Tamil National Alliance in deep crisis after Sri Lankan election collapse

Subash Somachandran

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the Tamil bourgeoisie’s main party in Sri Lanka, obtained only 10 seats in the August 5 general elections, down from 16 in the last parliament. Its overall vote fell to 327,168, a sharp drop from the 515,963 votes it received in the 2015 elections.

The TNA is a coalition of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO) and Peoples’ Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). ITAK is the TNA’s leading party.

In the elections, ITAK leader and former parliamentarian Mavai Senadhirajah and its secretary, former Eastern Provincial Council member K. Thurairajasigham, were defeated. Other leaders are now seeking to grab the top party posts. To avert a further split, proposals have been made to appoint TELO and PLOTE leaders as TNA spokesman and organiser, respectively, ousting the current officials.

Whatever patch-ups are made will not resolve the crisis erupting in the TNA. This is an expression of the bankruptcy not only of the TNA, but the entire Tamil bourgeois-nationalist perspective.

In the November 2019 presidential election, the TNA promoted Sajith Premadasa, the right-wing United National Party (UNP) candidate, as a “lesser evil” against Gotabhaya Rajapakse, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) nominee.

Rajapakse is hated among Tamil workers and poor. As defence secretary under former President Mahinda Rajapakse, he presided over the final years of the bloody war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The Sri Lankan army ended the war in May 2009, crushing the LTTE by killing at least 40,000 civilians, according to the UN, and committing many further crimes.

After Rajapakse won the presidential election, the TNA made an abrupt turn and declared its willingness to support his government if it agreed to make a “constitutional change that would fulfil political aspirations of the Tamil people.” TNA leader R. Sambandan said that the party “must have a connection to those in power” in Colombo.

This turn to an official responsible for war crimes further fuelled popular anger against this party.

The TNA’s sharp rightward shift since the LTTE’s defeat in 2009 is undeniable. After many rounds of talks with Mahinda Rajapakse’s government, it turned openly to seek US support for a “political deal” with Colombo while serving US imperialism’s geopolitical interests. While strengthening military and strategic relations with India, Washington was turning sharply against China.

Washington and New Delhi both supported Mahinda Rajapakse’s war against the LTTE and his anti-democratic rule. However, both were hostile to his growing relations with Beijing to obtain military hardware and investment. Washington wanted to bring Sri Lanka, strategically located in the Indian Ocean, under its sway.

In the 2015 Sri Lankan presidential election, Washington covertly orchestrated a regime change operation to oust Mahinda Rajapakse, replacing him with Maithripala Sirisena. The TNA, together with the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the pseudo-left groups, fully backed the operation. They cynically claimed Sirisena would bring “good governance” and improve living and social conditions.

The TNA promised the new government would investigate human rights violations and rectify the social devastation caused by the war. It became a de-facto partner of the coalition government led by Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Washington had no interest in TNA demands for power-sharing, however, but wanted the TNA to stabilise the Colombo regime, which it saw as favourable to its geopolitical interests.

The TNA has obediently followed US demands throughout the past five years. Sambandan and Sumanthiran helped the Colombo regime suppress war crime investigations, block demands to free Tamil political prisoners, prevent the release of lands occupied by the military, and deny justice in disappeared persons’ cases.

Moreover, the TNA collaborated with the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe regime’s austerity programme dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) despite continuous resistance from the workers and poor. Especially starting in 2018, united strikes and protests of Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim workers erupted amid an international upsurge of class struggles. This ultimately brought down the “unity government” in Colombo, further discrediting the TNA in the eyes of Tamil workers and poor.

This election saw the collapse of the traditional capitalist parties that had alternately governed the country since formal independence in 1948—Wickremesinghe’s UNP and Sirisena’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).

Like their counterparts in Colombo, the Tamil nationalist parties fear seething the social anger among workers and poor as big business and the state intensify attacks on social rights amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. President Rajapakse is rapidly moving towards military dictatorship against the working class.

The bourgeois parties are united in their fear and enmity of the working class. This also underlies the TNA’s approach to Rajapakse. Significantly, all the Tamil MPs joined their counterparts in the parliament last Friday to approve the president’s policy speech without a vote.

Responsibility for continuing communal discrimination and bloodshed against the Tamil minority, which is historically rooted in the colonial oppression of the island by imperialism, lies mainly with the Colombo elite. The Tamil bourgeois parties backed it with their own nationalist politics, however, creating one disaster after another for Tamil workers and poor. Over more than seven decades of existence, ITAK (the Federal Party), formed in a 1949 break-away from the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), played the leading role in this.

The ACTC, then a partner of the UNP government, supported its 1948 Citizenship Act, which abolished basic democratic rights of Indian-origin Tamil plantation workers, launching communal discrimination to divide the working class. Since then, ITAK has posed as a champion of Tamil nationalism while Colombo regimes intensified anti-Tamil campaigns.

The great betrayal by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) of the principles of socialist internationalism, by entering in 1964 into the bourgeois coalition government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, which was based on Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism, strengthened the Tamil nationalist party. In the ensuing years, this paved the way for the emergence of Tamil militant groups, including the separatist LTTE in the 1970s.

Moreover, the 1972 constitution gave priority to Buddhism and to Sinhala as the official language. The architect of this constitution was LSSP leader Colvin R. de Silva, a minister of the SLFP-led coalition government.

In response, ITAK united with the ACTC in 1972 to form the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). In 1976, its conference at Vaddukoddai, near Jaffna, passed a resolution reiterating self-determination and calling for an independent separate “secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam” for the north and east.

ITAK and other Tamil parties used Tamil nationalism to divide workers along ethnic lines. This only helped the Colombo elite and chauvinist groups’ Sinhala-communalist provocations that culminated in the three-decade civil war, which began in 1983.

Today, ITAK, TULF, the LTTE remnants and the TNA, which was formed in 2001, all have a similar line: to bargain with the Colombo elite for greater power with backing from New Delhi and Washington, while ultimately conforming to US interests. This is the reactionary dead end of Tamil nationalism.

The political struggle against the LSSP’s Great Betrayal and against Tamil nationalism waged by the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and its predecessor, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) since its inception in 1968, is well documented. Our struggle is based on the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Democratic rights in countries of belated capitalist development can be secured only by a united struggle of the working class for socialist revolution on an international scale.

