Catastrophic conditions for refugees on Croatian border as authorities close camp

Markus Salzmann

According to media reports, the Bosnian authorities have started the evacuation and closure of the Vucjak refugee camp. The approximately 600 inhabitants of the camp are to be taken to a former barracks near Sarajevo within the next three days.

The catastrophic conditions in the camp, which lies near the town of Bihac, once again illustrate the inhuman refugee policy of the European Union and the right-wing governments of the region. The Bosnian authorities reacted only after international media had reported on the untenable situation of the refugees and the EU Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, intervened.

In Vucjak, up to 600 refugees lived in unheated tents, although temperatures have dropped to -5 degrees Celsius in recent days with the onset of winter. Tents collapsed under the weight of snow, television station N1 reported. There is no electricity or running water. There is no medical care either. The refugees had to cook their meals mainly from the meagre donations given by the local population and aid organisations.

At the end of November, several hundred refugees went on hunger strike to protest against the inhuman conditions and to demand being able to enter the EU. On homemade signs they wrote “We are dying!” expressing their despair.

Male refugees in Vucjak, in particular, tried desperately to cross the impassable terrain of the border region into Croatia, an extremely dangerous undertaking. Croatian border guards use enormous brutality against refugees. Croatia even sends migrants back to Bosnia when they are already in the interior, so they are not safe there either.

At her final press conference, EU Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatović, who visited refugee camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina last week, was forced to strongly criticise the actions of Croatian border officials, especially the brutal repatriation of refugees to Bosnia.

Numerous doctors had credibly confirmed that massive violence was being used in the repatriation, reported Mijatović. She had heard many testimonies of violence and ill-treatment by the security forces. Often the refugees are also robbed by the security forces. According to Mijatović, the repression of the refugees is a violation of the Human Rights Convention, the right to asylum and the prohibition of torture.

The EU commissioner noted that she had already requested in October that Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković take appropriate measures. Since then, however, the situation had worsened. Mijatović called for an independent investigation into police violence. The culprits had to be identified and brought to justice. At the same time, illegal migration in the region must be closely monitored and then reacted to at the European level, she said.

The northern Bosnian town of Bihac lies on the border with EU member Croatia and is part of the so-called new Balkan route. Most refugees fleeing war and persecution from the Middle East come via Turkey and try to reach EU territory via the Balkan states that do not belong to the EU.

Initially, the route was mainly via Hungary. But then Viktor Orban’s right-wing government, supported by the EU, hermetically sealed the border. It erected an insurmountable fence and concentration camps on the border with Serbia. State and paramilitary groups hunted down migrants. Aid organisations were punished for helping refugees.

Croatia is now using the same methods to seal off the EU’s external border. Not only refugees who are trying to obtain asylum in Europe are affected. As the newspaper Žurnal recently reported, two Nigerian students who were legally in Croatia were arrested in Zagreb and deported to Bosnia.

Before crossing the green border into Bosnia-Herzegovina, the two had to sign documents in Croatian, the news magazine Focus reports. It quotes one of the men saying, “The car stopped. We were led outside and a policeman told me: Sign! I said I don’t want to do that, you can’t expect me to sign something I don’t understand. Then one of the policemen pulled a gun and said he would shoot me if I didn’t sign. I was scared, and I signed.”

Then the policemen stole their money and forced them to cross the border on a forest road. Together with a group of refugees who had also been expelled, they ended up in the “Miral” refugee camp in Velika Kladuša. According to media reports, the camp is in a terrible condition, as is the case in Vucjak.

Although there can be no other explanation for the incident, the Croatian police strictly denied it. It is impossible to say how the two students got to a refugee camp in Bosnia more than 100 kilometres away without travel documents and money. “It is not documented that the two persons left Croatia legally,” a statement said.

According to Tajana Tadić of the Croatian human rights organisation “Are You Syrious,” this incident is part of a widespread practice throughout the country. The police deliberately targeted people of other skin colours and seldom took the trouble to examine people thoroughly. There had been several documented cases of illegal deportations from Croatia to Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Officially, the Croatian authorities justify this practice with the political aim of being admitted into the Schengen area as soon as possible,” says Tadić.

According to Amnesty International, the actions against refugees at the EU’s external border are carried out with the knowledge and approval of European governments. “European states are closing their eyes to the malicious attacks of the Croatian police and are financing their activities,” the human rights organisation wrote in a statement.

In Croatia, as in Hungary, the EU relies on an extremely right-wing government. During a border visit in the summer, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović justified the police brutality. “When someone walks through this difficult terrain, it is normal for abrasions, haematomas and wounds to occur,” she said, “You have to think about that next time you hear stories about the brutality of our police officers. They’re not brutal, I guarantee it.”

Grabar-Kitarović claimed that there were no illegal deportations, and added, in the jargon of right-wing extremists, that they were not refugees anyway, but economic migrants.

Grabar-Kitarović is a member of the governing party HDZ. This ultra-nationalist party was founded in the late 1980s under Franjo Tudjmann, who led the country into a bloody civil war. Even today, nationalists and open fascists set the tone in the party. For example, the professed anti-Semite and fascist Zlatko Hasanbegović was Croatian Minister of Culture in 2016. In the meantime, he is no longer a member of the HDZ and has founded his own neo-Nazi party. The HDZ maintains close relations with the leading EU states and is a member of the European People’s Party (EPP), to which Germany’s Christian Democrats also belong.

During a visit to the Croatian capital Zagreb at the end of November, German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute to Croatian efforts to protect the EU’s external border and the country’s efforts to join the Schengen zone.

When a journalist asked whether Croatia could take over the EU Council presidency, in view of the allegations of human rights violations at the border, Merkel rejected the criticism and replied, “From a German perspective, we have also had experiences with refugees and migrants. But from the perspective of a country that is supposed to protect the external border, of course, it looks different than from the perspective of a country that is in the middle of the Schengen area.”

