Ukrainian President Zelensky meets Turkey’s Erdogan as US threatens Russia

Jason Melanovski & Clara Weiss

This weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, amid rising tensions between Moscow, Kiev and Washington.

Threats coming from Kiev and above all from the Biden administration in Washington are driving a dangerous military escalation. After Biden denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer” last month, the Ukrainian President’s Office endorsed a strategy document, the “ Crimean platform ,” pledging to seize Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea. Ankara confirmed Friday that the US will send two warships through the Turkish straits into the Black Sea.

There are deep divisions in Turkish ruling circles over relations with NATO and Russia. Ten retired Turkish admirals were arrested last week as a bitter conflict erupted inside the Turkish state over whether to scrap the 1936 Montreux Convention regulating passage between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Turkey, a NATO member state, has also developed close ties with Ukraine, signing multiple arms deals, notably involving the sale of Turkish drones.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy shakes hands with a soldier as he visits the Donbas region, eastern Ukraine, Thursday, April 8, 2021. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)

These conflicts were reflected in Erdogan’s concerned, somewhat ambiguous remarks at the meeting. As both Kiev and Moscow amass forces on their shared border, he stated: “We hope for the worrying escalation observed on the field recently to end as soon as possible, the ceasefire to continue and for the conflict to be resolved via dialogue on the basis of the Minsk agreements.”

While agreeing on military ties with Ukraine, Erdogan stressed that this cooperation was not directed against any other country.

At the same time, however, Erdogan backed Ukraine over Crimea, stating: “We reaffirmed our principled stance of not recognizing the annexation of Crimea.” In a joint declaration, Turkey endorsed Zelensky’s “Crimean platform” as “a new format for resolving the issue of the illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea.”

The NATO powers and Ukraine are reviving the conflict initiated by the 2014 coup in Ukraine, backed by Washington and Berlin, led by far-right groups in Kiev including the Right Sector militia and the Svoboda party. Anti-Russian threats by the Ukrainian far right led Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, including Crimea and the Donbass in eastern Ukraine, along the Russian border, to secede. Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea, voted to rejoin Russia in 2014.

Kiev’s announcement of plans to conquer Crimea and the Donbass, now controlled by Russian-backed separatists, is a declaration that it is planning war with Russia. It is driving renewed fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian army units in East Ukraine.

The joint declaration by Kiev and Ankara also pledged “efforts to improve the living conditions of Ukrainian citizens, in particular Crimean Tatars, who have been forced to leave their homeland, Crimea, as a result of the temporary occupation.” The Turkish government also announced on Saturday that it would help build 500 homes for Crimean Tatars in Ukraine.

Crimea was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire before being annexed by the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great in 1783. It is home to approximately 250,000 Crimean Tartars, 11.4 percent of Crimea’s population, who share linguistic and cultural ties with Turks.

In 2016, Erdogan made clear that he viewed Crimea as part of a “Greater Turkey”, stating, “Turkey cannot disregard its kinsmen in Western Thrace, Cyprus Crimea and anywhere else.” That same year, he warned that the Black Sea was turning into a “Russian lake.”

Exploiting ethnic tensions in Crimea has long been central to imperialist strategy in the region—that of the Nazi regime and its genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, but also of US imperialism during the Cold War. At that time, Turkey supported US imperialism’s efforts to foster nationalist, anti-Communist forces among Crimean Tatars to destabilize the Soviet Union. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s crimes against Crimea’s Tatar minority facilitated these efforts.

Zelensky and the Biden administration are clearly banking on Erdogan’s reactionary Turkish nationalism to press Ankara to support aggressive action. After the summit, Zelensky tweeted: “We share common values with #Turkey, including human life and support.”

Washington, Ukraine’s main military supporter, plays the central role in this conflict, and there are indications that behind the scenes, it is applying intense pressure on Kiev. Significantly, Biden waited more than two months after his inauguration, until April 2, to contact Zelensky. He did not call Zelensky until the Ukrainian president launched a crackdown on pro-Russian political opposition forces in Ukraine, shut down pro-Russia media outlets, and announced plans for an invasion of Crimea.

On Sunday, speaking to NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken threatened Moscow that “there will be consequences” for amassing troops on the Russian-Ukrainian border. “President Biden’s been very clear about this. If Russia acts recklessly, or aggressively, there will be costs, there will be consequences,” Blinken stated.

This week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is to meet in person with NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg to discuss Ukraine. He will also visit US troops in Germany and meet German defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer who has threatened Russia in a recent interview. Washington is trying to use the crisis to pressure the European powers for new economic sanctions, as the NATO powers launch an even larger military build-up, targeting Russia.

In the Washington Post Sunday, Evelyn N. Farkas a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia under the Obama administration, wrote that “sanctions are coming, and they are a good start.” Farkas claimed that failing to back Ukraine against Russia would also embolden China.

Since the 2014 coup, Ukraine has received billions of dollars in US military aid. Moreover, as it stokes a suicidal conflict with Russia that threatens to escalate into all-out regional and global war, the crisis-ridden Zelensky government is also seeking to divert from the explosive social and political discontent building up in the country. The seven-year civil war in the East is deeply unpopular. Zelensky’s false promises to end it and to discontinue the rabidly anti-Russian policies of his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, were the main reasons for his election in 2019.

An estimated 7-9 million young Ukrainians now work abroad, at least for part of the year, in the EU and Russia. Many young men are leaving Ukraine to escape not only poverty, but also conscription.

While the Ukrainian regime unsurprisingly reveals little about this sensitive subject, it appears there is little popular support for joining the military other than for a paycheck—apart from among members of far-right paramilitary groups like the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector.

In 2015, a little after a year since the civil war in Donbass began, a Ukrainian official revealed that 16,000 Ukrainian troops had abandoned their posts, many with weapons in hand. The Ukrainian government responded by passing a law allowing commanders to shoot deserters.