The SEP fights for the internationalist unity of the Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim workers, demands the withdrawal of Sri Lankan forces from the north and east, and opposes dictatorship, war and inequality based on a socialist program. Its perspective is for a Sri Lanka-Eelam Socialist Republic as part of the Union of the Socialist Republics of South Asia and internationally. We urge Tamil working people and youth to study the unrelenting fight of the SEP and join and build this party.

Low-income Canadians twice as likely to be hospitalized due to self-harm than the wealthiest

Alexandra Greene

Research published recently by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) found that low-income Canadians are twice as likely to be hospitalized due to self-harm than their counterparts in wealthy neighbourhoods. The study also revealed that 25,000 people were either hospitalized or died due to self-harm last year, the equivalent of about 70 self-harm incidents per day.

Around 3,800 of the total cases proved fatal. The suicide rate was highest among men aged 45 and over, which suggests growing levels of despair among a section of the population that has lived through a period of a drastic deterioration in the social position of the working class and skyrocketing levels of inequality.

The CIHI figures show that residents in Canada’s lowest-income neighbourhoods were hospitalized at a rate of 104 per 100,000, compared to 49 per 100,000 in the country’s wealthiest areas. Demonstrating the lack of community mental health resources, the study also noted that around one in nine of those hospitalized have had two or more hospital stays due to self-harm within a year.

“People are showing up in emergency departments and they’re showing up in hospitals. That’s kind of a place of last resort,” remarked Tracy Johnson, director of health systems analysis and emerging issues for CIHI. “That says to me that these people require more help than they’re getting.”

As shocking as these figures are, they are certainly an underestimation of the true extent of the prevalence of self-harm and suicide attempts. The data does not include people who may have been helped by other primary health care providers — family doctors or emergency clinics, or those who went to emergency rooms but were not admitted into care. Moreover, it was gathered prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, with the ruling elite’s disastrous response producing a dramatic rise in mental health problems, drug overdoses, and other signs of social distress. Many of the 4 million people still out of work confront on a daily basis, the fear of long-term joblessness and financial crisis, and uncertainty about what the future will bring—all factors known to impact negatively on one’s mental wellbeing.

The disproportionate impact of the mental health crisis on the poorest sections of the population revealed in the CIHI study is a reflection of the glaring levels of social inequality in Canada. This is a society where the richest 1 percent owns 25.6 percent of all wealth, which is equivalent to the wealth controlled by the poorest 80 percent. The poorest 40 percent of the population possesses a mere 1.2 percent of all wealth.

It is also the product of decades of austerity spending on health care and other critical social services adopted by all of the major parties. Since coming to power in 2015, the federal Liberal government has enforced a mere 3 percent annual increase in the health transfers it makes to the provinces to fund health care services–virtually the same terms imposed by its Conservative predecessors. When population increases and rising health care costs due to an aging population are taken into account, this amounts to a substantial cut in health budgets.

At the provincial level, governments from the hard-right Progressive Conservatives to British Columbia’s New Democrats have prioritized balanced budgets and low corporate taxes over funding critical social services. With the onset of the pandemic, they all rallied around the Trudeau government’s multi-billion dollar bailout of the big banks and financial oligarchy, and are all enforcing a reckless back-to-work drive that is forcing workers to return to unsafe workplaces with totally inadequate protections against the coronavirus.

Warnings about the disastrous consequences for mental health services and social care due to chronic underfunding have been issued repeatedly by professional organizations over recent years, but they are taking on an even more dire tone under conditions of the pandemic.

The Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) is calling for resources to cope with the threat of an “echo-pandemic,” a predicted surge of mental illness and self-harm as a result of the pandemic’s effects. Experts are already finding a pronounced rise in mental health concerns and suicidal thoughts among surveyed subgroups of socially disadvantaged people, while indicators of social distress, like drug overdoses and homelessness, are worsening. To illustrate the scale of the problem, the CMHA reported that its Nova Scotia branch, which usually processes around 25 requests for help each day, now receives approximately 700.

CMHA chief executive Margaret Eaton warned that a severe toll is also being taken on the mental wellbeing of frontline medical workers due to COVID-19. Dr. Joanne Liu, a former international president of the Doctors Without Borders charity, emphasized that widespread fear, stress, and anxiety among medical staff treating COVID-19 patients is being fueled by the failure of governments to provide personal protective equipment and other support. “This is nerve-racking. I do understand that we have to use carefully our PPE, but if you want us to care for patients, I’m begging you to care for us, to protect us,” she told the House of Commons Health Committee.

Canada has registered a significant spike in drug overdoses and deaths since the start of the pandemic. Paramedics responded to 2,706 overdose calls in British Columbia alone in July. Ontario and Manitoba have also been hard hit. Toronto reported 27 opioid-related deaths attended by paramedics in July, which is the highest number on record. Winnipeg recorded a 227 percent increase in opioid-related 9-11 calls in June.

The desperately low levels of funding for overdose prevention and other critical mental health services is responsible for the worsening crises at overdose prevention sites and other outreach services in Canada’s major urban centres. Many of these facilities are staffed by poorly paid workers and volunteers who lack the support and resources to tackle the wide range of social problems their clients face. Thomus Donaghy, a peer worker in Vancouver’s West End, was fatally stabbed during his shift on July 27. Peer workers are themselves former drug users and often work on a voluntary basis while continuing to receive government benefits.

Homelessness is also expected to increase sharply, as provinces including British Columbia and Ontario move to lift bans on evictions implemented in March. Underscoring that homelessness is affecting ever broader layers of the population, the recently released homelessness count in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, found that 17 percent of the city’s homeless population was in part-time or full-time employment. Given that the count was performed in March, prior to the impact of the pandemic, it is likely that this figure is now even higher.

British government to use treason laws targeting Russia and China to suppress domestic dissent

Simon Whelan

The UK’s 1351 Treason Act has stood, with amendments, for hundreds of years. The Act of Parliament is so old it was initially written in Norman French and distinguishes two forms of treason: high treason, disloyalty to the crown, and the lesser charge of petit treason, when deemed disloyal to a subject of the sovereign.