US trucking firm Celadon goes bankrupt leaving thousands of drivers stranded

Steve Filips

Indianapolis-based trucking firm Celadon Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, December 9, leaving 4,000 drivers and other employees without jobs just before the holiday. The company, founded by former Ford Motor Co. executive Stephen Russell in 1985, will wind down its operations across the US, Canada and Mexico, while it sells assets to pay off creditors.

Thousands of drivers were left stranded across the country with their loads as the company suddenly cut of funding for their gas cards. Veteran driver Latasha Tillman told a local Fox News affiliate in Indianapolis, that she saw numerous social media posts of people saying, “Hey, look, I’m stuck here in St. Louis,” “I’m stuck here in Kansas,” “I’m stuck here in Baltimore,” “I called the job, no one’s answering, my fuel card is still not working,” “If you can give me a lift to get me back home, that would be well appreciated.”

“People are stranded,” said another driver. “There are people that are broke down on the side of the road. Some of them didn’t have enough gas, some of them were told that they could put gas in out of their own pocket.”

More than 1,300 office and administrative personnel at the company’s Indiana headquarters were abruptly told to clear out their belongings and informed that their accrued vacation time would not be paid. They were also told their medical insurance was terminated.

A Celadon driver, Scott Riley, told the Guardian, he’s not sure if he has enough of his diabetes medication to get through the next 90 days. Scott was also unsure whether he would be paid the $1,000 pay owed to him. The company estimates, at the time of bankruptcy, that it owes $4.4 million in pay and $1 million in termination bonuses to its employees.

One of Celadon’s largest creditors is the US Department of Justice. The company has $33 million in outstanding debt for a $42.2 million settlement for securities fraud allegations. Two company officials, Bobby Lee Peavler and William Meek were indicted in connection to fraud allegations from overvaluing trucks that had mechanical problems and overstating company income from 2014 to 2016.

There has been an upsurge in the number of trucking companies, which have closed this year. Despite the record stock market bubble and continued fall in the official unemployment rate—chiefly due to the growth of low-paid part-time and other precarious jobs—there are many signs of a broader economic slowdown in the US and world economy, which has been worsened by Trump’s trade war policies.

Other larger trucking companies that have closed include New England Motor Freight (NEMF) based in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which covers the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. NEMF was a less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier that had Amazon and other large retailers as customers. According to industry analyst Evan Armstrong, “NEMF was burdened by several large under performing contracts, including Amazon.com,”

The company had 3,746 total employees, and 1,385 drivers who were members of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers (IAM) union, when NEMF filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last February. The company and IAM were in contract negotiations in 2018 and deep concessions were sought by the company, according to a press report.

Falcon Transport, based in Youngstown, Ohio, closed its operations in April, leaving 577 employees and 488 drivers unpaid and without work. Some of the drivers were informed while still en route and forced to find alternate means to return home. The shutdown of Falcon is largely due to the closing of the General Motors Lordstown, Ohio factory, which was sanctioned by the United Auto Workers union after its sellout of the 40-day GM strike. The executive safety officer for Falcon Transport, Andy Straley, told Overdriveonline, “We were losing millions [of dollars] in expediting freight for GM.”

Truck manufacturers are also laying off workers because of falling demand for freight haulers. “We expect the total North American truck market to be down nearly 30 percent, or about 100,000 trucks, next year,” Volvo spokesman John Mies told the online trade publication Freightwaves. “And we expect one of Volvo’s core segments, the long-haul truck market, to represent a significant part of that reduction.”

Volvo Trucks North America will lay off about 700 workers in January, extending an industry pullback in production to match slowing orders of new Class 8 trucks, Freightwaves reported. The November 22 announcement by the Swedish-based truck maker followed the 12-day strike by 3,500 workers at six Volvo-Mack facilities that was also sold out by the UAW.

Daimler Trucks North America laid off 900 workers at two plants in North Carolina and several hundred workers in Mexico in October. Navistar International Corp. trimmed production at US and Mexican facilities by about 15%, reversing additions made in late 2018. Kenworth Truck Co., a unit of Paccar Inc. (NASDAQ: PCAR), cut about 100 workers at the beginning of November.

The American Trucking Association (ATA) estimates 70 percent of all freight in the US is transported by truck, and that there is an annual shortage of 60,000 qualified drivers due to inadequate starting pay, the negative effects on family life of being absent for long periods, and the difficult conditions and physical dangers that are faced on the road.

According to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) figures show that transportation and warehousing sector jobs have the second highest total of fatalities with 882 in 2017. The US trucking industry is a large segment of the US economy with $796.7 billion in gross freight revenues in 2018.

Wave of teachers strikes confront attacks on pensions and working conditions in Brazil

Tomas Castanheira

A wave of strikes by public school teachers, joined by other sections of public workers, has swept Brazil since last month. With the entire Brazilian working class confronting practically identical attacks as the teachers, which are even further driving down their conditions of life, there is a growing potential for the eruption of a nationwide upheaval on the scale of Chile.

Teachers’ demonstration in Porto Alegre [Photo: Caco Argemi]

A number of Brazilian states are trying to enact, simultaneously, modifications to the pension systems for public employees. The measures are aimed at reducing the benefits for state and municipal workers to the levels of the recently approved pension “reform” pushed through congress by Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro. State and municipal workers are not covered by the this national plan, which provoked a one-day general strike in June that was sabotaged by the unions.

In the drive to destroy jobs in the public sector, there has been a generalized attack on public employees. Bolsonaro’s government and its economy minister Paulo Guedes have made it clear that they aim to privatize all public services. Guedes, who is the brother of the president of the National Association of Private Universities, Elizabeth Guedes, has defended the replacement of public schools by private schools that “offer cheaper service,” i.e., that drive down labor costs.

The first of the strikes against the changes in the pension system and working conditions was launched by teachers in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. The announcement by the administration of Governor Eduardo Leite, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) represented the last straw for teachers who had already suffered major attacks.

Teachers protest in Porto Alegre [Photo: Caco Argemi]

Teachers and other public employees in Rio Grande do Sul have gone five years without a wage increase, and their paychecks have been constantly delayed since the previous administration of José Sartori, of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) party. Sartori was defeated in his campaign for re-election, which focused on the need to cut spending in the state, which has declared itself in a fiscal crisis.

