Banking on Uranium Makes the World Less Safe

Linda Pentz Gunter

There is a curious fallacy that continues to persist among arms control groups rightly concerned with reducing the threat of the use of nuclear weapons. It is that encouraging the use of nuclear energy will achieve this goal.

This illogical notion is enshrined in Article IV of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which rewards signatories who do not yet have nuclear weapons with the “inalienable right” to “develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.”

Now comes the international low-enriched uranium bank, which opened on August 29 in Kazakhstan, to expedite this right. It further reinforces the Article IV doctrine— that the spread of nuclear power will diminish the capability and the desire to manufacture nuclear weapons.

The uranium bank will purchase and store low-enriched uranium, fuel for civilian reactors, ostensibly guaranteeing a ready supply in case of market disruptions. But it is also positioned as a response to the Iran conundrum, a country whose uranium enrichment program cast suspicion over whether its real agenda was to continue enriching its uranium supply to weapons-grade level.

The bank will be run by the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose remit is “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy.” Evidently the IAEA has been quite successful in this promotional endeavor since the agency boasts that “dozens of countries today are interested in pursuing nuclear energy.”

A caveat here, borne out by the evidence of nuclear energy’s declining global share of the electricity market, is that far more countries are “interested” than are actually pursuing nuclear energy. The IAEA numbers are more aspiration than reality.

Superficially at least, the bank idea sounds sensible enough. There will be no need to worry that countries considering a nuclear power program might secretly shift to nuclear weapons production. In addition to a proliferation barrier, the bank will serve as a huge cost savings, sparing countries the expense of investing in their own uranium enrichment facilities.

The problem with this premise is that, rather than make the planet safer, it actually adds to the risks we already face. News reports pointed to the bank’s advantages for developing countries. But developing nations would be much better off implementing cheaper, safer renewable energy, far more suited to countries that lack major infrastructure and widespread electrical grid penetration.

Instead, the IAEA will use its uranium bank to provide a financial incentive to poorer countries in good standing with the agency to choose nuclear energy over renewables. For developing countries already struggling with poverty and the effects of climate change, this creates the added risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident, the financial burden of building nuclear power plants in the first place, and of course an unsolved radioactive waste problem.

No country needs nuclear energy. Renewable energy is soaring worldwide, is far cheaper than nuclear, and obviously a whole lot safer. No country has to worry about another’s potential misuse of the sun or wind as a deadly weapon. There is no solar non-proliferation treaty. We should be talking countries out of developing dangerous and expensive nuclear energy, not paving the way for them.

There is zero logic for a country like Saudi Arabia, also mentioned during the uranium bank’s unveiling, to choose nuclear over solar or wind energy. As Senator Markey (D-MA) once unforgettably pointed out: “Saudi Arabia is the Saudi Arabia of solar.” But the uranium bank could be just the carrot that sunny country needs to abandon renewables in favor of uranium.

This is precisely the problem with the NPT Article IV. Why “reward” non-nuclear weapons countries with dangerous nuclear energy? If they really need electricity, and the UN wants to be helpful, why not support a major investment in renewables? It all goes back to the Bomb, of course, and the Gordian knot of nuclear power and nuclear weapons that the uranium bank just pulled even tighter.

Will the uranium bank be too big to fail? Or will it even be big at all? With nuclear energy in steep decline worldwide, unable to compete with renewables and natural gas; and with major nuclear corporations, including Areva and Westinghouse, going bankrupt, will there even be enough customers?

Clothed in wooly non-proliferation rhetoric, the uranium bank is nothing more than a lupine marketing enterprise to support a struggling nuclear industry desperate to remain relevant as more and more plants close and new construction plans are canceled. The IAEA and its uranium bank just made its prospects a whole lot brighter and a safer future for our planet a whole lot dimmer.

Capitalism, the State and the Drowning of America

Ted Steinberg

As Hurricane Harvey lashed Texas, Naomi Klein wasted no time in diagnosing the “real root causes” behind the disaster, indicting “climate pollution, systemic racism, underfunding of social services, and overfunding of police.” A day after her essay appeared, George Monbiot argued that no one wants to ask the tough questions about the coastal flooding spawned during Hurricane Harvey because to do so would be to challenge capitalism—a system wedded to “perpetual growth on a finite planet”—and call into question the very foundations of “the entire political and economic system.”

Of the two choices, I vote for Monbiot’s interpretation. Nearly forty years ago, the historian Donald Worster in his classic study of one of the worst natural disasters in world history, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, wrote that capitalism, which he understood as an economic culture founded on maximizing imperatives and a determination to treat nature as a form of capital, “has been the decisive factor in this nation’s use of nature.”

Care must be taken not to imagine capitalism as a timeless phenomenon. Capitalism has a history and that history is important if we are to properly diagnose what happened recently in Texas and is about to happen as Hurricane Irma bears down on Florida. What we need to understand is how capitalism has managed to reproduce itself since the Great Depression, but in a way that has put enormous numbers of people and tremendous amounts of property in harm’s way along the stretch from Texas to New England.

The production of risk began during the era of what is sometimes called regulated capitalism between the 1930s and the early 1970s. This form of capitalism with a “human face” involved state intervention to ensure a modicum of economic freedom but it also led the federal government to undertake sweeping efforts to control nature. The motives may well have seemed pure. But the efforts to control the natural world, though they worked in the near term, are beginning to seem inadequate to the new world we currently inhabit. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built reservoirs to control floods in Houston just as it built other water-control structures during the same period in New Orleans and South Florida. These sweeping water-control exploits laid the groundwork for massive real estate development in the post–World War II era.

All along the coast from Texas to New York and beyond developers plowed under wetlands to make way for more building and more impervious ground cover. But the development at the expense of marsh and water could never have happened on the scale it did without the help of the American state. Ruinous flooding of Houston in 1929 and 1935 compelled the Corps of Engineers to build the Addicks and Barker Dams. The dams combined with a massive network of channels—extending today to over 2,000 miles—to carry water off the land, and allowed Houston, which has famously eschewed zoning, to boom during the postwar era.

The same story unfolded in South Florida. A 1947 hurricane caused the worst coastal flooding in a generation and precipitated federal intervention in the form of the Central and Southern Florida Project. Again, the Corps of Engineers set to work transforming the land. Eventually a system of canals that if laid end to end would extend all the way from New York City to Las Vegas crisscrossed the southern part of the peninsula. Life for the more than five million people who live in between Orlando and Florida Bay would be unimaginable without this unparalleled exercise in the control of nature.

It is not simply that developers bulldozed wetlands with reckless abandon in the postwar period. The American state paved the way for that development by underwriting private accumulation.