The last trial for high Treason in the UK was that of William Joyce, infamously known as “Lord HawHaw,” an American born fascist and wartime Nazi propagandist, who died by hanging almost 75 years ago at Wandsworth Prison in 1946.

Today, as part of its offensive against democratic rights, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is planning to repurpose the Treason Act as a political tool to suppress dissent and protest in the UK. Their moves are designed to exacerbate an already poisonous political atmosphere and advance moves towards a police state. In parallel, the Espionage Act and Official Secrets Act are also to be reformulated.

A senior government source said Home Office officials have their “foot very much on the gas” to publish the new treason laws this autumn as an integral component of a defence and security review.

Johnson is understood to want the new measures on the UK statute books “within months rather than years.” Such haste is a sure sign of the febrile political situation in the UK. The Tory government is acutely aware of the growing opposition by British workers to its policies, both at home and abroad.

The proposed new acts will mean those deemed to have sworn allegiance to a foreign power or organisation are automatically criminalised if they operate in or attempt to re-enter the UK.

Under the changes being considered, merely voicing opinions and facts associated with the hindrance of British interests abroad—however the government defines this—will make citizens open to accusations of treason. Individuals and organisations accused by the government of providing succour to those deemed enemies of the UK will be prosecuted.

The aim is to secure a hostile political atmosphere, under which citizens are reticent to voice dissenting opinions in public.

The law changes will criminalise those accused of acting on behalf of a “hostile” nation or who travel abroad to fight with armed groups. But socialists and progressives communicating a political message advocating international or global movements and solutions rather than national and parochial ones will be vulnerable to prosecution.

The government intends to utilize such laws as weapons with which to combat states deemed hostile to British interests, primarily Russia and China, by criminalising collusion, including possibly business and political links, with individuals from these states.

Ultimately, however, the government’s aim—beyond asserting an increasingly aggressive foreign policy—is directed against opposition emerging from the working class towards their homicidal pandemic policy, war, militarism, and austerity.

The UK’s Law Commission is the statutory body that reviews laws in England and Wales and makes recommendations whether laws need updating. They intended to review the UK law on treason in 2008, under the last Labour government, but the project was shelved because it had “ceased to be of contemporary relevance.” “In the Middle Ages,” reasoned the commission, “England was more often than not at war. It is questionable whether treason offences are required in peacetime.”

The "Russia report" authored by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee

The government is using the Intelligence Security Committee’s (ISC) report into alleged but unproven “Russian interference” in British politics as a means to remodel treason legislation. Despite the report finding no evidence of Russian interference, the Home Office, together with anti-Russia hawks like Anne Applebaum and the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and media outlets—primarily the Guardian —present Russia as a serious security threat to Britain.

In addition to contributing to the report, ex-MI6 officer Steele is closely associated with another recent dossier, this time on the subject of Chinese influence, which is also being used to bolster attempts to alter the Treason Act.

According to Steele, the Chinese regime seeks to influence the British elite by conducting subversive activities and seeking to influence UK politics, academia, and business to further China’s foreign policy. The content of the China dossier has not been made public and was shown only to a small number of parliamentarians and media organisations, including Sky News. Steele has form. In 2016 he compiled what became known as the Steele Dossier, a compilation of unverified and salacious charges against Trump that alleged links with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sajid Javid, the then Home Secretary, first raised the prospect of a redefinition of the British treason law to tackle “hostile state activity” last year. Despite being subsequently promoted to chancellor last year—a position he then resigned from—Javid still plays an important role in the Tory party. He insists that the UK must treat the alleged threat of Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks as it does terrorism.

Former Home Secretary Sajid Javid, addressing a 2019 Conference on confronting extremism (credit: twitter-Home Office)

“It is crucial,” argued Javid in the Mail on Sunday last month, “that we give the police and security services more legal tools.” The Putin government was an “immediate and urgent threat to our national security.”

He continued, “Since the 1990s, we have made well-intentioned attempts to work with Russian business and their government. This has spiraled into members of the Russian elite—with close links to Putin and his intelligence services—extending their influence across the British establishment and using London as a financial laundromat.”

Javid drew comparisons between Russia and China: “Similarly to Russia’s blurring of state and corporate activity, Beijing has been accused of using state-backed businesses to orchestrate the takeover of strategic UK companies. Where this fails, they have sometimes resorted to corporate espionage to get at sensitive information.”

In seeking to impose more sweeping treason laws, the government is heavily utilizing the case of Shamima Begum, who, having been groomed online, left Britain aged 15, in 2015, to join the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, along with two school friends. The two childhood friends with whom Begum travelled to the Levant are both dead, as are two children born to Begum. She currently resides in a squalid Syrian refugee camp.

As home secretary, Javid stripped Begum of British citizenship to stop her returning from Syria. This made her stateless, which is illegal under international law. The Nazi regime in Germany stripped Jews and opponents of their regime of citizenship in order to deprive them of their basic rights. Since then, citizenship has been understood as the “right to have rights” and popularly considered irrevocable.

This undated photo released by the Metropolitan Police of London, shows Shamima Begum, a young British woman who went to Syria to join the Islamic State group and now wants to return to Britain. (Metropolitan Police of London via AP, File)

Lawyers representing Begum took legal action against the Home Office. Javid commented in his Mail on Sunday piece on the necessity for “repurposing our ancient treason laws to cover Britons who operate on behalf of a hostile nation or go abroad to fight alongside terrorist groups.

“Too often it feels as if our laws work against a common sense of justice and security. The recent Court of Appeal decision on Shamima Begum is just the latest example.”

This was a reference to a senior judge ruling that Begum could only have a “fair and effective appeal” if “permitted to come into the United Kingdom to pursue her appeal.” The government appealed that ruling and on July 31 won permission at the Court of Appeal to fight, at the Supreme Court, Begum’s appeal against being stripped of her British citizenship.

Democratic rights and civil liberties are being decimated at breakneck speed. As recently as 2014, the then Justice Minister for the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government, Simon Hughes, was asked whether the offence of treason was “available for use by prosecuting authorities against UK citizens participating in jihad in the Middle East.” He responded at the time that the offence of treason was outdated, and counter-terrorism powers were more than sufficient.