The announcement by recently elected Governor Leite that he was deepening the attacks on public employees provoked immediate opposition from the workers, who decided to launch a fight against the new measures as well as against the holding back of their wages. An assembly on November 14, in front of the government building in Porto Alegre, the capital of the state, was attended by close to 20,000 teachers, who voted in favor of a strike set for the following Monday.

At the end of the first week of the strike, the Leite government tried to force a return to work, announced the cut-off of salaries for strikers, and refused to negotiate restoring pay for the days spent on the picket line. The threat of cutting wages, which already were not being paid regularly, further angered the workers. Rather than intimidating them, the threat caused the strike movement to grow.

In the beginning of the second week of the strike it was estimated that 1,500 of the state’s schools—close to 65 percent—were either totally or partially paralyzed. From then on, it was considered the biggest teachers strike in Rio Grade do Sul in decades. The strike spread through the interior of the state, and in some cities every school was shut down.

In the state capital, a major demonstration by teachers and students on November 26 was brutally repressed by the shock troops of the Military Police. The teachers tried to enter the state’s Legislative Assembly together with their negotiating committee, composed of members of the union, and were met with truncheons and tear gas grenades that left 11 teachers and students wounded.

On the same day, an assembly of the other sectors of public employees filled the auditorium of a hotel in Porto Alegre, with workers spilling out onto the sidewalks in front of the building. Among the state employees present, who voted to immediately join the strike, were agricultural inspectors and public health workers.

The way in which the strike movement spread laid bare the increasingly stark class divisions that prevail throughout Brazilian society. The population of the state quickly identified with the public employees, rejecting the propaganda lie of the government that the cuts to their conditions were designed to combat “privileges.”

The strike became a mobilization of broader sections of the working class, which joined the teachers in the streets. In cities in the interior of the state, popular protests took over the main highways. The movement of the working class also drew support from local small businesses, also oppressed by the capitalist system. In many shops, posters were hung up bearing the words “I support the teachers strike.”

On the opposing side, the capitalists and their representatives united, exposing the interests dominating the state government. In a video circulated on social media. the president of the Federation of Commerce of Goods and Services appeared in an office of the institution surrounded by businessmen, whom he claimed “represent half of the GDP of the state.” They demanded that the state’s deputies vote “in favor of the of reforms of the state public sector, because this is the only way to get out of the state’s current financial crisis.”

Brazil’s Economy Minister Paulo Guedes appeared together with Eduardo Leite, declaring that the governor was “doing a heroic job” combating costs for the state’s civil service and pensions that are “out of place.” The courts also supported the government, upholding its cutting of wages for workers on strike.

In the same week that the strike was intensifying in Rio Grande do Sul, teachers in the state of  Sergipe, in the northeast of Brazil, went on strike over the same issues. The government, a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the Workers Party (PT), launched sharp attacks on teachers’ working conditions and pensions in the name of “economizing on spending.”

Beginning on November 26, the strike spread in less than a week to 40 percent of the schools in the state and was ended only after the withdrawal of the majority of the state’s proposals. While the union declared it a victory for the teachers, the state government managed to implement at least one of its attacks. The right to a shortening of the working day after 15 years will now take effect only after 20 years in the classroom.

On the following Monday, December 2, teachers in the state of Paraná, in southern Brazil, walked out over changes in pension rules and against the closing down of night classes.

In 2015, the Paraná teachers had carried out a massive strike against another proposed pension reform. The teachers won the support of the general population above all after brutal repression by the Military Police that left more than 200 wounded when they attempted to occupy the state Legislative Assembly to block a vote on the bill.

This time, the attacks on pensions have more immediate effects, considerably raising employee contribution rates, as well as the minimum age for retirement. In a demonstration held on December 3, strikers knocked down barricades and occupied the Legislative Assembly in the midst of the vote on the legislation. In the face of the occupation the legislators left for another building, surrounded by police, and continued with their deliberations. Under these conditions, the union shut down the strike, defending the return to work as the best means of “advancing the struggle.”

Despite the attacks on public employees being essentially the same throughout the country, the strikes have taken place in an isolated manner and without any communication between them. The unions in these states belong to the same union federation, the CUT, and are members of the same union, the National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE), neither of which have any interest in uniting the ongoing strikes.

The teachers union in the state of São Paulo, the APEOESP, claims to be one of the biggest unions in all of Latin America, with a membership of 180,000. The  APEOESP has been led for the last 10 years by Maria Izabel Azevedo Noronha, known as Professora Bebel, who is also a deputy in the São Paulo state legislature.

Teachers in São Paulo are likewise threatened with a pension reform and new work rules, which would increase salaries in the short term, but do away with step increases as well as job security. In the face of these attacks the APEOESP called a strike “only on Tuesdays,” beginning on November 26.

Danilo, a teacher in the São Paulo state system for 15 years, told the World Socialist Web Site, “In the state of São Paulo the movement has already begun very weakly.” Referring to the increase in the pension contribution rate from 11 percent to 14 percent of total salary, he said “I don’t see a real fight for this not to go up to 14 percent. They are already assuming that it will pass.”

Fabiano, who has been teaching in a state school for eight years, said that the government, in putting the vote back until the end of the year, “is using the same strategy adopted by the government of the city of  São Paulo,” where the pension reform was approved on the first vote in December of last year. The APEOESP called a mobilization on the last Tuesday of November, which is the last week of classes for students. However, Fabiano said, “No strike was proposed, but rather a shutdown on every Tuesday, which is already weird.”

Both teachers stressed the major cuts in salaries and working conditions carried out over the last decade, which have forced teachers to find second jobs or accept conditions of poverty. Moreover, teachers were divided into various sub-categories, with the short-term contracts becoming generalized. “We have actual teachers and various other teachers who simply work under conditions of an extreme lack of rights,” said Danilo. “It seems that the unions accepted these conditions, allowing employees to be divided.”

