Demolition of Bedouin village highlights Netanyahu’s “Greater Israel” plan

Jean Shaoul 

Thousands of Palestinians converged on Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank Monday, in a bid to save the Bedouin village, home to 180 people of the Jahalin tribe, from demolition by the Israeli authorities.

The rally was part of a general strike and protest against Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians, including its apartheid-style nationality law that defines Israel as a Jewish state and grants nationality rights to its Jewish but not its Palestinian citizens.

Palestinian factories, shops, schools and offices in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza closed, bringing thousands on to the streets and blocking traffic. It was one of the first strikes involving both the Palestinian-majority areas of Israel in the Galilee, Triangle and Negev regions as well as the Occupied Territories.

Last week, Israel’s Civil Administration served a notice on Khan al-Ahmar’s residents, who make a living out of raising sheep and goats, demanding they evacuate their village by October 1 or face demolition and forced displacement. On Friday, Israel’s security forces declared Khan al-Ahmar a closed military zone to prevent Palestinians, international activists and reporters from exiting or entering the village.

Khan al-Ahmar is located in the E1 bloc, the name given to the area between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Its demolition is part of Israel’s broader strategy of separating East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed illegally after its seizure from Jordan in the June 1967 war, from the West Bank. The plan is to cleanse the area of its Palestinian residents, expand the settlements and bisect the West Bank in defiance of international law and countless UN resolutions.

The village is one of the small Palestinian Bedouin communities in the West Bank, scattered around the road between East Jerusalem and Jericho that the Israeli authorities have sought to drive out by making it impossible for them to maintain their pastoral lifestyle. They have been refused permission to connect to water, electricity or sanitation systems or to pave the roads, and their pastureland has been restricted. As a result, the villagers have little access to health, education and welfare services and lack the most basic utilities.

The villagers have fought a protracted battle since 2010 to maintain their homes—consisting of makeshift tin and wood shacks built on a desert hillside—in the face of Israeli threats to remove them. Originally from Tel Arad in the Negev desert, from where they were expelled by the Israeli army in the 1950s, they leased land for residential purposes and for herding on the site of what is now the settlement of Kfar Adumim, from which they were expelled before moving to Khan al-Ahmar.

Israel again justified the demolition of their homes with its well-worn refrain that the Bedouin village is illegal because the residents do not have a permit to build homes—a catch-22 situation since Israel rarely if ever grants permits to Palestinians to build houses or extend their homes, forcing them to build without permits.

According to data obtained under freedom of information by Peace Now, Israel has allocated just 400 acres of “public land” for use by Palestinians, with more than 99 percent of the land approvals going to help Israeli settlements.

Over the last 12 years, the authorities have already demolished 26 homes in the community, making 132 people homeless, 77 of them children and teenagers, and seven non-residential structures.

In May, the Supreme Court rejected the residents’ petitions against the demolition of their homes and their transfer to West Jahalin, near the garbage dump in Abu Dis, empowering the state to remove them. Abu Dis, a Palestinian village near Jerusalem, is believed to be what the Trump administration is offering the Palestinians as the capital of some future Palestinian state.

In July, the authorities sent in heavy construction equipment with a police escort in readiness for the demolition of the Khan al-Ahmar homes and the expulsion of its residents. When protests broke out, the police made several arrests.

In further legal proceedings in August, it emerged that the authorities would consider moving the residents at some future date to a new site in the desert, south-west of Jericho, provided that the residents of three neighbouring communities also relocated with them—doubling the number of Bedouin villagers to be expelled—and all agreed to sign affidavits that they would move.

The new site is just a few hundred metres from a sewage treatment plant and the construction of access roads to it would mean taking Palestinian land, highlighting the utter contempt Israel has for the Palestinians. Israel’s policies are ethnic cleansing in support of the government’s Greater Israel project and the expansion of the settlements, a policy not dissimilar to Germany’s policy of settler colonialism from the 1890s to the 1940s, known as lebensraum .

Nevertheless, on September 5, the High Court—presided over by the same three judges that had earlier rejected the residents’ petitions—accepted the government’s proposals as good coin and nodded through the forced transfer of the villagers and the demolition of their homes. In so doing, it gave its imprimatur to a war crime.

The evacuation of Khan al-Ahmar and neighbouring communities will enable Greater Jerusalem to be surrounded by the Security Wall, split the West Bank in two, making it impossible to establish a Palestine statelet, and expand the number of settlers in Area C. Crucially, it is also key to the control over Areas A and B, as Area C is richly endowed with natural resources, including water and most of the West Bank’s agricultural and grazing land, and shares its border with Jordan.

Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three administrative areas, A, B and C, each with a different administrative status, pending a final negotiated agreement. Areas A and B were delineated in such a way as to contain only Palestinians, while Area C was defined as all the rest. Area A comprises approximately 18 percent of the West Bank and Area B about 22 percent, and together are home to some 2.8 million Palestinians. Area C, around 60 percent of the West Bank, includes the settlements, outposts, declared “state land,” the Palestinian part of the Dead Sea, and thus its mineral wealth.

In May 2014, Uri Ariel, Israel’s housing minister and resident of the West Bank settlement of Kfar Adumim, estimated the settler population as 400,000 in the West Bank and 350,000 in East Jerusalem, a number that has certainly increased since then. A settlement near Khan al-Ahmar has plans for expansion. The settler population exceeds the 300,000 Palestinians that live in Area C.

Thus, the expulsion of the villagers is about much more than Khan al-Ahmar. The ever-increasing settlements in Area C involves the impoverishment of the Palestinians in Areas A and B, to the extent that they too, like Gaza, become uninhabitable.

The Trump administration has remained silent on the issue, while the European Parliament formally condemned Israel’s plans for Khan al-Ahmar, warning that it would be committing a war crime. It called for monetary compensation for financial losses should the village be demolished, making clear it knew the protest would go unheeded. An EU spokesperson said it would end any chance of a two-state solution in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, which is of course the aim of the Netanyahu government.