In their rush to overturn centuries old democratic rights, the Tory government and right-wing media neglect to mention that IS, with whom Begum is accused of associating, emerged from the debacle of the 2003 US and UK illegal invasion of Iraq. IS and countless other Islamic terrorist groups fighting in the Syrian civil war were trained, armed, and incited against the minority Baathist Alawite regime in Damascus by British, American, Israeli, Gulf, Turkish and Saudi military intelligence.

UK “hostile environment” sees two more asylum seeker deaths

Thomas Scripps

Reports of the deaths of two asylum seekers have demonstrated again the horrific consequences of the “hostile environment” that continues to exist for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Britain—supported by the Conservatives, Labour, and Scottish National Parties alike.

Last Saturday, Mercy Baguma, 34, was found dead beside her malnourished one-year-old baby son, Adriel, in a Glasgow flat. They were discovered after neighbours heard the sounds of the baby crying. According to refugee charity Positive Action in Housing, the child was “weakened from several days of starvation.” Luckily, the child was found in time and after being taken to hospital and discharged, Adriel is now with his father.

Mercy Baguma (credit: Positive Action in Housing)

Originally from Uganda, Baguma had claimed asylum in the UK and was living in extreme poverty after losing her job at a restaurant—and any access to financial aid—when her leave to remain expired. She was forced to live on food donations from friends and charity organisations.

Communication between Baguma and her friends and relatives stopped on August 18, five days before her death.

According to the Positive Action in Housing (PAIH) charity, Mercy contacted them several weeks ago as she did not have enough money to look after herself or her baby.

The Independent reported, “Baguma contacted PAIH on 11 August to ask for help. Though asylum seekers are entitled to a small weekly stipend (£37.75 for each person in a household), she told charity workers that she had not yet received any money.”

The charity’s director Robina Qureshi, said, “Would this mother be alive if she was not forced out of her job by this cruel system that stops you from working and paying your way because a piece of paper says your leave to remain has expired? I’m sure Mercy’s son will want to ask this and other questions once he is old enough.”

A Home Office spokesperson had the gall to claim it takes “the wellbeing of all those in the asylum system extremely seriously, and we will be conducting a full investigation into Ms Baguma’s case.” But on Wednesday, while at an event in Glasgow, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey refused to even discuss Mercy’s death or answer questions from journalists.

Mercy’s death sparked anger with a protest held yesterday outside the Home Office immigration centre in Glasgow. It quickly became a trending event on Twitter, and by 7pm on the day her death was announced more than 12,000 tweets about it had been sent across Britain. One Facebook news item had nearly 1,000 postings in response. In the space of just three days, a fund set up to pay for her funeral costs raised over £41,000 (far above an initial target of £10,000). Another fund has been set up, with all donations to go towards the future welfare needs of Mercy’s baby.

Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, hundreds and thousands of children in migrant households in the UK have been affected by the “no recourse to public funds” stipulation, brought in by the last Labour government in Section 115 of its Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. Made stricter in 2012 by Theresa May’s Tory government, the law withdraws access to state financial aid for those subject to immigration controls.

On Sunday, in a separate case, the Guardian reported the death of Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Alhabib in the Manchester hotel room where he had been placed by the Home Office after seeking asylum. The 41-year-old man was found dead on August 6. The cause of death is under investigation.

Alhabib had fled Yemen, currently suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. At least 14 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine, 80 percent rely on food aid, and 1.2 million people have contracted cholera. This is thanks to a criminal war waged by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States and the UK which has claimed at least 110,000 lives, internally displaced 3.6 million people and decimated the infrastructure of what was already the Arab world’s poorest nation. These terrible conditions are now being compounded by the pandemic.

Escaping this hellscape, Alhabib eventually crossed the English Channel to Dover on a small boat with 15 other refugees from Yemen, Syria, and Iran. One of the other Yemeni refugees, placed in the hotel room next to Alhabib, told the Guardian, “The journey was terrifying. Every minute of it we felt we were hovering between life and death and could drown at any time.

“All of us on these journeys, we have lost our country, lost our family, lost our future. When we got into the boat in Calais [in France] we felt the sea was the only place left for us to go.”

Picked up by UK border force officials, they were then held in “prison-like” conditions in the notorious Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire, before being transferred to the Manchester hotel. The asylum seekers were left in constant fear about the possibility of being sent back along the chain of European countries they have passed through under the European Union’s Dublin regulation.

One told the Guardian, “Abdullah was frightened all the time about this. His wife and four young daughters, the oldest who is just 10, are still in Yemen. His dream was to bring them out of Yemen to safety. Now that will not be possible.”

These tragic events reveal the intolerable stress such extremely vulnerable and already desperate people are made to suffer by the asylum system in Britain. In just the last four months, the Scottish National Party government has overseen the death of 30-year-old Syrian refugee, Adnan Olbeh, in his temporary hotel accommodation in Glasgow and the tragic stabbings at the Park Inn hotel in the same city and shooting to death by police of a Sudanese asylum seeker, Badreddin Abadlla Adam.

Alhabib’s fellow asylum seeker raised his fears that, “Now that Abdullah is dead, we are worried that the same thing will happen to us. We all asked the doctor to check our hearts and our blood pressure. The Home Office has already taken six Yemeni asylum seekers from this hotel and put them in detention in Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick ahead of the charter flight next week. We cannot sleep. We are waiting for a knock on the door and for the Home Office to come and take the rest of us. We feel we are on death row.”

Britain continued deportations throughout the pandemic, even while the country was in lockdown, with 24 removals taking place between March 20 and April 3. A total of 285 individuals were deported between April 1 and June 30. According to the Independent, these included a 10-year resident of the UK who was removed to Poland on the basis of a 6-month sentence for shoplifting and forced to leave her 11-year-old son behind.

The first deportations specifically of asylum seekers since the start of the pandemic began in early August. A Yemeni national scheduled to be removed told the Independent he felt suicidal after his government-allocated housing was raided by immigration officers: “I felt so scared. Everything I’ve worked so hard to reach is being demolished. I’m destroyed. I’m unable to eat or drink. I feel that there’s no meaning to my life.”