The two teachers doubt that the unions will call for the national unification of the strikes. As is the case with many teachers in the state system, they work a second shift in a municipal public school. Both related that, more than once, the municipal and state teachers unions have called demonstrations for the same day, but in different locations, breaking up a common workforce. “I have never seen any joint action, just the opposite,” said Danilo. “The impression is that one union just as much as the other wants to maintain a distance.”

For Danilo, “The unions were built by men who don’t have any ideology, but only aspirations and interests. It is divide and conquer. As long teachers don’t understand that we are a class, we will not have a unification.”

For public school teachers to unify their strikes across Brazil, they must break the control of the unions over their struggle. The unions are against any independent political action by the working class, because it puts at risk the material base of their social position. The union officials do not want their funds, which guarantee them conditions far superior to those of the working class, to be compromised by strikes, nor do they want the class struggle to disrupt their political pretensions within the bourgeois state. Under the control of the unions, workers will only see their already deteriorated conditions of existence negotiated even lower.

The movement of Brazilian workers is part of the resurgence of the class struggle on a world scale. 2019 has been marked by teachers strikes across the planet, in dozens of countries and across five continents. In all these places, teachers are fighting against governments and capitalist corporations that demand privatization of schools and cuts to public education, and, invariably, their struggles have been isolated and betrayed by the unions. Overcoming this obstacle with new forms of organization, democratically directed by the rank-and-file, is a crucial task for the working class worldwide.

India adopts Hindu supremacist citizenship law

Rohantha De Silva & Keith Jones

In the face of widespread popular opposition and warnings that India is rending its “secular” political-constitutional order, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government have rammed through legislation that effectively redefines Indian citizenship in Hindu supremacist terms.

Tabled in the lower house of India’s bicameral parliament only on Monday, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019 or CAB was given presidential assent last night.

Passage of the CAB sets the stage for the BJP to proceed with its plans to draw up a National Register of Citizens (NRC), under which all of India’s more than 1.3 billion residents will have to prove, to the authorities’ satisfaction, that they are Indian citizens. Those unable to do so will be declared stateless and subject to detention and expulsion.

The NRC’s ostensible purpose is to identify “illegal immigrants.” In truth—and the CAB makes this manifestly evident—the aim of the NRC will be to harass, intimidate, and victimize India’s Muslim minority.

Adding insult to injury, the BJP is cynically trying to dress up the CAB, to use Modi’s words, as an act of “compassion and brotherhood.”

The CAB grants Indian citizenship to non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India prior to 2015, on the grounds that Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Christians in those countries have been subject to religious persecution.

Conspicuously left off the list are members of minority Muslims groups, such as Pakistan’s Ahmadiyas or Afghanistan’s Shia Hazaras, who are victims of state discrimination and/or communal violence. Also, notably absent are the Rohingya, more than one million of whom had to flee Myanmar (Burma), which borders India to the east, in late 2016. Claiming the Rohingya are a “security threat,” the BJP government has held those that fled into India in detention camps and is deporting them to Myanmar.

When coupled with the CAB, the NRC’s essentially fascistic anti-Muslim purpose becomes clear.

Given that much of India’s population is illiterate and impoverished and state services are limited to non-existent, hundreds of millions of people will likely find it difficult to come up with the papers needed to “prove” their Indian citizenship. But only Muslims will face the threat of being rendered stateless, with all that entails, for the others will be accorded citizenship under the discriminatory terms of the CAB.

With its CAB, wrote Indian Express columnist Harsh Mander, “the government is clearly messaging that if people of any identity except Muslims are unable to produce the required documents, they will be accepted as refugees and given citizenship. This means that the real burden to prove that they are Indian citizens (under the NRC) … is only thrust on Muslims, because only they risk statelessness. Most Indians would find it impossible to muster the required documents to prove their citizenship, but only document-less Muslims will face the prospect of detention centres, or being stripped of all citizenship rights.”

The NRC in Assam

A foul taste of what the Modi government intends has already been provided by recent events in the northeastern state of Assam. On the orders of the Supreme Court, and in keeping with the terms of a reactionary agreement the Rajiv Gandhi Congress Party government entered into in 1985 to end an exclusivist Assamese agitation, the state’s 30 million residents were forced to prove that they or their ancestors lived in India prior to the March 1971 eruption of the Bangladesh national struggle against repressive Pakistani rule.

Millions suffered psychological torment, financial hardship, and official abuse as they struggled to “prove” they are Indian citizens. Not only did they have to prove their citizenship claim to the satisfaction of ethno- and Hindu chauvinist officials. Under the terms of the NRC, third parties have the right to challenge an individual’s claim to citizenship. The All Assam Students Union (AASU) and other groups filed close to 200,000 such objections.

Ultimately, when the “final” NRC was published last summer, 1.9 million people, most of them poor Muslims, were excluded—i.e., deemed non-citizens. Of these, the overwhelming majority had been born in India.

However, this outcome failed to satisfy either the Hindu supremacist BJP or the ethno-exclusivist Assamese organizations like the AASU. The former was angered that up to a third of those left off the NRC were Hindus; the latter that “only” 1.9 million of Assam’s residents were declared illegal migrants.

Now the NRC is to be extended across India. Speaking in Monday’s debate on the CAB in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, Modi’s chief henchman, Home Minister Amit Shah, vowed the government will rapidly move forward with the national NRC. Shah, who has repeatedly described “illegal” Muslim “immigrants” as “termites,” told the Lok Sabha, “Once the NRC is implemented, we will ensure no infiltrator remains in the country.”

As part of the national NRC, and in accordance with the newly enacted CAB, the Modi government is also intending to redo the NRC process in Assam.

Taken together the CAB and NRC effectively reduce India’s 200 million Muslims to second-class citizens.

Despite having implemented the reactionary communal partition of South Asia at independence in 1947, into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India, India’s Congress Party-led government rejected the demand of the BJP’s Hindu supremacist precursors, the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, that India be declared a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu nation. The 1955 Citizenship Act, which the CAB amends, made territoriality (i.e., birth in India or the pre-1947 British Indian empire), not religion, the criteria of citizenship.