Official statistics from January 2019 revealed that 9,300 Ukrainians are classified as deserters; real numbers are likely far higher. In recent years, the Ukrainian military has stopped using conscripts for combat operations, allowing only professional soldiers on the civil war’s front line.

For workers in Ukraine facing the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused nearly 1.9 million cases and over 37,000 deaths, as well as the industrial collapse and impoverishment following the 2014 coup and civil war, a suicidal war with Russia has no appeal.

Nonetheless, the danger of such a war, which poses the risk of a much wider regional and even global conflagration, is very real. The course of events is exposing the disastrous military and political consequences of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist regime, three decades ago, in 1991. Halting the drive to war requires building an international socialist anti-war movement in the working class, against imperialism and the capitalist system as a whole.

Albanian government deploys military against striking air traffic controllers

Markus Salzmann

On Wednesday, the Albanian government ended a strike by air traffic controllers in the capital city of Tirana with a massive deployment of military and police force. Twenty-eight strikers were temporarily arrested. The air traffic controllers were protesting for an increase in their salaries and against the dismissal of colleagues.

Police vehicles arrive at Tirana airport

A total of 65 air traffic controllers stopped work for 24 hours on Tuesday evening. As Tirana airport is the only international airport in the country available for passenger flights, the strike had an immediate impact. More than a dozen flights had to be canceled. Parts of the airport are also used for military purposes. To break the strike, the Ministry of Infrastructure hired air traffic controllers from Turkey and Greece.

The work stoppage was directed against the brutal wage cuts and dismissals that the operating company AlbControll had ordered last year. The company was founded in 1992 as a state-owned company and became a public limited company in 1999. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year, it has cut air traffic controllers’ salaries by almost 70 percent and most recently laid off five workers. The strikers demanded a return to the agreed pay level and the reinstatement of the dismissed colleagues.

The dispute began after five workers reported temporarily off duty due to stress. Immediately afterwards, two of them were dismissed. As a result, 30 other workers declared themselves unfit for work in solidarity.

Even before that, the company had repeatedly threatened the workers with sanctions if they did not accept the wage cuts. A week earlier, negotiations with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy failed to produce results because the government justified and supported the wage cuts.

The public prosecutor’s office has opened proceedings for abuse of authority. At least 24 of the air traffic controllers were interrogated for hours by police, according to their lawyer Rezart Kthupi. Two are still in custody, and one is under house arrest.

Government and opposition parties alike condemned the strike. Several politicians called the walkout a “threat to national security.” Prime Minister Edi Rama called it “illegal” and railed against the strikers at an event. “These destructive forces, these totally blind forces, these forces of the past that want to take the country hostage by any means, they have no chance to stop us.”

Albanian President Ilir Meta expressed similar sentiments. Infrastructure Minister Belinda Balluku also declared, “No one will take our country hostage.” She demanded the strikers be punished with full force, saying they had endangered the safety of the population.

On the other hand, the air traffic controllers’ lawyer stressed that the workers had acted under applicable laws and guidelines. One air traffic controller told Fax News TV he felt threatened by Balluku’s remarks. “I don’t know how I can continue working like this.” The Association of European Air Traffic Controllers (ATCEUC) said it was “appalled” by the events and called for the immediate release of their detained colleagues.

The brutal crackdown on the air traffic controllers is intended to make an example of anyone who dares to rebel against exploitation and oppression.

The vast majority of the population of the Balkan country is in a desperate situation. Even before the pandemic, the average wage in Albania was the equivalent of just 500 euros. Since then, thousands have been laid off or had their wages cut. Many of the approximately one million Albanians working abroad because of the catastrophic situation have also lost their income and could not transfer money home to their families.

According to the official unemployment surveys, which are not very convincing, the number of unemployed increased by 36,000 people last year. Hundreds of small businesses were forced to close. There is no state aid for ordinary working people. The IMF recently revised its growth forecast downwards by 1.1 percentage points from October. In 2020, the economy contracted by 3.5 percent, and the GDP fell by 3.3 percent.

The ruthlessness of the political elite is particularly evident in the pandemic. Since November last year, the number of COVID-19 infections has risen steadily. In the country of 2.8 million inhabitants, it reached almost 1,200 a day in February. The country’s already ailing hospitals were completely overwhelmed; only then did the government impose some measures to protect the population.

Even vaccinations have only recently been made available on a larger scale. But this is only because the tourism industry will be reopened in the summer. For this reason, workers in this sector are to be vaccinated as a priority. On April 11, 12 deaths and 529 new infections were still reported.

All the establishment parties are completely discredited. The campaign for the parliamentary elections on April 25 is essentially a political mudslinging contest. Although the parties have different roots, their election programmes hardly differ. None of them addresses the dramatic social situation. Instead, they all promise tax cuts, business support and the fight against corruption.

The Socialist Party (PS) of government leader Edi Rama won the last election by a large margin and was able to govern alone. The PD (Democrats) and the LSI (Socialist Movement for Integration) were punished electorally and have been in opposition ever since.

Rama’s PS and the LSI have been playing the nationalist card. Rama again brought up the idea of unification with Kosovo that could lead to fierce conflicts and possibly a war with Serbia, which has never recognised Kosovo's independence. This was fueled by the cancellation of EU accession negotiations with Albania last year after the Dutch government opposed it.

The country’s political elite fears strikes and protests by the working class. Last week, opposition leader Lulzim Basha (PD) therefore promised miners a new law on labour protection if his party won the elections.

In the last three years alone, 19 miners have died in Albania. The number of injured is not known because nonfatal incidents are not reported in the first place. Yet not a single company has been held accountable. In 2019, miners in Bulqiza had formed their own union and went on strike accusing the government and established unions of working in the interests of the private mining companies.

