Barbaric murder by Brazilian security guards sparks protests, repression

Miguel Andrade

Thousands of Brazilian workers and youth have taken to the streets in six cities since November 20 to demonstrate against the barbaric murder by security guards of João Alberto Freitas, a 40-year-old worker from of Porto Alegre, capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. In addition to Porto Alegre, the federal capital Brasília and four of the country’s five largest cities saw protests—São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Fortaleza.

Demonstration against the killing of João Alberto Freitas in Porto Alegre. (Credit: Ezequiela Scapini/Brasil de Fato)

The police have yet to explain the circumstances of the murder. Video footage shows Freitas being escorted out of a Carrefour supermarket while his wife was still paying for their purchases. He appears to make a rude gesture towards one of the guards on the way out, after which he is thrown to the ground and beaten barbarically. He was then held to the ground with one of the guards pinning him with his knee, dying in front of his wife—a scene reminiscent of the murder of George Floyd in the United States and so many other murders by police around the world.

Public information available about Freitas makes clear the social conditions that are the backdrop to such horrific violence. Freitas lived in the Vila do IAPI housing project, personally inaugurated by the bourgeois-nationalist president Getúlio Vargas in 1953 as a model social housing complex at the heart of a bustling industrial region, which is now filled with crumbling and empty warehouses. The project, a testimony to the former reforms in working class living conditions that have since been abandoned by every faction of the ruling establishment, is known as the birthplace of one of the most iconic interpreters of Brazilian popular music, Elis Regina. Freitas was forced to retire after an industrial accident at the local airport limited use of one of his arms, but even so worked as a welder with his father when there was work available.

João Alberto Freitas (Facebook)

Family and friends charged that racism motivated the hate-filled reaction of the guards, at the same time providing testimony of widespread harassment of working class customers by store security. Freitas was black, while both guards are white. They are being held in custody, and the police have acknowledged that racism is an official line of investigation.

The murder happened on the eve of Brazil’s national Black Consciousness Day, November 20, which is recognized in the federal calendar and is a local-level holiday in more than a thousand cities across the country. It pays homage to the day in 1695 when Portuguese troops captured and beheaded Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of the longest-lasting and most powerful of the inland settlements built by runaway slaves in Brazil, known as quilombos. The first demonstrations against the murder were coordinated with organizers of traditional Black Consciousness marches, which in many cases re-routed their traditional marches to local Carrefour branches, where they were met with shock police and cavalry troops.

Federal authorities have reacted with utter hostility toward the outpouring of grief and rage over the murder of Freitas, one of the almost 6,000 Brazilians killed by police each year, six times more than in the United States, which has a population a third larger than that of Brazil. A disproportionate number of victims are recognized as black by the national statistics bureau, IBGE, which combines the numbers of those self-declaring as “black” and “brown” in the country’s historic skin-color classification. They comprise 75 percent of police victims, as compared to 56 percent in the population. Some 1,500 white Brazilians are killed by police every year, 50 percent more than all those killed in the US.

Protest outside Carrefour supermarket in Porto Alegre (Credit: Luiza Castro/Sul21)

Freitas’ murder is directly bound up with the terror regime imposed upon workers by Brazil’s capitalist state: one of the assassins is a Military Police soldier working illegally as a private security guard, a widespread practice throughout the country.

In response to the murder and protests, Bolsonaro took to Twitter to proclaim that “miscegenation” had left Brazil free of racism, and to denounce those attempting to “destroy the Brazilian family” and replace it with “conflict, resentment, hatred and class division.” He ominously warned that “those instigating the people into discord” are “in the wrong place. Their place is in the trash.”

The next Saturday, he opened his remarks to the G20 meeting by again hailing “the Brazilian national character” and denouncing “attempts to import to our territory tensions alien to our history.” On Saturday, the Época magazine revealed that the head of the federal broadcasting agency, the EBC, ordered that the agency ignore the murder.

Bolsonaro’s threats were put into practice in no time. Even before rubber bullets, tear gas and mounted police were unleashed against demonstrators in the evening of November 20, the Catholic Church leadership in Rio de Janeiro took the unprecedented decision to cancel the Black Consciousness Day mass in the city’s historic central district of Gloria, due to threats of violence by far-right Catholic fanatics, who opposed the use of traditional African religious artifacts in the ceremony.

The fascistic president is openly adopting a thesis that had been until very recently the dominant ideological approach of the Brazilian ruling class towards “national unity” and the suppression of opposition to social inequality. It has extolled Brazil’s history of miscegenation, as opposed to Jim Crow segregation in the United States and ethnic conflicts in Europe and elsewhere, claiming that it has rendered Brazil a nation free not only of racism, but of all internal conflicts, and that those who differ should be swiftly suppressed. In Brazil, Bolsonaro proclaimed, there are only two colors, “green and yellow,” the colors of the Brazilian flag.

Bolsonaro, a close ally of US President Donald Trump and his far-right adviser Steve Bannon, is resurrecting an apparently outmoded and anachronistic view—in terms of contemporary bourgeois public opinion dominated by identity politics—that Brazil is free of internal divisions as a “racial democracy.” This ideological campaign is being conducted in furtherance of an international offensive of imperialist militarism, austerity and reaction. Its aim, as that of racism itself, is to divide and weaken the rising activity of the working class drawn from every racial, ethnic and religious background.

Bolsonaro’s focus on the “importing of conflicts” represent a grave and double threat to Brazilian workers. At the same time that he endorses far-right and police riots against demonstrators, he is consciously seeking to exploit divisions provoked by the turn by a significant section of the ruling class to identity politics and racialist communalism, as well as their unanimous adoption by the pseudo-left.