Concrete was the capitalist state’s favored medium. But as the floods
mounted in the 1960s, it turned to non-structural approaches meant to keep the sea at bay. The most famous program along these lines was the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) established in 1968, a liberal reform that grew out of the Great Society. The idea was that the federal government would oversee a subsidized insurance program for homeowners and in return state and local municipalities would impose regulations to keep people and property out of harm’s way.

At the same time that the U.S. government launched the NFIP, a Keynesian crisis that would extend over the course of the next decade and a half began to unfold. Declining corporate profits were brought on by rising wages, mounting class conflict, escalating competition from Japan and western Europe, and increased consumer and environmental regulation. The profit squeeze combined with stagflation and widespread fiscal problems to produce major economic dislocation.

A new form of capitalism began to slowly emerge as business responded to the crisis. Major institutional change occurred in the global economy, in the relationship between capital and labor, and most important for our concerns here, in the state’s role in economic life. In the early 1970s the Business Roundtable was established as a corporate lobbying group. Among its tasks was to undermine various forms of consumer and environmental regulation.

This was the context for the assault on the liberal flood insurance program. By the 1990s, under the Clinton Administration, the pretense of regulating land use on the local level was all but dismissed in favor of a policy that simply encouraged localities to do the right thing to ensure the safety of people and property. It is not an accident that one of the worst-hit developments in Houston—southern Kingwood—was built in the last years of the twentieth century and the aughts right in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s designated 100-year floodplain.

Nor is there anything the least bit natural in how cities in the postwar United States have functioned as profitable sites for capital accumulation. Developers have been able to derive profits from capitalist urbanization in coastal locations because of what was effectively a giant subsidy by the American state.

Flirtation with disaster is in a sense the essence of neoliberal capitalism, a hyperactive form of this exploitative economic order that seems to know no limits. Some might find comfort in the words of Alexander Cockburn: “A capitalism that thrives best on the abnormal, on disasters, is by definition in decline.”

Others, myself included, worry that the current organization of this market economy to benefit the interests of capitalists, with its blind, utopian faith in the price mechanism, is likely to head in precisely the direction that the economic historian Karl Polanyi predicted in 1944. An institutional arrangement organized around a “self-adjusting market,” he warned, “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”

Taking Aim: WikiLeaks, Congress And Hostile Agencies

Binoy Kampmark

Various scribbles have started to pepper the conversation started by the adventurous Mike Pompeo after he branded WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence agency before the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  (This would have generated a wry smile of content from Julian Assange.)

The words of the Central Intelligence Agency chief are worth retelling in their mind distorting wonder: “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Individuals like Assange and Edward Snowden receive the necessary special treatment as history’s great turncoats: “As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security.” Celebrity disrupters, dangerous irritants, narcissists in pursuit of personal glory.

This wretchedly desperate sentiment – for its nothing else – has wound its way into Congressional ponderings.  Prior to the August District Work Period, the Senate Intelligence Committee took up Pompeo’s views, slotting into the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act (SB 1761) some suggestive wording:

“It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resembles a non-state  hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.”

This inventive provision passed 14-1, the only demurral coming from Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon.  To The Hill, Wyden explained that “the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets.” And what, he feared, of the “unstated course of action” against those sinister non-state hostile intelligence services?

Responses to the provision have varied.  Patrick G. Eddington of the Cato Institute was less than rosy about WikiLeaks, suggesting that such “Sense of Congress” provisions are pure “legislative puffery” lacking legal force, at least as far as Assange is concerned.  “To claim otherwise trivializes the real threats that actual investigative journalists and their news organizations face from the US government.”

Forget the Assange obsession, Eddington suggests to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, and focus on dragging out the rotten apples, those “real problems and real bad actors inside the American Intelligence Community”. Eddington evidently forgets that such rotten fruit can have establishment camouflage.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi takes the wording of the clause more seriously, seeing it as a form of justification to ground an action against WikiLeaks. But another expansive outcome could just as well ensue, empowering “federal law enforcement agencies to go after legitimate media outlets that obtain and publish classified information regarded as critical or even damaging to government policies.” (Giraldi shares with Eddington a common trait of not regarding WikiLeaks as a legitimate media outlet.  Such is the nature of backhanded praise.)

This sort of legislative interference is far from unusual.  Australia’s own parliament, whose laws originally supplied no means or facility to prosecute Assange or WikiLeaks activities over US material per se, did pass what was tantamount to a “WikiLeaks amendment” in 2011.

To understand the amendment, it is worth looking at the political contortions adopted by the Australia prime minister of the period, Julia Gillard.  Rather than considering the legal improbabilities at hand, she openly called the publishing of US cables “a grossly irresponsible thing to do and an illegal thing to do”, a point at odds with the finding by the Australian Federal Police that nothing unlawful had happened – at least in the Australian context.

“The AFP has completed its evaluation of the material available,” came its statement in December 2010, “and has not established the existence of any criminal offences where Australia would have jurisdiction.”

A year later, the Intelligence Services Legislative Amendment Bill 2011 made its way through the drafting process. It seemed innocuous, a sort of laundry list of inoffensive provisions. But one crucial change mattered: the tinkering of the term “foreign intelligence” in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979.

The original definition was a narrower one, making foreign intelligence relevant to covering “capabilities, intentions or activities” of foreign governments, entities controlled by the same or foreign political organisations.  The current definition draws the tent outwards to the “capabilities, intentions or activities of people or organisations outside Australia.”

Such a change should have sent the political classes into a furious state. But it passed with barely a murmur, only ruffling the Australian Greens concerned that it might arrogate too much power to ASIO.

So soporific was the debate that some senators never bothered to turn up.  Few, it seemed, had read the submission by law academic Patrick Emerton to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee.  It reads as a sober warning to legislative overstretch, a parliamentary gift to bureaucratic paranoia: “The amendments would permit ASIO to investigate a far wider range of individuals and organisations, even where Australia’s defence interests and international relations are not at stake.”

Legislative sloppiness, congressional warnings, and the ignorant passage of statutes – these point to business as usual, the wood of unwary representatives.  But they also suggest a serious program at work: the targeting and punishment, not merely of whistleblowers, but the outlets that disseminate their findings.  That much can be said for such legislative puffery.

Profit Maximization Is Easy: Invest in Violence

Robert J. Burrowes

For those of us committed to systematically reducing and, one day, ending human violence, it is vital to understand what is causing and driving it so that effective strategies can be developed for dealing with violence in its myriad contexts. For an understanding of the fundamental cause of violence, see ‘Why Violence?’