Brutal conflict in Tigray threatens breakup of Ethiopia

Jean Shaoul

Bloody conflict in Tigray, one of Ethiopia’s semi-autonomous, ethnically defined provinces in the north of the country, is fueling support for secession from Ethiopia’s federal state.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched what he called a “law-and-order” operation against the regional government of Tigray, run by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), last November, in response to what he claimed was an “attack” by Tigray’s ruling party on an army compound.

It followed moves by the federal government to bypass the regional government after Tigray rejected Abiy’s decision to postpone elections due to the pandemic and went ahead with its own elections in September.

Ethiopian refugees line up for water in Qadarif region, easter Sudan, Sunday, November 15, 2020. Thousands of Ethiopians fled the war in Tigray region into Sudan. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali)

While Abiy declared at the end of November that he had defeated the TPLF, fighting has continued, with forces from Ethiopia’s Amhara region in the west—which have effectively annexed parts of Tigray to Amhara—and the Eritrean army in the east fighting alongside federal forces against the TPLF. With more than half of Ethiopia’s army based in Tigray, a legacy of the 20-year-long war with Eritrea, Abiy could not rely on the military’s support, to the extent that he sacked his army chief, head of intelligence and foreign minister days after the fighting began.

Aid workers and diplomats believe that thousands have died in the conflict. Villages have been shelled. More than two thirds of Tigray’s health facilities have been destroyed and there has been widespread looting of public and private property—including food stores and oxen for ploughing.

More than one million people have been displaced, with around 60,000 fleeing to Sudan. More than two thirds of Tigrayans, 4.5 million people, have been without electricity, communications and other essential services for more than four months and are in need of emergency food supplies. For three months, the federal government blocked all access to Tigray and imposed a news blackout of the conflict, shutting down telephone lines and the Internet.

Tigrayans fleeing the conflict, as well as aid agencies, have testified to massacres, the most terrible atrocities and sexual violence. Dominik Stillhart, operations manager at the International Committee of the Red Cross, said, “The violence against the civilian population, especially sexual violence… seems to be a feature of the conflict.”

Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, warned of “blanket denials and finger-pointing” as evidence mounts of atrocities committed by all sides, including the Ethiopian National Defence Force, the Eritrean army, the TPLF and its supporters, as well as fighters from Amhara province.

The US, European Union (EU) and United Nations have condemned Eritrea’s presence in Tigray, with Brussels imposing sanctions. The incoming US Biden administration put pressure on the United Arab Emirates to halt its military operations in Yemen, leading to the decommissioning of its drone base in Assab that had been supporting Ethiopian forces against the TPLF. It has called for the withdrawal of Amhara forces from western Tigray, which Amhara lays claim to, a demand Abiy has rejected, dependent as he is on Amhara support both to regain control of Tigray and win the elections set for June.

After months of denying ongoing military operations in Tigray, reports of ethnic atrocities committed against civilians and the involvement of Eritrea’s military in the conflict, Abiy has finally conceded that Eritrean forces did cross into Tigray, claiming that “they feared an attack from the TPLF.” Members of Ethiopia’s interim government in Tigray have admitted that Eritrea controls a 100 kilometre strip of Ethiopian territory along the border, although Abiy said Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki had agreed to withdraw his forces from the region “as soon as Ethiopia’s army could control the trenches along the border.”

To evade responsibility for potential crimes against humanity, he sought to blame Eritrean forces for “atrocities… committed in Tigray region,” thereby antagonizing his ally Afwerki. Should Eritrea withdraw its troops from Tigray, Abiy would be unable to regain control of the region, as thousands of young Tigrayans are reportedly taking up arms.

The Tigrayan conflict has been brewing for some time. The TPLF, a nationalist movement founded in 1974, played a key role in defeating the Moscow-aligned government of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991. It became the dominant party in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of several militia groups and parties, under the leadership of Meles Zenawi, a Tigrayan, that imposed an authoritarian regime on Africa’s second most populous country of 112 million people.

As resentment grew against Tigrayan political and economic dominance—Tigrayans constitute just six percent of the population—politicians whipped up ethnic tensions in opposition to a unified struggle by the impoverished masses against the Ethiopian elites seeking to open the country to foreign investment. While Ethiopia saw more than a decade of rising growth rates, some of the highest in Africa that turned the country into the economic powerhouse of the region, little of this trickled down to the impoverished masses.

There were huge protests starting in 2014, precipitated by a central government land grab of historic Oromo lands that were handed over to overseas companies—often from the Gulf and China, for infrastructure and export-orientated agribusiness. Ethnic protests in Oromia and Amhara, who constitute about 35 percent and 27 percent of the population, saw thousands killed and tens of thousands arrested.

The ensuing political crisis forced the resignation in February 2018 of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, who took office after Meles’ death in 2012. He was succeeded by Abiy Ahmed, a former military intelligence officer and an Oromo with close links to Washington. He was welcomed at home and abroad as a “reformer,” receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the 20-year-long war with Eritrea one year later. In November 2019, he disbanded the EPRDF, replacing it with the Prosperity Party (PP), which TPLF refused to join.

Abiy released tens of thousands of political prisoners, ended the internet blackout imposed by the previous government, lifted a ban on several political parties, some of which had been designated “terrorist” groups, paving the way for their leaders to return to Ethiopia. He introduced a raft of measures aimed at reducing the TPLF’s dominance, including retiring their military and government officials, instigating corruption charges against some members and announcing plans for the privatisation of swathes of the state-owned economy and liberalisation of the banks.

But Abiy’s promised new dawn was short lived. The military, enraged by the changes, mounted an abortive coup in 2019. Despite Abiy’s promise to end ethnic discrimination, ethnic violence increased, with 1.7 million internally displaced people living in camps. Viewed as collectively responsible for the crimes of the previous regime, some 100,000 Tigrayans were driven from their homes and were living in camps even before the conflict erupted last year. Land sales continued, under conditions where 80 percent of Ethiopians are dependent on the land for their subsistence and at least 25 percent of the population ekes out an existence on less than $2 a day.