These forces have mounted an increasingly right-wing attack on the so-called “racial democracy myth,” portraying it as a barrier to the development of a “black identity” among Brazilians. They pretend to fight racism and the hypocrisy of the past by elevating race as the primary category, thereby enabling Bolsonaro to pose as an opponent of racism. At the same time, they seek to subordinate workers to capitalist identity politics, which benefits solely a narrow “rainbow coalition” of reaction by appointing “black” and “brown” capitalist managers and officials in the repressive state apparatus.

This danger was on display in the response of the media and the political establishment to the recent Black Consciousness Day.

November 20 saw the bourgeois press inundated with reports of how companies had to do more to promote black leaders, with the conservative O Estado de S. Paulo —formerly a fierce opponent of affirmative action—calling attention to the fact that none of the presidents of the 100 largest companies traded on the São Paulo stock exchange are black. The CEO of the Brazilian branch of Carrefour, Noel Prioux, made a televised speech on the most watched prime-time program, Globo’s Jornal Nacional, declaring that the murder of João Alberto Freitas was “beyond his comprehension” as a “white and privileged” person.

Signaling a renewed right-wing lurch by the Workers Party (PT), former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared on Twitter that “racism is the origin of every abyss in this country.”

The latest unemployment figures indicate that 15 percent of Brazilians are out of a job. Brazil is being hit by a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic without ever coming close to controlling the first, and unemployment will soar even further. More than 170,000 Brazilians have already died, leaving millions with their lives destroyed emotionally and financially. The economic crisis resulting from the pandemic is vastly accelerating the war drive among the imperialist powers, which is itself making necessary brutal austerity and impoverishment the world over.

The horrifying murder of João Alberto Freitas is a sharp exposure of capitalist barbarism. Such crimes, from Brazil, to the US, to France and around the globe, are provoking an ever more militant reaction by the working class internationally. The latest demonstrations in Brazil were without question connected to a much larger movement of millions of workers and youth of every background against police violence, racism, social inequality and the murderous “herd immunity” policy of the ruling class.

Spain’s Podemos to oversee distribution of EU bailout funds to the super-rich

Alejandro López

Last week, with barely any press comment, let alone public debate, Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government unveiled a law specifying how billions of euros in EU bailout funds will be funneled to banks and corporations. It takes place as the government claims that de-escalation of anti-COVID-19 measures is needed because “there is no money” for a scientific fight against the virus.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks in the Spanish parliament in Madrid, Spain, Monday, Dec. 30, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

In July, after five days of acrimonious negotiations in Brussels between EU member states, the EU announced a financial stimulus programme to transfer €750 billion to the financial aristocracy. The amount allocated to Spain, €140 billion, including €72 billion in grants, made it the second-biggest recipient after Italy. On his return to Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that day was “one of the most brilliant pages in EU history has been written.” Podemos leader and Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias hailed it as “a breath of fresh air for the European project.”

The reactionary class content of this project is unmistakably clear. While tens of millions of workers and small business owners have only received (or are still waiting for) meagre COVID-19 furlough schemes, billions of euros are to be handed, with unprecedented speed, to the banks and major corporations.

A draft royal decree specifies that most of handouts will be for Strategic Projects for Economic Recovery and Transformation ( Proyectos Estratégicos para la Recuperación y Transformación Económica – PERTE). These projects will foster public-private partnerships to “strengthen those projects” that contribute “to economic growth, employment and the competitiveness of our country.”

The draft law is tailored to large corporations and banks, who, given the “magnitude of the risks associated with these projects” will work closely with the state. Due to the complexity of these projects, level of resources required and volume of the investment, their main targets are clearly companies in Spain’s Ibex 35 stock exchange, and not small businesses, let alone the working class.

As El Periódico noted, “The idea is that the PERTE will channel part of the funds to generate traction projects, led by large companies, but in which small and medium enterprises will also enter into execution and in which the state actively participates in their design. An example would be to create the necessary infrastructure to develop the electric car value chain in Spain, from the battery factory to the chargers in urban centres where users plug in vehicles.”

The Spanish Confederation of Employers’ Organizations (CEOE), Spain’s main big business association, is designing 20 “macro-projects” and will present them to the state in coming weeks.

Due to civil service cuts in recent decades, Madrid has traditionally faced issues with disbursement of EU funds. A new, fast-tracking procedure has therefore been designed with lower controls and supervision.

To prevent “excess bureaucracy” from hindering the enrichment of the financial aristocracy, the decree states that “the dispatch of these projects will have priority over any other, and the control body must rule within five business days.” However, “when due to exceptional circumstances there is an accumulation of files that prevents compliance with the period of five business days, the General Accountant of the State Administration will adopt the necessary measures to guarantee the effective compliance of this period.”

Significantly, large companies may receive advanced funding even before the project starts. This ranges between 50 and 90 percent.

Podemos reacted to the draft law leak with anger—not at the fact that billions will be handed to the financial aristocracy, but that such disbursements would not have Pablo Iglesias’ signature on it. Iglesias demanded that he be admitted onto the Commission to execute the Transformation and Resilience Plan for the Spanish Economy—the commission set up to manage the funds.

Iglesias said there is “a lot of anger about this issue” and a “rectification from La Moncloa,” the prime minister’s residence, was required. He added, “the logical thing is that I should be there.” Soon after, the government included Iglesias on the commission.

Since the inauguration of the coalition government in January, Iglesias has been the chief spokesman and defender of the government’s measures in parliament, tasked with presenting them as “left.” He also sits on the Intelligence Affairs Commission, the body directing the National Intelligence Centre, and recently toured Latin America with the Spanish King Felipe VI. His colleague, Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz, has overseen the back-to-work policy enforced by the trade unions.