However, while we can tackle violence at its source by each of us making and implementing ‘My Promise to Children’, the widespread violence in our world is driven by just one factor: fear or, more accurately, terror. And I am not talking about jihadist terror or even the terror caused by US warmaking. Let me explain, starting from the beginning.

The person who is fearless has no use for violence and has no trouble achieving their goals, including their own defence, without it. But fearlessness is a state that few humans would claim. Hence violence is rampant.

Moreover, once someone is afraid, they will be less likely to perceive the truth behind the delusions with which they are presented. They will also be less able to access and rely on other mental functions, such as conscience and intelligence, to decide their course of action in any context. Worse still, the range of their possible responses to perceived threats will be extremely limited. And they will be more easily mobilised to support or even participate in violence, in the delusional belief that this will make them safe.

For reasons such as these, it is useful for political and corporate elites to keep us in a state of fear: social control is much easier in this context. But so is profit maximization. And the most profitable enterprise on the planet is violence. In essence then: more violence leads to more fear making it easier to gain greater social control to inflict more violence…. And starting early, by terrorizing children, is the most efficient way to initiate and maintain this cycle. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So, for example, if you think the massive number of police killings of innocent civilians in the United States – see ‘Killed by Police’ and ‘The Counted: People killed by police in the US’ – is a problem, you are not considering it from the perspective of maintaining elite social control and maximizing corporate profit. Police killings of innocent civilians is just one (necessary) part of the formula for maintaining control and maximising profit.

This is because if you want to make a lot of money in this world, then killing or exploiting fellow human beings and destroying the natural world are the three most lucrative business enterprises on the planet. And we are now very good at it, as the record shows, with the planetary death toll from violence and exploitation now well over 100,000 human beings each day, 200 species driven to extinction each day and ecological destruction so advanced that the end of all life (not just human life) on Earth is postulated to occur within decades, if not sooner, depending on the scenario. See, for example, ‘The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere’.

So what forms does this violence take? Here is a daily accounting.

Corporate capitalist control of national economies, held in place by military violence, kills vast numbers of people (nearly one million each week) by starving them to death in Africa, Asia and Central/South America. This is because this ‘economic’ system is designed and managed to allocate resources for military weapons and corporate profits for the wealthy, instead of resources for living.

Wars kill, wound and incapacitate a substantial number of civilians, mostly women and children, as do genocidal assaults, on a daily basis, in countries all over the planet. Wars also kill some soldiers and mercenaries.

Apart from those people we kill every day, we sell many women and children into sexual slavery, we kidnap children to terrorise them into becoming child soldiers and force men, women and children to work as slave labourers, in horrific conditions, in fields and factories (and buy the cheap products of their exploited labour as our latest ‘bargain’).

We condemn millions of people to live in poverty, homelessness and misery, even in industrialized countries where the refugees of western-instigated wars and climate-destroying policies are often treated with contempt. We cause many children to be born with grotesque genetic deformities because we use horrific weapons, like those with depleted uranium, on their parents. We also inflict violence on women and children in many other forms, ranging from ‘ordinary’ domestic violence to genital mutilation.

We ensnare and imprison vast numbers of people in the police-legal-prison complex. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’. We pay the pharmaceutical industry and its handmaiden, psychiatry, to destroy our minds with drugs and electro-shocking. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’.We imprison vast numbers of children in school in the delusional belief that this is good for them. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ And we kill or otherwise exploit animals, mostly for human consumption, in numbers so vast the death toll is probably beyond calculation.

We also engage in an endless assault on the Earth’s biosphere. Apart from the phenomenal damage done to the environment and climate by military violence: we emit gases and pollutants to heat and destroy the atmosphere and destroy its oxygen content. We cut down and burn rainforests. We cut down mangroves and woodlands and pave grasslands. We poison the soil with herbicides and pesticides. We pollute the waterways and oceans with everything from carbon and nitrogenous fertilizers to plastic, as well as the radioactive contamination from Fukushima. And delude ourselves that our token gestures to remedy this destruction constitutes ‘conservation’.

So if you are seeking work, whether as a recent graduate or long-term unemployed person, then the most readily available form of work, where you will undoubtedly be exploited as well, is a government bureaucracy or large corporation that inflicts violence on life itself. Whether it is the military, the police, legal or prison system, a weapons, fossil fuel, banking, pharmaceutical, media, mining, agricultural, logging, food or water corporation, a farm that exploits animals or even a retail outlet that sells poisonous, processed and often genetically-mutilated substances under the label ‘food’ – see ‘Defeating the Violence in Our Food and Medicine’ – you will have many options to help add to the profits of those corporations and government ‘services’ that exist to inflict violence on you, your family and every other living being that shares this biosphere.

Tragically, genuinely ethical employment is a rarity because most industries, even those that seem benign like the education, finance, information technology and electronics industries, usually end up providing skilled personnel, finance, services or components that are used to inflict violence. And other industries such as those in insurance and superannuation, like the corporate banks, usually invest in violence (such as the military and fossil fuel industries): it is the most profitable.

So while many government bureaucracies and corporate industries exist to inflict violence, in one form or another, they can only do so because we are too scared to insist on seeking out ethical employment. In the end, we will take a job as a teacher, corporate journalist or pharmaceutical drug pusher, serve junk food, work in a bank, join the police or military, work in the legal system, assemble a weapons component… rather than ask ourselves the frightening questions ‘Is this nonviolent? Is this ethical? Does it enhance life?’

And yes, I know about structural violence and the way it limits options and opportunities for those of particular classes, races, genders…. But if ordinary people like us don’t consider moral issues and make moral choices, why should governments and corporations?

Moral choices? you might ask in confusion. In this day and age? Well, it might seem old-fashioned but, in fact, while most of us have been drawn along by the events in our life to make choices based on such considerations as self-interest, personal gain and ‘financial security’, there is a deeper path. Remember Gandhi? ‘True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.’

Strange words they no doubt sound in this world where our attention is endlessly taken by all of those high-tech devices. But Gandhi’s words remind us that there is something deeper in life that the violence we have suffered throughout our lives has taken from us. The courage to be ourselves and to seek our own unique destiny.

Do you have this courage? To be yourself, rather than a cog in someone else’s machine? To refuse to submit to the violence that surrounds and overwhelms us on a daily basis?

If you are inclined to ponder these questions, you might also consider making moral choices that work systematically to end the violence in our world: consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’, signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ and/or helping to develop and implement an effective strategy to resist one or the other of the many threats to our survival using the strategic framework explained in Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

Of course, these choices aren’t for everyone. As Gandhi observed: ‘Cowards can never be moral.’