Tigray is only one of the country’s festering ethnic conflicts in a country that is a mosaic of ethnicities and languages. The Financial Times recently cited Abiy admitting that Ethiopia’s federal army was fighting a guerrilla war on at least eight separate fronts as unrest grows across Ethiopia.

Abiy also faces an increasingly fraught border dispute with neighbouring Sudan, which in December moved its forces into the long-contested border region of al-Fashaqa, the fertile agricultural triangle farmed by Ethiopians since the mid-1990s, that Khartoum claims as its own, prompting Addis Abba to redeploy troops to the border. The hostilities forced Ethiopia’s Amhara farmers to flee the region.

Abiy is also facing Egyptian and Sudanese opposition to Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and its plans to fill what is Africa’s largest dam on its own schedule that its neighbours fear could jeopardise their water supply in the event of a drought. The Blue Nile, whose source lies in Ethiopia, provides more than 80 percent of the Nile’s waters. With Ethiopia refusing to negotiate the timetable, there are fears that Egypt and/or Sudan may support the armed insurgencies in Benishangul-Gumuz and Oromia regions.

Under such conditions, the TPLF and other insurgent groups would seize the opportunity to resist the federal government in Addis Ababa, precipitating a wider civil war that threatens not just the survival of Abiy’s government but the stability of the wider region.

57 years after the 1964 coup, Brazil again confronts specter of dictatorship

Miguel Andrade & Tomas Castanheira

President Jair Bolsonaro’s sudden firing of his defense minister and the entire command of the armed forces has unleashed an unprecedented military and political crisis in Brazil.

That the fascistic Brazilian president’s action coincided with the anniversary of the 1964 US-backed military coup was no coincidence. Bolsonaro is an unabashed defender of the military overthrow of President Joao Goulart, which ushered in two decades of blood-soaked dictatorship against the working class and the youth in Brazil and a wave of similar coups across South America.

President Jair Bolsonao and sacked Army commander Gen. Edson Pujol (Credit: AgênciaBrasil)

Today, 57 years after that terrible historical event, the Brazilian working class once again confronts imminent dictatorial threats and the reemergence of the military at the center of political power.

Bolsonaro’s efforts to consolidate authoritiarian rule, which he has advanced since assuming the presidency, have escalated sharply since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brazil has now passed the grim milestone of 350,000 COVID-19 deaths, and the pandemic remains absolutely out of control. Each week the country breaks new terrible records, with the daily death toll rising above 4,100 twice in the last week

An unprecedented social crisis is ravaging working class homes. Unemployment has reached record levels, and tens of millions of Brazilians have been thrown into poverty since the pandemic began. Recent studies indicate that half of Brazil’s population is suffering from food insecurity.

But from the point of view of the capitalist class, we live in a golden age. The number of billionaires in Brazil has increased from 45 to 65 over the last year of mass death, according to the new Forbes list. The wealth accumulated by this parasitic oligarchy had an extraordinary growth, from $127 billion in 2020 to $219 billion in 2021.

Such grotesque levels of social inequality, as well as the imposition of mass killing by COVID-19, are radically incompatible with democratic forms of government. These objective trends are behind the remarkable political events of recent weeks.

The unprecedented replacement of the military command—traditionally changed only in the transition between governments—was carried out by Bolsonaro amid demands that the armed forces subordinate themselves fully to his government’s political agenda, in particular his declared war on coronavirus lockdowns.

Bolsonaro’s most immediate goal is to establish total control over the repressive apparatus and to nullify the power of local authorities. Acting in coordination toward this end, Bolsonaro’s closest allies (including his son Eduardo Bolsonaro) have openly incited uprisings by the Military Police against orders by state governors to restrict social movement. In the House of Representatives, Bolsonaro’s allies tried to push through a law allowing the president to mobilize local police during a pandemic.

This conspiracy to establish a de facto presidential dictatorship in Brazil is still in full swing.

Bolsonaro made this clear in a speech against shutting down economic activities during an event in Santa Catarina on April 7. Pointing to the imminent threat of a nationwide social explosion, he stated that he is already asking the armed forces: “If this breaks out across Brazil what are we going to do? Do we have the manpower to contain the amount of problems we may have ahead?”

Bolsonaro reviewing Brazilian paratroopers (Credit:Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil)

Bolsonaro’s speech exposes the real dilemma of the armed forces and the Brazilian ruling class. Even though they are aware of the explosive social situation, the fired commanders and the bourgeois opposition consider Bolsonaro’s coup incitement itself to be a contributing factor for social instability, which may precipitate an uncontrollable reaction by the working class. The president, for his part, warns that if the military does not support his preventive authoritarian measures today, it may not have the strength to repress a mass uprising tomorrow.

A fraudulent bourgeois opposition

Although growing sectors of the Brazilian ruling class are seeking to distance themselves from the Bolsonaro government, they are incapable of offering any alternative perspective to its policy of mass misery and death and the drive toward authoritarian rule in Brazil

This corrupted capitalist opposition presented itself in a letter signed last month by five hundred economists and businessmen, including bank directors and CEOs of large corporations, in opposition to the catastrophic pandemic policy adopted by Bolsonaro.

The dissident factions of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, as well as its counterparts and governments internationally, see the explosive spread of COVID-19 in Brazil as a threat to their profits. This is reflected in worried editorials about the Brazilian crisis published by leading newspapers around the world.

World-renowned Brazilian physician and neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis has defined the situation in the country as a “biological Fukushima”: the uncontrolled contagion provokes a chain reaction in that it increases the potential for the emergence of new variants, which are themselves more contagious. Such uncontrolled spread is a direct threat to Brazil’s impoverished neighbors in South America, and has the potential to bring the already insufficient global efforts against the pandemic back to square one.