The integration of Podemos in the bailouts testifies to the reactionary character of petty bourgeois “Left Populist” politics. It comes as they have demonstrated their readiness to defend the financial aristocracy’s wealth even at the cost of workers’ lives.

Over the past year, protests against the PSOE-Podemos’ austerity, “herd immunity” and unsafe back-to-work policies, have been met with police violence and threats to deploy the army. At the same time, since the PSOE-Podemos government passed the Digital Gag Law, as it is known, opposition websites and social media are being increasingly monitored by the police and intelligence agencies.

Amid this context, and terrified at the exposure of right-wing role of Podemos, forces orbiting around Podemos like the Corriente Revolucionaria de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (Workers' Revolutionary Current—CRT) are trying to suppress this opposition by promoting illusions in the trade unions.

In its piece on the bailout mechanism, they declare that “workers are not going to obtain any direct benefit from these funds as they are designed, basically to guarantee corporate profits and especially those of large companies. It is necessary to occupy the streets, snatching them from the reaction and impose on the union bureaucracies a plan to fight for an emergency programme so that the capitalists pay for the crisis.”

In fact, the same union bureaucracy they are appealing to has been campaigning for months in defence of the EU funds. It is busy setting up a forum with the CEOE to advise the government on the funds. According to union sources of El País, “UGT and CCOO will immediately designate teams to participate in the negotiations [on the projects to be funded] to be presented to the EU.”

The unions are also cynically claiming that they are not subject to austerity conditions from Brussels. On Wednesday, the General Secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, said “There is no negative conditionality, there is no position on the part of the [European] Commission… the funds are for us to look into the future.”

As Sordo well knows, the PSOE-Podemos government is preparing labour reforms, pensions cuts and slashing billions in public expenditure in next year’s budget to reduce the deficit as promised to Brussels. Meanwhile, the unions are negotiating wage “moderation” with the CEOE.

The decisive question facing the international working class is to ensure its political independence from these reactionary, middle class forces. The only way to address the pandemic and growing social inequality is to impound the fortunes of the financial aristocracy and to confiscate the massive sums of public money illegitimately handed over to the ruling class by Podemos.

Microsoft’s new “Productivity Score” helps employers spy on workers

Mike Ingram

Microsoft has expanded the analytics provided with its Office 365 suite of productivity applications into a “full-fledged workplace surveillance tool” according to privacy advocates.

The tool, called Productivity Score, allows employers to know the number of days a person was active on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype and Teams over the previous four weeks and on what type of device.

The software gives managers access to 73 pieces of granular data about employee behaviors, all of which is associated with employees by name. Microsoft denies the software is workplace surveillance, but privacy advocates say it most certainly is.

Vienna-based researcher Wolfie Christl tweeted a screenshot of the Productivity Score dashboard, writing that “Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365.”

“A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into a full-fledged workplace surveillance tool,” Christl added.

Microsoft claims that the software is not designed as a tool to monitor employee work output activities. A September blog post by Anthony Smith, introducing the product, claimed, “we safeguard against this type of use by not providing specific information on individualized actions, and instead only analyze user-level data aggregated over a 28-day period, so you can’t see what a specific employee is working on at a given time. Productivity Score was built to help you understand how people are using the productivity tools and how well the underlying technology supports them in this.”

In an email to The Register Christl refuted the software giant’s claim, saying the system “does clearly monitor employee activities.” He referenced Microsoft’s own promotional video which shows a list of clearly identifiable users. Posting the video on Twitter, Christl wrote: “Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!), for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc.”

Screenshot of the Productivity Score dashboard

While Productivity Score is not enabled by default, when companies enable it, the software automatically shows data on individual employees. Employers can anonymize user data or opt out of using user-level data at all, but managers have to manually change the settings. Employees have no control over this whatsoever.

The software dashboard provides a so-called peer benchmark, which measures the company against other companies for each metric collected, meaning companies using the product are sending analytics data back to Microsoft.

The documentation for Productivity Score shows the extent of workplace surveillance the software allows. “Person metrics” include data such as the number of hours a person spent in meetings and on email outside of working hours and the number of emails sent. The system also monitors “low-quality meeting hours” which is defined as, the “Number of meeting hours in which an attendee multitasked, attended a conflicting meeting, or attended a meeting that exhibits Redundancy (organizational).”

Employees are assigned an “influence” score “that indicates how well connected a person is within the company. A higher score means that the person is better connected and has greater potential to drive change.” The product documentation states. The software also has a “Diverse tie score” indicating how varied and broad a person’s connections are and a “Strong tie score” recording how many “strong and tight engagements a person has had.”

J.S. Nelson is an associate professor of law at Villanova University who studies workplace surveillance. She told Forbes the software is “horrendous.” “Why are they monitoring people this way and what is that telling people about the relationship they should have with their employers in the workplace? What message are you sending?” she asked.

More invasive employee monitoring tools such as Teramind can capture any user activity, including screen recordings, live views of employee computers, and track emails, keystrokes and even video sessions. These are specialized products and regarded as overly intrusive by many workers.

A Computerworld article from October this year examined how COVID-19 and the move to remote working has spurred faster adoption of employee monitoring software by companies seeking to boost productivity and spy on workers outside of the office.

The article quotes Brian Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s HR practice. “When COVID-19 hit, we found that within the first month, 16 percent of companies put new tracking software on the laptops of remote employees,” Kropp said. By July that number had risen to 26 percent of companies.

