Sri Lanka: Beyond the Presidential Elections

Sripathi Narayanan


The result of the 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election was on expected lines because of the nature of the captive vote-bank of the frontrunners, Sajith Premadasa, and the winner and now President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The campaign and the poll, in many ways, were contested on electoral arithmetic similar to that of Sri Lanka’s 2005 presidential election and all subsequent elections, big and small. It is for this very reason that losing candidate, Sajith Premadasa, like the then incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2015, conceded defeat even during the early stages of counting of the votes.

For (now) President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, like his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa (who is now prime minister), their primary political base was majority Sinhala-Buddhist constituency in the South. Premadasa, like all previous political rivals of the Rajapaksas, was able to consolidate that strata of the Sinhala society which is not conservative, along with religious and linguistic minorities - namely the Tamils of the North and the Muslims. This divide in the electoral map is one that has not only dominated the politics of the country but has also been the determining factor in shaping the nation’s polity.

However, for Sri Lanka, this presidential election is just a precursor to the parliamentary polls, which are a few months away. Given the polarising aspect of the presidential elections, a similar voting pattern can be expected in the parliamentary polls as well. If that takes place, then Sri Lanka’s domestic politics would not only be at loggerheads but would exacerbate prevailing social divisions. The inability of the electorate and the political class to bridge the communal divide has been one factor that has dominated the politics of the country but for Sri Lanka, it is time to go beyond these fissures and to script its politics and political identity beyond the ethnographic lines.

Ghosts of the PastIndia’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was one of the first political leaders of the world to congratulate Gotabaya on his victory and also to invite him to visit India. This was followed Indian External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar’s, visit to Colombo, thereby indicating a reset in the bilateral ties between the two countries. This is of consequence as India-Sri Lanka bilateral ties during the previous Mahinda Rajapaksa dispensation was strained owing to a number of issues, including the ‘China factor’.

Nonetheless for Sri Lanka, its primary concern would be not only balancing its ties with the two Asian giants, India and China, but also its partners in the West. Even prior to the elections, the US had kicked up a storm when it expressed its reservations on the elevation of Lt. Gen Shavendra Silva as the Commander of Sri Lanka’s army. For Washington, Gen Silva, who in his earlier capacity was one of the few field commanders responsible in ending Sri Lanka’s civil war, has been on the radar for alleged war crimes and human rights violations. Coupled with the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, the US position on internal security concerns not only made national security an election issue but also made protecting the honour of the country’s military a campaign plank for the two main candidates.

However, for Sri Lanka, now back under the Rajapaksas, allegations of human rights violations in the closing days of the civil war could return to haunt. This is because the initial post-poll reaction of the US, which was the main sponsor of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution on the war-crimes probe in Sri Lanka, was not a note of congratulation but caution. In a statement to the press, the US called upon the new administration in Sri Lanka to uphold the country’s commitments to security sector reform, accountability, respect for human rights, and non-recurrence of violence.

These were the very issues that had consumed much of the country’s energy on the external front during the previous Rajapaksa dispensation post war (under Mahinda Rajapaksa), and that of then Defence Secretary and now President, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. Even at the time of commencement of the polling campaign, Gotabhaya had rejected the UNHRC process, like the Rajapaksas had previously done when in power.

The US, by raking up issues of the past, has not only drawn the battle-lines for the new dispensation in Colombo and but also sketched Sri Lanka’s foreign policy outlook. ‘Accountability issues’ had made the Rajapaksas unpopular not only at home but also overseas. This matter also became a catalyst in consolidating Sri Lanka’s ties with China given how Beijing not only refrains from talking about such sensitive domestic issues but has also stood by Colombo, when needed and wherever needed, including at the UN Security Council and the UNHRC. Gotabhaya’s primary interest thus would not be in befriending more in the comity of nations, but in combating the ghosts that had plagued him and his brother Mahinda during their previous stint in power and later as well.

India, on the other hand, would now not only have to re-establish fraternal ties with the Rajapaksas but would also have to be seen as doing so in ways that the larger section of the Sinhala society, too, would understand, in addition to ethnic Tamils. This would mean that on issues of accountability, India would have to sing a new tune, after voting for UNHRC resolutions in the past, and in ways that is heard loud and clear, despite its interest in the Tamils of the island state.

America’s Arms Sales Addiction

William D. Hartung

The 50-Year History of U.S. Dominance of the Middle Eastern Arms Trade

It’s no secret that Donald Trump is one of the most aggressive arms salesmen in history. How do we know? Because he tells us so at every conceivable opportunity. It started with his much exaggerated “$110 billion arms deal” with Saudi Arabia, announced on his first foreign trip as president. It continued with his White House photo op with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in which he brandished a map with a state-by-state rundown of American jobs supposedly tied to arms sales to the kingdom. And it’s never ended. In these years in office, in fact, the president has been a staunch advocate for his good friends at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — the main corporate beneficiaries of the U.S.-Saudi arms trade (unlike the thousands of American soldiers the president recently sent into that country’s desert landscapes to defend its oil facilities).

All the American arms sales to the Middle East have had a severe and lasting set of consequences in the region in, as a start, the brutal Saudi/United Arab Emirates war in Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians via air strikes using U.S. weaponry and pushed millions of Yemenis to the brink of famine. And don’t forget the recent Turkish invasion of Syria in which both the Turkish forces and the Kurdish-led militias they attacked relied heavily on U.S.-supplied weaponry.

Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he cares far more about making deals for that weaponry than who uses any of it against whom. It’s important to note, however, that, historically speaking, he’s been anything but unique in his obsession with promoting such weapons exports (though he is uniquely loud about doing so).

Despite its supposedly strained relationship with the Saudi regime, the Obama administration, for example, still managed to offer the royals of that kingdom a record $136 billion in U.S. weapons between 2009 and 2017. Not all of those offers resulted in final sales, but striking numbers did. Items sold included Boeing F-15 combat aircraft and Apache attack helicopters, General Dynamics M-1 tanks, Raytheon precision-guided bombs, and Lockheed Martin bombs, combat ships, and missile defense systems. Many of those weapons have since been put to use in the war in Yemen.