Price gouging at Amazon and the case for public ownership

Eric London

As Florida’s residents brace themselves for Hurricane Irma, Amazon is profiting from third party sellers hiking the cost of water sold on the corporation’s online marketplace.

Family and residents of areas expected to be slammed by the hurricane’s torrential rain and 180 mile per hour winds took to Twitter in recent days to protest high mark-ups on cases of water. Many people have attempted to buy water online in the run-up to the storm because grocery stores and warehouses quickly sold out.

Florida resident Lee Munro tweeted, “So. Florida girl trying to by food on @Amazon before Irma...prices have tripled. Isn’t that PRICE GOUGING? @JeffBezos”

Another user, J, posted a photo of a 24-pack of bottled water priced at $20, adding, “@Amazon, I’m in Tampa trying to buy water online because stores are out of water and this is crazy price gouging!”

Diana Moskovitz, an editor for the web site Deadspin, posted a photo of Amazon sellers charging $18.48 for a 24-pack of bottled water usually priced at $5-6. To ship the bottled water before the storm hits would cost $179.25, making the total cost $197.73, or $8.24 per bottle. USA Today reported that an Amazon search for Ice Mountain Spring Water priced a 24-pack at $99.99 before shipping.

Amazon replied by denying claims of price gouging. “We do not engage in surge pricing,” a corporate spokesperson told Business Insider, adding that bottled water prices “have not widely fluctuated in the last month.” While true that the price increases are not due to surge pricing, Amazon contracts with third party sellers and receives a percentage of sales revenue and is profiting from third party price hikes. The company spokesperson blamed the company’s algorithms for the rising price, noting that “lower priced offers are quickly selling out, leaving higher priced offers from third party sellers.”

Even the pro-corporate Forbes magazine found this defense suspicious, with Tom Popomoronis writing yesterday: “Personally, I find it appalling and sickening to just ‘blame the algorithm’ and sweep this under the rug amidst catastrophe.” Popomoronis explained, “Under normal circumstances, algorithmic processing can result in price shifts ranging from just a penny or two to several dollars, depending on the demand the AI analyzes and the initial price. ... But in hurricanes and other natural disasters and crises, algorithms break this general rule. Because equipment and supplies that are necessary for human survival get tagged with the increases, the ethics of allowing regular supply and demand concepts to prevail comes into question.”

Even in the wake of last week’s devastating Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, capitalist think tanks have defended the policies of companies like Amazon. Writing for the American Enterprise Institute, University of Michigan economist Mark Perry wrote recently, “A frequent claim we hear is that the laws of economic should be suspended, ignored or circumvented following a natural disaster like Hurricane Harvey, which then motivates laws against ‘price-gouging.’ But you can make a stronger case that it’s during the period following a natural disaster like a hurricane when we want market prices to prevail and market forces to operate as forcefully and powerfully as possible.”

In other words, let the corporations prey on workers and their families in Texas and Florida whose homes have been destroyed or who are attempting to get out of harm’s way. Airlines are currently charging Floridans thousands of dollars to leave the state for safe grounds. American Airlines, for example, is charging just under $2,000 for flights from Miami to Minneapolis. One twitter user said, “This is how American Airlines helps people to evacuate Miami ... by raising tickets 400% #shameful!”

The recent price hikes by third party sellers on Amazon is a particularly egregious example of corporate profiteering, but this type of vulture activity is the rule under capitalism, where social need and human rights are subordinated to the interests of corporate profit. Amazon has catapulted itself to the top of the economic food chain by imposing a business model based on the hyper-exploitation of its 300,000-person workforce, forcing workers all over the world to labor under strenuous conditions at low pay and low benefits.

While the government protects the right of corporations to profit off of flood victims, it ignores infrastructure, rescue preparations, and leaves residents to fight for themselves. In Houston, rescue efforts were largely spontaneous and organized by the working class without sufficient support from the government. While thousands of workers took their boats into the flood waters looking for victims and bringing them food and water, the Washington Post—owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—sought to paper over the government’s lack of preparedness, writing: “Rescue officials say there was no way to prepare for deluge’s ferocity.”

The response of the ruling class and the working class to this summer’s storms shows the burning need for the socialist reorganization of the world economy. Instead of price gouging and government neglect, trillions of dollars must be taken from the major corporations and from the bank accounts of their billionaire owners to build flood and natural disaster infrastructure across the world. Massive jobs programs involving millions of workers must be launched to protect the population against storms, earthquakes, fires and floods.

Corporations like Amazon must be placed under social ownership and directed not for private profit, but to meet social needs. Under socialist direction, Amazon could be transformed into a platform for natural disaster rescue. The corporation’s fleet of delivery drones could be flown to Miami or Houston and used to deliver free water, food, medical supplies, flares, inflatable rafts, etc., to millions of residents.

Drones with live video cameras could be used to go street-by-street through the floodwaters, identifying residents in need of rescue and alerting authorities. The corporation’s massive warehouses could be used to store food and its growing network of neighborhood shops could be used as distribution centers, supplied with a constant flow of emergency goods and personnel by the company’s complex international supply line.

Rebuilding efforts could be scientifically organized according to a regional plan that calculates the material needs of different neighborhoods, programming drones, delivery drivers and trucks to drop off supplies and pick up waste. With the immense power of a corporation like Amazon at the full disposal of disaster relief efforts, rebuilding a major city like Houston could be as smoothly orchestrated as municipal garbage pickup.

This requires a level of social planning which cannot be introduced under a capitalist system where private profit is the rule.

Mass demonstrations in Togo threaten to topple ruling government

Eddie Haywood 

On Wednesday and again on Thursday, tens of thousands of Togolese poured into the streets of cities across the West African nation demanding the ruling government of Faure Gnassingbe resign immediately. The numbers of protesters are unprecedented; initial figures reported in the media indicate that at least 100,000 turned out in 10 cities around the country on Wednesday.

The demonstrations were organized by the Pan-African National Party (PNP) and the National Alliance for Change (ANC) to call for the immediate release of party members imprisoned by the government. But the demonstrations took on a revolutionary dimension with the crowds expressing popular contempt for the government with widespread calls for the Gnassingbe regime to resign.

Lomé, Togo’s capital city, saw the largest convergence of protests. Banners were waved with the words “Faure Must Go!” and “50 Years Is Long Enough!” a reference to the dynastic character of the Gnassingbe government.

Social anger reached a fever pitch in August when two protesters were killed by police during demonstrations against the Gnassingbe government organized by the opposition party of Jean-Pierre Fabre, the National Alliance for Change (ANC). Many were beaten and assaulted with teargas, with others arrested and jailed.