Kropp said that even before the pandemic, companies were moving in the direction of “passively monitoring our employees, listening to them and watching them, and asking them less and less.”

“What the pandemic has done is just accelerate the speed at which that is happening. ... They were going to get there eventually; the pandemic has just accelerated the future into the present,” Kropp said.

The development of Productivity Score now gives companies similar tools without the need to roll out new software. The near-ubiquitous presence of Office 365 in the workplace gives employers ready-made surveillance of their employees.

While the office suite market is dominated by Google with 59.41 percent, Microsoft Office 365 is used by over a million companies worldwide with close to 600,000 companies in the US alone. Under conditions of a global pandemic that has forced the closure of offices around the world and enforced remote working from home, Microsoft is giving corporations the tools to drive up productivity and monitor workers’ activity 24 hours a day.

The metrics provided by Productivity Score will be used by corporations to identify low scoring employees and facilitate more layoffs with increased exploitation of those remaining, under an ever-present pressure to improve their scores.

Ethiopian military seizes control of regional capital after offensive against Tigray province

Jean Shaoul

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced Sunday that government forces were “fully in control” of Mekelle, the regional capital of Ethiopia’s northern province of Tigray.

He claimed the military had entered the city in the “last phase” of the conflict with the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). Military operations in the Tigray region had ceased, he said, although federal forces would “continue their task of apprehending TPLF criminals and bring them to the court of law.”

The neighbouring province of Amhara has sent its uniformed “special forces” to support the military and maintain security, while civil servants have also arrived from Amhara to take over the running of some of Tigray’s western towns and cities. Both moves will fuel ethnic tensions.

Ethiopia regions (credit: map for use on Wikivoyage, English version)

The army’s takeover of Mekelle follows the offensive that began after the expiry of Abiy’s ultimatum for dissident local leaders to surrender expired Wednesday evening.

Abiy had called on the leadership of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the local ruling party, to surrender to prevent the assault on the city. He threatened Mekelle’s 500,000 citizens, saying “We call on the people of Mekelle and its environs to disarm, stay at home and stay away from military targets [and] to do their part in reducing damages to be sustained because of a handful of criminal elements.” He urged them to support the federal government against the TPLF “in bringing this treasonous group to justice.”

Military officials had earlier warned there would be “no mercy” if residents of Mekelle did not distance themselves from the TPLF and leave while they still could. Such action targeting civilians is a breach of international law, prompting Human Rights Watch’s Laetitia Bader to warn “Treating a whole city as a military target would not only [be] unlawful, it could also be considered a form of collective punishment.”

TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael defied Abiy’s ultimatum, declaring that his people were “ready to die” defending their homeland and their right to self-determination and that “Their brutality can only add [to] our resolve to fight these invaders to the last.”

Abiy launched the military offensive in Tigray, home to around six million people, on November 4, claiming that the TPLF had started it by overrunning army bases and slaughtering non Tigrayan officers and its purpose was to restore “enforce constitutional order and the rule of law.”

Parliament declared Tigray’s regional government illegal and voted to dissolve it. The Tigray leadership was accused of having “violated the constitution and endangered the constitutional system” by holding regional elections in September after Abiy postponed this year’s promised elections, ostensibly due to the pandemic, as anti-government protests and opposition mounted. The Tigrayan elections came in the wake of bitter disputes between the federal government and the TPLF that says it has been marginalised since Abiy became prime minister in February 2018.

Parliament said a new caretaker administration would hold elections and “implement decisions passed on by the federal government.” It declared that the TPLF should be branded a terrorist group after blaming it for a massacre of ethnic Amhara in Oromia on November 2.

Abiy is determined to secure the removal of the TPLF leadership and establish a new leadership subservient to the federal government as part of his broader plan to centralise its authority at the expense of the devolved regions, amid mounting ethnic tensions that threaten to tear Ethiopia apart.

There were reports of fighting between Tigrayan and federal forces in several towns in the province. While it is believed that there have been heavy casualties on both sides, there is little reliable information about what is happening because the federal government in Addis Adaba has cut the telephone and internet lines to Tigray, arrested journalists, deported the Crisis Group’s Ethiopia Senior Analyst William Davison on November 21, and prevented people reaching the province.

As well as military clashes, hostilities have spread to civilians, with ethnic violence between Tigrayans and Amhara, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. According to an investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, a Tigrayan youth group with the complicity of local security forces had killed at least 600 civilians from the Amhara and Wolkait ethnic groups in Mai Kadra two weeks ago. Tigrayan leaders have denied this. Tigrayan refugees have reported atrocities by Amhara militia fighting alongside federal forces.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, have died in the conflict so far, with up to a million people displaced as civilians fled the fighting. Around 43,000 from western Tigray around the towns of Humera and Kansha have fled to neighbouring Sudan. The Kassala region is one of Sudan’s most impoverished regions that is struggling to cope with the influx of refugees and is in urgent need of assistance. Ethiopian troops and paramilitaries are reportedly now preventing Tigrayans reaching or crossing the border.

According to the UN, shortages have become “very critical” in Tigray region, with cash and fuel needed to run diesel-powered generators running out. A report published last week said that food for nearly 100,000 Eritrean refugees living in neighbouring Tigray would run out in a week and more than 600,000 people who rely on monthly food rations have not received them this month. Ethiopia has some 1.7 million refugees and internally displaced people living in camps.

The worst locust swarm to hit Ethiopia in 25 years is compounding the crisis. Last year locusts destroyed 350,000 tonnes of cereals and three million acres of pasture, resulting in a million people across the country needing emergency food assistance. This year’s damage is expected to be worse, given the recent heavy rains.