Unable to adopt effective measures against the pandemic, and supporting Bolsonaro’s criminal herd immunity policy, the dissident factions within the Brazilian bourgeoisie limit themselves to pleading with the government for the acceleration of vaccinations, adoption of low-cost measures by the state to contain the transmission of the virus, and the forging of a coalition of bourgeois parties to face the health crisis. This cowardly program finds political expression in the unified “opposition” to Bolsonaro by the governors of the Workers Party (PT) and the traditional parties of the Brazilian right, such as the PSDB. In every case, the social distancing measures adopted in their states are absolutely insufficient to put an end to the COVID-19 nightmare.

At the same time, these forces of the bourgeois political establishment, especially the PT, work tirelessly to dispel the concerns of workers and youth about the sword that is hanging over their heads. They are unanimous in pointing to the generals (those who wield this sword!) as the main guarantor against the threat of another dictatorship in Brazil.

Bolsonaro’s sacking of his defense minister and the entire high command is portrayed by the PT-led “opposition” not as a serious threat to democracy in Brazil, but as its opposite: a sign that everything remains in place. “It is a message that the armed forces are not at the service of a coup attempt,” said Bohn Gass, the PT leader in the House.

A note signed by all the parties that falsely pose as a “left” opposition to the government—among them the PT, the pseudo-left PSOL, and the Maoist PCdoB—characterized the president’s actions as “authoritarian delusions.” Opposing Bolsonaro to the military, the note stated that while the former still “has not overcome” the 1964 coup, “the armed forces and their main leaderships have stuck to the institutional role that the Federal Constitution assigned to them.”

The fraudulent—and insistent—promotion of the military as Bolsonaro’s “constitutionalist” opponents inevitably fuels sympathy for a deposition of the president by the armed forces themselves. Advocating a transfer of power to the vice president, Gen. Hamilton Mourão, PCdoB leader and Maranhão governor Flávio Dino declared, “Mourão in Bolsonaro’s place is exchanging barbarism for civilization.”

The fact that the military has once again been elevated to the role of the arbiter of the nation’s political future is proof of the profound deterioration of democratic forms of rule in Brazil, far beyond the “authoritarian delusions” of the fascist Jair Bolsonaro. Only 35 years since the launching of its “re-democratization” process, how is it possible that Brazil has sunk so deeply into this crisis?

The military’s path to power

The immense dangers that the Brazilian working class confronts today have their roots in the historical betrayals by its trade unionist, Pabloite and Stalinist leaderships in the 1980s. When the downfall of the Brazilian military regime, in the face of mass strikes and student protests threatened capitalism itself, these political forces, unified in the treacherous project of building the Workers Party, acted to divert a revolutionary uprising of the Brazilian working class behind illusions in a bourgeois-democratic regime.

These treacherous leaderships promoted the lie that it was possible to guarantee the political and social rights of the Brazilian working class without abolishing the capitalist state itself, and without settling accounts with the military and civilian politicians who commanded that brutal regime of torture and mass murder. With the support of the PT, the criminals of the ruling class were granted amnesty and were able to keep their positions behind the façade of the new regime.

During the 14 years that it ruled Brazil, the PT defended the interests of the ruling class while presiding over the highest levels of social inequality among the major economies of the world. At the same time, it more and more consistently brought the military back to the center of the national political arena.

In the initial years of his administration, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sent the armed forces into a criminal “peace-keeping” operation in Haiti, while fostering public confidence in a series of reactionary generals who became the advisers of Bolsonaro’s coup plots. Chief among them is Gen. Augusto Heleno, the commander of the Haiti intervention, who is now Bolsonaro’s intelligence chief.

The PT governments also made increasing use of the armed forces in “Guarantee Law and Order” operations against the Brazilian working class. In 2010, Lula celebrated the military occupation of the Alemão favela complex in Rio de Janeiro. In the face of a wave of violence against Alemão’s poor residents, he said, “The people saw the armed forces serving the Brazilian people.” His hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, turned the military’s apparatus of repression ever more openly against political protests.

Bolsonaro’s coming to power was not a political accident. It was the direct product of the historical betrayals of the Brazilian working class committed by the PT and its promoters among the pseudo-left.

For the independent political mobilization of the working class

Just as in the coup 57 years ago, the dictatorial turn by the Brazilian ruling class today has profound international implications. The 1964 coup in Brazil was used as a model and operational platform for even more brutal coups against the working class in countries like Chile, Uruguay and Argentina. The Brazilian dictatorship acted as an instrument for organizing counterrevolution throughout the continent, in close coordination with US imperialism.

Bolsonaro’s coup threats unfold as US imperialism is struggling to reestablish its hegemony over Latin America and transform the region into a front line in its “great power conflict” with China.

These efforts, which involve reckless and desperate regime change operations in countries like Venezuela, continue in full swing under Democratic President Joe Biden. Those who claim that the fact that Bolsonaro’s ally Donald Trump has left the White House is a further guarantee against a coup in Brazil are criminally misleading the working class, promoting illusions in the “democratic” role of US imperialism.

The lessons of history show that the only progressive way out of the current political crisis is to build a mass political movement of the Brazilian working class, unified with its class brothers in Latin America and internationally in the fight for socialism.

All the fundamental problems faced by Brazilian workers—the threats against democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic and spiraling social inequality—have a universal character: They can only be solved by expropriating the capitalist elite and destroying its state, and establishing the political power of the working class.

French mosque defaced with fascist graffiti amid Macron’s anti-Muslim campaign

Will Morrow

The defacing of the Avicenne cultural centre and mosque in the French city of Rennes over the weekend underscores the dangerous implications of the anti-Muslim atmosphere being whipped up by the government of Emmanuel Macron, and its politically criminal character.