To its credit, the Obama administration did at least have an internal debate on the wisdom of continuing such a trade. In December 2016, late in his second term, the president finally did suspend the sale of precision-guided bombs to the Royal Saudi Air Force due to a mounting toll of Yemeni civilian deaths in U.S.-supplied Saudi air strikes. This was, however, truly late in the game, given that the Saudi regime first intervened in Yemen in March 2015 and the slaughter of civilians began soon after that.

By then, of course, Washington’s dominance of the Mideast arms trade was taken for granted, despite an occasional large British or French deal like the scandal-plagued Al Yamamah sale of fighter planes and other equipment to the Saudis, the largest arms deal in the history of the United Kingdom. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, from 2014 to 2018 the United States accounted for more than 54% of known arms deliveries to the Middle East. Russia lagged far behind with a 9.5% share of the trade, followed by France (8.6%), England (7.2%), and Germany (4.6%). China, often cited as a possible substitute supplier, should the U.S. ever decide to stop arming repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, came in at less than 1%.

The U.S. government’s stated rationales for pouring arms into that ever-more-embattled region include: building partnerships with countries theoretically willing to fight alongside U.S. forces in a crisis; swapping arms for access to military bases in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Persian Gulf states; creating “stability” by building up allied militaries to be stronger than those of potential adversaries like Iran; and generating revenue for U.S. weapons contractors, as well as jobs for American workers. Of course, such sales have indeed benefited those contractors and secured access to bases in the region, but when it comes to promoting stability and security, historically it’s been another story entirely.

The Nixon Doctrine and the Initial Surge in Mideast Arms Sales

Washington’s role as the Middle East’s top arms supplier has its roots in remarks made by Richard Nixon half a century ago on the island of Guam. It was the Vietnam War era and the president was on his way to South Vietnam. Casualties there were mounting rapidly with no clear end to the conflict in sight. During that stopover in Guam, Nixon assured reporters accompanying him that it was high time to end the practice of sending large numbers of U.S troops to overseas battlefields. To “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world,” he was instead putting a new policy in place, later described by a Pentagon official as “sending arms instead of sending troops.”

The core of what came to be known as the Nixon Doctrine was the arming of regional surrogates, countries with sympathetic rulers or governments that could promote U.S. interests without major contingents of the American military being on hand. Of such potential surrogates at that moment, the most important was the Shah of Iran, with whom a CIA-British intelligence coup replaced a civilian government back in 1953 and who proved to have an insatiable appetite for top-of-the-line U.S. weaponry.

The Shah’s idea of a good time was curling up with the latest copy of Aviation Week and Space Technology and perusing glossy photos of combat planes. Egged on by the Nixon administration, his was the first and only country to buy the costly Grumman F-14 combat aircraft at a time when that company desperately needed foreign sales to bolster the program. And the Shah put his U.S.-supplied weapons to use, too, helping, for instance, to put down an anti-government uprising in nearby Oman (a short skip across the Persian Gulf), while repressing his own population at the same time.

In the Nixon years, Saudi Arabia, too, became a major weapons client of Washington, not so much because it feared its regional neighbors then, but because it had seemingly limitless oil funds to subsidize U.S. weapons makers at a time when the Pentagon budget was beginning to be reduced. In addition, Saudi sales helped recoup some of the revenue streaming out of the U.S. to pay for higher energy prices exacted by the newly formed OPEC oil cartel. It was a process then quaintly known as “recycling petrodollars.”

The Carter Years and the Quest for Restraint

The freewheeling arms trade of the Nixon years eventually prompted a backlash. In 1976, for the first (and last) time, a presidential candidate — Jimmy Carter — made reining in the arms trade a central theme of his 1976 campaign for the White House. He called for imposing greater human-rights scrutiny on arms exports, reducing the total volume of arms transfers, and initiating talks with the Soviet Union on curbing sales to regions of tension like the Middle East.

Meanwhile, members of Congress, led by Democratic Senators Gaylord Nelson and Hubert Humphrey, felt that it was long past time for Capitol Hill to have a role in decision-making when it came to weapons sales. Too often Congressional representatives found out about major deals only by reading news reports in the papers long after such matters had been settled. Among the major concerns driving their actions: the Nixon-era surge of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, then still an avowed adversary of Israel; the use of U.S.-supplied weapons by both sides in the Greek-Turkish conflict over the island of Cyprus; and covert sales to extremist right-wing forces in southern Africa, notably the South African-backed Union for the Total Independence of Angola. The answer was the passage of the Arms Export Control Act of 1978, which required that Congress be notified of any major sales in advance and asserted that it had the power to veto any of them viewed as dangerous or unnecessary.

As it happened, though, neither President Carter’s initiative nor the new legislation put a significant dent in such arms trafficking. In the end, for instance, Carter decided to exempt the Shah’s Iran from serious human-rights strictures and his hardline national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, undercut those talks with the Soviet Union on reducing arms sales.

Carter also wanted to get the new Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) he established — which eventually morphed into the U.S. Central Command — access to military bases in the Persian Gulf region and was willing to use arms deals to do so. The RDF was to be the centerpiece of the Carter Doctrine, a response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah of Iran. As the president made clear in his 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by use of any means necessary, including the use of force.” Selling arms in the region would prove a central pillar of his new doctrine.

Meanwhile, most major sales continued to sail through Congress with barely a discouraging word.

Who Armed Saddam Hussein?

While the volume of those arms sales didn’t spike dramatically under President Ronald Reagan, his determination to weaponize anti-communist “freedom fighters” from Afghanistan to Nicaragua sparked the Iran-Contra scandal. At its heart lay a bizarre and elaborate covert effort led by National Security Council staff member Oliver North and a band of shadowy middlemen to supply U.S. weapons to the hostile regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. The hope was to gain Tehran’s help in freeing U.S. hostages in Lebanon. North and company then used the proceeds from those sales to arm anti-government Contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of an explicit Congressional ban on such aid.

Worse yet, the Reagan administration transferred arms and provided training to extremist mujahedeen factions in Afghanistan, acts which would, in the end, help arm groups and individuals that later formed al-Qaeda (and similar groups). That would, of course, prove a colossal example of the kind of blowback that unrestricted arms trading too often generates.