According to a United Nations (UN) internal document seen by Reuters, the conflict in Tigray brought efforts to combat the locust swarms to a halt as Tigrayans were being mobilised for war. According to a recent report by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), about 600,000 Tigrayans are dependent on food assistance, while another million people receive other forms of support, all of which are now disrupted, as banks are closed and roads are blocked.

Abiy has refused all calls from the UN, the European Union, the African Union and international agencies to negotiate with the TPLF, claiming that the military operation was a “law enforcement operation” aiming to remove “traitorous” rebel leaders and restoring central authority in accordance with Ethiopia’s devolved constitutional system. He insisted, “A fundamental element of the international legal order is the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states… We respectfully urge the international community to refrain from any unwelcome and unlawful acts of interference.”

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who holds the chair of the African Union, sent three high-level envoys for Ethiopia, but the federal government in Addis Ababa refused to allow them to meet the TPLF leadership.

The UN’s efforts to arrange mediation appears to have been stymied by Washington, which has long viewed Ethiopia as a key ally and proxy in the Horn of Africa.

The desperate situation confronting Ethiopia is bound up with the escalating crisis of world capitalism and the resultant great power rivalry that led over the last decades to the fragmentation and disintegration of a region that includes Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti. The Horn is an arena of intense great power and regional rivalry for control of oil reserves and mineral resources in neighbouring countries, and the sea route through the narrow Bab al-Mandeb straits through which much of Europe’s oil passes—with the US and Europe engaged in a ferocious struggle with China.

The Trump administration played a key role in bringing Abiy to power in 2018 as part of its efforts to loosen the country’s dependence on Chinese investment initiated under the TPLF-dominated government, open up the state-owned economy to global corporations and banks and counter the spread of China’s influence across the continent.

Tibor Nagy, the US assistant secretary for African affairs, expressed his backing for Abiy saying “This is not two sovereign states fighting. This is a faction of the government running a region that has decided to undertake hostilities against the central government.”

Hundreds of thousands protest across France against police violence and Macron’s police immunity law

Will Morrow

Hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations across France on Saturday afternoon to protest police violence and oppose the Macron government’s law to criminalize the filming of the police. Opposition is growing amid a series of acts of police violence over the past week.

More than 100 protests were organized across every major city. The largest protest, which took place in Paris, began at Republic Square at 2:00 p.m. and marched to the Place de la Bastille. The government’s own underestimated account claimed that 46,000 people were in Paris alone, but images and videos show that the real number was several times higher. There were more than 10,000 in Bordeaux and Lille, and thousands in Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse.

Protest in France against global security law (Twitter/@Sophie_Busson)

The police responded with a violent crackdown on the protests, particularly in Paris, where hundreds of riot police were deployed. This included the beating of 24-year-old Syrian freelance photographer Ameer Al-Halbi, who works with AFP, at the Place de la Bastille. Reporters Without Borders general secretary Christophe Deloire published a tweet of Al-Halbi in a hospital with his head and faced bandaged on Saturday evening, stating that he had been hit in the face with a police truncheon.

Gabrielle Cézard, another journalist who was with Al-Halbi in a narrow street when the police attacked, said, “We were identifiable as photographers and stuck against the wall. We cried, ‘Press, press!’ There were projectiles thrown from the side of the protesters. Then the police led a charge, truncheons in hand. Ameer was the only photographer not wearing a helmet or armband. I lost him from my sight and then found him surrounded by people, his face covered in blood and bandages.”

In another video, a riot police officer can be seen pointing a beanbag gun point blank at the face of another journalist.

The “global security” law, which was passed by the National Assembly on Monday and will go to the Senate in January, would make it an offense punishable by a €45,000 fine and three years in jail to publish a video showing the face of a police officer. In addition, it expands the powers of off-duty police to carry their firearms, by requiring that they not be refused entry to any public places for carrying a weapon. The law also provides a blanket permission for the use of drones to film protesters by police, which had already been in practice.

The mass turnout on Saturday was also triggered by anger at two incidents of police violence in the past week. On Monday, riot police went on a rampage at Republic Square, attacking a peaceful encampment of between 450 and 500 refugees set up to protest the lack of housing, government support and the approval of their asylum claims.

On Thursday, Loopsider published a video of a vicious police assault of black music producer Michel Zecler in his Paris recording studio. The video has now been seen more than 20 million times. In it, Zecler narrates minute by minute while watching the CCTV footage showing police attacking him for over 20 minutes, repeatedly kicking, punching and hitting him with a truncheon on the head and face, and calling him a “dirty negro.”

The police threw Zecler in prison for 48 hours and falsely charged him with assaulting them, before being forced to drop all charges when presented with the CCTV footage.

The “global security” law is correctly recognized as aimed at providing the police with enhanced impunity to use violence against the population. Over the past two years, not a single policeman was charged for the brutal crackdowns on “yellow vest” protests and railway strikes, during which dozens of people had their eyes shot out and hands blown off by stun grenades and bean bag bullets. On the contrary, the riot police commander whose unit fired the tear gas canister that killed the octogenarian Zineb Redouane in Marseille was among the 9,000 police bestowed with medals of honor, as was the head of the unit that raided a music concert in Nantes that caused the drowning of 24-year-old Steve Canico.

Facing an explosion of opposition in the population, Macron released a statement on Facebook on Friday, stating that the beating of Zecler “brings us shame.” Macron, whose routine police violence against peaceful protests has been condemned by international human rights organizations, absurdly proclaimed his support for the “right to protest,” and that “every citizen must be able to express his convictions and demands, safe from all violence and pressure.”