Mass graves in Mannar point to further war crimes in Sri Lanka

Murali Maran & Vimal Rasenthiran

Another mass grave has been uncovered in Sri Lanka, near Mannar, a town in the Northern province, where the almost 30-year war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) resulted in thousands of deaths.

According to reports last month, the skeletal remains of 136 individuals were unearthed from a site near the town after 74 days of excavation. It was the second mass grave discovered in the area since the war ended in 2009. The first, which contained 84 skeletons, was found in nearby Thiruketheeswaram in 2013. The graves point to some of the gruesome war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military during the conflict.

Judicial Medical Officer Dr Saminda Rajapakse told the media on September 19 that forensic excavators at Mannar had found the bones of children among the skeletons. He said all the skeletons were being kept in a special room at the Mannar court complex and would be sent for carbon-dating in the US.

The mass grave at Mannar

The human remains were accidentally found on March 27, as workers dug soil for a building construction. The official exhumation process was conducted in the presence of a magistrate. Once it was confirmed that the bones and teeth were human, the excavation continued under the supervision of the judicial medical officer and Professor Raj Somadeva of the Department of Archaeology.

Somadeva told the media that the excavation area had two sections. “In one segment we have a proper cemetery. In the other part, you have a collection of human skeletons that have been deposited in an informal way.”

The bodies in the second area, he said, were placed in the pit without clothes or other personal items that could lead to their identification. He revealed that there were at least 16 children among the dead. Dr Rajapakse told a press conference in July that some skeletons showed evidence of limbs being tied, suggesting execution-style killings.

According to local residents, the mass grave could date back to 1990, when the government re-escalated the war after a brief truce with the LTTE. There was a navy checkpoint at the time near the current excavation site.

In April, Vanni district parliamentarian Charles Nirmalanathan said: “I do not think that human residues identified in the area were buried by ordinary people. The army’s permanent camp and military intelligence surveillance was located only 50 metres from this mass grave. The region was directly controlled by the military after the war began.”

Sothilingam, a resident of Manthai, near Mannar, told World Socialist Web Sitereporters: “The government and the military claim that both sites were cemeteries. If that is true, there should have been a cemetery in the middle of the street in Manthai or within the shopping complex in Mannar town. The mainstream media is also instrumental in this cover-up.”

Ketheeswaran, another local resident, asked: “Is it a cemetery when more than 100 people are buried in the same pit? There is no doubt, in my mind, that this is a grave established by the state forces.

“We don’t know how many graves are inside the jungle area but the government’s actions are suspicious. The military has forcibly occupied over 20 acres, and a Buddhist temple, established after 1990, occupies 10 acres. The area from Mullipallam to Pappamottai has been declared a bird sanctuary.”

A female resident told the WSWS that the navy and army burnt shops in Mannar and murdered civilians in the 1990s. Recalling one incident, she said the military shot and killed a teacher and his wife from Jaffna, and then tied their bodies onto a jeep in the street.

Like its predecessors, the government of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is attempting to whitewash these crimes. Recent court orders have banned journalists from taking photographs at the mass grave site, and about three weeks ago, a Mannar magistrate limited all media briefings to just 30 minutes.

Mass graves have also been found in Chemmani, in the Jaffna area, and at Ambilipitiya, Sooriyakanda and Matale in Sri Lanka’s south. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have died in the war against the LTTE in the North and East, and in the civil insurgency by rural Sinhala youth in the South.

A researcher recovering a skeleton at the Mannar grave site

Five years ago, a mass grave was found at Matale district in the Central Province, a Sinhala majority area. Investigations have been stalled at this site, which may date back to 1987–90, when the military and pro-government death squads killed more than 60,000 rural youth.

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), whose members were the main target in these killings, has provided tacit support to the government and its attempts to bury details about the Matale grave.

A similar burial ground from this period was discovered at Sooriyakanda by political supporters of former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, just before the 1994 parliamentary election. After being exploited for political advantage during the election, the issue was swept under the carpet. The JVP supported Kumaratunga and kept quiet about the mass grave.

The pseudo-left parties, such as the Nava Sama Samaja Party and Frontline Socialist Party, are maintaining a notable silence over the mass graves. The Tamil and Muslim communal parties, such as the Muslim Congress and the Tamil National Alliance, have responded to the mounting evidence of the military’s war crimes in the North and East with limited rhetoric.

All sections of the ruling class, conscious that similar atrocities will be used to suppress the emerging struggles of the workers, oppressed and students, are strengthening their efforts to hide these crimes.

After claiming that they would investigate all human rights violations, Sirisena and Wickremesinghe have declared that the military forces were “war heroes,” who committed no atrocities and would not be hauled before the courts. Sirisena recently appealed to the UN General Assembly to stop raising questions about the military’s war crimes.

This ongoing whitewash of terrible atrocities demonstrates that any authentic investigation into the crimes committed during the communal war and the civil insurgencies of 1971 and 1987–90, are only possible as part of the struggle for a workers’ and peasants’ government, based on socialist and internationalist principles.

Wealth of 400 richest Americans hits record $2.9 trillion

Alec Andersen

On Wednesday, the US finance magazine Forbes released its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans, revealing an immense increase in wealth among the top social stratum in the United States.

The total net worth of the 400 people included on the list hit a record $2.9 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion last year. The most heavily represented sector was finance, from which 88 people on the list, including bank executives, hedge fund managers and investors, drew their wealth.

The next highest proportion comes from technology giants such as Google and Facebook. The CEO of Twitter and payments firm Square, Jack Dorsey, registered the greatest percentage growth in wealth from the previous year, an increase of 186 percent to $6.3 billion. This was due in large part to a jump in Square’s stock price.

The threshold necessary for inclusion on the list rose to $2.2 billion in 2018, up $100 billion from last year’s threshold. Fully one-third of billionaires in the United States, a record 204 individuals, failed to make this year’s Forbes 400 list.

The average net worth of billionaires on the list rose to $7.2 billion, an increase of a half-billion over last year’s average of $6.7 billion.