The Hindu right has always rejected this, claiming that India is a first and foremost a Hindu nation. V.D. Savarkar, the principal ideologue of Hindutva and hero of the contemporary Hindu right, argued that India’s Muslims were not true Indians, because for them—unlike India’s Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists—India is their “motherland,” but not their “holy land.” During the late 1930s Savarkar urged India’s Hindus to treat Muslims like the Nazis treated the Jews. If he dropped such rhetoric during World War II, it was only because he and the Hindu Mahasabha were hoping to form an “Anglo-Hindu” alliance with the British colonial state so as to combat the Muslim “menace.”

In according preferential treatment to non-Muslims from select neighbouring states, while setting up a process whereby only Muslims must establish their Indian citizenship, the BJP government has gone a long way to realizing the Hindu right’s longstanding goals of asserting Hindu dominance and making religion and not territoriality the criteria of citizenship.

The inclusion of Christians who migrated or fled to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan among those to be accorded citizenship under the CAB is a ruse. It is meant to camouflage the legislation’s Hindu supremacist motivation, no doubt with an eye to currying favor with the White House and the US Christian right.

Shah defended the concept of “religious-based” citizenship in the Lok Sabha debate on the CAB, claiming it “has been happening in India since the partition of this country.” Revealing more of his mindset than he perhaps intended, he also declared, “India will never be Muslim mukti (free).”

The BJP’s campaign of Hindu supremacist assertion

Since winning re-election last May, the Modi government has moved aggressively to realize key elements of the agenda of the Hindu right. In this it has had either the explicit support or acquiescence of the other institutions of the Indian state and the rest of India’s venal ruling elite,

On August 5, Modi and Shah working in close tandem with the top brass of the military and intelligence agencies carried out a constitutional coup, abrogating the special semi-autonomous status of India’s lone Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, and reducing it two Union Territories, thus placing the contested region under permanent central government control.

Modi’s coup against Kashmir has been enforced with a security clampdown that has seen thousands, including much of the traditional pro-Indian Muslim Kashmiri elite, detained without trial; the deployment of tens of thousands of additional security forces to what is already one of the world’s most heavily militarized regions; and a months-long communications blackout, including the suspension of internet and cellphone service.

Bowing to the wishes of the BJP and the RSS, India’s Supreme Court last month instructed the government to oversee the construction of a Hindu temple on the site where the Babri Masjid mosque stood until Hindu activists at the instigation of top BJP leaders razed it to the ground on December 6, 1992. This crime provoked the bloodiest wave of communal violence since Partition.

Modi and Shah are systematically whipping up communal hostility against Muslims with the aim of channeling the social tensions produced by rapacious social inequality and a rapidly deteriorating economy behind reaction and a bellicose foreign policy, and splitting an increasingly restive and militant working class.

With the passage of the CAB and its vow to rapidly launch the NRC, the BJP is dramatically accelerating its drive to transform India into a Hindu rashtra and reduce Muslims to second-class citizenship. This is giving some sections of the ruling elite pause. They fear the Modi government’s actions will incite mass opposition, discredit and delegitimize the Indian state, and destabilize key state institutions, including the military.

Already the government has rushed troops to Assam, imposed an indefinite curfew on the state capital, Guwahati, and suspended cellphone service in ten Assam districts after mass protests erupted against the CAB. The protests are being led by Assam ethno-chauvinist organizations opposed to the CAB’s granting of citizenship to Bangladeshi Hindu migrants, some of whom were victims of communal violence. According to press reports, at least two people were killed and many injured Thursday when security personnel fired at protesters defying the Guwahati curfew.

Having promoted communalism and casteism for decades as a key strategy for politically controlling and suppressing India’s workers and toilers, transformed the toxic Hindu supremacist BJP into its largest party, and attacked democratic rights, the Indian bourgeoisie and its political representatives are entirely complicit in the growth of Hindu supremacism and the putrefaction of Indian “democracy.”

To defeat communal reaction and defend democratic rights, the working class must be mobilized as an independent political force, rallying the oppressed toilers behind it in the fight against capitalist rule and on the basis of a socialist internationalist program.

Johnson wins majority in UK election after collapse of Labour vote

Chris Marsden

Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson has secured the biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 victory, on the back of the worst result for the Labour Party since 1935.

The Tories, previously reduced to a minority government, now have an 80-seat majority, with 365 MPs, compared to Labour’s 203, the Scottish National Party’s 48, the Liberal Democrats 12, Plaid Cymru’s 4 and one Green.

The Tory vote only rose by one percent, but Labour’s fell by 8 percent on the 2017 general election.

Johnson’s return consolidates the most right-wing government in post-war British history, with devastating consequences for the working class.

He has pledged to move swiftly to “get Brexit done” and to complete the “Thatcher revolution.” The Withdrawal Agreement Bill, paving the way for Brexit on January 31, will have its second Commons reading on Friday, December 20.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Brexit is bound up with an ever-sharper lurch towards trade war and the forging of an ever deeper military alliance with the Trump administration, targeting Russia and China. These plans to secure Britain’s imperialist interests must be paid for through an ever more savage attack on jobs, wages and working conditions.

During the election, Britain’s courts twice ruled against a planned strike by Royal Mail postal workers, while Johnson threatened to ban all strikes on public transport in response to the action taken by workers against South Western Railway. Operation Yellowhammer included plans to deploy 50,000 regular and reserve troops and 10,000 riot police in the event of civil unrest provoked by a no-deal Brexit. It will now be revealed as a response to the civil unrest resulting from the frontal assault on working people being planned by the government.

The scenes now unfolding in France, of riot police brutally attacking strikers and Yellow Vest protesters are a foretaste of what is to come. So too is the venal and anti-democratic character of the election campaign itself.

The media, including the BBC, has spewed out a multi-million-pound torrent of lies directed against Corbyn, centred on warnings of economic ruin, claims that he represents a threat to national security and is an anti-Semite. It was a campaign openly encompassing leading representatives of the armed forces, security services and even the chief rabbi and archbishop of Canterbury.

In the process the entire structure of parliamentary politics has been exposed as rotten. “Democracy" has been revealed, as it was in the 1930s, as a cynical and criminal sham.