Three police involved in the beating of Zecler have been placed in temporary detention. The government has announced an internal review of the attack on the refugee encampment on Monday, including the assault of journalist Remy Buisine, by its internal police investigators (IGPN), whose role is to investigate police but inevitably clear them of all wrongdoing.

On Thursday, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin falsely claimed in an interview on the 8 p.m. France2 evening news that Buisine had refused to testify in the IGPN investigation, which Buisine has refuted in a tweet, stating that no one had attempted to contact him.

The Socialist Party (PS), the Greens and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmisive France party have intervened into the protest movement to channel it behind empty appeals for police reform. These parties all support the buildup of a police state against growing opposition in the working class over social inequality, and backed the imposition of the two-year state of emergency by the PS under President François Hollande. They are terrified over the possibility of an explosion of working class anger and the development of a movement of the working class against capitalism.

Hollande published a statement on Twitter calling on Macron to withdraw the “global security” law, adding that there is “more honour” in withdrawing a law “when the risk is to create incomprehension and violence.”

LFI deputy Adrien Quatennens called on Darmanin to “go in the direction of de-escalation” through the “removal of the [Paris police] prefect [Didier] Lallement and the withdrawal of the law that is contested even in the ranks of the [governing] majority.”

Mélenchon, speaking to reporters at the protest on Saturday, said that “it is time to proceed to take in hand the police and, to be more clear, to a refounding of the police.” He gave no details about what such a “refounding” would involve, except to declare that in a “democratic” government the police would be “guardians of the peace.”

Mélenchon’s aim is to conceal from workers the essential historical role of the police as the direct repressive arms of the capitalist state, tasked with protecting the interest of a tiny capitalist elite that has amassed immense wealth against popular opposition from below. Macron’s rapid turn to the building of an authoritarian police state is part of a turn towards dictatorship by capitalist governments around the world: from Brazil and the United States, to Germany, where the fascist Alternative for Germany has been elevated to the official opposition party in the German parliament.

This process is being fueled by the tremendous growth of social inequality that has been intensified by the coronavirus pandemic. The answer to this strategy of the ruling class is the building of an international revolutionary movement of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish workers’ states, expropriate the wealth of the financial elite, and reorganize economy to meet social need.

French government orders dissolution of leading Muslim rights group

Samuel Tissot

On November 27, the Collectif Contre Islamophobie en France (CCIF) published a “final statement” in response to a November 19 dissolution order from the government. It stated that the board of directors had in fact pronounced its own voluntary self-dissolution, behind closed doors, on October 29. On November 28, the CCIF’s website and social media accounts were removed.

Last week, the CCIF stated on Twitter that they were “reproached for doing our legal work, applying the law and demanding its application.” It described the dissolution order as “as a terrible message to citizens of the Muslim faith: ‘you do not have the right to defend your rights.’”

The CCIF was one of the largest charities in France, primarily offering legal support to Muslims across the country in discrimination cases. It was founded in 2003 by Samy Debah and led legal campaigns against the 2004 law banning religious symbols in schools, the 2010 law banning full-face veils like the burqa, and the 2016 El Khomri law allowing employers to impose “ideological and religious neutrality” on workers.

Despite the charity’s well-recorded defense of French law, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin described the CCIF as an “Islamist office against the republic.”

Barakacity is another charity based in France that received a dissolution order from Darmanin’s office. Over the past ten years, it has provided humanitarian aid to over 2 million people. The charity’s founder, Idriss Sihamedi, was accused of spreading “hateful, discriminatory, and violent ideas.” In October, Sihamedi and his family were subject to a violent no-knock raid in which he was beaten in front of his wife and children, who did not have time to dress. Although Barakacity has pledged to fight the order, Sihamedi is currently seeking asylum in Turkey.

BarakaCity employees (Facebook photo)

Before issuing the order, Darminin described both CCIF and Barakacity as “enemies of the republic.” In flagrant violation of the secular principle of laïcité, which the government falsely claims to defend, since the beginning of the year the government has closed 71 Muslim schools and institutions. Since the murder of schoolteacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist of Chechen origin, 231 Muslims were deported.

The Macron government’s claims to be protecting the population against Islamist terrorism are shot through with hypocrisy. The French imperialist state itself maintains an alliance with ultra-conservative theocratic-monarchy of Saudi Arabia and uses far-right Islamist militias in its regime change operations across the Middle East and North Africa, from Libya to Syria and beyond.

The CCIF has long been a target of the French political establishment. In 2017, it published a piece criticizing ex-Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who followed Macron from the Parti Socialiste to the newly-formed La Republique En Marche. The CCIF criticized Valls for twisting the notion of “republic” and “secularism” to attack Muslims and Roma, accusing him of legitimizing far-right views. In the aftermath of the November 2015 attacks in Paris, the CCIF also campaigned against the state’s attacks on democratic rights after its declaration of a state of emergency.

In moving to officially ban the charity, Macron has realized the wishes of the neo-fascist National Rally. In 2016, National Rally Senator David Rachline released a press statement specifically calling for the dissolution of CCIF. Rachline claimed he was outraged by the CCIF’s campaign “for the repeal of the laws banning headscarves in schools and the full veil in public spaces.”

In response to the CCIF’s tweets, another state agency, the Interministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalization (CIPDR), accused the CCIF of “duplicity” and of spreading “the fallacious idea that France is a racist anti-Muslim country.” Christian Gravel, a close associate of Valls, was appointed as CIPDR Security General in October. The state instructed the agency to set up a “republican” counter-discourse unit, working to deny the existence of an anti-Muslim campaign and to spin mounting attacks on Muslims as the defense of republican values.