Even as the exposure of North’s operation highlighted U.S. arms transfers to Iran, the Reagan administration and the following one of President George H.W. Bush would directly and indirectly supply nearly half a billion dollars worth of arms and arms-making technology to Iran’s sworn enemy, Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein. Those arms would bolster Saddam’s regime both in its war with Iran in the 1980s and in its 1991 invasion of Kuwait that led to Washington’s first Gulf War. The U.S. was admittedly hardly alone in fueling the buildup of the Iraqi military. All five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and China) provided weapons or weapons technology to that country in the run-up to its intervention in Kuwait.

The embarrassment and public criticism generated by the revelation that the U.S. and other major suppliers had helped arm the Iraqi military created a new opening for restraint. Leaders in the U.S., Great Britain, and other arms-trading nations pledged to do better in the future by increasing information about and scrutiny of their sales to the region. This resulted in two main initiatives: the United Nations arms trade register, where member states were urged to voluntarily report their arms imports and exports, and talks among those five Security Council members (the largest suppliers of weapons to the Middle East) on limiting arms sales to the region.

However, the P-5 talks, as they were called, quickly fell apart when China decided to sell a medium-range missile system to Saudi Arabia and President Bill Clinton’s administration began making new regional weapons deals at a pace of more than $1 billion per month while negotiations were underway. The other suppliers concluded that the Clinton arms surge violated the spirit of the talks, which soon collapsed, leading in the presidency of George W. Bush to a whole new Iraqi debacle.

The most important series of arms deals during the George W. Bush years involved the training and equipping of the Iraqi military in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But $25 billion in U.S. arms and training was not enough to create a force capable of defeating the modestly armed militants of ISIS, when they swept into northern Iraq in 2014 and captured large swaths of territory and major cities, including Mosul. Iraqi security forces, short on food and equipment due to corruption and incompetence, were also short on morale, and in some cases virtually abandoned their posts (and U.S. weaponry) in the face of those ISIS attacks.

The Addiction Continues

Donald Trump has carried on the practice of offering weaponry in quantity to allies in the Middle East, especially the Saudis, though his major rationale for the deals is to generate domestic jobs and revenues for the major weapons contractors. In fact, investing money and effort in almost anything else, from infrastructure to renewable energy technologies, would produce more jobs in the U.S. No matter though, the beat just goes on.

One notable development of the Trump years has been a revived Congressional interest in curbing weapons sales, with a particular focus on ending support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. (Watching Turkish and Kurdish forces face off, each armed in a major way by the U.S., should certainly add to that desire.) Under the leadership of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA), Congress has voted to block bomb sales and other forms of military support for Saudi Arabia, only to have their efforts vetoed by President Trump, that country’s main protector in Washington. Still, congressional action on Saudi sales has been unprecedented in its persistence and scope. It may yet prevail, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020. After all, every one of the major presidential contenders has pledged to end arms sales that support the Saudi war effort in Yemen.

Such deals with Saudi Arabia and other Mideast states may be hugely popular with the companies that profit from the trade, but the vast majority of Americans oppose runaway arms trading on the sensible grounds that it makes the world less safe. The question now is: Will Congress play a greater role in attempting to block such weapons deals with the Saudis and human-rights abusers or will America’s weapons-sales addiction and its monopoly position in the Middle Eastern arms trade simply continue, setting the stage for future disasters of every sort?

Release of Western Hostages and Prospects of Peace in Afghanistan

Nauman Sadiq

Three Taliban commanders have been released today, on Tuesday, by the Afghan government as part of a prisoner swap involving two Western hostages. Reportedly, the militant leaders, including senior Taliban leader Anas Haqqani, had landed in Qatar, which hosts the Taliban political office.

In exchange, two university professors identified as US citizen Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks were reportedly released later on Tuesday. The pair had been held by the Taliban for three years. “The two professors are safely freed and are being taken care of now,” an Afghan official told Reuters news agency.

Kevin King and Timothy Weeks were kidnapped in August 2016 from outside the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul where both worked as professors. They appeared in a hostage video a year later looking disheveled and pleading with their governments to secure their release.

The developments come after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani announced a week ago that Haqqani, whose elder brother is the deputy Taliban leader and head of the Haqqani Network, a Taliban affiliate, and the two other commanders would be freed.

Renewed efforts to end the country’s 18-year conflict have been stepped up recently, with US special representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad visiting Pakistan last month to meet the Taliban’s top negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close aide to the Taliban’s deceased leader Mullah Omar.

Baradar was released from captivity in October last year by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and was allowed to join his family in Afghanistan. He was captured in a joint US-Pakistan intelligence-based operation in the southern port city of Karachi in 2010.

His release was a longstanding demand of the US-backed Kabul government because he is regarded as a comparatively moderate Taliban leader who could play a positive role in the peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

Alongside the issues of Taliban providing guarantees that it would not allow Afghan soil to be used by transnational terrorists, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State Khorasan, the Taliban holding direct negotiations with the US-backed Afghan government – which the Taliban regards as an American stooge and hence refuse to recognize – a permanent ceasefire and the formation of a mutually acceptable interim government, a few other minor issues, such as the exchange and release of prisoners, removing travel restrictions on the Taliban leadership and unfreezing its bank accounts were on the agenda of the peace talks, before Donald Trump abruptly ended the negotiations in September.

In announcing the cancellation of the peace talks with the Taliban in September, Trump cited a Taliban attack in Kabul in which 12 people, including a US soldier, were killed, though that was only an ostensible excuse because the death toll of American soldiers in Afghanistan already stood at 2,372 in July 2018.

Fact of the matter is that the biggest stumbling block in the peace talks has been the American deep state. The bureaucracy of the Pentagon, the State Department and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, tried their best to thwart the nuclear negotiations with North Korea and Trump’s Syria withdrawal last year, and their subversive antics are hampering the Afghanistan drawdown too.

Regarding the presence of transnational terrorist networks on the Afghan soil, the al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has already been killed in a May 2011 raid of the US Navy Seals in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan and its second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri is on the run. Besides, the number of al-Qaeda’s Arab militants in the Af-Pak region does not exceed more than a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.