The protests have struck a chord of terror within the Gnassingbe government. Recalling the mass demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011 that saw the hated dictators of both countries swept from power, the wave of large scale demonstrations currently in Togo have shook the very foundations of the Gnassingbe government.

Recognizing the massive threat to its continued existence in the wave of popular outrage, the Gnassingbe government is desperate to put an end to the demonstrations.

Public service minister and government spokesperson Gilbert Bawara announced on Wednesday that the government had moved to limit Internet access nationwide for “security” purposes. Internet as well as mobile text messaging and money transfer networks were completely down by Thursday.

In an effort to assuage popular anger the Gnassingbe government has promised to introduce legislation in October that would call for limits to two terms for the presidency. In the unlikely event this meaningless reform was made law and enforced, Gnassingbe would remain in power for another three years, leaving office in 2020.

Togo is among the poorest countries in the world, with more than 80 percent of the rural poor living on less than $2 a day while a tiny layer at the top enjoy obscene privilege at the expense of these impoverished masses.

The social anger which has erupted in mass demonstrations has been kindled for decades by the dictatorial and dynastic government. The Gnassingbe family has ruled Togo for half a century.

In 1967, Faure Gnassingbe’s father, Etienne Gnassingbe Eyadema, took power after he staged a coup against the government of Nicolas Grunitzky. His nearly four-decade rule was one of the longest in Africa.

Eyadema’s political trajectory paralleled the path of many post-colonial African autocrats. In 1953 during French colonial rule, Eyadema joined the army, rising to the rank of sergeant. While in the army during the decade of the 1950s, he fought on behalf of France in its bloody colonial wars conducted against Indochina and Algeria.

After he assumed power, Eyadema enjoyed the backing of France and other European governments, including Washington. Like other newly independent governments coming to power in Africa’s post-colonial era, Eyadema’s government sought to continue undisturbed the capitalist operations established in Togo under the colonial administration.

The Eyadema government was characterized by corruption, nepotism and authoritarianism. The government held a series of allegedly democratic elections, now widely regarded as rigged, at various times throughout Eyadema’s 38-year rule.

Upon taking power, Eyadema decreed his party, Rally of the Togolese People (RPT), as the only legal political organization allowed in the country. A rabid anticommunist, he targeted political enemies with accusations of having close ties to the Soviet Union.

In 1993, after feeling international pressure over his regime’s gross human rights violations, Eyadema attempted to give his regime a veneer of democratic legitimacy by allowing other parties to campaign for elections held that year. These reforms were largely farcical, and the fraudulent character of these “elections” was revealed when Eyadema was declared the winner in every single election afterwards.

Following Eyadema’s death in 2005 of health complications while on a plane bound to Tunisia for medical treatment, the remaining government in Lomé appointed his son, Faure Gnassingbe, as the new president.

When the Togolese masses poured into the streets in revolt at this blatant establishment of dynastic succession, Faure Gnassingbe felt compelled to hold elections. Not surprising to the Togolese masses, Gnassingbe was declared the winner.

International election observers, barred by the government from monitoring the election, strongly suspected the ballot was rigged. During protests against the regime’s dynastic machinations, 500 people were killed by security forces.

An element of dread no doubt haunts the minds of the Togolese ruling elite and Western capitalists regarding the potential for the collapse of the Gnassingbe government and its effect on their capitalist operations and banking enterprises in Togo in the wake of the mass demonstrations.

Washington displayed its “scramble for Africa” strategy in August, when it sent representatives of the Trump administration to attend the annual African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade forum held in Lomé. AGOA was enacted in 2000 by the Clinton administration, to better facilitate trade between the United States and Africa.

When asked by the media regarding President Donald Trump’s position on Africa, US State Department spokesman Brian Neubert, who was present at the forum, said that Washington has “very significant interests in Africa.”

Speaking further, Neubert elaborated on Washington’s imperialist aims for Africa, “There are opportunities for American investors in several sectors. For example, in the energy sector—the opportunities are enormous.”

Wednesday’s demonstrations make clear the establishment is petrified of the Togolese masses, and the ruling elite is desperate to contain the social outrage. Calculating the implications of a collapse of the Gnassingbe government, the ruling class is attempting to forge an alliance with the political opposition in a combined effort to channel the restive masses down the fraudulent avenue of constitutional reforms of presidential term limits.

On Wednesday, the Gnassingbe government demonstrated its eagerness to make a political alliance with the PNP and ANC by releasing several PNP and ANC figures it held in prison.

The fraudulent political parties behind the organization of the demonstrations represent a faction of the Togolese capitalist elite, and seek to take undeserved political advantage of the mass social anger towards the dynastic regime and channel it into a political campaign to assume power for themselves. The election of either the PNP or ANC would not improve the miserable conditions of life experienced by the Togolese masses.

Suicide attempt by Renault Nissan worker reveals brutal conditions in India’s free trade zones

Arun Kumar 

A recent suicide attempt by a worker at Renault Nissan India’s manufacturing plant in Oragadam Special Economic Zone (SEZ), 50 km from Chennai, has once again highlighted the brutal and inhuman conditions facing autoworkers in India.

The August 17 incident occurred with virtually no comment by the regional and national corporate-controlled media. It came to light only after Thozhilalar koodam (Workers Forum, tnlabour.in), an English-Tamil bilingual website with ties to Maoist-led organizations, reported the suicide attempt on September 3.

Renault Nissan is a leading global auto company and the second-largest car manufacturer in India. It was formed in the 1999 as an alliance of France-based Renault and Japan-based Nissan and employs nearly 450,000 workers globally. Renault Nissan is the leading plug-in electric car manufacturer in the world. The company began its Indian operations in Oragadam in 2010.

The Oragadam plant manufactures 480,000 cars per year and markets them in India and 106 countries around the world. The plant employs more than 10,000 workers, including regular, contract and apprentice workers.

Following a heated argument with the supervisor over his application for leave, an assembly shop floor worker in the plant attempted to poison himself by consuming soap oil. The supervisor not only refused to grant the worker’s request for leave but also verbally abused him. The helpless worker, extremely frustrated by supervisor’s response, attempted to kill himself.

The immediate intervention by co-workers, who witnessed the incident, saved the worker’s life. They rushed him to the nearest Global Hospital where, after two days of treatment, he was discharged and has recovered.

The next day, the angry workers in the plant stopped production for 20 minutes to protest the supervisor’s refusal to grant leave to their co-worker and demand that the supervisor be disciplined for driving the worker to suicide.

