ferrovial and Broadspectrum make from the DIBP contract stands in stark contrast to the shockingly poor conditions in … the RPCs.”

An Australian Senate inquiry, which Amnesty cites, documented conditions on Nauru in which asylum seekers lived in mouldy tents, children had holes in their shoes, the replacement of soiled sheets on which children had urinated was a low priority and detainees accused security staff of torture and abuse.

The Senate inquiry was designed to whitewash the Australian government’s responsibility for the conditions in the camps. Nevertheless, the revelations in its report have been supported by numerous other investigations. One Amnesty report last year, published after the agency gained first-hand access to the centres, characterised the RPCs as places of torture because the infliction of abuse and anguish was the deliberate intent of the Australian government.

RPC staff members and ex-members themselves leaked incident reports that revealed officially suppressed cases of violence and abuse, particularly against children. A Human Rights Watch analysis this year again condemned the “heavy human toll” exacted on asylum seekers by Australia’s detention regime.

These are just a few of the now voluminous accounts of torture, physical and sexual abuse and mental degradation. When Ferrovial acquired Broadspectrum in April 2016 it had intimate knowledge of these operations. In December 2015, in a bidder statement, Ferrovial referred to the DIBP contracts as “highly profitable.”

After the PNG Supreme Court ruled, last April, that the Manus Island RPC was illegal, because of the unconstitutional deprivation of liberty, and must be closed, Broadspectrum recommended that its shareholders accept Ferrovial’s takeover bid. Ferrovial later announced it would not seek to renew Broadspectrum’s DIBP contract when it ends this October.

Amnesty’s report recommends that Ferrovial end its contract as soon as possible and that the Australian government scrap offshore processing and bring all detainees to Australia to have their “international protection applications” processed in a timely manner.

There is no chance, however, that the current Liberal-National government, or a Labor government, will heed such recommendations. Successive Australian governments, including the previous Greens-backed Labor administration, have deliberately brutalised asylum seekers and stripped them of the most basic legal and democratic rights. Refugees are being demonised and victimised to divert working-class opposition to worsening inequality and declining social conditions.

Moreover, Australia’s supreme court, the High Court, has sanctioned the continuation of indefinite detention on the basis of two fictions —that Australia is not the sovereign power incarcerating the refugees, despite financing and orchestrating the detention, and that RPCs are not “punitive” in character.

Similar developments are taking place across America, Europe and internationally. Xenophobia and nationalism are being whipped up, dovetailing with preparations for war. As a result, some of the world’s most vulnerable people, many fleeing the wars already unleashed by the US and its allies, are being subjected to ever-more cruel and lawless imprisonment.

Nationalists storm Macedonia's parliament

Markus Salzmann

The political crisis in Macedonia, which has been raging for months, intensified after some 100 partly masked nationalists, followers of long-time Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, stormed the parliament building in the capital, Skopje.

The demonstrators waved Macedonian flags and sang the national anthem. They attacked members of the Social Democratic Party and the parties representing the country’s Albanian minority. According to media reports, around 100 people were injured. Zoran Zaev, the designated Social Democratic head of government, suffered an injury to the head.

Although there has been a series of violent conflicts and assaults in recent months, there were only a handful of police in and around the parliament building. Police were able to establish some sort of control only after several hours, while some 3,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the parliament shouting nationalist and racist slogans. The police refrained from intervening.

It must be assumed that the security forces had been informed in advance about the action. Gruevski has considerable support in the security apparatus.

The occasion for the attack was the election of a new president of the parliament. The Social Democrats (SDSM) and the party of the Albanian minority had elected Albanian Talat Xhaferi with 61 out of a total of 120 votes, although the acting president had already declared the meeting closed. Gruevski’s party, the VMRO, described this as a coup.

The storming of parliament, in a country wracked by poverty and with just over two million inhabitants, threatens to turn into all-out civil war. President Gjorge Ivanov, who has close links to the VMRO, refused to give the Social Democratic opposition a mandate to form a government following parliamentary elections in December 2016, despite the fact that the SDSM together with Albanian parliamentarians has a majority. Ivanov accuses the opposition of “undermining Macedonia’s sovereignty.”