Though the homegrown insurgent movements comprising ethnic Pashtun militants, such as the Taliban and its breakaway factions, including the Islamic State Khorasan, are a much larger menace. According to a recent report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the US-backed Afghan government controls only half of Afghanistan’s territory.

It’s worth noting, however, that SIGAR is a US-based governmental agency that often inflates figures. Factually, the government’s writ does not extend beyond a third of Afghanistan. In many cases, the Afghan government controls district centers of provinces and outlying rural areas are either controlled by the Taliban or are contested.

The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s late chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige, and draw funds and followers, but which doesn’t have any organizational and operational association with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.

The total strength of the Islamic State-Khorasan is estimated to be between 3,000 to 5,000 fighters. By comparison, the strength of the Taliban is estimated to be between 60,000 to 80,000 militants. The Islamic State-Khorasan was formed as a merger between several breakaway factions of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in early 2015. Later, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a Pakistani terrorist group Jundullah and Chinese Uyghur militants pledged allegiance to it.

In 2017, the Islamic State-Khorasan split into two factions. One faction, based in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, is led by a Pakistani militant commander Aslam Farooqi, and the other faction, based in the northern provinces of Afghanistan, is led by a former Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) commander Moawiya. The latter faction also includes Uzbek, Tajik, Uyghur and Baloch militants.

If we take a cursory look at the insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the Northern Alliance in October 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack. Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of lesser priority for the Bush administration.

The number of US troops stationed in Afghanistan did not exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as president, and soon after occupying Afghanistan, Washington invaded Iraq in March 2003 and American resources and focus shifted to Iraq.

It was the Obama administration that made the Afghanistan conflict the bedrock of its foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling then-President Obama’s electoral pledge of withdrawing American forces from Iraq in December 2011. At the height of the surge of the US troops in Afghanistan in 2010, the American troops numbered around 100,000, with an additional 40,000 troops from the rest of the international coalition, but they still could not manage to have a lasting effect on the relentless Taliban insurgency.

The Taliban are known to be diehard fighters who are adept at hit-and-run guerrilla tactics and have a much better understanding of the Afghan territory compared to foreigners. Even by their standards, however, the Taliban insurgency seems to be on steroids during the last several years.

The Taliban have managed to overrun and hold vast swathes of territory not only in the traditional Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, such as Helmand, but have also made significant inroads into the northern provinces of Afghanistan which are the traditional strongholds of the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups.

In October 2016, for instance, the Taliban mounted brazen attacks on the Gormach district of northwestern Faryab province, the Tirankot district of Uruzgan province and briefly captured the district-center of the northern Kunduz province, before they were repelled with the help of the US air power.

The main reason of the surge in the Taliban attacks during the last several years appears to be the drawdown of the American troops which number only 14,000, and the number has reportedly been further reduced by several thousand even after the cancellation of the peace talks with the Taliban in September, indicating impending resumption of the dialogue process as is obvious from the release of Kevin King and Timothy Weeks on Tuesday.

Epstein scandal engulfs Britain’s Royal family after BBC interview with Prince Andrew

Chris Marsden

An attempt at damage limitation by the palace and the BBC has backfired in spectacular fashion. Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis sought to refute allegations that his relations with deceased billionaire sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein included having paid sex with an underage girl. But his answers were met with widespread derision and demands that the Duke of York go to the United States to testify under oath.

Prince Andrew [Credit: commons.wikimedia.org]

Epstein was at the centre of an elite social circle and procured women and underage girls for sexual abuse by himself and others. The prince maintained his relations with Epstein long after he was convicted for his crimes.

In 2008, Epstein served 13 months for procuring an underage girl for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. A three-year investigation had identified 36 girls, some as young as 14 years old, he had sexually abused. Epstein was arrested again on July 6, 2019, on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. He died in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. Ruled as a suicide, Epstein’s lawyers and many others have alleged that he was assassinated to protect his friends in high places—including the Duke of York.

Andrew’s friendship with Epstein was close and even involved arranging for him to pay off the debts of his former wife, Sarah, Duchess of York.

In January, Virginia Roberts, now with the married name Giuffre, alleged in a court case that Andrew, “a former prime minister” and lawyer Alan Dershowitz had sex with her while she was a teenager. Epstein had paid her £10,000 to have sex with the Duke on three occasions, including during a trip to London in 2001, when she was 17, in New York and on a private Caribbean island.

Flight logs confirmed that Andrew and Roberts/Giuffre were in all the places she alleges sex happened. There is a photo of him with his arm around her waist taken at the London flat of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged “madam” and a friend of Prince Andrew. A second girl, Joanna Sjoberg, alleges that Andrew touched her breast while seated with Roberts in Epstein’s mansion.

In August 2019, the New Republic magazine published an email exchange between Epstein associate John Brockman and journalist Evgeny Morozov from September 2013, in which Brockman mentions seeing a British man named “Andy” receiving a foot massage from two young Russian women at Epstein’s New York mansion in 2010. He later “realized that the recipient” of the foot massage “was His Royal Highness, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.”

Pilot David Rodgers claims the prince was a passenger on flights with the financier and Roberts/Giuffre, including to the US Virgin Islands on April 11, 2001.

Last month the right-wing website Project Veritas published a leaked video, revealing that ABC News had suppressed reports of Epstein’s sex-trafficking for three years, with Breaking News anchor and Good Morning America co-host Amy Robach stating off-camera, “Then the Palace found out we had [Roberts/Giuffre] whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. We were so worried that we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate [Middleton] and Will [Prince William], that also quashed the story.”

This was the background to the November 16 Maitlis interview, recorded in Buckingham Palace November 14.

To give a flavour of the painful episode, Andrew said he first met Epstein in 1999 through his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the deceased and disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell. He had maintained relations only because he wanted to learn more about the “international business world” in his capacity as a special representative for international trade and investment. Epstein had attended Princess Beatrice’s 18th birthday at Windsor Castle in July 2006, but only as Maxwell’s “plus one.” Beatrice is Andrew’s daughter.

Andrew had broken contact with Epstein after his initial conviction, until December 2010, when he visited the financier just four months after he had completed his prison sentence. The duke claimed he had only done so to (again) break off relations. He had considered speaking to Epstein by telephone but decided to meet him face-to-face “to show leadership.”