The denial of leave was not the act of just a particularly sadistic supervisor but is the common practice of Renault Nissan and other global automakers in India to maximize the exploitation of workers and corporate profits. Though plant workers are eligible for casual leave with pay, each leave application has to be approved by the floor supervisor. In most cases supervisors deny leave, forcing workers to forgo time off or to go on “unapproved” leave facing a cut in one-day wages. Every month hundreds of workers lose pay for taking such leaves.

The victimized worker had reportedly already lost two days wages amounting to 2,000 rupees (US $31.27) for his earlier such “unapproved” leave. The lost of these meagre wages is devastating for impoverished workers. Because the worker could not afford another pay cut, he challenged the supervisor.

In an earlier incident at the same Renault Nissan plant, which highlighted the lack of basic safety measures, Thiyagarajan Mahalingam, a 29-year-old junior engineer in the factory’s maintenance department, was crushed to death on January 6 by a hydraulic press he was inspecting in the engine assembly section.

Sweatshop conditions are commonplace throughout the country’s factories and are encouraged by successive central and state governments to attract foreign investment. Since coming to power in May 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has escalated the attacks on the social and democratic rights of the working class in the name of Modi’s “Make in India” campaign.

The sharpest expression of this ruling class offensive is the witch-hunt against the Maruti Suzuki autoworkers in Manesar, Gurgaon in northern India Haryana state. Last March, 13 Maruti Suzuki workers were sentenced to life imprisonment on trumped-up murder charges in a brutal display of class justice aimed at intimidating and silencing workers and crushing the rising resistance to exploitation.

Twelve of the 13 imprisoned workers were leaders of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU), which was formed by workers in a rebellion against the company and the government-sanctioned stooge union. The July 2012 frame-up followed more than a year of militant strikes and protests against brutal conditions in the plant, including the lack of leave, arduous production quotas and the hated contract labour system, which prevail across the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt—a huge auto manufacturing centre that has sprung up on the outskirts of Indian capital Delhi.

India’s main Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI)—and their affiliated union federations—the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) respectively—have systematically isolated the embattled Maruti Suzuki workers, thereby facilitating the company-government vendetta against them.

In Sriperumbudur, Oragadam and other nearby SEZs, many global auto and electronics corporations and auto parts companies extract vast profits with conditions similar to Maruti Suzuki. The Stalinist CITU and Maoist-linked unions are active in these SEZs and seek to restrict workers to a narrow trade unionist and nationalist outlook while boosting illusions in the Congress Party, the traditional party of the Indian ruling class, which also played the central role in the state persecution of the Maruti Suzuki workers.

German conservative parties embrace the language of dictatorship

Peter Schwarz

On September 1, the interior and justice ministers of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) adopted a statement on domestic security which reads like a blueprint for dictatorship. The two “Union” parties head the current coalition government in Germany, with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as a junior partner.

At the start of the document the signatories boast: “We are the driving force in domestic and legal policy.” The document continues in this vein and ends: “We stand for a strong state that takes seriously its responsibility for the security and protection of its citizens. Security in freedom requires order. ... We will not permit unregulated areas.”

The word “right” is used in the text exclusively in expressions linked to state, law and order, rather than in connection to democracy. The term “democracy” appears only once in the document: “Right and left-wing extremism question the basis of our democracy.” The concept of “basic rights” or “democratic rights,” which protect citizens from state violence and exploitation, does not exist in the vocabulary and mindset of the Union ministers.

Under the title “A strong state of law to protect our citizens,” the document puts forward a catalogue of measures any dictator would be proud of. This begins with the sentence: “Optimal cooperation between the federal and state level, and especially between the police, intelligence services and the judiciary, is the decisive factor for effective security in our country.”

The ministers seem to have forgotten that the separation of the intelligence services and the police as well as their decentralisation were among the basic principles of the post-war German order. This was the most important conclusion drawn from the criminal role played by the Secret State Police (Gestapo) of the Nazi regime.

The German bourgeoisie, however, did not arrive at this conclusion voluntarily; it was forced to adopt it under pressure from the Allied powers. Following the restoration of full Germany sovereignty after unification, the longstanding separation of the police and intelligence forces has been increasingly questioned. The CDU ministers now consider it to be irrelevant.

Many of the measures proposed by the Union ministers would have made the Gestapo envious—in particular because it did not yet have the new possibilities of state control opened up by the latest surveillance technology.

“We will strengthen the police and security forces, both in terms of personnel and state-of-the-art equipment,” the document states. “We want to bring state-of-the-art technology (for example, intelligent video technology for face recognition), powers corresponding to our time, close cooperation between the security authorities, and, last but not least, a modern data policy that balances security interests with data protection concerns.”

“Islamist terrorism” serves as a pretext for the massive build-up of state powers, This, despite the fact all of the major terror attacks in recent years—from Paris, Brussels and Berlin to Barcelona—were committed by perpetrators known to the security authorities and frequently in close contact with them. Significantly, however, the interior ministers go further. They cite as an additional reason for boosting state power the threat from “right-wing and left-wing extremism,” with the emphasis on the latter.

The violent clashes on the fringes of the G20 summit in Hamburg, provoked by the police and massively exaggerated by the media, serve as a pretext for attacking social and political opposition from the left. “The brutal violence on the streets of Hamburg at the G20 summit has demonstrated the terrifying potential for violence stemming from left-wing extremists,” the text reads.

This serves as a justification to undermine the basic rights to demonstrate and exercise free expression. To this end the criminal offence of civil disorder is to be broadened in a way that a single stone, thrown by a police provocateur, can serve as a pretext to declare a peaceful demonstration to be a mob of violent criminals. Based on the new law, criminal proceedings can be brought, not only against those who practice violence, but also against all those who “assist aggressors by offering them protection in the crowd.”

Meeting places of Autonomists—such as the Rote Flora in Hamburg and Riga Street in Berlin—will no longer be “tolerated,” and masking one’s face on a demonstration is to remain a criminal offence and not be “downgraded to an administrative offence.”

The Union ministers also want to further empower prosecutors and the courts to combat and intimidate social opposition. This is to be done via improved “personnel and material equipment,” the further expansion of criminal law as well as the modernisation “of the instruments for prosecution.” This includes “new possibilities to evaluate DNA” and the expansion of “the storage and recovery of traffic data.” “Promoting sympathy” for “terrorist and criminal associations … on our streets and squares”—whatever that means—is to be made a punishable offence.

Many of the proposals have unmistakably racist features, e.g., when the ministers demand the examination of DNA “for skin colour, hair colour and bio-geographical origin” or when they are threatening: “We will not tolerate parallel societies—only our rights, our values, our principles are valid.”