The caretaker of the centre found the graffiti at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday morning as prayers were taking place. The graffiti included anti-Muslim slogans like “No to Islamisation,” as well as fascist and royalist statements, such as “immigration kills,” “The crusades will begin again,” “Long live the king” and “Catholicism religion of the state,” as well as Catholic crosses and the royalist fleur-de-lis.

Paris - Mosquée de Paris Moschee Camii (muratc3/Creative Commons)

After news of the attack broke nationally, the government issued a hypocritical condemnation. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin tweeted that “these anti-Muslim inscriptions are unacceptable.” He went to Rennes on Sunday afternoon, where he stated that “the president has asked me to inform the leaders of this association … of the disgust that these inscriptions inspire in us. All religious houses, all places of religious inspiration are welcome in our country and we owe protection to our Muslim fellow citizens just as to our Christian or Jewish fellow citizens.”

These statements should fool no one. It is the Macron government’s anti-Muslim campaign that is creating the political atmosphere directly emboldening openly fascist forces like those who carried out the attack in Rennes. Darmanin himself has played a leading role in this effort.

Among the far-right slogans scrawled on the Rennes mosque was “Greens = traitors,” alluding to the Macron government’s ongoing campaign against a local Greens mayor in the Alsace-Lorraine region’s city of Strasbourg.

Last month, the mayor voted to allocate $2.5 million toward the construction of a mosque. The Alsace-Lorraine region is not subject to the 1905 secularism law banning state funding of religious buildings, which went into effect when Alsace-Lorraine was not part of France. The region has previously allocated funding toward Jewish and Christian churches, in larger amounts.

On March 23, Darmanin intervened to build a national political campaign around denunciations of funding for the construction of a mosque. It was centred on the claim that the Greens-led council was supporting “political Islam,” and implicitly allowing foreign powers, notably Turkey, which has ties to the association building the mosque, to conduct political interference in France.

Darmanin denounced the Greens as “a party that is complacent towards radical Islam.” Marlène Schiappa, the junior minister for citizenship, tweeted that “here, clearly, there is an irresponsibility on the part of the Greens. … In the facts, there is a complicity with political Islam in any case.”

More broadly, the Macron government has led an ever more open campaign restricting the rights of France’s Muslim population and promoting an anti-Muslim atmosphere. On Friday, police in Angers reported that they had arrested a 24-year-old man supporting Nazi ideology, after a report that he had threatened to conduct an attack on the Mans mosque and kill multiple people. Police discovered multiple arms where he was living, including a pump-action shotgun. He admitted to making the threat and stated that he had a “hatred for Arabs.”

Macron is currently seeking to pass the “anti-separatism” law, so named to refer to the supposed danger of Islamic “separatism,” which it later renamed the law “protecting Republican principles.”

The law would establish a “Charter of principles” that Muslim associations are legally obliged to sign, pledging their allegiance to the state. It provides vast powers to the government over religious and all other associations, such as political associations, including the power to dissolve them based on the conduct of individual members. Political discussion inside mosques is banned, and statements denouncing the French state as racist are declared to be defamatory.

Amnesty International last month denounced the “anti-separatism” law as being incompatible with fundamental democratic rights. Katja Rouge of Amnesty stated that “conditioning public funding toward associations on their acceptance of fundamental symbols of the Republic constitutes an illegal restriction on the right to freedom of expression.” The organization has called for the removal of Article 6 of the law, which specifies a “contract of Republican engagement” that every association must submit to.

On April 30, in its first week of debate of the “anti-separatism” law passed by the National Assembly, the Senate voted to amend the bill by banning children under the age of 18 from wearing religious clothing in public—a measure clearly directed at banning the wearing of the veil by young women.

Over the last year, the Macron government has closed more than 70 mosques, promoting a hysterical atmosphere in which mosques are constantly suspected of potentially harbouring terrorist sympathizers.

Darmanin himself denounced even the presence of international foods, such as halal and kosher foods, in separate supermarket aisles, in a television interview conducted in October. In the wake of the Islamist terror attack killing of high school teacher Samuel Paty on October 16, Darmanin declared that he had “always been shocked to walk into a supermarket and see an aisle with the cuisine from some community and some other on the other side. That’s my opinion—that this is how communalism begins.”

The political context of the Macron government’s increasingly hysterical anti-Muslim campaign is the coronavirus pandemic, which has dramatically intensified social inequality and opposition in the working class over the homicidal policy that the Macron government has pursued in response to the virus. As across the EU, Macron has permitted the virus to spread throughout the population, leaving schools and non-essential workplaces open in order to prevent any restriction on production and corporate profit-making. Almost 100,000 people in the country have died as a result.

The French ruling class is aware of explosive anger over these conditions and is building up the powers of the state to violently suppress social opposition. The past two years have already witnessed major upheavals in the form of the “yellow vest” protests over social inequality, which were met with riot police, tear gas and rubber bullets.

The Macron government’s anti-Muslim campaign is directed at dividing a movement of the working class along religious lines, and promoting far-right forces that will be used as a repressive arm of the state against social opposition.

Attack on Iran nuclear facility linked to Israel

Jean Shaoul

Sunday’s attack on Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz has been widely attributed to Israel. It threatens to derail talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with Tehran that the Trump administration unilaterally abandoned in 2018, while escalating the years-long shadow war between Iran and Israel.

The incident, at first believed to be caused by a cyberattack, later attributed to an explosion, destroyed the specially protected power system supplying electricity to thousands of underground centrifuges at the Ahmadi Roshan nuclear enrichment facility, Iran’s main enrichment program.

In this April 10, 2021, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, second from right, listens to the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi while visiting an exhibition of Iran's new nuclear achievements in Tehran, Iran. (Iranian Presidency Office via AP, File)

Located at Natanz, in the desert in the central province of Isfahan, Iran's uranium enrichment program is subject to monitoring by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran has repeatedly stated that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only. It has said that while it intends to steadily resume nuclear activities prohibited under the deal—since January, Iran has acquired 55kg of uranium enriched to 20 percent purity—it will immediately reverse course once sanctions are rescinded.