The Labour Party’s position on these questions was epitomised by its response to the right-wing medias’ manufactured “Channel migrant crisis ” two weeks ago, when a few hundred refugees tried to make it from France to England in small boats. Shadow immigration minister Holly Lynch criticised Boris Johnson’s government from the right, accusing it of a “lack of grip and competence” in dealing with the issue. Following a massive popular backlash, shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds modified the line marginally in describing the actions of the most right-wing Tory government in history—which mobilised the armed forces to prevent boats from reaching Britain—as “lacking in compassion and competence.” Party leader Sir Keir Starmer likewise called for a “compassionate response.”

Labour’s refusal to defend the basic democratic rights of migrants and asylum seekers was so pronounced that even loyal pro-Remain sections of the party, who glorify the EU’s formal commitment to free movement and migrant rights, are uncomfortable—fearing political exposure. These include the Starmer-supporting Open Labour and the Labour Campaign for Free Movement. An open letter with 300 signatures, including MPs Kate Osamor and Clive Lewis, called on “the Labour leadership, our parliamentary representatives and our trade unions to join us in condemning the government…”

Momentum, the main backers of Starmer’s nominally “left” predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, organised a petition calling on Starmer “to end his silence on the scapegoating of refugees and migrants.”

These token moves have drawn attention to Starmer’s equally token leadership campaign pledge to “defend migrants’ rights,” including a promise to close the Yarl’s Wood detention centre, and to back last year’s Labour conference vote by members to endorse free movement and migrant rights.

The defence of migrants and refugees demands the building of a socialist movement which defends the right of all to live and work where they choose with full access to the necessary social services.

Rattled by crisis, US-aligned Polish government steps up intervention in Belarus

Clara Weiss

On Wednesday, Polish President Andrzej Duda swore in Zbigniew Rau as the new foreign minister and Adam Niedzielski as the new health minister of Poland. The partial government reshuffle comes amidst a major crisis of the Lukashenko government in neighboring Belarus, which has been shaken by mass protests and strikes, and the resurgence of the coronavirus in Poland.

It follows an August 15 visit by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Warsaw, where he signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. The new foreign minister of Poland, Rau, is credited with particular expertise in relations with the US.

President Donald J. Trump and Polish President Andrzej Duda meet delegation members Wednesday, June 12, 2019, in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

The Polish government has been beset by a mounting domestic social and political crisis. President Andrzej Duda only narrowly won the presidential elections in July on the basis of an anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist campaign.

Last week, Health Minister Łukasz Szumowski resigned over allegations of misconduct in the procurement of medical equipment needed to fight the coronavirus. During the first wave of the pandemic, Polish hospitals, lacking the most basic personal protective equipment (PPE), were rapidly overwhelmed by patients. Entire cities had no ventilators. In Silesia, the coal mines were never closed. As a result, miners became the single largest group affected by the virus, accounting for over a fifth of all infections nation-wide.

Even as the virus continued to rip through mining communities, the government pushed for a premature full reopening of the economy. Now, cases are skyrocketing, with more cases registered on a daily basis than during the first wave of the pandemic. The country has now more than 63,000 confirmed cases, and out of those 20,000 were registered over the past month alone.

Under these conditions, the mass strikes and protests in Belarus, which borders Poland to the east, have raised significant concerns in Warsaw that strikes might spread beyond the borders of Belarus. The work stoppages have already cost the Belarusian economy billions of dollars and sent the Belarusian ruble into free fall. The Grodno region on the Belarusian-Polish border has been one of the main centers of the strike movement.

On August 11, as strikes began to escalate in Belarus, the Polish government, after consultations with the trade unions, decided to delay the announcement of the closure of several mines, which threatened the layoff of up to 7,700 workers. The announcement was almost certain to provoke strikes and protests. In 2019, the government was shaken by a nation-wide strike of 300,000 teachers, and it has been scrambling to avoid large-scale protests and strikes by miners since the beginning of this year.

Under these conditions, the Polish government has responded to the strike movement in Belarus and the turn by Alexander Lukashenko to the Kremlin by increasing its support for the EU-backed opposition in Belarus. In conjunction with the imperialist powers and especially the US, Warsaw is seeking to exploit the crisis to further its geopolitical interests in the region, which has become the main staging ground for the NATO war preparations against Russia.

In this intervention in Belarusian politics, the Polish state is making use of its long-standing ties to the anti-Lukashenko opposition in Belarus, which date back decades. The 22-year-old blogger Stepan Putilo who runs the Telegram channel NEXTA, which has become one of the main sources of information about the protests and strikes, is based in Warsaw. Numerous leaders from the Belarusian opposition, in particular Pavel Latushko, who used to be a diplomat of the Lukashenko regime in Poland, also have close ties to the Polish elite.

Last week, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki revealed a “five-point program” to support the opposition and promised to spend over 50 million Zloty, more than €11 million, on the program “Solidarity for Belarus.” The program is supposedly aimed at financially supporting oppositionists in Belarus to cover medical or legal fees. The Polish government also allows Belarusians fleeing their country to forgo visa costs and promises them financial support through NGOs. Moreover, the Polish state is increasing funding for the Warsaw-based oppositionist television station Belsat, which broadcasts in Belarusian.

The pretense of the Polish (PiS) government to support “democracy” in Belarus is absurd on its face. Since coming to power in 2015, the PiS government has dismantled democratic rights and institutions in Poland and has banned free speech on the crimes of Polish anti-Semites during the Holocaust. The promotion of anti-Semitism, homophobia and extreme right-wing nationalism have become central ideological pillars of its rule.

There is little question that all steps by Warsaw on Belarus are carefully coordinated and discussed with Washington and NATO. Since 1989, Poland has become one of the closest allies of the US in Europe and has played a critical role in the military build-up against Russia.

On August 15, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Warsaw to sign the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which also paves the way for the redeployment of many of the American troops that had been stationed in Germany to Poland. On top of the already-stationed 4,500 US personnel, there will be an additional 1,000. US President Donald Trump issued a statement on the agreement, calling it “historic.”

During his visit, Pompeo also commented on Belarus, saying that the elections had been neither free nor fair and that the US would support Belarus’s “civil society.”