The dissolution of the CCIF is a drastic attack on fundamental democratic rights, as the French government prepares an “anti-separatist” law that would effectively illegalize what it calls “radical” Islam and give the state enormous powers to dissolve legal associations. The dissolution order to the CCIF makes clear that, by introducing this law, the Macron administration intends to permanently undermine the democratic rights of France’s six-million-strong Muslim minority. This policy threatens the democratic rights of the entire working class.

Darmanin’s arbitrary assertion that the CCIF is an enemy of the state, without any evidence of illegal behavior, is a drastic attack not only on the democratic rights of Muslims, moreover, but on the freedom of association. There can be little doubt that such draconian dissolution orders will soon be turned against other associations, organizations, or parties. Amnesty International described the legal grounds for the dissolution order as “problematic” and “vague.”

Initially, Prime Minister Jean Castex had said that he planned to dissolve “all those associations whose complicity with radical Islamism can be established.” This suggested that the state would publicly provide some evidence to justify taking the extraordinary measure of dissolving the association.

Ultimately, however, the government did not bother to provide any evidence of links it alleged the CCIF had to “radical Islamist” groups as a pretext to dissolve it. This only further underscores its contempt for the law and for democratic rights.

“If the CCIF sometimes defends a rather strict version of Islam, it remains prudent and acts in a legal manner,” Professor Franck Frégosi of Sciences-Po-Aix told LCI. “To my knowledge, it has never called for murder, vengeance, or the overthrow of the Republic.”

The history of France and of Europe in the 20th century bears witness to the extreme dangers posed by relentless official scapegoating of religious or national minorities. The cultivation by the ruling class of political anti-Semitism in late 19th-century France as a right-wing counterweight to the socialist movement played a significant role in the development of European fascism and the preparation of world war and the Holocaust.

Today, amid mounting working class anger at Macron’s policies of austerity and of “herd immunity” on the pandemic, it is clear that the government is trying to incite a fascistic atmosphere, using layers of the Muslim population as scapegoats. Workers must be warned: while French Muslims are attacked today, these measures will be used as a precedent to justify attacks on the entire population tomorrow. It is critical to fight for and build a socialist movement in the working class against war and against the incitement of anti-Muslim hatreds.

Migrants protest in India demanding right to return to New Zealand

Tom Peters

Hundreds of stranded migrant workers have protested in India in recent weeks, calling on New Zealand’s government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to allow them to return.

More than 10,000 people who normally live in NZ were stuck outside the country in March when the Labour Party-led government imposed draconian border restrictions in response to the pandemic. The National Herald estimated that 2,000 of work visa holders have been stuck in India for nine months. Some have been separated from family members in New Zealand. Many have lost their jobs and are in severe hardship.

Migrants protest in New Delhi demanding right to return to New Zealand (Source: Facebook)

On November 17, more than 50 people demonstrated in New Delhi. Rallies, organised through social media, have also been held in Sangrur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Mohali and Gujarat. Protest organiser Jagdeep Dhillon said they called on the New Zealand government to give all temporary visa holders visa extensions equal to the duration of the border closure, and to allow all workers normally resident in NZ to return.

Tens of thousands of NZ citizens have returned from overseas during the pandemic. On arrival, they are required to spend two weeks in a quarantine hotel.

The coalition government, which includes the Green Party and is backed by the trade unions, is discriminating against migrants in order to divert popular anger and prevent a unified struggle by workers from all backgrounds against soaring unemployment, austerity and social inequality. Within New Zealand, thousands of migrants on temporary visas who have lost their jobs are barred from accessing unemployment benefits. Tens of thousands who have applied for residency are facing endless delays and fear that they may be forced to leave the country.

Migrants protest in Mohali (Source: Facebook)

In response to the Indian protests, NZ immigration minister Kris Faafoi told Radio Tarana the government was “allowing entry to some normally resident temporary visa holders who can demonstrate a longstanding connection to New Zealand and have a job or business to return to.” Such statements are thoroughly misleading. Only a small handful have been allowed to return.

Urvi, who attended the New Delhi protest, told the World Socialist Web Site she had studied and worked in New Zealand since 2017. She was visiting her grandmother, who was unwell, when the border closed. “My return flight was booked for March 23 and on the 19th they just shut the borders and no time was given to re-book a flight and come back,” she said.

Urvi applied to Immigration NZ (INZ) for an exemption to return on humanitarian grounds, but was turned down. “They won’t tell us what is humanitarian, according to them. People’s lives are at stake but that is not considered humanitarian,” she said. Unable to return, Urvi lost her job in New Zealand with a bank.

Urvi

Urvi said she had been impressed by media coverage glorifying Ardern’s response to the far-right terrorist attack in Christchurch in March 2019, but she now criticised the portrayal of New Zealand as “the most compassionate government in the world.”

“I’ve written to so many MPs and ministers,” Urvi said. “The government doesn’t even acknowledge our emails. They are not ignoring one or two people, they are ignoring thousands of people writing to them.” The New Zealand High Commission had refused to send anyone to meet with New Delhi protesters to receive their list of demands, she said.

Swarna had visited India to give blood to her mother, who was gravely ill, just before the NZ border shut. She has spoken with several other people who had travelled for medical reasons. “There’s a girl who came to India for three weeks’ holiday to have eye surgery because she can’t afford it in New Zealand. One guy I know had an accident in Christchurch and he came to India to rest because there was no one to take care of him in New Zealand.”