As Forbes notes, the vast increase in wealth among the very richest Americans is largely thanks to a continuing surge in US stock indexes. They have reached new record highs in part due to unprecedented levels of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which are parasitic diversions of wealth away from productive investment in areas that produce decent-paying jobs and to the detriment of pursuits such as research and development. The billionaires on the Forbes 400 list have also benefited immensely from the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy signed into law in December 2017.

Topping the list is Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, whose $160 billion is $63 billion more than the second-wealthiest person on the list, Bill Gates, and a full $78.5 billion more than last year. Bezos has made his fortune through the super-exploitation of warehouse workers around the world, enabling Amazon to move its products faster and at cheaper prices than its retail competitors.

The staggering increase in Bezos’s wealth over the past year has been due to the more than 100 percent increase in Amazon’s stock price. The $2,950 Jeff Bezos has earned per second in 2018 is more than the $2,796 a fulfillment center worker in India makes in an entire year.

Ironically, the Forbes report was published the same day that the press was full of praise for Bezos’s supposed generosity and humanitarian concern for his workers, occasioned by the announcement that he was raising the minimum wage of his US-based employees to the poverty-level wage of $15 an hour.

If the $160 billion fortune Bezos holds were divided among Amazon’s global workforce of 500,000, each worker would receive $320,000.

Coming in second on the list with a net worth of $97 billion is Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who had topped the Forbes list since 1994. The top 10 wealthiest people on the list alone have a total net worth of $730 billion, up from $610 billion in 2018.

However, just the top 45 individuals out of the 400 on the list accounted for fully half of the total wealth, or $1.45 trillion. That amounts to an average fortune of more than $32 billion each, which is more than the estimated $30 billion required to end world hunger, according to a United Nations estimate.

The Forbes report illustrates that the barrier to resolving societal ills, such as poverty, hunger and disease, is the siphoning off and hoarding of a growing proportion of society’s resources by the wealthiest segment of society.

The $2.9 trillion in the hands of these 400 richest people in the United States is roughly three-quarters of the total federal budget. It represents nearly three times the 2018 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, which was slashed from over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion budget for the Department of Education in 2018.

Rather than addressing these issues, the Democratic Party’s midterm election campaign has instead been centered on a right-wing effort to channel opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump behind a #MeToo-style hysteria over alleged sexual abuse. This is accompanied by the ongoing campaign to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin and brand Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin.

The timing of the release of the Forbes list is significant, coming as it does on the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the $700 billion bank bailout that set the stage for the trillions that were essentially stolen from the working class to rescue the financial oligarchy and make it richer than ever. The result of the decade-long plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in the new Forbes 400 list.

Anger grows as Indonesian tsunami disaster worsens

Mike Head

Reports that entire villages have been buried in mud, possibly killing thousands of people, point to the true scale of the devastation triggered by last Friday’s earthquake and tsunami on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. They also highlight the indifference and inadequacy of the response of the Indonesian government and the global capitalist powers.

The disaster’s total official death toll has risen above 1,400, but it is obvious that the real figure is much higher. Most of the confirmed dead have come from the region’s main city, Palu. Losses in remote areas remain unknown. Communications have been cut and bridges and roads have been destroyed or blocked by landslides.

Even by official estimates, about 1.6 million people have been affected, on top of those killed and injured. Hundreds of thousands of people have gone without food or water for days. Because of the lack of government and international assistance, desperate residents have been reduced to scavenging for food in wrecked houses, shops, farms and orchards.

Six days after the 7.5 magnitude earthquake first struck, it has been revealed that at least two villages near Palu have virtually disappeared into liquefied sinkholes, even though they were not directly affected by the tsunami that swept through Palu, population 380,000 and Donggala, a coastal town of 300,000.

Many of the 1,747 houses in Balaroa, a few kilometres outside Palu, have sunk into the ground, with little more remaining than rooftops sticking out of the mud. Residents fear that up to 70 percent of its 2,000 people have been killed. According to media reports, the village is destined to become an unmarked grave, with earthmovers to be used to bury the entire location.

In the smaller nearby village of Petobo, many of the 744 houses are buried in mud sludge, resembling quicksand. “The houses just got sucked into the earth and then the mud came over and sealed them over,” a survivor, Joshua Michael, 24, told the Guardian. “I saw my neighbours get buried alive.” Densely populated, Petobo was home to 11,000 people.

Even according to the limited coverage provided by the world’s corporate media, anger is rising over the lack of official help amid worsening conditions. Reporters described scenes of hospitals being overwhelmed, people queueing for petrol for 24 hours and devastated rural areas remaining without any help.

A Guardian report noted: “On Tuesday evening half a dozen police officers with automatic rifles were guarding long queues of frustrated residents and their gerry cans at a Palu petrol station. Hengki, a local resident, said he had been waiting for almost eight hours in the searing heat. ‘I survived a disaster and now I have to survive this?’ he asked, visibly agitated.

“Others in the queue chimed in with shared anger and disgust. ‘The government doesn’t care about us,’ said another resident, Yuli, repeating a refrain seen spray-painted on at least one Palu city wall.”

In one devastated Palu warehouse, survivors clamoured over a reeking pile of rubbish or staked out a patch of territory before pulling out small cartons of milk, soft drinks, rice, sweets and painkillers. “We came here because we heard there was food,” Rehanna, a 23-year-old student from Balaroa village, told the Associated Press (AP). “We need clean water, rice.”

In an apparent effort to assuage the outrage, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo visited Palu for a second time yesterday, surveying the collapsed Roa Roa hotel where search and rescue workers were trying to get to 30 people still buried.

However, the focus on the hotel angered residents who asked why poorer areas were being neglected, and why food, water, fuel and medicine had yet to reach areas outside Palu.

“We feel like we are stepchildren here because all the help is going to Palu,” commented Mohamad Taufik, 38, from Donggala, where five of his relatives are still missing. “There are many young children here who are hungry and sick, but there is no milk or medicine,” he told AP.