Asked why he had then stayed at Epstein’s mansion and attended a dinner party, Andrew said, “It was a convenient place to stay… with the benefit of all the hindsight that one can have it was definitely the wrong thing to do but at the time I felt it was the honourable and right thing to do.

“I admit fully my judgement was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable,” he added.

Asking about the alleged sexual encounter with Roberts/Giuffre, Maitlis said, “She says she met you in 2001, she says she dined with you, danced with you at Tramp Nightclub in London. She went on to have sex with you in a house in Belgravia belonging to Ghislaine Maxwell, your friend. Your response?”

Andrew replied: “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.”

Roberts/Giuffre’s accusations were “very specific,” Maitlis said, including that the prince had been “profusely sweating.” He replied that “I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenalin in the Falklands War when I was shot at and I simply… it was almost impossible for me to sweat.” He had only started to be able to sweat again “in the recent past.”

“Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored but I don’t recollect that photograph ever being taken,” he said. He had never been upstairs at Maxwell’s Belgravia flat and “when I go out in London, I wear a suit and a tie.” He was shown with his hand on her waist, but “I am not one to, as it were, hug.”

Most importantly, the day that his encounter with Roberts/Giuffre was meant to have taken place, March 10, 2001, he was “at home with the children.” He had taken Princess Beatrice to a party at a Pizza Express restaurant in Woking at about 4 or 5 p.m., “And then because the Duchess was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other one is there.”

“Going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do,” he said. “I remember it weirdly distinctly.”

He never suspected Epstein’s criminal behaviour or saw anything unusual about the large number of guests at what have been alleged to be orgies. “I live in an institution at Buckingham Palace which has members of staff walking around all the time and I don’t wish to appear grand but there were a lot of people who were walking around Jeffrey Epstein’s house. As far as I was aware, they were staff.”

Andrew still did not regret being friends with Epstein. Knowing Epstein had “some seriously beneficial outcomes… The people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn, either by him or because of him, were actually very useful.”

Maitlis closed the interview by asking, “Would you be willing to testify or give a statement under oath if you were asked?” He replied, “If push came to shove and the legal advice was to do so, then I would be duty bound to do so.”

This may yet prove to be the most damaging statement made by the prince. Lawyers representing 10 of Epstein’s victims have demanded that he now speak to the FBI.

Gloria Allred, representing five of Epstein’s victims, told the Guardian, “The right and honourable action for Prince Andrew to take now is for him to volunteer to be interviewed by the FBI and prosecutors for the southern district of New York.”

Lisa Bloom, who represents another five victims, said that some of the prince’s answers were “simply not credible.”

Anna Rothwell, from criminal law firm Corker Binning, said, “Prince Andrew is not entitled to any form of immunity by virtue of his position as a member of the royal family. His friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is under investigation by the FBI and he is vulnerable to extradition.”

Trial begins over 2015 anti-government protest on Nauru

John Braddock

The long-delayed trial of a group of activists and former politicians involved in an anti-government protest on Nauru in 2015 began in the country’s High Court on November 14. The so-called ‘Nauru 19’—now reduced to 15 people—face charges including rioting and disrupting the legislature.

Nauru, a Pacific atoll of just 21 square kilometres with a population of less than 12,000 people, functions as an Australian semi-colony. It has a long history of oppression by the imperialist powers and a legacy of poverty and economic backwardness.

The defendants were last year granted a permanent stay of proceedings by Supreme Court Judge Geoffrey Muecke. Muecke, a retired chief judge of the South Australia District Court, found the trial could not be fair, that the government had thwarted legal representation and was persecuting the defendants. The government had also refused legal aid and placed them on a blacklist, ensuring they would struggle to find work.

The stay was removed in June by the newly established Nauru Court of Appeal after Muecke was sacked and abused in parliament by the former justice minister David Adeang. Newly-appointed Supreme Court Justice Daniel Fatiaki last month rejected another stay application and refused the Nauru 19 leave to appeal his decision.

Two defendants, former MP Squire Jeremiah and his cousin sought asylum in Australia before the government placed a ban on group members travelling overseas. Jeremiah said Nauru’s new president Lionel Aingimea had, as junior justice minister in the previous government, been closely involved in the pursuit of the Nauru 19, and was “denying us our political rights and our constitutional rights.” Former president Sprent Dabwido, also a Nauru 19 member, sought asylum in Australia earlier this year, before dying of cancer.

The protests in June 2015 erupted outside Nauru’s parliament over government corruption, with some 300 people attending. For nearly a year previously there had been no effective opposition, with five MPs suspended before they could take their seats.

The country’s then president, Baron Waqa, had sole power to appoint the cabinet from among the parliamentarians. Legal moves by the MPs to regain their seats failed. Mathew Batsiua, one of the excluded MPs, said people were angry at “the absence of checks and balances on government.” Waqa responded with increasingly authoritarian measures. These included harsh prison terms for publishing anything that “stirred up political hatred,” “caused emotional distress to a person,” or was “likely to threaten national defence, public safety, public order, public morality or public health.”

Waqa’s administration operated from 2013 as a virtual dictatorship, deporting and imprisoning opposition politicians, disciplining the police and judiciary, shutting down social media websites, and criminalising political dissent. The government’s treatment of refugees at the Australian-run detention centres frequently came under fire from rights groups.

In the lead-up to the 2018 Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in Nauru, the government banned Australian journalists entering the country after the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) aired a program in June 2015, which coincided with the anti-corruption protests in Nauru, and another in 2016. The Nauru government accused the ABC of “blatant interference in Nauru’s domestic politics” prior to the 2016 election, and “continued biased and false reporting about our country.”

The ABC had alleged that Getax, a large Australian phosphate company, funneled more than half a million dollars in kickbacks to Waqa and other government figures. The ABC also publicised leaked emails it claimed revealed a plot to overthrow the previous Nauru government in 2010. The ABC’s reporting reflected concerns by a section of the Australian foreign policy establishment that Waqa’s administration might not have been toeing Canberra’s line closely enough.