On August 18, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg discussed the crisis in Belarus directly with Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Under the PiS, Warsaw has openly adopted the strategy of the so called “Intermarium” or “Three Seas Initiative,” which involves setting up right-wing nationalist governments throughout eastern Europe that can be mobilized against Russia and other potential adversaries. The Trump administration has officially approved of this strategy. Along with Ukraine, the Baltics, and Romania, Belarus is considered an important component in such an alliance, which could be directed not just against Russia, but also other rivals of the US in Europe, including Germany and increasingly China.

During his tour of eastern and central Europe concluded in Warsaw on August 15, Pompeo tried to rally countries behind the US’s campaign against China’s 5G networks and Huawei. The Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington that is militantly anti-Russian, noted that “Beijing has been making inroads in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with investments and economic incentives through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).”

The US, the think tank wrote, regarded these developments as “not only a geopolitical challenge but a concrete security threat.” It urged the US government to strengthen its alliances with eastern European countries more broadly and “leverage the Three Seas Initiative” that is spearheaded by Warsaw against China.

Much indicates that what is involved in the geopolitical scrambling over Belarus is not just the influence of Russia, which maintains extremely close economic and military ties with the country, but also the growing role of China in the Belarusian economy. Over the past decade, Lukashenko, while also balancing between NATO and the Kremlin, has deepened the country’s ties with China significantly.

China regards Belarus as a “gateway” to Europe and key component of its “Belt and Road Initiative.” As part of the BRI, China and Belarus have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the Great Stone Industrial Park, which is set to house multiple factories, residential buildings, and research centers. The Park’s final worth is estimated at between $2 and $5 billion. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called it a “model project” of the BRI, while Lukashenko described it as the most important economic project in Belarus.

China has also provided large loans to the struggling Belarusian economy, including a $15 billion line of credit to Belarus’s Development Bank. The New York Times noted in 2019 that the loan was 20 times larger than the current loans to Belarus by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Workers anger grows as Turkish government downplays COVID-19 crisis

Barış Demir & Çetin Akın

The coronavirus continues to spread in Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government re-opened the economy on June 1, backed by bourgeois opposition parties and trade unions.

As in countries all over the world, the coronavirus pandemic is out of control in Turkey after a deadly back-to-work campaign in the interests of the ruling class. The government only responds with unreliable statements and data. As the total official number of cases in Turkey reached 261,000, with more than 6,150 deaths, the number of daily cases on Tuesday was 1,502, the most since June 15.

As workplaces spread of the pandemic, companies and authorities are forcing even the infected to work, provoking growing opposition among workers.

After increasing COVID-19 cases on-site, the Artvin Governorate decided to keep the nearly 4,000 workers at the Yusufeli Dam and hydroelectric power plant construction sites. Workers responded with a walk-out on August 25.

One worker told sendika.org: “Many workers who wanted to leave work in this process. However, they did not give permission, and we heard that there were those who received threats like, ‘You cannot get your notice compensation and you cannot get your unemployment pay.’ Today, they force us to stay on the construction site with the agreement of the governor’s office.”

Last month, a canned fish company, Dardanel, in the western city of Çanakkale, forced all workers into its factory for 14 days after more than 40 workers tested positive for coronavirus. This decision was approved not only by the governor’s office, but also by city’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor—exposing the reactionary collaboration between the government and so-called opposition parties at workers’ expense.

Reports of workplace outbreaks in provinces across Turkey are rising. They include:

• In factories in the Adana Organized Industrial Zone, COVID-19 cases have surged over the last week. Dozens of positive cases were found in Atlas Denim, Erbey İplik Dokuma and Kastamonu Entegre factories, and the virus has been also seen in many factories throughout the industrial zone. Workers reported more than 40 cases in Erbey İplik Dokuma and nearly 10 cases in Kastamonu Entegre.

• In a textile factory in Zonguldak, where 155 workers are employed, 43 workers tested positive and the other workers were quarantined. Production at the factory was stopped.

• Coronavirus tests of 36 workers at the Söke Flour Factory in Aydın were positive.

• Reportedly, despite the increase in the COVID-19 outbreak in the Manisa Organized Industrial Zone, no measures have been taken. In the Vestel factory alone, there are nearly 1,000 cases, and at least 8 workers have lost their lives.

• The virus is spreading rapidly among postal workers, considered among the most at-risk workers during the pandemic. Reportedly, 241 workers in the state-owned PTT mail distribution company have caught the virus.

Anger towards the government’s response is also increasing among health care workers, the most affected by the pandemic. Last week, the Diyarbakır Health Platform shared the latest data of COVID-19 Diagnosis Healthcare Professionals in the city. According to the report, while in total 476 healthcare workers were infected in Diyarbakır, 130 of them only got sick in the last two weeks.

Health care workers held a one-hour work stoppage and sit-in in Diyarbakır on August 20 to draw attention to difficult working conditions. They issued a statement declaring that the government’s measures are insufficient: “Unfortunately, just within last week, we have lost two physician friends, one health technician and one subcontracted worker in this period in Diyarbakır and Urfa.”

The Trade Union of Public Employees in Health and Social Services (SES) Batman branch co-chair Deniz Topkan recently stated that of 3,500 health workers in Batman city, 700 tested positive. As the health system was insufficient in the face of the intense increase in cases, he added, seven people died last week while waiting for intensive care—even though the 350-bed hospital’s capacity was increased to 450.

Workers spread reports about deadly workplace situations only via social media. While corporate media do not report them and line behind the political establishment, unions cooperate with state officials and companies, especially to hide the number of cases in the workplace. Workers are falling ill and even dying, but management and the union refuse to tell workers how many have COVID-19.

In the BMC auto factory in İzmir, where nearly 3,000 workers are employed, workers said the number of positive cases has risen from 12 last week to 70, and production has stopped. Mürsel Öcal, the Türk-Metal union’s İzmir branch head, denied that there were infected workers in the BMC. His statement about the situation expresses the utter contempt of the entire ruling class and all its servants for workers’ lives: “Factories are the most reliable places in İzmir.”