The fact that attacks on democratic rights carried out in the name of “security” are an essential characteristic of dictatorships was part and parcel of German public education just a few years ago. According to a report on the military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay posted on the web site of the Federal Centre for Civic Education in 2006, all these regimes justified their rule with the “Doctrine of National Security,” which is elaborated as follows: “This doctrine asserts external and internal security to be the most important task of the state; to this end state action is not subject to (human) rights restrictions and controls. The doctrine therefore legitimates the considerable tightening up of existing security laws.”

On the basis of these criteria, the German minister’s proposals clearly point to the establishment of a dictatorship. And in this respect they are not alone. As we have already pointed out in another article, in the current federal election campaign, all of the parties involved, from the far-right Alternative for Germany to the Left Party, are trying to outdo one another “with demands for more policemen, civil war equipment for police and better surveillance techniques.”

It should also be noted that the ministers of interior and justice from nine federal states, who drafted the statement with German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, include ministers from Baden-Württemberg and Hesse, where the CDU governs in coalition with the Greens. The demand for the rearmament of the police and judiciary also occupies a central place in the programs of the SPD and the Left Party.

The only explanation for the drive towards state armament and dictatorship is that all parties anticipate fierce social and political conflict after the Bundestag election. They know that the policies of militarism and dismantling of social rights—their response to the global crisis of capitalism and growing international tensions—are deeply unpopular. They are consciously preparing to forcibly repress any opposition.

Quebec Liberals expand chauvinist bill targeting Muslims

Louis Girard 

Thousands of migrants, mostly Haitian, have recently crossed the US-Canadian border near Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec, to escape the Trump administration’s threats of deportation and apply for asylum in Canada.

They have received a warm welcome from ordinary people, who are sensitive to the plight of those who have suffered severe hardship. Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, was devastated in 2010 by an earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people. In 2016 a hurricane destroyed a large part of the island.

But the reception from the Quebec and Canadian elite has been cold, if not hostile. Migrants are widely portrayed by the media and the establishment parties as “illegals,” even “invaders,” including by the two main opposition parties in Quebec, the Parti Québécois (PQ) and the Coalition for Quebec’s Future (CAQ), and by the Conservatives, the Official Opposition in Ottawa.

Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard and his Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) government have adopted the pose of defenders of civil rights. They are claiming to be “open” to the asylum seekers and have warned that the xenophobic agitation of the opposition parties is encouraging the extreme right.

“[P]olitical leaders need to be very careful when they describe people as illegal when they are not,” said Couillard. “When you make it seem as though we can solve the problem by snapping our fingers, we worry the population and we encourage this kind of thing.” Here Couillard was pointing to the connection between the anti-immigration pronouncements of the PQ and CAQ and a spike in the activity and public presence of the far-right.

But there is an enormous gap between Couillard’s humanitarian rhetoric and the actions of his government.

Since returning to office in 2014, the Liberals have carried out massive cuts in health care, education, social assistance and child care. In 2015-16, with the help of the trade unions, the Couillard government imposed cuts in the real wages, pensions and working conditions of a half-million public sector workers.

In May of this year, in a move that has become the norm across Canada, the PLQ criminalized a strike by 170,000 construction workers who were resisting the employers’ drive for “flexibility” in work schedules, cuts in overtime pay, and a five-year contract with wage increases below the rate of inflation.

This is on top of the attacks on democratic rights unleashed by the Liberals during the student strike that shook Quebec in 2012. Liberal Premier Jean Charest responded by unleashing police violence against the students and adopting a draconian law, Bill 78, that effectively illegalized the strike and banned demonstrations over any issue.

Now the PLQ is making its own pronounced turn towards chauvinism to divert the growing opposition to its austerity measures in a reactionary direction and to split the working class.

The party’s real attitude to the asylum seekers and other immigrants can be gauged by the government’s moves to amend Bill 62—proposed Liberal legislation that in the name of the “security” and the “religious neutrality of the state” targets the Muslim minority. Bill 62 would prohibit anyone giving or receiving public services while wearing a face covering, a provision that explicitly targets Muslim women who wear the burqa or niqab.

It is meant as the Liberals’ response to the debate over the reputed “excessive accommodation” of religious minorities—a reactionary and diversionary debate that Quebec’s political elite and media have promoted for the past decade.

The Liberals’ new version of Bill 62 would extend its reach to municipalities, public transit companies, museums and other government agencies, thereby imposing a virtual public ban on the wearing of Muslim face-coverings.

The strengthening of Bill 62 is part of a series of calculated steps taken by Couillard and his Liberals in recent months to promote chauvinism.

In the name of upholding Quebec’s “cultural,” i.e., Roman Catholic, “heritage,” Health Minister Gaétan Barrette and other leading Liberals have defended the decision of a Quebec hospital to restore a giant crucifix to its central position at the hospital’s main entrance.

In June, after a police officer was stabbed in the United States by a Muslim Quebec resident, Couillard adopted the typical language of anti-Muslim chauvinism, declaring that it was not possible to “separate such events—terrorism—from Islam in general” and asserting that Quebec Muslims have a special responsibility to oppose terrorism.

The fact that Bill 62 provides for certain unspecified accommodations has raised the ire of the opposition parties, who predictably claim that the anti-democratic legislation does not go “far enough.”

The CAQ, which recently said that the border between the United States and Quebec “shouldn’t leak like a sieve,” has called on the government to be “firmer in enforcing its regulation on the giving and receiving of services with the face uncovered.”

For his part, Parti Québécois (PQ) leader Jean-François Lisée has called on Couillard and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to suspend the international agreement under which the federal government accepts asylum-seekers. Lisée has tweeted that Quebecers “are against the normalization of illegal crossings” and has sought to whip up chauvinism with demagogic denunciations of the government for providing financial support to asylum-seekers while telling “us it can’t give two baths” a week to seniors in nursing homes.

Lisée is also adamantly opposing a request from the mayor of Montréal, where most Quebec Muslims live, for the right to opt out of some of Bill 62’s provisions.

Both the CAQ and the PQ are criticizing the Liberals for not banning the chador, traditional Iranian clothing that covers the body but leaves the face uncovered. Both organizations also argue that the bill should prohibit the wearing of religious symbols by state employees in “positions of authority,” including, in the CAQ’s case, daycare workers. This ban was first proposed in 2008 by the Liberal-appointed Bouchard-Taylor Commission on “reasonable accommodation.”

It is noteworthy that Bill 62 has received tacit support from New Democratic Party (NDP) federal leadership candidate and Quebec MP Guy Caron. Niki Ashton, who also aspires to lead Canada’s social democratic party, and who is being heavily promoted by the pseudo-left as a quasi-socialist, also indicated her support for what she termed the “consensus among Quebec’s political leaders on secularism.” But she later backtracked after coming under fire for supporting legislation “dictating women’s attire.”