In what was viewed as a vote for change, Waqa lost his seat in the general election held in August. He was replaced as president by Aingimea. In a Radio NZ interview in September, Aingimea defended the previous administration, of which he had been a member, and scotched any suggestion of major policy changes. He repeatedly denied government involvement in the treatment of the Nauru 19.

However, Australian lawyer Stephen Lawrence, who has represented the Nauru 19, told media in Australia and NZ that the rule of law on the island had completely “broken down.” Lawrence described the ruling that prevented the group from appealing Justice Fatiaki’s decision as “nuts,” saying the court was riding roughshod over their rights. He said the Nauru judiciary has no independence, and declared the proceedings to be a “true sham trial” and a “parody of justice.”

Lawrence added that Australian lawyers could no longer provide pro bono services, so the defendants now faced a criminal trial without their own legal representation. Their sole legal representative is the court-appointed public defender and they continue to be denied legal aid.

The Law Societies in NZ and Australia have previously called for action against Nauru. In 2015, legal academics in New Zealand published an open letter demanding the then National Party government take a “more forceful” approach and remove aid from Nauru’s justice sector. NZ Foreign Minister Murray McCully suspended $NZ1.2 million ($US0.76 million) in aid, citing concerns around “civil rights abuses and the rule of law.” It has since been restored.

Australia’s then foreign minister Julie Bishop said in September 2015 that Nauru’s legal processes were “progressing and judicial processes are being followed” and Canberra’s assistance was “not under threat.” Bishop defended the Waqa administration, insisting that its affairs were “domestic matters” that she discussed “confidentially” with the president.

Both regional powers are determined to maintain their geo-strategic dominance across the South Pacific and lock out rivals, above all China. Nauru is strategically situated adjacent to the US-controlled Marshall Islands, an American missile testing ground. It is one of the few countries in the world that continues to recognise Taiwan and has no diplomatic relations with China.

For nearly a decade from 2005, Australian governments ran a so-called Pacific Regional Assistance for Nauru program (PRAN). Modeled on Canberra’s intervention in the Solomon Islands, PRAN saw Australian officials take over key elements of the state apparatus, including the finance ministry, police and judiciary, until they were removed when Waqa became president.

However, Australian domination has continued with Canberra’s notorious asylum seeker “processing centre,” where refugees have been detained indefinitely in breach of their basic rights under international law. More than 1,000 men, women, and children who attempted to claim asylum in Australia after arriving by sea were imprisoned on Nauru after being deported by Australian Border Force officials.

The trial of the Nauru 19 is currently continuing.

Venice sees second worst flooding in recorded history

Allison Smith

Last week, massive flooding brought the city of Venice, Italy to its knees. On Tuesday, November 12, the high-water mark reached 187 centimeters (six feet), the second worst flooding in recorded history. On Friday, a new tidal surge brought another high tide of 154 centimeters (five feet). The “great flood” of 1966 holds the record at 190 centimeters (well over six feet).

As the first flood alarm sounded on Tuesday night, water rushed through the city, well above street level, flooding homes, shops, restaurants, hotels and monuments, and leaving tourists and locals to wade through the muck. Local authorities estimate that more than 85 percent of the city is under water. Dramatic video footage shows the extent of the damage.

On November 14, Italian Five Star Movement (M5S)-Democratic Party coalition Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte declared a state of emergency. The following day Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro (coalition center-right) closed Venice’s St. Mark’s Square and basilica. That wasn’t enough to protect the historic church, as flood waters left the crypt under more than a meter of water. The historic Gritti Palace hotel was also flooded, furniture floating in the lobby as workers raced to bring it to higher floors. Gritti was just finished repairing damages from last year’s storm.

A person wades through flood water in Venice, Italy, Friday, Nov. 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Water taxis, the only efficient means of transportation between islands, were suspended and schools and city services remained closed for the entire week. Hotels say they are being forced to cancel reservations through December amid reports of more bad weather to come.

Not even Venice’s Libreria Acqua Alta bookshop could withstand the deluge as shopkeepers and patrons rushed to save the beloved store that has been weathering storms for many years. At least two deaths have been reported. One, a man in his 70s, died from electrocution when he turned on the flood pump in his home. The Venice Fire Brigade deployed 150 firefighters to rescue people stranded on jetties, recover boats that broke free of their moorings, and to put extra water ambulances in the canals.

Mexican tourist Oscar Calzada, 19, told AFP on Friday, “It’s shocking to see this, having water up to your knees.”

The cost of this year’s storm damage is already estimated to be hundreds of millions of euros, yet the government is only promising residents a miserly €5,000 for flood-damaged homes and €20,000 for flood-damaged businesses. Many are still recovering from record tides last year, and this sum is hardly enough to make anyone whole again.

Known as La Serenissima, the most serene, Venice is an ecologically sensitive area made up of 118 small islands inside a lagoon off the north-east coast of Italy. Exceptional tide peaks, known as acqua alta, high water, occur periodically between autumn and spring, when the astronomical tides are reinforced by prevailing seasonal winds in the northern Adriatic Sea, reaching their maximum in the Venetian Lagoon.

Climate change has increased the severity and frequency of flooding as glacier ice melts and raises sea levels. Since 1923 over half of the exceptional high tides have occurred in the past 20 years alone. In 2018, there were 121 days of acqua alta, nearly twice the number of high tides in 2017.

Adding to the problem, Venice is sinking due to shifting tectonic plates and water pumped out of the ground for industrial use in the middle of the 20th century. Between 1950 and 1970, it sank almost five inches and continues to sink about one-fifth of an inch annually.

But capitalism is the real culprit. The long-awaited flood barrier system, MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), approved in concept in 1988 and under construction since 2003, is still not complete despite costing nearly €6 billion. It is projected to open in 2021 or 2022, with estimated annual operating costs of €110 million per year, a tidy sum as Italy’s GDP continues to shrink following the 2008 global financial crisis.

In 2014, 35 people, including then Venice Mayor Giorgio Orsoni, a member of the Democratic Party, and Giancarlo Galan, a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza party, were arrested following a three-year state-run criminal investigation into corruption, illicit party financing and tax fraud, totaling €5.3 billion.