Millions of workers will be appalled by the election’s conduct and outcome, especially those who had looked to Corbyn to provide an alternative against such a widely despised figure as Johnson. Above all the reason for such a defeat must be understood.

Speaking after securing a reduced majority in his Islington constituency, Corbyn said that “Brexit has so polarised and divided debate in this country, it has overridden so much of the normal political debate and contributed to the result for the Labour Party across the country," overriding Labour’s popular manifesto policies.

He noted in addition the “attacks that take place against family and loved ones of politicians” that “are disgraceful and frankly they are disgusting."

There is truth in both statements.

Brexit played a major role in losses in Labour’s working-class heartlands, many of which voted leave. The Tories won an increase of between 4 and 6 percent in leave areas and fell by 3 percent in remain seats. In contrast, Labour’s vote fell by 12 to 13 percent in the North East and Yorkshire, compared with 6 to 7 percent in London and the South of England. Labour seats were lost in Ashfield, Bishop Auckland, and Workington that have never previously elected a Tory MP.

Labour lost its longest serving MP, Dennis Skinner, when the Tories took the Bolsover seat he has held since 1970.

In Wales, the Tories won Vale of Clwyd, Wrexham, Clwyd South, Delyn and Ynys Mon from Labour.

In Scotland, Labour lost six of its seven seats, deepening the ascendency of the Scottish National Party established by the betrayals of the Blair Labour government.

But the ability of the Tories to win ground in former Labour strongholds, together with the Brexit Party which did not stand in Tory seats but won significant swings against Labour, was made possible by Corbyn himself. It is he, and the pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party who claimed he was leading a left renewal of the Labour Party, who bear political responsibility for Johnson’s victory.

On Brexit, Corbyn adapted himself fully to the pro-EU agenda of the City of London, from the 2016 referendum onwards, ending up with a policy of renegotiating a deal with the EU followed by a second referendum in which he would remain neutral that convinced no one and made unifying the working class against the Tories impossible.

But this was only one element of a constant series of political adaptations—to the Blairites and big business alike—that meant ever fewer numbers were convinced that the thin gruel of minor reforms he advanced offered a genuine alternative to the Tories or that, given his refusal to drive out the Blairites, that Corbyn would ever fight for the workers who looked to him since 2015 to oppose austerity, militarism and war.

Even now, Corbyn is attempting to continue his role of keeping Labour united while holding out the threadbare prospect of a “left” succession. He has pledged to his Blairite critics that he would not lead Labour into the next election but would stay on to preside over a "process of reflection" and ensure that “we move on into the future.”

Further retreats must be expected. The pro-Corbyn group Momentum’s national coordinator Laura Parker declared, “There is absolutely no appetite to go back to the centrist policies of old… We will keep the Labour party socialist.” But Momentum’s founder, Jon Lansman, gave only half-hearted support, saying the decision on who should replace Corbyn did not need to be taken “until the new year.”

The Blairites, for their part, have already declared war. Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer said, “[W]e have a duty to rebuild, starting now." Labour peer Andrew Adonis tweeted, “I think the ‘period of reflection’ required to assess the need for new leadership of the Labour Party should be about ten minutes.”

The real period of reflection required is for the working class to fundamentally reassess its attitude to Labour.

The election outcome is the result not only of the political cowardice of Corbyn. It is, in a more fundamental sense, the inevitable product of decades in which the supposed “left” of the Labour Party and its periphery pursued the middle-class politics of identity, while working with the trade union bureaucracy to suppress the class struggle and ridicule and denigrate the class-based politics of socialism. That is why Corbyn could never represent a genuine alternative to the Labour right and worked instead to subordinate workers and youth to a party and a trade union apparatus that is a political instrument of big business.

To wage the struggle necessary against the Tory government, the working class must now draw the most fundamental conclusions from the political shipwreck suffered by Labour.

The Socialist Equality Party rejected all claims that Corbyn’s leadership would lead to a renewal of the Labour Party. Events have now confirmed that there is no national reformist, parliamentary path on which jobs, wages and social services can be defended, democratic rights preserved and the drive to militarism and war halted.

The SEP opposed all attempts to divide workers and to dragoon the entire working class behind one or other reactionary capitalist faction in the Brexit dispute. We warned of the political dangers of the divisions created and urged a unified struggle by workers across the continent for the United Socialist States of Europe.

World Bank economist warns of worsening crisis in Sri Lanka

Saman Gunadasa

Hans Timmer, the World Bank’s chief economist for South Asia, has warned that promised tax cuts by the new minority government of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse could destabilise the economy and deepen the island’s financial crisis. His comments were made at a December 3 public lecture hosted by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka in Colombo.

Gotabhaya Rajapakse [Credit: AP Photo]

Timmer acknowledged that the government’s plan to boost the economy in the lead up to the forthcoming general election but cautioned that its “stimulation package” was risky and insisted on the full implementation of the “structural reforms” demanded by International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“Sri Lanka may not have the needed fiscal space for an ambitious stimulus,” he said. Fitch Ratings, the global ratings agency, had previously warned that new tax concessions would derail budget discipline. Imposition of “fiscal discipline” means slashing the country’s budget deficit as demanded by the IMF. The IMF wants the Sri Lankan government to reduce the deficit, which has risen to 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, to 3.5 percent.

The minority government’s recent concessions include a reduction of individual income tax rates from 24 to 18 percent; abolition of the 5 percent withholding tax on dividends and interest; abolition of the Nation Building Tax; exempting agriculture, fishing, livestock and information technology services from income tax; and a reduction in the Value Added Tax (VAT) from 15 to 8 percent. The previous government, on IMF orders, had increased VAT.

The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) government and the media have insisted that the tax reductions will boost business and the ailing economy and increase consumption.

Moody’s Investors Service, however, has predicted that the tax cuts will reduce government income by between 1 and 1.5 percent of GDP. The government estimates a 500- to 550-billion rupee ($US3 billion) annual decrease.