Québec Solidaire, the ostensibly “left-wing” pro-independence party, has remained silent on the amendments to Bill 62. Although it occasionally criticizes certain “excesses” in the identity debate, QS has played a key role in legitimizing it with the claim that discussions on “religious accommodation” are “necessary.”

QS’s response to the rise of xenophobia has been anything but principled. Faced with the spike in asylum-claims, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the new “male spokesperson” for QS and former 2012 student strike leader, said the “situation is serious” and that “some concerns are legitimate.” The next day, he solidarized with the governments of Quebec and Canada—instruments of big business, which are trampling on worker and democratic rights—declaring the “real problem is Donald Trump.”

Canada, under the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, hypocritically claims to be in favor of refugees. But this is a sham.

Canada’s Liberal-led government has accepted only 40,000 Syrian refugees in the last two years, although millions have been forced to flee the civil war in that country, and it has made clear that many, if not most, of the Haitian asylum seekers will be deported.

Moreover, Ottawa has taken part in almost all the US-led military interventions and wars of the last quarter century that are at the root of the refugee crisis. This includes the “regime change” operation that overthrew Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. These interventions, from Libya to Afghanistan, have razed entire societies, forcing millions to flee.

Canada’s turn to militarism, which is fully supported by both the federal and sovereignist (pro-independence) wings of Quebec’s ruling elite, is taking place in tandem with a cross-country assault on public services and workers’ wages and pensions.

It is these regressive policies that create fertile ground for far-right, ultra-nationalist groups like La Meute (the Wolf Pack). Last month La Meute staged a high-profile demonstration in Quebec City, under police protection, to demand Canada violate its international obligations and immediately return all the asylum-seekers to the US. On January 29, a young Quebec sympathizer of Donald Trump and France’s National Front, strongly influenced by the anti-Muslim discourse of Quebec’s politicians and media, opened fire in a mosque in Quebec City, killing six people and wounding 20.

Myanmar: Contextualising the Violence In Northern Rakhine

Angshuman Choudhury

At midnight on 25 August, hundreds of assailants launched coordinated attacks on close to 30 security installations, including police stations, border posts, and a military base, in northern Rakhine, Myanmar. The attacks left 110 dead, including militants, security personnel, and civilians.

The militant assault was claimed by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a relatively new armed group formed by Rohingya émigrés based in Saudi Arabia and made up of locally-trained Rohingyas. In response, state security forces (SF) have launched ‘clearance operations’ to neutralise militants and recapture seized weapons and territory. However, the campaign has been marred by allegations of use of excessive force, alongside reports of around 270,000 Rohingyas having fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

In what context did the attacks take place and what does the state’s response reflect?

Prelude

Contrary to current news coverage, the attacks did not take place in isolation but were part of a conflict continuum in northern Rakhine.

Since a similar attack on border posts in October 2016, also linked to ARSA, northern Rakhine has witnessed incremental militarisation undertaken by state authorities in response to multiple instances of killings of ethnic non-Muslims by suspected Rohingya extremists. In addition to building 30 new security posts in the area since 2016, authorities had been steadily ramping up force presence to conduct frequent ‘clearance operations’ in the Mayu hill tracts between Maungdaw and Buthidaung Townships to weed out suspected militant training camps, some of which were uncovered around 21 June.

According to the union government, 63 ethnic Rakhines and security personnel were killed and 37 have gone missing since October 2016. On the other hand, local pro-Rohingya media reports claim that SFs had been conducting violent raids in Rohingya villages in collaboration with ethnic non-Muslim ‘Rakhine extremist’ brigades, allegedly leading to extrajudicial deaths, arbitrary arrests, sexual violence, and forced displacement of Muslims. These incidents played significantly into sharpening the longstanding mutual suspicion between the two contiguous communities.

The situation took a drastic turn after 3 August when the dead bodies of six Mru (Arakenese sub-ethnic group) farmers were discovered in a village called Kay Gyee. A meeting of Rakhine’s local ruling party, Arakan National Party (ANP), and the Tatmadaw’s commander-in-chief immediately followed, where the former reiterated its demand for boosted security measures. On 10 August, new battalions of the army began arriving in Maungdaw to conduct fresh operations in the area, following which reports of violent raids and blockades of Rohingya villages by SFs and ethnic Rakhines began to emerge.

Thus, the 25 August attacks happened in the thick of two-way escalation and were unlike any ‘typical’ peacetime terror attack like those in Dhaka or Paris. The area has been trapped in a overwhelming cycle of violence since last year, and the instance of aggravated violence must be seen in this context. This is even more so because the assailants chose hard (military), rather than soft (civilian), targets.

Aftermath

Following the attacks, northern Rakhine has been gripped by heightened insecurity in the face of a security lockdown and a disproportionately aggressive counterinsurgency campaign by SFs, allegedly in collaboration with non-Muslim civilian brigades. In this regard, it is important to inquire as to what exactly is pushing thousands of local Rohingyas to flee the area.

Local reports and eyewitness accounts indicate that SFs are treating the entire Rohingya population as one insurgent collective, having adopted a scorched-earth policy, including burning of Rohingya settlements, rather than targeted counterinsurgency measures based on specific intelligence. There is little doubt that this has resulted in broad-spectrum violence due to the lack of any design or intent to distinguish combatant Rohingyas from non-combatants. It is also worth noting that the government has evacuated only local non-Muslims trapped in the core conflict zone, a policy that reflects the Burmese state’s differential treatment of Rohingya civilians during crises.

This time, the SFs have been given sweeping powers to undertake offensive action against a broad set of targets through parliamentary approval. The government has also approved the military’s request to designate the entire Maungdaw district as an "operational area," which gives SFs power to undertake "decisive action against terrorist organisations." What exactly such a mandate entails remains unclear. The premise was laid when the government proscribed ARSA as a terrorist organisation a few hours after the attacks, effectively referring to a local insurgency as terrorism.

A quick analysis of ARSA’s Twitter feed reveals that the organisation is attempting to project itself as a legitimate armed group fighting to restore the Rohingya as a recognised ethnic group in Myanmar. This is opposed to the Home Minister’s statement on 27 August that ARSA wishes to establish an ‘Islamic State’ in Rakhine, an apprehension that remains unverified. While it is difficult to know what the group really seeks, the fact that it has upgraded its strike capacity and consolidated local support over the past few years is undeniable.

At this moment, it is fair to say that violence will endure as long as the state continues to operate without a larger political strategy. The current strategy could trigger a bigger humanitarian crisis in the region while creating newer political opportunities for ARSA to operate, survive, and grow.