Orsoni was convicted and sentenced to jail for accepting €500,000 in illicit funding from the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the entity overseeing the MOSE project. However, through a plea deal, he never saw a day in jail and returned to his post as professor of law at Ca’ Foscari University. Galan received a prison sentence of two years and 10 months and a fine of €2.6 million for bribery, extortion and money laundering. He served his “prison” term in the comfort of his own home near Padua.

This past July, it was discovered that all 156 hinges—each weighing 36 tons—on the underwater barriers that were supposed to last at least 100 years are nearly rusted shut after just 10 years under water. The €200 million tender for the hinges was awarded to Gruppo Mantovani without a formal bid, and the company is under investigation for using sub-par steel. Replacing the hinges is estimated to take 10 years and cost €30 million.

Last week, Venice resident Dino Perzolla, 62, reflected the outrage felt by Venetians about MOSE, telling AFT news, “They’ve done nothing, neglected it. It doesn’t work and they have stolen six billion euros. The politicians should all be put in jail.”

Ironically, as the Veneto regional council was debating the 2020 regional budget, including measures to address climate change, the chamber room flooded.

Mass protests in Prague against Czech government

Markus Salzmann

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the so-called Velvet Revolution, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in the Czech capital of Prague on Saturday against the corrupt right-wing government led by Prime Minister Andrej Babis. According to the police and the protest organisers, some 250,000 people participated.

In June, 300,000 people protested against the government, and recent weeks have witnessed a series of demonstrations with more than 100,000 participants. The protests are primarily directed against Babis, who is accused of abusing his political office for personal and business gains. According to Forbesmagazine, the Czech prime minister’s wealth amounts to an estimated €3.3 billion, making Babis the country’s second richest man. He has been accused of corruption in a number of cases.

People take part in a large anti-government protest in Prague, Czech Republic, Saturday, Nov. 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

The protests on Saturday took place the day before November 17, the date in 1989 when the first protests were held that led to the breakdown of Stalinist rule in Czechoslovakia. A few days later, on November 26, the Stalinist leader Ladislav Adamec and Vaclav Havel met at the negotiating table. By the end of December, Havel was president.

The sustained protests underscore that the restoration of capitalism in the Czech Republic and Eastern Europe has not led to prosperity and democracy, but to glaring levels of social inequality and the rise of a corrupt, authoritarian elite.

Babis personifies this development. He enjoyed close ties to the Stalinist leaders. Several investigations have confirmed that he was active on behalf of the StB intelligence agency. After capitalist restoration in 1989, he used his contacts to establish his business empire. Initially, he made his money with a company in the agricultural and grocery sectors, Agrofert, which now controls some of the country’s major media outlets.

Like many other former Stalinist functionaries in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe, Babis transformed himself into a vocal proponent of the capitalist market. The social democratic CSSD and post-Stalinist KSCM, which support Babis along with his ANO movement, are full of former Stalinist officials who benefited personally from the privatisation of public assets.

The Czech Republic in particular saw a rapid sell-off of public companies during the early 1990s. The Democratic Citizens Party (ODS) and the CSSD governed in a variety of alliances and with different coalition partners. But their politics always remained the same. One austerity programme after another was implemented in the interests of the Czech and European ruling elites, who promoted militarism and a repugnant campaign to scapegoat refugees and foreigners.

The major parties experienced a rapid decline. At the last election in 2017, the ODS achieved just 11 percent, while the CSSD got 7 percent of the vote. Babis benefited from this by portraying himself as an alternative to the established parties. ANO won the 2017 election with over 30 percent of the vote. The right-wing is currently deeply divided, while the CSSD has split into bitterly warring factions. The party is experiencing a dramatic drop in membership and could fail to win seats in parliament at the next election.

The protests against Babis express the anger at the entire political establishment that has led the country for the past 30 years. In contrast to the official portrayals of the Czech Republic as a country characterised by low unemployment and rapid economic growth, the reality for the working population is very different. A recent poll revealed that 38 percent of those over 40 believed that they had a better life prior to 1989. Among workers, the figure rose to 52 percent.

The protest organisers have nothing in common with the broad masses of the population. Under conditions of mass protests in countries around the world and growing anger towards traditional parties, they are attempting to contain the protests and channel them in a reactionary direction. Over recent months, a series of strikes and protests expressing the dissatisfaction of broad sections of the population have taken place across Eastern Europe, including in Poland, Serbia and Albania.

The leaders of the “One Million Moments for Democracy” movement have close links to pro-European Union liberal and conservative forces, and aim to pressure the government to adopt a more pro-European course. “We’re not making another revolution or anything like that, we are actually trying to retain what was achieved in 1989,” explained one of the organisers, Benjamin Roll. In their view, the current government’s corruption cuts across the interests of the EU.

The movement is led by the theology student Mikulas Minar. Its declared goal is to steer clear of political parties as much as possible. However, this was exposed as a transparent fraud by a meeting held between leaders of the movement and right-wing politicians, reported by the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

While some right-wing and liberal parties have backed the protests, the social democrats, Stalinists, and trade unions have opposed them. The KSCM, in particular, is drawing on the tradition of the Stalinist state party, which suppressed any independent struggle in the population. Following the protests in the summer, the party’s central committee adopted a statement explicitly supporting Babis’ ANO and praising its right-wing agenda. The statement described anti-government protests as the “destabilisation” of the Czech Republic and warned of the influence of “foreign power circles” and a “coup in the interests of right-wing elites.”

This makes clear that workers and young people in the Czech Republic and Eastern Europe confront fundamental questions of political perspective. Three decades of capitalist rule have not led to democracy and an improvement in living standards for the working class, as once promised by the advocates of capitalist restoration.

In reality, it produced a social catastrophe and the rise to power of right-wing, parasitic elements like Babis. The developing working-class movement must oppose these forces with a socialist and internationalist perspective. Arming the emerging struggles with a socialist programme requires the construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in the Czech Republic and throughout Eastern Europe.

Iranian regime shuts down internet following protests over gas price hikes

Keith Jones

Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime has been shaken by mass protests, some of which turned violent, against a dramatic increase in gasoline prices.