The VMRO won the election on December 11, 2016 with 39 percent of the vote, just ahead of the Social Democrats. But it has since been unable to form a government coalition. The SDSM, led by Zoran Zaev, formed an alliance with the representatives of ethnic Albanians, who account for 20-25 per cent of the population. Since then, the Gruevski camp has been trying to paralyse the work of the parliament with filibusters and other procedural tricks. More recently, the tactics have taken violent forms, with the clear intent of seizing power.

President Ivanov, who has himself played a vile role in the right-wing protests, hypocritically called for peaceful protest in a TV speech. Last Friday, he invited the various party leaders to discuss the situation in his office.

The political strife in Macedonia has been going on for more than ten years, but has recently intensified considerably. In 2006, the VMRO won the parliamentary election and formed a government with the parties of the Albanian minority. After 2008, the government collapsed when the VMRO refused to recognize Kosovo as an independent state.

The early parliamentary election of 2008 was overshadowed by protests and violent outbreaks involving deaths and injuries. After a long political crisis, Gruevski was finally confirmed in 2011 as head of government.

According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Gruevski is regarded as a “corrupt power-broker, who regards politics as an opportunity for personal enrichment” and employs authoritarian methods. The VMRO has roots in fascist traditions. It is a successor to the Inner Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which was founded in 1919 as a nationalist movement and has always maintained a paramilitary wing.

At the same time, Gruevski has the backing of the European Union and European powers because, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he was useful at the height of the refugee crisis “as a bulwark against migration flows.” In 2015, when tens of thousands of refugees attempted to navigate the Balkan route to Western Europe, Macedonia reinforced its border with Greece, set up frontier fences and used tear gas to repulse refugees, including women and children.

The country has been transformed into a powder keg by the rampant corruption of the ruling elite, which earns part of its wealth through smuggling operations, and the bitter poverty of the population. Macedonia has no significant independent economy, and effective unemployment is around 45 percent. The status of candidate for accession to the EU, agreed in 2005, has served only to intensify the social and economic crisis as Macedonia struggles to fulfill the conditions for EU membership.

Both the VMRO and the Social Democrats seek to direct these tensions along ethnic and nationalist channels. Following the break-up of Yugoslavia, to which Macedonia belonged, the country was embroiled in the Kosovo war. In 2001, armed conflicts occurred in the northwest of Macedonia after the Albanian militia occupied some villages and fought with the police and the army.

Now the VMRO is once again playing the Albanian card. President Ivanov refused to appoint the Social Democrat Zaev as premier because he and his coalition partners agreed to strengthen the rights of Albanians in the country. Albanian is due to become the second official language.

The great powers are also stirring up conflicts in the country, although they try to stay in the background. For example, Dušan Reljić, the head of the Brussels office of the official German Institute for International and Security Affairs, complained about the role of the United States in the region. He told the Austrian Standard: “The Americans have always had the say, not the Europeans. The fact that the Albanians turned away from Gruevski and toward the Social Democrats a year-and-a-half ago can be traced back to direct interference from Washington.”

“The whole region still sees America as its most important security policy partner, especially the Albanians,” Reljić continued, a situation that obviously does not suit Brussels and Berlin. He described talk about the growing influence of Russia in the region as “nonsense.”

For his part, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel condemned the attack carried out by Gruevski supporters on the parliament. “There must now finally be a government. There were democratic elections,” Gabriel said on Friday on the fringes of an EU meeting in Malta. “It is absolutely unacceptable when the former ruling party allows its supporters to attack the parliament and assault MPs.”

The crisis in Macedonia could quickly spread across the entire region. Ethnic conflicts, social misery and ruthless, reactionary elites dominate all of the states of the former Yugoslavia. The danger of war in the region looms ever closer.

In March, the British Economist magazine wrote: “In normal times, the world tends to ignore Macedonia and its 2 million people, a quarter of them ethnic Albanian. But the world is not ignoring Macedonia now. Western politicians are rushing to Skopje, Russia is issuing warnings, and Serbian newspapers proclaim that war is coming. Geopolitical relevance is returning to the Balkans…”