Iranian news sources reported that intelligence sources had identified the person who had caused the power outage at the site, implying physical infiltration, and were taking action to arrest him.

While Israel has refused to comment on its involvement, American and Israeli officials told the New York Times that Israel had played a role and Israeli news outlets, citing intelligence sources, attributed the attack to the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.

Tehran has called the incident “nuclear terrorism,” indicating that it believes Israel was behind it, and claimed that those responsible are seeking to derail efforts to restore the 2015 nuclear accord, which President Joe Biden has said the US is conditionally prepared to rejoin.

The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, said that the explosion was not an accident but an act of sabotage. Salehi rebutted reports that the explosion would set back Iran’s nuclear program at Natanz by nine months, claiming it would operate at 50 percent capacity.

Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Monday said “the Zionists want to take revenge because of our progress in the way to lift sanctions .... They have publicly said that they will not allow this. But we will take our revenge from the Zionists,” according to Iranian state TV.

In addition to its geopolitical ramifications, the blast was incredibly reckless from an environmental standpoint. Whatever nuclear operations are conducted at Natanz, the loss of electrical power for any length of time could have had serious consequences. In the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, the earthquake and subsequent tsunami knocked out all the electrical power at the nuclear power station, including the emergency generators that keep the cooling systems running. The result was the second worst nuclear meltdown in history, rivaling Chernobyl.

Iran’s foreign office spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said, “All of the centrifuges that went out of circuit at Natanz site were of the IR-1 type,” Iran's first generation of enrichment machines that are more vulnerable to outages, and insisted they would be replaced with more advanced ones. The day before the explosion, Iran marked its National Nuclear Technology Day by turning on a chain of 164 advanced IR-6 centrifuges and testing IR-9 centrifuges that are 50 times faster than the old IR-1s that make up most of the capacity at Natanz.

Khatibzadeh stated that the incident had caused no contamination or injuries but could be considered as an “act against humanity,” adding that Iran would take revenge at the “appropriate time.” He said, “The answer for Natanz is to take revenge against Israel,” and “Israel will receive its answer through its own path.”

The explosion took place the same day that US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz and later held a private meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the first official visit to Israel by a member of the Biden administration.

In a joint statement on Sunday, Gantz pledged to cooperate with the Biden administration on Iran, promising that Israeli security would be safeguarded under any renewed Iranian nuclear deal that Washington reaches. He said, “We will work closely with our American allies to ensure that any new agreement with Iran will secure the vital interests of the world and the United States, prevent a dangerous arms race in our region and protect the State of Israel.”

Although Austin said nothing about Iran, he reassured Israel that the Biden administration would continue to ensure Israel's “qualitative military edge” in the Middle East as part of a “strong commitment to Israel and the Israeli people.” He insisted that “Our bilateral relationship with Israel in particular is central to regional stability and security in the Middle East. During our meeting I reaffirmed to Minister Gantz our commitment to Israel is enduring and it is ironclad.”

While Israeli and American officials would not say whether the US government had been warned of the attack in advance, or whether the attack had been timed to coincide with Austin’s visit, it is inconceivable that the attack on Natanz was mounted without Washington’s knowledge and approval. Indeed, Tel Aviv’s role is to carry out Washington’s dirty work in the region, thereby enabling Washington to deny responsibility.

On Monday, as if on cue, a White House spokesperson refrained from condemning the attack while denying any US involvement saying, “The US was not involved in any manner and we have nothing to add to speculation about the causes.”

This is Israel’s second attack on Natanz in recent months, following an explosion and fire at the facility last July aimed at disrupting uranium enrichment and research. In 2010, the US and Israel stymied Iran’s nuclear program with the Stuxnet virus that reportedly destroyed a fifth of Iran’s centrifuges, while Israel orchestrated a string of assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists in 2010 and 2011, and then in November last year murdered Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading Iranian scientist who set up the country’s nuclear programme two decades ago.

Israel has for years been carrying out a covert war against Iran, launching hundreds of strikes on Iranian-linked targets, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, in neighbouring Syria since the start of the US-led proxy war to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

This has now extended to a naval offensive, with an attack last week on the cargo ship MV Saviz, owned by the state-linked Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, in the Red Sea. It follows revelations by the Wall Street Journal, citing US officials, that Israel had attacked at least a dozen ships bound for Syria in the past two and a half years, most of which were carrying Iranian oil, while some were carrying weaponry to Tehran’s allies, including Hezbollah, in Syria.

The New York Times ’ revelations of Israel’s involvement in the Natanz explosion serves escalate the likelihood of Iran retaliating, especially since presidential elections are due in June. The faction around President Hassan Rouhani, who signed the JCPOA agreement, faces defeat at the hands of the so-called hardline conservative faction that was and remains opposed to the deal.

While Israel and Mossad calculate that Rouhani is keen to secure relief from US sanctions that have wrecked Iran’s economy and will therefore avoid any major escalation, Danny Yatom, a former head of the Mossad, told the radio station run by the Israeli army, “Once Israeli officials are quoted, it requires the Iranians to take revenge,” adding, “There are actions that must remain in the dark.”

Netanyahu for his part has insisted that there should be no return to the “dangerous” 2015 nuclear accord, saying on Sunday, “The fight against Iran and its proxies and the Iranian armament is a giant mission. The situation that exists today doesn’t say anything about the situation that will exist tomorrow.”

With talks on the nuclear deal set to resume Wednesday in Vienna, Netanyahu is determined to prevent the Biden administration rejoining the JCPOA and lifting sanctions against Iran, or failing that, to force Tehran to agree to tougher and longer curbs on its nuclear ambitions along with restrictions on its ballistic missile program and its support for regional militias.