Timmer noted that South Asia, after five years of being the fastest growing region in the world, was experiencing a steep reduction in growth projections. India’s GDP growth, previously considered one of the engines of the global economy, is expected to decline this year to less than 5 percent. Sri Lanka’s growth has been projected to fall to 2.7 percent.

The World Bank economist said that “huge uncertainties in growth markets with trade wars, policy uncertainties [and] political tensions” would exacerbate economic difficulties in South Asia. “The big problem in South Asia is that there is no fiscal rule which impacts on the macroeconomic environment” and added that “crony capitalism” was a common problem across the region.

Timmer called for increased “formalisation” of the economy, noting that 80 percent of South Asian workforce was in the informal sector and there was an “underutilization” of women workers. The World Bank, he continued, was focused on bringing the informal sector into the formal sector so that tax income could be increased. In other words, to create the conditions to further reduce business and investment tax rates.

Timmer warned that unless Sri Lanka reduced protectionism the country’s growth prospects were bleak. The structural changes required, he said, included broadening the tax base and reducing government spending—i.e., further cuts to health and education and rural subsidies.

The business environment would be developed, he continued, through a “private investment-tradeable sector-led growth model” to “improve governance and performance of state-owned enterprises.” This implies cutting funds to the state-owned enterprises, forcing them to become profitable and privatising them.

Timmer called for the “underemployed” or “unutilised labour” to be fully utilised and said the aging population was a burden on the economy. He said arrangements were needed to boost skill levels, improve productivity and encourage “longer working lives.”

Timmer’s remarks were delivered as the Sri Lankan economy confronts a severe crisis with the foreign and domestic debt burden now at 85 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and the country’s growth rate dropping to similar levels as Pakistan and war-torn Afghanistan.

Central Bank governor Indrajit Coomaraswamy recently warned that Sri Lanka would face the same situation as Greece if it failed to raise the required funds to service its debts. Colombo currently needs about $US4 billion per year, until 2022, to pay its debt.

President Rajapakse hopes to consolidate his regime by obtaining two-thirds majority in parliament by holding a snap general election in April.

While Rajapakse is desperately attempting to generate some positive economic news and win electoral support, the government has announced initial expenditure cuts to all government ministries, departments and statutory boards and agencies.

On December 3, the finance ministry said that the estimated fiscal deficit for 2019 would be 7 percent of GDP and the government would “make a concerted effort to recalibrate its operations along a sustainable deficit reduction path towards 4 percent of GDP in the medium term.” The next day, the finance ministry issued a circular that said “all non-essential and non-priority expenditure” was to be curtailed at the request of the president.

Rajapakse’s government has also indicated that it will need the last instalment of the IMF bailout loan negotiated by the previous government. The IMF will no doubt insist that the new regime sharply reduce the fiscal deficit and implement its austerity program.

While Rajapakse is hoping to win a two-thirds majority in an early general election his government will soon confront a combative working class that will not tolerate further attacks on its living and social conditions.

New doping provocation against Russia prior to 2020 Olympics

Kevin Reed

The Executive Committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) issued a new provocation against Russia on Monday by ruling that its athletes will be banned from participating in international competition for four years because data about the country’s anti-doping program was found to be “neither complete nor authentic.”

A press release issued by WADA said the committee “unanimously endorsed the recommendation made by the independent Compliance Review Committee (CRC) that the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) be declared non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code (Code) for a period of four years.”

The CRC is a six-member subcommittee within the WADA set up in 2015 to monitor the compliance of each country’s anti-doping organization with the 2015 Anti-Doping Code. The CRC submitted a 26-page report to the WADA executive committee on November 25 that outlined its evaluation of the RUSADA data and the ban proposal. The basic claim is that the RUSADA falsified athlete test results submitted to the WADA as part of a previous compliance agreement stemming from doping charges in 2018.

Craig Reedie, President of the World Anti-Doping Agency [Credit: Graham Hughes/Canadian Press via Associated Press]

At a meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, the 12-member WADA executive committee voted unanimously to approve the ban which “includes a series of strong consequences and conditions of reinstatement in accordance with the International Standard for Code Compliance by Signatories (ISCCS).” Among the consequences are that Russian athletes and sports officials will be banned from participating in the upcoming Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2020, the 2022 World Cup and the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022.

The anti-Russia character of the WADA decision was expressed directly by the president of the organization, Sir Craig Reedie, who said, “For too long, Russian doping has detracted from clean sport.” As though the international epidemic of athletic doping is exclusively a Russian problem in an otherwise pure and honest environment, Reedie said, “Russia was afforded every opportunity to get its house in order and re-join the global anti-doping community for the good of its athletes and of the integrity of sport, but it chose instead to continue in its stance of deception and denial.”

In response, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the decision would be appealed and charged the WADA with “an endless anti-Russian series” of accusations and hiding other countries’ violations “under the table.”

It should be pointed out that, although the WADA stands for the “World” Anti-doping Agency, one of the only athletic associations in the world that continues to block doping oversight and testing by the global organization is the American National Football League located in New York City. The NFL has refused to allow blood-testing for human growth hormones (HGH) among players and contact with the WADA was at stalemate as of September 2013.

The WADA decision contains provisions that will permit Russian athletes to participate in competition once they prove they are “clean.” However, these athletes will not be permitted to represent any country or flag and must participate as “neutral” competitors. The WADA rules also allow the RUSADA to dispute the decision within 21 days. If Russia appeals, the final decision will be placed in the hands of the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The WADA decision to ban Russian athletes for four years is an extension of a non-stop campaign against Russian participation in international sporting events going back to the organization’s founding in 1999. This campaign has particularly intensified over the past four years with charges emerging in 2015 that banned Russia from track and field events in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and the entire team from the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.

The most vociferous promoter of the campaign to ban Russia from international sports competition is the New York Times. On the day of the WADA announcement, the Times encouraged and amplified the anti-Russian campaign over the fact that the committee was going to allow some athletes to compete.

Under a headline of “What the Russia Global Sports Ban Means, and What It Doesn’t,” the Times wrote, “So Russia’s flag, name and anthem will not be allowed at the Tokyo Summer Games and other events, but athletes from Russia not implicated in doping can still compete.”