According to the scientists and medical experts, Health Ministry figures are well below the actual number of cases and deaths, which are no longer reliable at all. Even the sum of the figures for a few cities announced by branches of the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) exceeds the total daily national number provided by the Health Ministry.

Many doctors, health care workers and patients’ relatives report that many infected people have lost their lives during treatment for COVID-19, but hospitals list other causes of death. While the number of intensive care and intubated patients is rising, the Health Ministry has claimed the daily death toll is just between 18 and 24 for more than two months. While health workers from various provinces state on social media that the situation in hospitals is the worst it has been since the pandemic began, official figures are well below the worst period recorded in Turkey.

In an August 25 interview, TTB Central Council Member Dr. Halis Yerlikaya said: “Almost half of the figures by the Ministry are from Diyarbakır… On the day the Ministry announced the number of cases as 1,200-1,300, the Diyarbakır Medical Association announced that 601 people in Diyarbakır tested positive. If it was transparent and the actual figures were revealed, perhaps the reflexes and behavior of society would develop accordingly.”

Despite the growth in the number of cases, expert warnings that the pandemic will increase in the coming months, as well as the destructive examples of America and Europe, the government is also preparing to re-open schools in September 21. In October, football matches are to be played with thousands of fans attending.

Private schools which the government has highly promoted in past decades already opened on August 17, and public school teachers returned to school on Monday for the so-called “seminar” process. The government is set to open all schools as part of its opening of the economy.

The government has had to postpone the opening of public schools from September 1 to September 21 due to mounting social opposition. At the beginning of this month, the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) published a survey titled “Education in Pandemic Conditions” with 2,239 teachers nationwide. The vast majority of the participants (96.4 percent) said that if face-to-face education is initiated during the pandemic, their health and the health of their family will be in danger.

As COVID-19 spreads due to the ruling class’ deadly response to the pandemic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the only way forward for the working class is to take action. To save lives, workers including teachers and health care workers in should build rank-and-file safety committees in their workplaces, independent of pro-capitalist trade-unions, in Turkey and internationally.

TikTok files federal lawsuit against the Trump administration

Kevin Reed

On Monday, the social media platform TikTok filed a federal lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s xenophobic ban of the Chinese-owned company in the US if it is not sold within 45 days to an American-owned firm. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California.

In a blog post entitled, “Why we are suing the Administration,” the company explains that President Trump’s executive order on August 6 forcing TikTok to divest its US assets on the basis of national security emergency powers is a violation of Fifth Amendment due process rights.

The TikTok statement says, “the Administration failed to follow due process and act in good faith, neither providing evidence that TikTok was an actual threat, nor justification for its punitive actions.” Trump’s executive orders against TikTok and the Chinese-owned app WeChat were based on provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) that permit the president to regulate economic transactions during a national emergency.

The TikTok blog says, “Now is the time for us to act. We do not take suing the government lightly, however we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees.” The short-form video sharing app, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has 1,500 employees and 100 million users in the US.

TikTok’s lawsuit thoroughly exposes the anti-Chinese political purpose of Trump’s executive order, “The executive order seeks to ban TikTok purportedly because of the speculative possibility that the application could be manipulated by the Chinese government. But, as the U.S. government is well aware, Plaintiffs have taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s U.S. user data, including by having TikTok store such data outside of China (in the United States and Singapore) and by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its U.S. user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products.”

These measures were well-known by the US government as they were part of the requirements imposed on ByteDance at the start-up of TikTok in the US following the company’s acquisition of the Chinese company Musical.ly in 2017. At that time, ByteDance went through an extensive national security inspection which “provided voluminous documentation to the U.S. government documenting TikTok’s security practices and made commitments that were more than sufficient to address any conceivable U.S. government privacy or national security concerns.”

The lawsuit also says that “key personnel responsible for TikTok, including its CEO, Global Chief Security Officer, and General Counsel, are all Americans based in the United States—and therefore are not subject to Chinese law. U.S. content moderation is likewise led by a U.S.-based team and operates independently from China, and, as noted above, the TikTok application stores U.S. user data on servers located in the United States and Singapore.”

Furthermore, since the onset of the anti-Chinese campaign of the Trump administration and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the company has cooperated for more than a year with a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), headed by US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The TikTok brief explains, “During this period, and through the course of the CFIUS review, ByteDance provided voluminous documentation and information in response to CFIUS’s questions. Among other evidence, ByteDance submitted detailed documentation to CFIUS demonstrating TikTok’s security measures to help ensure U.S. user data is safeguarded in storage and in transit and cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons—including any government—outside the United States.”

Despite the cooperation, acting under the direction of the Trump administration and its increasingly aggressive economic attacks and military threats against China, CFIUS issued a letter five minutes before the expiration of its review deadline—at 11:55 p.m. on July 30—that was “principally based on outdated news articles, failed to address the voluminous documentation that Plaintiffs had provided demonstrating the security of TikTok user data, and was flawed in numerous other respects.”

True to his US imperialist bullying form and with a real estate speculator’s mentality, President Trump not only demanded that the assets of TikTok be handed over to American corporate executives and Wall Street speculators, he also insisted that a “very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the treasury of the United States. … It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant. Without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So, they pay what’s called key money or they pay something.”

In response to this particularly criminal aspect of the entire project, the TikTok lawsuit says, “The President’s demands for payments have no relationship to any conceivable national security concern and serve only to underscore that Defendants failed [attempt] to provide Plaintiffs with the due process required by law.”

The US corporations Microsoft and Oracle were all too eager to jump on Trump’s anti-Chinese bandwagon. With dollar signs swirling around in their minds, corporate executives and investors for both software tech giants have gotten in line to make the purchase at a steep discount with the expectation of a massive post-purchase valuation on Wall Street.

A report in the New York Times on Wednesday said, “a deal with Microsoft could help propel the valuation of the app’s business outside China to as high as $80 billion,” and would provide TikTok with “the endorsement of a blue-chip American company to mollify the Trump administration, which had called TikTok’s Chinese ties a national security threat.”

Additionally, the Times report went on, “Bankers and investors, some authorized and some simply trying to gin up a deal, have also called Netflix and Twitter about buying TikTok, they said, though it is unclear if those companies have a genuine interest in an acquisition. … A deal price is unclear, though numbers have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion depending on what parts of TikTok will be sold, the people said.”