Aid being distributed in Palu features red and white bags—the colours of the Indonesian flag—marked as being supplied by the president’s office. But the government’s real focus is not aid but suppressing unrest.

Indonesian military chief Hadi Tjahyanto said an armed soldier and an armed police officer would be placed on every aid truck, and soldiers would be sent to secure markets, the airport and fuel depots to maintain order where there had been reports of “looting.” Police said they had begun making arrests of those allegedly caught stealing.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous nation, with about 260 million people. The World Bank rates it a poverty-reduction success story because the pro-market regime established since the downfall of the US-backed Suharto military dictatorship in 1998 has supposedly halved the poverty rate to around 10 percent.

In reality, by Oxfam’s calculations, Indonesia has become, like the rest of the planet, extremely unequal. Its four richest men now hold more wealth than 100 million of the country’s poorest people, whose incomes hover marginally above the official national poverty line. As of last year, 93 million Indonesians lived on less than $US3.10 a day, which is defined by the World Bank as the moderate poverty line.

The economic and political gulf between the ruling elite and the impoverished is epitomised by the government’s insistence that it lacked the funds to maintain the tsunami warning systems put in place after the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 167,000 people, most of them in Indonesia.

National Disaster Management Board (NDMB) spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told AP that Indonesia had 4,500 to 6,000 earthquakes a year but, due to a limited budget, had just 60 tsunami siren units. “We need thousands of them,” he said. Twenty-five to 35 buoys designed to warn about a tsunami approaching Palu had been out of order since 2012, he said.

A more sophisticated early warning system that might have prevented many of the deaths in the tsunami has been stalled in the testing phase for years. A high-tech system of sea-floor sensors, data-laden sound waves and fibre-optic cable was meant to replace a system set up after the 2004 tsunami but had not moved beyond a prototype.

The shocking lack of assistance from the global powers also seems bound up with political calculations by the Indonesian government. It is evidently anxious to wrap itself in nationalist imagery while balancing between the conflicting interests of the rival powers, notably the US and China, that are vying for influence over the strategic archipelago and the Indo-Pacific region as a whole.

After three days of delay, the government agreed to accept international aid on Sunday night, but then later reportedly told foreign rescue teams to “stand down,” insisting it had the disaster under control. Palu’s airport remained closed to foreign airlines wishing to transport aid into the area and Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the government had rejected the offer of a hospital ship from the US government.

The BNPB’s Sutopo said the international assistance would be “selective.” He told a news conference: “We need to select the countries based on their capacity to help us.”

Every aspect of the official response is an indictment of the private profit system, in which a super-rich elite monopolises society’s wealth, and the divisive nation-state system itself, through which the capitalist classes maintain their rule.

Adding to the crisis, a volcano erupted yesterday in North Sulawesi province, about 940 kilometres northeast of the earthquake zone, spitting ash more than 6,000 metres into the sky. Planes were warned of the cloud billowing from Mount Soputan but no evacuations were ordered in the area.

Brexit and growing social divide dominate crisis-ridden Tory conference

Robert Stevens

Prime Minister Theresa May ended the Conservative Party conference with a speech that reeked of desperation, appealing for unity with her “hard-Brexit” opponents to avert the danger of a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

With the UK scheduled to formally exit the European Union (EU) in less than six months, divisions have reached breaking point in the Tory party with speculation that a leadership contest may be imminent.

Boris Johnson, the leading representative of the Tory’s hard-Brexit wing, gave an interview as the conference began to the Sunday Times in which he described May’s Chequers plan for a “soft Brexit” maintaining access to the Single European Market as “deranged.” Regarding May’s key proposals to have customs officials collect different tariffs on products depending on whether their final destination is the EU or Britain, he declared “nobody thinks it can work… It surrenders control.”

On Tuesday, Johnson spoke at a well-attended fringe meeting. His audience included most of the leading Brexiteers including David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, Steve Baker, John Redwood, Priti Patel, Zac Goldsmith and Conor Burns.

The EU’s lead negotiator Michel Barnier has offered no lifeline to May, echoing statements that her proposals are unworkable.

Such are the divisions that May took 27 minutes to even mention the word “Brexit” and then only in the context of a warning that “If we go off in different directions in pursuit of our own visions of the perfect Brexit, we risk ending up with no Brexit at all.”

Despite their continual undermining of May, it is unclear as to whether the hard-Brexit faction, though having a sizable faction in parliament, have the numbers to begin, let alone win, a leadership challenge. The latest to declare no confidence in May was James Duddridge, who waited until the day of her speech to cause maximum embarrassment. However, to unseat her would need 48 MPs to submit letters of no confidence and then more than half of the party’s 315 MPs to oppose her in a subsequent ballot.

To appeal to the MPs being wooed by her critics, May declared, “Britain isn’t afraid to leave without a deal, if we have to.” This was met with the most sustained applause.

In his intentionally provocative speech to the conference, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who could yet emerge as a leadership contender, warned that Brexit could accelerate the break-up of the EU. “It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving,” he said. “The lesson from history is clear: if you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish it will grow, and we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape.”

He later told the Telegraph, “We are one of the great countries of Europe and there comes a point where we say, ‘We’re not prepared to be pushed around, if you’re not serious about a deal then he won't be either’ and that would be profoundly damaging.”

With further critical talks with the EU just two weeks away, May could lose her majority due to the opposition to her Brexit plan by the Democratic Unionist Party, whose 10 MPs are required to give the government a working majority.

On Tuesday, DUP leader Arlene Foster, in a reference to Johnson, told the hard-Brexit-supporting Daily Telegraph, “Whoever leads the Conservative Party we will work with as it’s in the national interest. The reason we signed the agreement [to govern with the Tories] was to ensure Brexit.”

She added, again in tacit support of Johnson, “Our confidence arrangement is with the Conservative Party… It is a party-to-party agreement.”

Speaking to BBC’s Radio 4, Foster said the DUP had drawn a “blood red” line and would not accept a border arrangement that separates Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK in any deal reached with the EU. Foster refused to rule out voting down May if her plan was brought to parliament, adding, “We don’t want to be in that position.”