Demonstrations and road blockades erupted Friday only hours after the price hike took effect. The protests reportedly spread to a hundred cities and towns across the country on Saturday and Sunday, and continued, at least in some measure, yesterday. Government spokesman Ali Rabiei said there had been “gatherings in some cities, in some provinces” on Monday, but that “tomorrow and the day after we won’t have any issues with regard to riots.”

The most senior leaders of the Islamic Republic have accused ultra-reactionary forces aligned with US imperialism of using the protests to foment violence and “anarchy.”

Protesters in Iran, Credit: @Bahram_Gooor (Twitter)

In a nationwide address Sunday in which he proclaimed his support for the gas price hikes, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei named the US-based monarchist opposition, which seeks to restore the son of the hated Shah to the throne, and the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq or MEK, as instigators of the violence. The MEK has been actively promoted by many current and former Trump aides, including John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani.

In his address, Khamenei conceded there had been some deaths in what he called clashes between “thugs” and “hooligans” and security forces.

Already Saturday evening, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council had suspended internet access across the country. As of last night, the blackout remained in force, with access allowed only to a limited number of government-approved sites.

Washington, in an act tantamount to war, has unilaterally imposed a de facto economic blockade on Iran with the avowed aim of crashing its economy. Now it is hypocritically voicing support for the protesters. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who last November told the BBC’s Persian service that Iran’s leaders had to bow to US demands if “they want their people to eat,” tweeted, “The United States is with you.”

The White House issued a statement Sunday that denounced the Iranian regime for using “lethal force” against “peaceful protests.” It also said, “Tehran has fanatically pursued nuclear weapons” and “terrorism,” repeating the lies Trump has used to justify Washington’s illegal blockade, which includes an embargo on all Iranian energy exports and bars Iran all access to the world banking system, thereby throttling its foreign trade.

Blinded by imperialist arrogance, the authors of the White House statement evidently did not realize the self-incriminating character of the conclusion of their inflammatory tirade, which cited the Islamic Republic as “a cautionary tale of what happens when a ruling class abandons its people and embarks on a crusade for personal power and riches.”

Given the Islamic Republic’s internet blackout and the Western media’s animus toward the regime, it is difficult to gauge the size, composition and precise character of the protests.

Government and intelligence officials do concede that there is genuine popular anger against the price hikes, which were imposed without prior warning.

Speaking at the conclusion of a cabinet meeting Sunday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said it was “natural” that some people were opposed to the government’s plan and had the “right to give voice to their opposition.” But “the government will not allow anyone at all to [create] chaos and insecurity,” by rioting, he added.

“People started their demonstrations in peace on Saturday morning,” said Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij wing of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps. “But in the evening of the same day a wave of unrest was created by the support of the country’s enemies.”

Government reports put the number of persons killed during the protests at a dozen, including two security personnel and a security guard. The BBC and other Western news outlets cite government opponents inside Iran as saying the true figure is double or more than that.

On Sunday, the semi-official Fars News Agency cited an intelligence report that claimed 87,400 people had taken part in the protests. Of these, it said only a small fraction had taken part in violent activities.

Many of the protesters, said the report, “were merely present at the location of rallies and did not cooperate with rioters, and many of them have received warning messages on their cell phones from security organizations to avoid further participation in protests.”

The report further claimed there had been widespread property damage, with “more than 100 bank branches and 57 big stores… set on fire or sacked in one province alone.” It said more than a thousand people have been arrested across the country for participating in or inciting violence.

That the US and its Saudi and Israeli clients will seek to exploit growing popular alienation and anger against the Iranian regime to advance their own reactionary agendas is indubitable.

It is also true that recent years have seen growing popular opposition to the Iranian regime, in the form of strikes and demonstrations over job cuts, poverty wages and lengthy delays in the payment of wages. The final days of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 saw widespread protests against social inequality and austerity, including in poorer rural towns and cities that had hitherto served as a base of support for the regime.

The current protests and the government’s response speak to the acute social tensions within Iran as the economy buckles under the relentless pressure being exerted by Washington, and the crisis of the bourgeois nationalist regime, as it attempts to maneuver between imperialism and Iran’s workers and toilers.

Friday’s price hike imposes a 50 percent increase on the first 60 litres of gas purchased by a car owner, to 15,000 rials—the equivalent, due to the collapse of Iran’s currency, of just 13 US cents. The cost of additional litres has been raised by up to 300 percent.

The price of gas in Iran remains among the lowest in the world. The price hike, however, has sparked widespread anger because years of austerity imposed by all factions of the Iranian political establishment and punishing US-led sanctions have led to mass unemployment, shrinking incomes and ever-deepening social inequality.

Initially the government touted the price rise as a measure to combat smuggling, one moreover that was in accordance with IMF recommendations for Iran.

But in the past 72 hours, it has insisted that the real motivation was to provide greater financial support for ordinary Iranians. As early as yesterday, the government began depositing money in Iranians’ bank accounts that, it says, will compensate them for cutting back the subsidized price of gas. According to the government, ultimately a total of 60 million people or more than 70 percent of Iran’s population, will be eligible for the monthly payments.

The government first introduced small direct cash payments to Iranians in 2011, when it eliminated or rolled back subsidies on an array of staple foods and products. Under the now modified scheme, a family of five will be eligible for a payment of $US17 per month.

The Iranian press is claiming that as early as Friday, Khamenei criticized Rouhani’s government for not rolling out the subsidy increase and the gas price hike in tandem.

The Supreme Leader’s declaration of support for the gas price hikes in his statement Sunday was aimed at least in part at trying to prevent the protests from deepening the cleavages within the regime. Some of Rouhani's social conservative opponents had announced that they were going to press parliament to rescind the price hikes, saying they were illegal. But after the Supreme Leader made clear his support, they backed down.

Replying to statements by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French Foreign Ministry echoing Washington’s denunciations of the Iranian regime’s response to the protests, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif noted that the European powers, despite their professed support for the Iran nuclear accord, have aided and abetted Washington in re-imposing the brutal sanctions.

The growing social and political crisis in Iran underscores the urgency of the working class intervening as an independent political force in opposition to imperialism, its direct agents such as the monarchists, and all factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie. The fight for a workers’ republic in Iran must be linked to the struggle to mobilize the working class and oppressed across the Middle East against Washington and imperialism as a whole.