The latest provocation by the IOC and WADA against Russia—abetted by anti-Russia mouthpieces of the US military-intelligence apparatus like the New York Times —must be viewed within its broader geopolitical context. Under conditions of an imminent impeachment by congressional Democrats of President Donald Trump for endangering the national interest vis a vis the “hot war” between Ukraine and Russia, the banning of Russian athletes is an overt political act.

As the World Socialist Web Site stated two years ago about the IOC’s banning of Russia in the lead up to the 2018 Olympics, “The decision is a political provocation. It has much less to do with steroid use by Russian athletes than with US imperialism’s aim to humiliate and isolate Russia.... The purpose of all of this is to project an image of Russia as the ultimate pariah state.”

Turkey’s Erdoğan threatens to send troops into Libya

Bill Van Auken

Turkey is prepared to send troops into Libya should the war-ravaged north African nation’s besieged government in Tripoli ask for Ankara’s aid, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan warned Tuesday.

The threat of intervention came as the Libyan capital, a metropolitan area comprising some two million inhabitants, appeared to be on the brink of an all-out battle between the collection of militias supporting the Tripoli-based, UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj and the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), which is aligned with a rival government based upon the Libyan House of Representatives in the eastern port city of Tobruk.

Libya, once the wealthiest country in Africa, boasting the continent’s largest oil reserves, was transformed into a so-called failed state and plunged into a permanent state of chaos and bloodshed by the 2011 US-NATO war for regime change. A seven-month-long bombing campaign was launched in support of CIA-backed Islamist militias to destroy Libya’s security forces and vital infrastructure and overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi, who was tortured and murdered by an Islamist lynch mob.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [Credit: State Department]

Turkey is the sole power providing significant material support to the GNA of Prime Minister al-Sarraj in Tripoli. The Tobruk government and the LNA, which is commanded by the 76-year-old “Field Marshal” Khalifa Haftar, has won backing from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France and Russia.

Washington’s attitude toward the conflict has been ambiguous. While the US formally recognizes the GNA in Tripoli and has called for a ceasefire, President Donald Trump spoke personally to Haftar last April as his forces were mounting a previous siege of Tripoli and, afterwards, praised him for playing a “significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources.”

A former Gaddafi general turned CIA asset, Haftar spent two decades living near the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, collaborating in US plots against the Gaddafi government, before returning to Libya shortly after the NATO war began in 2011 to lead NATO-backed “rebels.”

Haftar’s forces have appeared to gain the upper hand amid reports of Russian aid in the form of military contractors as well as warplanes and air defense systems that have given them control of Libyan airspace.

Washington’s standpoint has appeared to shift in opposition to the increased Russian role. Last month, the chief of the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), Gen. Stephen Townsend, said that a Russian air defense battery had shot down a US military surveillance drone near Tripoli. He acknowledged that the US drone may have been mistaken for one of the Turkish drones used by the GNA militias to attack Haftar’s forces. He added, “But they certainly know who it belongs to now and they are refusing to return it. They say they don’t know where it is, but I am not buying it.” US officials also suggested that Russia was “exploiting” the crisis created by US imperialism’s destruction of Libya’s government and society eight years ago.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that he had discussed Libya the day before with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Washington, and had insisted that there was “no military solution.” He also reiterated US support for an arms embargo imposed against Libya in 2011, an embargo that was blatantly violated by the CIA in supplying arms to the Islamist militias in the country, weapons that later found their way to Al Qaeda-linked forces in Syria and elsewhere.

Whether such negotiations will take place is far from clear. Haftar and his cohorts have declared that they will take Tripoli before the end of the year. The LNA forces are reportedly just two miles from the Libyan capital, having taken control of most of the Salah el-Deen district just south of Tripoli. The LNA’s entry into the city would almost certainly trigger bloody street fighting and the displacement of a population that already includes large numbers of both internal and external refugees.

Erdoğan’s suggestion that Turkish soldiers could be sent to prop up the GNA came on the heels of the signing of an agreement between the Turkish government and the regime in Tripoli providing not only for security assistance, including the right to build Turkish bases in Libya, but also a Memorandum of Understanding delineating a supposed diagonal maritime boundary between the two countries.

The agreement lays claim to a vast stretch of the eastern Mediterranean separating Libya from Turkey, including waters off the Greek island of Crete, Cyprus and Egypt, along with off-shore reserves of oil and natural gas whose worth is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Greece expelled the ambassador of the Tripoli government after the signing of the deal and went to the United Nations to challenge the agreement as a violation of international law. The government of Cyprus said it was launching a legal action at the International Court of Justice at the Hague against what it said was Turkey’s violations of its sovereign rights.

Turkey’s deal with a regime that appears to be on its last legs in Libya is aimed at bolstering its claims over drilling rights in the area.

“With this new agreement between Turkey and Libya, we can hold joint exploration operations in these exclusive economic zones that we determined. There is no problem,” Erdoğan said Tuesday.

“Other international actors cannot carry out exploration operations in these areas Turkey drew [up] this accord without getting permission. Greek Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and Israel cannot establish a gas transmission line without first getting permission from Turkey,” he added.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the pro-government A Haber news network Wednesday that Ankara “has the right to prevent” any unauthorized drilling in the waters that it has claimed. Asked if Turkey would resort to military force to prevent such drilling, he replied, “Of course.”

Cyprus has struck deals with France’s Total and Italy’s ENI energy conglomerates to carry out joint drilling operations in waters that are now claimed by Turkey. Last July, Turkey sent drilling vessels escorted by Turkish warships to carry out exploratory drilling in what Cyprus regards as its exclusive economic zone. Last year, Turkish warships blocked a drill ship leased by ENI from entering waters southeast of Cyprus. Turkey does not recognize the country, claiming a large part of its economic zone as its own based on what it says is its protection of Turkish Cypriots in a breakaway statelet in the island’s north.

The conflict over energy reserves in the eastern Mediterranean and the bloody war in Libya are part of an increasingly unstable situation throughout the region that poses the threat of a region-wide and even global military conflagration.