Among the main concerns of both wings of the Tories is that May’s downfall would pave the way for a Labour government led by Corbyn that would be unable to keep a restless working class in check.

May played to these fears in much of her speech, describing Labour pre-Corbyn in the most flattering and politically revealing terms while reiterating every slander dredged up by the Blairites to demonise Corbyn.

May declared, “What has befallen Labour is a national tragedy.” Labour once had “some basic qualities that everyone could respect. They were proud of our institutions. They were proud of our armed forces. They were proud of Britain. Today, when I look across at the opposition benches, I can still see that Labour Party. The heirs of [Labour right-wingers] Hugh Gaitskell and Barbara Castle, Dennis Healy and John Smith. But not on the front bench.

“Instead their faces stare blankly out from the rows behind, while another party occupies prime position: the Jeremy Corbyn Party.”

Praising previous Labour leaders, she asked, “Would Neil Kinnock, who stood up to the hard-left, have stood by while his own MPs faced deselection, and needed police protection at their Party conference?

“Would Jim Callaghan, who served in the Royal Navy, have asked the Russian government to confirm the findings of our own intelligence agencies?

“Would Clement Attlee, Churchill’s trusted deputy during the Second World War, have told British Jews they didn’t know the meaning of antisemitism?”

Corbyn is a stooge of Russia and Iran who opposed war, and the main role of the Tories was to ensure that never comes to power, said May.

While attacking Corbyn for his own minimal reform proposals, the Tories are acutely aware of the need to recalibrate their agenda in the face of the growing opposition to austerity that has led to his popular support. Speaking to the Financial Times, Tory MP Robert Halfon said, “If we don’t answer the growing unfairness and struggle in people’s everyday lives, Corbyn is going to sweep the board.”

Recognising these dangers, May concluded her speech with the pledge that “When we’ve secured a good Brexit deal for Britain… a decade after the financial crash, people need to know that the austerity it led to is over and that their hard work has paid off.”

With austerity ripping apart the livelihoods of workers, however, there wasn’t a single concrete proposal May could make to back up her ludicrous pledge. Indeed the only populist largesse offered during conference was a proposal allowing waiters to keep all of their tips and maintaining a freeze on fuel duty for another year. In contrast, the support offered to the major corporations is never ending. May promised “the lowest corporation tax in the G20,” stating that “Britain, under my Conservative government, is open for business.”

International Court of Justice strikes down US sanctions against Iran

Alex Lantier

Rebuking US moves to scrap the 2015 Iranian nuclear accord, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague unanimously ruled yesterday that Washington must let Iran use international financial payments systems to buy humanitarian supplies.

When the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Iran in 2012-2015, it tried to strangle Iran’s economy by freezing it out of all financial transactions denominated in US dollars. At its request, the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Inter-bank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network expelled Iranian banks, ending Iran’s ability to use US dollars for international purchases. Since unilaterally repudiating the 2015 accord this May, the Trump administration has made clear it plans to re-impose sanctions as part of its preparations for war with Iran.

The ICJ ruling demands that Washington not block trade in critical goods, and makes clear that the US war drive against Iran—including calls by US officials such as White House national security adviser John Bolton to re-impose SWIFT sanctions on Iran—violate international law.

Pending final adjudication of US claims against Iran, the ICJ has ordered Washington to “remove, by means of its choosing, any impediments ... to the free exportation to the territory of Iran of goods required for humanitarian needs, such as (i) medicines and medical devices; and (ii) foodstuffs and agricultural commodities; as well as goods and services required for the safety of civil aviation, such as (iii) spare parts, equipment and associated services … necessary for civil aircraft.”

The ICJ adds: “To this end, the United States must ensure that licences and necessary authorizations are granted, and that payments and other transfers of funds are not subject to any restriction insofar as they relate to the goods and services referred to above.”

The Iranian foreign ministry applauded the ICJ decision, stating that it “vindicates the Islamic Republic of Iran and confirms the illegitimacy and oppressiveness” of US sanctions.

The ICJ has no mechanism or power to enforce its decision, however, and US officials immediately made clear they will defy the ICJ ruling. Calling Iranian requests “baseless,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the termination of the 1955 Treaty of Amity between the United States and Iran, on which the ICJ ruling relied. “That is a decision that is, frankly, 39 years overdue,” Pompeo said, referring to the 39 years since the 1979 Revolution toppled the bloodstained CIA-backed regime of the Shah of Iran.

Pompeo then cynically tried to imply that the ICJ ruling is irrelevant, as Washington already makes exceptions for humanitarian goods in its sanctions. He said, “With regard to the aspects of the court’s order focusing on potential humanitarian issues, we have been clear. … Existing exceptions, authorisations and licensing policies for humanitarian-related transactions and safety of flight will remain in effect. The United States has been actively engaged on these issues without regard to any proceeding before the ICJ.”

US sanctions on Iran have had devastating humanitarian consequences, and Pompeo’s argument is a repugnant political lie. Over a span of decades, economic sanctions have been a key foreign policy tool allowing US imperialism to inflict untold suffering on innocent people in an attempt to bully and bludgeon various countries it targeted for regime change into line.

US officials have applauded sanctions against Iraq, Cuba and the former Yugoslavia even as they caused horrific losses. The UN embargo Washington imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War cut off Iraq’s access to health supplies, leading to an estimated 500,000 deaths of Iraqi children. Asked about this number on television in 1996, then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously defended the sanctions: “A hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.”

The relentless campaign by Washington to isolate Iran since the 1979 Revolution, and in particular the 2012-2015 sanctions, have taken a terrible toll.

Between 2012 and 2016, Iran’s critical oil and gas exports fell from over $9 billion to under $3 billion, shattering its economy and its access to critical food, pharmaceutical and industrial supplies.