She said Ardern was using COVID-19 as a pretext “to throw the migrants away,” with many being plunged into poverty. “We are thinking about each penny because we haven’t earned anything for nine months. It is winter in India and one migrant was saying to me they don’t have enough winter clothes because they left them in New Zealand. When we travelled to India in March it was going to be summer.”

Zee, her husband and their seven-year-old daughter, have been living out of suitcases for nine months after travelling to Bangalore for what was meant to be a four-week visit to see her mother. The family had lived in Christchurch since 2018 and she is employed as an administrator for the Canterbury District Health Board. Zee told the WSWS, “My manager extended my unpaid leave up to January, and if I do not get back in January I will lose my job.”

Despite having no income, Zee and her husband were making repayments on a student loan and paying rent for their Christchurch house. “Whatever meagre savings we had are almost exhausted. Perhaps we will have to use our credit cards to pay our further rent as that is the only option we have,” she said.

Zee with her husband and daughter

“We are staying in my husband’s sister’s house and I don’t know what to do next. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Everything is in New Zealand, we don’t have anything in India. It’s been months that I have not had a peaceful sleep. My daughter is really distressed. She misses her teachers, her school, her friends. I have tried multiple times to apply for an exemption [to return] and I got rejected despite working for the health sector.”

Zee noted that the NZ border was never truly closed and double standards are being applied. “There are cricketers who are coming in and getting tested positive [for COVID-19], there are rugby players, nannies of actresses are being allowed, they are considered as critical workers. What are we then? Why can’t we come back?

“It’s not the general public who do not want us back,” she said. “All our Kiwi friends are very kind, they keep vouching for us, saying that we have the right to come back. It’s just the government that is playing with our lives.”

Zee was scathing about the media’s praise for Ardern’s supposed kindness. “My husband was just showing me that she is nominated for Time magazine’s Person of the Year. This is just a hoax,” she said. During the October election campaign, and in the weeks since then, Ardern has not spoken about the plight of migrants stranded overseas.

RCEP: An Indian Miscalculation?

Sandip Kumar Mishra

The conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) between China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and 10 Southeast Asian countries is an important development in the Indo-Pacific’s economic architecture. After almost eight years of negotiations, the deal—which creates the world’s biggest trading bloc—is finally done. Incidentally, India was part of the negotiations from the very beginning, but opted out in November 2019. It did so to protect itself from possible dumping of Chinese products in the Indian market. Beyond this, further details and reasons have not been shared.

India was likely expecting the RCEP talks to extend indefinitely after its withdrawal from the negotiations. New Delhi could have been overconfident in its belief that a regional free trade deal would ultimately collapse if a 1.3 billion rising economy such as India refused to join. India did have the example of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to go on. New Delhi’s non-participation caused significant damage to China’s intention of redrawing the regional economic map. India was also convinced that following its withdrawal, countries such as Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Vietnam might be dissuaded from going with China, fearing its dominance in the RCEP. Overall, the RCEP’s actualisation is thus an important setback to Indian foreign policy in recent years.

India expected most of the ASEAN countries to review their highly China-dependent supply chains in the aftermath of reports emerging about China’s role in the origin and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and several Chinese attempts to change the regional status quo. In fact, given the widening gap for example between Australia and China over the past few months, India’s expectations appeared on point. New Delhi tried to utilise this opportunity to strengthen its strategic linkages with the Quad, and other ASEAN countries.

The RCEP’s finalisation thus seems to have India off-guard. A plethora of arguments could be made to suggest a lack of significant implications for India. We could be reminded that India in any case has free trade agreements (FTAs) with 12 out of the 15 RCEP countries, bilaterally or collectively. The possibility of India joining the RCEP at a later stage, after sufficiently strengthening its domestic market, could be offered. Some could even argue the possibility of India becoming an observer in the RCEP—such a proposal has already been mooted by Japan. India attempting to compensate for this exclusion by signing another free trade deal with other blocs is one more potential suggestion.

It is however important to admit a missed opportunity. The rule of thumb for any multilateral trade negotiation is that rather than opting out, it is better to stay the course of negotiations and later attempt modification from within. By leaving the table, the door to influence the process generally closes for the departee. India thus made a miscalculation.

Further, even if—in fact especially if—India decided leave the negotiations, it became critically important to reach out to friendly countries in the region and convince them of India’s concerns. India should have tried to at least persuade said friends to move more slowly in concluding the RCEP. New Delhi was unable to do so successfully. It got tied down with the border standoff with China—perhaps a clever ploy by Beijing to distract New Delhi from developments leading up to the RCEP. India was so occupied that it did not seemingly take enough notice of the unprecedented cooperation Japan and South Korea have undertaken with China in addressing the pandemic, as well as in bringing their economies back on the track.

The RCEP as it looks now is a setback for India. It has exposed the limitations of India’s influence among even like-minded countries in the region. It has helped China position itself as a votary of free trade in the region, and India as insufficiently prepared—or even a hurdle in the way. India may deny most of these concerns, although they are obvious to countries in the region. Apart from the geopolitical issues, India is also likely to now face structural obstacles in its trade with the region.

India may cite its trade deficit with FTA partner countries, which reached almost US$ 105 billion in 2018, as needing to be taken stock of. However, it is equally important to realise that most Southeast Asian countries, and South Korea and Japan, are dissatisfied with what they see as Indian oversensitivity about the trade deficit. They argue that bilateral economic exchanges are multi-layered and with innumerable auxiliaries, of which India must not take such a narrow view.

It is time for Indian policymakers to adopt a more nuanced and far-sighted approach to the region’s economic and security architecture, and carefully chart New Delhi’s path and place in it. A sense of overconfidence or self-doubt will not be good for India or for the region, which is the RCEP’s most important lesson.