In other words, the vultures of the American oligarchy are expecting the forced sale of TikTok to rapidly yield as much as a 4-to-1 return on investment.

That there is both bipartisan support within the US political establishment and unanimity with the corporate elite for an aggressive takedown of the enormously successful Chinese mobile app developers was exposed by the Wall Street Journal on August 23.

In an article entitled, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok,” the Journal wrote, “In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Mr. Zuckerberg made the case to President Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook,” according to unnamed sources.

It was also after meetings that Zuckerberg held with Senator Tom Cotton (Republican-Arkansas) and Senator Chuck Schumer (Democrat-New York) that the two wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. A national-security review of the company began in November and the Trump administration began its offensive against TikTok in the spring.

Zuckerberg’s attempt to deflect government criticism of Facebook into a campaign against Chinese app developers is a particularly reactionary, but not surprising tactic for the American billionaire. In the end, the aggressive methods being deployed against TikTok will also be applied to the US-based social media platforms as part of the drive by the state to gain control of the information flow and to spy on the organization of the growing social unrest and class struggle against capitalism.

Top US official in Taiwan attends military commemoration

Ben McGrath

Over the weekend, the top US representative in Taiwan, Brent Christensen, attended a ceremony alongside Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen marking a battle fought between the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland in 1958. The US decision to take part in the ceremony is a deliberate provocation aimed at Beijing and will only further heighten the danger of war.

Christensen’s attendance at the August 23 ceremony was the first time a director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), Washington’s de facto embassy on the island, took part in the annual event that commemorates those killed during the Second Taiwanese Strait Crisis in 1958. This was a month-long conflict between the ROC and the PRC over the Kinmen and Matsu Islands, which are controlled by Taipei, but sit just kilometres off the coast of mainland China. Christensen also laid a wreath at a memorial for two US military officers killed during the First Taiwanese Strait Crisis in 1954.

While Christensen, the only foreign dignitary at the ceremony, did not make an official statement, the AIT declared on Facebook, “US—Taiwan security cooperation goes back decades and has been a key element in our partnership… Commemorations such as these remind us that today’s US-Taiwan security cooperation builds on a long and proud history that exemplifies the phrase ‘Real Friends, Real Progress.’”

Christensen’s involvement in the ceremony was undoubtedly approved at the highest levels of the Trump administration. It is part of Washington’s stepped-up confrontation with Beijing, initiated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month, which includes closer military cooperation with Taipei. Taiwanese President Tsai, re-elected in January on an explicitly anti-China platform, has signed up for this conflict behind the backs of the Taiwanese people.

Following Washington’s false narrative, the current conflict is one between defenders of “democracy” like Taiwan opposed to Beijing’s “tyranny.” In reality, the escalating tensions are the result of Washington’s decades-long imperialist agenda in the Asia-Pacific.

The fighting that erupted in 1954 and 1958 between the ROC and the PRC was a continuation of the Chinese Civil War that had forced the Kuomintang, otherwise known as the Nationalist Party, to flee to Taiwan in 1949. With US backing, including naval patrols in the Taiwan Strait, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists established a military dictatorship on the island that planned to reinvade the mainland and continued to claim legitimacy as the ruler of all of China. Taipei received recognition as such from Washington and even took China’s seat in the UN Security Council.

The First and Second Taiwanese Strait Crises took place only one and five years respectively after the end of the Korean War, which was launched by the US and its puppet state in South Korea in an effort to overthrow the Soviet-aligned government in Pyongyang while threatening Beijing. This included discussions on dropping “between 30 and 50 atomic bombs”—in US General Douglas MacArthur’s words—“strung across the neck of Manchuria.” The US also considered introducing hundreds of thousands of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Manchuria and in the south around Shanghai.

That these plans did not materialize did not mean they were off the table. With Taiwan sitting just 130 kilometers off the mainland’s coast, it has constituted a major base for US aggression against the PRC. Furthermore, the islands of Kinmen and Matsu, at the center of the Taiwanese Strait Crises, sit a couple of kilometres off the Chinese coast and were heavily fortified in the 1950s as they continue to be today. As such, Sunday’s commemoration of the fighting that took place there demonstrates they could be used for future military incursions.

US policy towards China began to shift to the mainland in the 1970s, gaining momentum with President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, and culminating in the recognition of PRC as the sole government of China in 1979. Formal US relations with Taiwan ended in a de facto recognition under the “One China” policy that the island is part of China’s territory. A rejection of this policy would likely trigger a war, with Beijing unwilling to allow Taiwan to become a base of operations for US war plans.

The US turn to Beijing was part of Washington’s agenda to further drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and China to deepen its influence in Asia. Under Mao Zedong, China also began the process of the restoration of capitalism, which accelerated in the 1980s, transforming China into a cheap labor platform for US companies.

However, with China’s emergence as an economic competitor, Washington is once more actively preparing for war with Beijing, with Taiwan a key element of these plans. The Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” sought to undermine China diplomatically, economically and militarily, an agenda that has accelerated under Trump. Before his inauguration, Trump called into question the “One China” policy, taking a phone call after his election from President Tsai, the first between leaders of the two countries since 1979. His administration has also overseen the sale of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to Taipei.

Now, with the US presidential election, both Trump and Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden are positioning themselves as more aggressive than the other towards Beijing, signaling an even more aggressive shift in the near future. Both candidates and their respective parties are attempting to deflect growing social anger in the US over the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis facing millions outwards against China as an “enemy.”

On August 17, the New York Times, a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and US intelligence services, cited unnamed officials in Washington calling for even deeper relations with Taiwan which will only exacerbate tensions with Beijing. It wrote, “Those officials, as well as Republican and Democratic lawmakers, aim to do as much as possible to show explicit US support for Taiwan. They want to send military signals to China and to make relations with Taiwan as close to nation-to-nation as possible, short of recognizing sovereignty.”

It is within this context that Sunday’s ceremony took place and indicates the growing danger of war erupting in the Asia-Pacific as Washington increasingly ramps up pressure on Beijing in its attempts to offset its own historic decline and worsening crisis.