A 2014 article on the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Biotechnology Information website, titled “Sanctions against Iran: The Impact on Health Services,” explains: “Although medicine is not included in the list of the sanctions, the difficulties in holding license for export of medicine, financial transaction, and shipment as well as fear of possible US sanction by pharmaceutical companies and international banks, led to the shortage of specific drugs and medical facilities in last months. A sudden fifty percent rise in the price of drugs is another contributing factor ... The impact is being felt by more than six million patients suffering from complex diseases such as hemophilia, multiple sclerosis, thalassemia, epilepsy, and various immunological disorders, as well as transplant and kidney dialysis patients and those being treated for cancer.”

And after Aseman flight 3705 crashed in Iran in February, killing all 65 aboard, the Guardian noted that at least 1,985 people have died in Iranian plane crashes since 1979: “There have been scores of plane crashes in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, mainly because western sanctions for decades limited its ability to purchase spare parts or buy new planes.”

Washington’s new sanctions have already resulted in a cut-off of vital medicines to Iran. According to Mohammad-Naeem Aminifard, a member of the Iranian parliament’s health commission, 80 important drugs are no longer available under the Iranian state’s drug insurance scheme.

An Iranian doctor working with low-income Iranians recently told the British-based Guardian, “It’s no more only about shortages in drugs for cancer or special diseases such as haemophilia or thalassemia. [N]ormal drugs ... like Warfarin, which stops blood clotting, (are) becoming difficult to find, which means patients’ lives are at risk.”

The ICJ ruling undoubtedly reflects growing opposition in ruling circles internationally to US policy—including its war drive against Iran, and threats of trade war and military attack against nuclear-armed Russia and China. It came a day after US ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison issued an unprecedented threat to bomb Russia in order to destroy cruise missiles Washington says violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Such an attack would set the stage for global nuclear war that could annihilate humanity.

Significantly, opposition to US policy increasingly comes from America’s imperialist “allies” in Europe and Asia. Germany, Britain and France have consistently defended the 2015 Iranian accord and, last month, signed an agreement with China, Russia and Iran to set up a so-called Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) funding scheme, to circumvent the use of the US dollar in the Iranian oil trade. Pompeo condemned the SPV scheme, saying he was “disturbed” and “deeply disappointed” by the “counterproductive” measure.

On Tuesday, moreover, reports emerged of high-level talks on Iran between Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and US State Department officials in Tokyo. The MOFA stated that “both sides actively discussed the US’ re-imposition of sanctions against Iran,” and that it had reiterated its “basic principle” that Japanese corporations should not be affected by the US sanctions.

Nonetheless, the only progressive opposition to the US-led war drive comes from the millions of working people around the globe who are opposed to war, not Washington’s imperialist rivals. After a quarter century of spreading imperialist war from Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, there can be no doubt that this growing inter-imperialist rivalry for access to oil and strategic advantage will only accelerate the drive toward all-out war across the Middle East.

Even those imperialist governments critical of US sanctions are, for their own reasons, stoking a confrontation with Iran. As France participates in the US-led proxy war for regime change in its former colony, Syria, it has already targeted Iran, a key military backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Paris has postponed sending a new ambassador to Tehran and has advised its diplomats to postpone visits to Iran.

Yesterday, the French government charged Iran’s ministry of intelligence for preparing a foiled bombing plot against a June meeting between the exiled Iranian Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) and top US officials including Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in Villepinte, near Paris. In a joint statement, the French interior, economic and foreign affairs ministries said: “A planned bomb attack was foiled at Villepinte on June 30. This extremely serious attack that was to take place on our territory cannot go without a response.”

It remains unclear what evidence Paris has connecting Iranian intelligence to those it is charging: Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi, who was arrested in July in Germany on terror charges, a Belgian couple of Iranian origin, and three others.

It came after French police launched a major “antiterrorist operation” to shut down the Shiite Islamic Zahra-France association, which works near the Grande Synthe refugee camp. Media reported that Paris wanted to “send a message” to Iran with the crackdown.

Tehran rejected accusations they were planning a terror bombing in Villepinte and demanded the Iranian diplomat’s release. An Iranian government spokesman warned of “the evil hands of ill-wishers who seek to ruin deep-rooted ties between Iran and France as well as other influential European countries.”

The fraud of Amazon’s $15 wage

Eric London

Amazon’s decision to raise minimum pay has been hailed by the corporate media and the political establishment as a show of generosity that proves the corporate aristocracy and working class can live in harmony.

In reality, the paltry wage hike is part of a staged publicity operation to boost Amazon’s image and pacify a growing movement among workers demanding higher wages and an end to sweatshop working conditions.

“This is how democracy and capitalism are supposed to work,” proclaimed the New York Times in an article titled “Amazon’s Surrender is Inspiring.” The Washington Post, which Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns, posted an article by Jared Bernstein, a former economic advisor to Joe Biden, praising the company for delivering “unequivocally good news.”

Leaders of both parties hailed Amazon, with Trump White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow calling Bezos a “good businessman” and a “smart guy” for the move, which brings wages to $15 an hour in the US and to between £9.50 ($12.39) and £10.50 ($13.69) in the United Kingdom. Ex-Hillary Clinton advisor John Podesta tweeted, “Thank you Senator Sanders,” praising Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders’ role in orchestrating the wage increase.

The fact the New York Times, Washington Post, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jeff Bezos are united in enthusiasm should give workers cause for concern. Keep your eyes on your purses and wallets!

Financial analysts and investors understand that Amazon’s raise is actually a cost-saving measure directed ultimately against the workers themselves. The Wall Street Journal noted that Amazon will make up for the cost of the raises by driving-up productivity—i.e., enforcing speedups and demanding higher rates.

Amazon “will not end up spending more in wages, they will end up hiring less people,” one industry analyst David Bahnsen acknowledged on CNBC. That’s because the slightly higher wage will pressure more workers to work through injuries and accept long hours and unsafe conditions, decreasing turnover and training costs. Amazon has also begun introducing massive cost-saving measures to increase exploitation and reduce its workforce, including at its recently-acquired Whole Foods markets.

Anthony Chukumba of Loop Capital Markets praised the move as a “public relations victory” that will reduce widespread demands to tax the company or enforce strenuous workplace safety regulations against it. The Wall Street Journal admitted, “for Amazon, paying up now may lessen the chance of regulations that pose a bigger cost down the road.”

There is, moreover, a calculated political dimension to the action, which takes place only a month before the midterm elections. Bezos, owner of the Washington Post and prominent backer of the Democratic Party, has donated millions toward electing Democratic candidates, particularly those with military backgrounds. The company is currently bidding for a $10 billion contract to provide the Pentagon with cloud services.

Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been calling for higher taxes on Amazon, immediately dropped his token criticism of the company: “I want to give credit where credit is due and that is that Mr. Bezos and Amazon have done the right thing,” he said in a gushing statement.

Jeff Bezos himself tweeted thanks to Sanders. “We’re excited about this,” Bezos wrote. Vox said Sanders and Bezos had joined “a weird mutual admiration society.”

Sanders’ role in the confrontation with Amazon was heavily staged from the onset. By first presenting himself as a critic of Amazon, Sanders has served as a political lightening rod, attracting social opposition, harnessing it within the framework of the political establishment, and dissipating it so that it would not impact corporate profits or derail the rising stock market.

Amazon bought the smiles of Sanders and the praise of the entire political establishment on the cheap. The raise will cost him a paltry $1–2 billion in the short-term, roughly equal to what he brings home each week. Workers outside the US and UK will not receive pay increases. Bloomberg Business said the cost represents 0.001 percent of Amazon’s market capitalization.

Most of cost of the raise is paid for by the estimated $789 million Amazon received as a result of this year’s tax cuts. Amazon paid $0 in taxes in 2017.

On top of this, Amazon workers reported to the World Socialist Web Site that the company is telling them to expect cuts to the Variable Compensation Plan and MyReward bonus program, as well as the Restricted Stock Units plan. What is being billed as a raise may actually result in a pay cut.

Democrats and Republicans are pleased because the move will also save the government money by reducing workers’ reliance on social services. This was the explicit purpose of Bernie Sanders’ “Stop BEZOS Act,” which would have taxed Amazon for the cost of public services used by the company’s employees.

But studies show that when wages are raised from the $10–13 range to $15 per hour, workers end up with incomes that are too high to qualify for social programs.

Curtis Skinner of the National Center for Children in Poverty estimates that a raise to $15 an hour could end up costing a parent over $10,000 a year. According to the Center for Community Solutions, an Ohio worker who receives a raise from $11.50 to $15 actually makes $29 less each month as a result of losing eligibility for food stamps, housing subsidies, and Medicaid. Such is the absurdity of American capitalism.

Amazon’s action is above all a political exposure of the role of Sanders and the many pseudo-left organizations and trade unions that operate in and around the Democratic Party. Bezos has realized their central economic demand, “Fight for $15.” The fact that the world’s richest man has done so as part of a calculated business strategy that will do nothing to alleviate the poverty-level conditions of Amazon workers says all that needs to be said about the real content of this supposed major reform.

Workers find themselves in the middle of a tug of war.

On the one hand, Bezos, Sanders, and the entire political and media establishment are desperately fighting to pull them back, to harness their anger and prevent an explosion of the class struggle. The financial aristocracy fears demands for massive wage increases will spill across all industries and lead in the direction of a mass general strike.

On the other hand, Amazon workers are being propelled forward by incredible levels of exploitation and inequality that they confront every day.

To break free of the forces pulling them back, workers need independent organization and a political program.

Many workers at Amazon and across different industries are responding to the Socialist Equality Party’s call for the formation of workplace committees. These new organizations must be independent of the companies, the capitalist parties, and the trade unions, run democratically by the workers themselves. Their purpose is to inform workers, connect them with one another, and unleash the tremendous social power of the unified working class in the fight for social equality.

The interests of workers will not be secured through the supposed benevolence of billionaires like Bezos, whose entire fortune depends on the continued brutal exploitation of the working class. The rights of the working class will only be won through organized class struggle. What is required is a fight to abolish the for-profit capitalist system and replace it with socialism, which entails the expropriation of the wealth of the corporate aristocracy and the transformation of companies like Amazon into social utilities, under workers control, to meet the needs of the population.

Shell University Scholarships for Undergraduate Nigerian Students 2017/2018

Application Deadline: 12th November, 2018

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible African Countries: Nigeria

To be taken at: Nigerian Universities

Subject Areas: Courses offered at Nigerian Universities

About Shell Scholarship: The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (Operator of the NNPC/SHELL /TEPN/AGIP Joint Venture) Scholarship Scheme offers first year students in all Nigerian universities the opportunity to study with an annual grant from the SPDC JV for the full duration of their course.  The programme aims to promote academic excellence and improve the skills of young Nigerians.

Type: Undergraduate

Who is qualified to apply? Eligible Applicants must: ·

• Be Nigerian citizens
• Be registered FULL-TIME undergraduates in an accredited and approved University in Nigeria.
• Be in 200 Level with a minimum CGPA of 2.5
• Have a minimum of five credits in one sitting, including Mathematics and English, in their Senior School Certificate Examinations.
• Have a minimum of 200 score in UTME.

The Scholarship is in two categories;

• the National Merit Award (NM) and
• the Areas of Operation Merit Award (OM).

Number of Scholarships: Several

Scholarship Worth: Annual grant from the SPDC JV for the full duration of your course

Duration of Scholarship: For full duration of the course

How to Apply: 

• All applicants should have a valid personal email account – for subsequent communication on their applications.
• All applications must be done ONLINE via the application portal-

Scholarship Application Portal
Scanned copies of letters of identification, stamped and signed by:

• The Paramount Ruler of the Community;and
• The Chairman of the Community Development (CDC) or
• The Chairman of the Executive Council (CEC) or

The Community Trust (CT) are also required for applicants for the Operational Area Awards. The letters should be addressed to:

The ER ManagerSocial Performance/Social Investment
The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited, Port Harcourt.

• Scanned documents must be in JPEG format and must not exceed 200KB.
• For more information or clarification please send an email to spdccommunitycontact@shell.com

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

UNESCO Regional Meeting on Transboundary Cooperation for Effective Management of World Heritage Sites in Africa 2018

Application Deadline: 21st October 2018

Eligible Countries: Sub-Saharan African countries

To be taken at (country): Niger

About the Award: The Africa Unit of the World Heritage Centre is accepting abstracts, in English or French, from a wide range of stakeholders: sites managers, international heritage experts, community groups, government representatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector. Contributions focusing on African examples, good practices, lessons learned and success stories for effective management of cultural and natural World Heritage sites in sub-Saharan African countries are welcome.

Field of Study: Open to all parties concerned, this meeting will explore a wide range of topics related to transboundary cooperation and the preservation of African heritage with an emphasis on examining major challenges and practical solutions.

Type: Research

Eligibility:

• This call is open to site managers, local communities, NGOs, experts and representatives of countries involved in transboundary cooperation initiatives for the effective management of cultural and natural World Heritage sites in Sub-Saharan African countries.
• The participation is limited to one person per case study in the case where a paper is co-authored and submitted by several people, applicants are invited to name the representative of the entire group. Applications from women are strongly encouraged.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Funded

Duration of Programme: 10 to 14 December 2018

How to Apply: Interested candidates are invited to submit their CVs (two pages max) and a summary of their paper in French or English (300 words max), to wh-africa@unesco.org. This summary should be relevant to the theme of the workshop and describe transboundary cooperation initiatives for effective management of World Heritage sites in Africa.

Apply

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Wadsworth African Fellowships for PhD in Anthropology for African Students 2019

Application Deadline: 15th December 2018

Eligible Countries: African countries

To Be Taken At (Country): South Africa

Eligible Field of Study: Anthropology

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: 

1. The Wadsworth African Fellowship is intended for young African scholars who may not otherwise be able to pursue a doctoral degree in anthropology. Normally, applicants will be under 35 years of age at the time they begin their fellowship. They must be citizens and residents of an African country at the time of application. They must also be members of an underrepresented group in academic anthropology/archaeology.
2. Applicants must be prepared to demonstrate their reasons for choosing their Host Institution (the institution where they plan to study). Currently applications to the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town are given priority.
3. A Host Institution can have only two active Wadsworth African fellows. Because anthropology can be taught in a variety of departments (Social Anthropology, Archaeology, Anatomy, etc.) it is expected that there will normally be only one active fellow per department at any time.
4. Applicants may have already begun their training for the doctoral degree at a South African university but they must demonstrate why their funding circumstances have changed and why they now do not have sufficient funding to complete their degree.
5. Students who have advanced beyond their first year of doctoral studies/training are not eligible to apply.
6. At the time they submit their application, candidates must have an application for doctoral admission pending at a South African institution that will provide training.
7. The applicant must have a Host Sponsor, or supervisor, who is a member of the South African institution at which the candidate plans to pursue training. The Host Sponsor must be willing to assume responsibility for overseeing the candidate’s training. A Host Sponsor cannot sponsor more than one applicant per funding season.
8. The applicant must have a Home Sponsor who is a member of the institution at which the applicant received his or her prior degree/s. The Home Sponsor must be prepared to supply a letter of reference for the applicant. In some cases the Host Institution may be the same institution where the applicant received his or her prior degree/s. If this situation applies, the Home Sponsor should be the Head of a relevant department at the Host Institution or another member of the academic staff who is familiar with the applicant, but who will not be acting as the Host Sponsor.
9. Applicants may submit only one application per funding season. They may not apply through two or more Host Institutions/Departments at the same time.
10. If the Foundation receives more than one application for a single South African department, the Foundation will contact that department to have them prioritize their applicants for potential funding.
11. Applications exclusively seeking support for fieldwork expenses and/or dissertation write-up are not accepted. Applicants should apply to the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant program for fieldwork expenses. The Foundation only funds dissertation write-up for Wadsworth African Fellows who have received funding for training purposes from the Wenner-Gren Foundation prior to undertaking their fieldwork.
12. Applicants must be able to demonstrate that they have sufficient funds in addition to the Wadsworth African Fellowship to complete their training at the Host Institution.
13. If a Wadsworth African Fellowship is awarded, the applicant must agree to comply with the Requirements and Conditions of the Wadsworth African Fellowship.

Selection Criteria: 

1. The Foundation is looking for applicants who are talented scholars, who may not otherwise be able to pursue a doctoral degree and who show potential for developing the field of anthropology in their home countries. Priority will be given to applicants from underrepresented groups in academic anthropology.
2. Applicants must show evidence of academic excellence in their prior training in anthropology or a related discipline.
3. Applicants should make a convincing case for choosing the Host Institution and the program of training they will receive at the Host Institution.
4. The Foundation places considerable importance on the reference from the Host Sponsor. Applicants are encouraged to make personal contact with the Host Sponsor prior to applying for the Wadsworth African Fellowship and to develop with that sponsor an appropriate program of training and study leading to the doctoral degree.
5. Priority is given to applicants with well-articulated training and research goals. It is also important to demonstrate a good fit between the Host Institution, Host Sponsor, and the applicant’s research goals.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The annual fellowship is $17,500 and can be used towards travel, living expenses, tuition, student fees, insurance, books, research expenses, and any other relevant categories of expenditure while studying at the Host institution. A separate application can be made for an additional year of funding to support dissertation write-up.

Duration of Program:  The fellowship is renewable for up to two additional years upon successful completion of each preceding year’s study.

How to Apply: Final decisions are made by January 15. Application materials are available 3 months before the application deadline. Applicants must use the most recent application form. They must also submit their application materials using the Foundation’s online submission procedure as well as send two printed copies to the Foundation by regular mail. See the link to ‘Application Procedures’ below for more information.

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Award Providers: Wenner-Gren Foundation