Furthermore, Netanyahu, who is desperately trying to cobble together a coalition government after a fourth inconclusive election in two years that will save him from an almost certain jail term for corruption, may be gambling that the threat of a major conflict with Iran will persuade his potential partners to join an emergency government.

Divisive “rape culture” campaign launched against UK schools

Julie Hyland

If the Conservative government, media and teaching unions are to be believed, the main issue facing Britain’s schools is… “rape culture”. So pervasive is this deemed to be that the government has ordered an inquiry, police have begun collecting “evidence”, and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) has been given powers to conduct “safeguarding inspections”.

Based on anonymous testimonies published on the Everyone's Invited website—founded last June by former private school girl, Soma Sara—schools are said to be rife with misogyny, sexual harassment and predatory males, and are even accused of enabling and concealing sexual violence.

Screenshot of the Everyone's Invited web site

Claims of an endemic “rape culture” are made despite only a tiny minority of the “testimonies” gathered alleging rape. Most involve unwanted attention, the exchange of nude images or varying degrees of “touching”, mostly historic. And despite schools being cited as the culprit, few of the alleged incidents took place in school but rather at private parties or other locations.

The claims are anonymous and cannot be verified, which is of a piece with the charge of “rape culture” itself, which is defined as “all the ways that different forms of aggressive and violent sexual behaviour are normalised, encouraged and even admired by society.”

In contrast to the wall-to-wall media coverage given over to Everyone's Invited, the real crisis in education goes largely unmentioned. The policy of “herd immunity” adopted by governments the world over in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic, has cost the lives of more than 2.95 million people, 150,000 of them in Britain. Even so, Prime Minister Boris Johnson insists it is “not the right time” to convene an inquiry into the Covid catastrophe.

Schools have been at the frontline of this reckless indifference to life as the efforts to keep education facilities open—in order to force parents into unsafe workplaces—has directly facilitated the spread of infections. Between March last year and January 2020 in England alone, at least 540 education staff died from Covid. Ten million children and young people have seen their education disrupted, with untold numbers having to self-isolate while help promised to those without access to the internet or laptops has failed to materialise. As a result, 95 percent of educators surveyed fear for their wellbeing, and more than one-third say they intend to quit the profession. As for those they teach, young people face a seemingly unending public health emergency, accompanied by rising unemployment, homelessness, poverty and an explosion of militarism.

Why then is it that a ruling elite so homicidally indifferent to a deadly pandemic is so moved to action over a supposed “rape culture”?

The description of these events as a #MeToo moment for schools must sound alarm bells. For years now an internecine gender war has been underway in the upper echelons of society to oust males (mainly white) from the top posts in the media, entertainment industry and academic world. Trampling over the presumption of innocence, generally unsubstantiated claims have been enough to destroy lives, careers and reputations.

For all the talk of a “rape culture”, this campaign has relied for its success on widespread public revulsion at sexual violence. Especially pernicious is the disorientation and confusion it has created, and an (intended) fractiousness in relations between the sexes.

That schools, where young people make most of their formative experiences with relationships and sexual boundaries while navigating their way from puberty to adulthood, have been impacted is hardly surprising. But this campaign has absolutely nothing to do with helping young people through this minefield; neither the girls in whose name it is conducted and especially not boys who are the target.

As the WSWS noted, none of the petty-bourgeois proponents of identity politics were in anyway prepared for the pandemic and its consequences. “Out of self-interest, which has appreciably narrowed their outlook, and in their self-deluded state, none of them could remotely imagine a cataclysm of the dimensions of the coronavirus crisis developing in a system they regarded as free of acute contradictions and, for all intents and purposes, everlasting.”

For a time, the #MeToo movement went quiet. Now it is back with a vengeance, and for the same self-serving and grasping purpose. Just as government's are utilising the pandemic to restructure economic relations ever more directly in the interests of the super-rich, the “rape culture” myth is being used to legitimise a dog-eat-dog struggle for position, primarily within the upper middle class, and to strengthen the repressive powers of the state.

It is not accidental that most of the Everyone's Invited testimonies centre on private schools, particularly the most prestigious. Just 6 percent of pupils attend private schools, which are overwhelmingly the preserve of the wealthy. Their significant funds not only guarantee a standard of education unavailable to the remaining 93 percent; they are the gateway to the top universities, corporate boardrooms and state power. Competition for entry and within these institutions is immense, which may account for the demand by some “survivors” to increase the sixth form ratio to admit more girls.

State schools have nonetheless been dragged into this filthy campaign. At least one impulse here is the government's new guidance for all schools to integrate Relationship and Sex Education into the curriculum from year 7 to 13. It is the first time that sex education will be compulsory across all schools, and that LGBTQ relationships will be taught. Some £6 million had already been set aside for “training and support providers”. Helpfully, in its template letter of protest, Everyone's Invited names its preferred providers as the “School of Sexuality Education & Bold Voices” due to their “intersectional, feminist, non-binary and sex positive” approach.

Another impulse is legitimising greater discipline, regulation and punishments in working class schools. That is why the campaign has the backing of such right-wing thinktanks as the Centre for Social Justice, former Tory Home Secretary and arch-Thatcherite, Savid Javid, and Katharine Birbalsingh, who promotes the return of “traditional values” in education.

Add to the mix support for single sex schools that unites feminist “activist” Natasha Walter and Telegraph columnist Annabel Heseltine, daughter of Lord Heseltine, and the reactionary circle is almost complete.

The final link is supplied by the trade unions and the pseudo-left groups, which have all lined up behind the “rape culture” provocation. The annual conference of the National Education Union (NEU) last week charged that sexism “stalks the corridors and classrooms” and demanded the government put in place “robust sexual harassment and abuse policies.” Nothing was said as regards the desperate need for Covid-19 safety measures.

The Stalinist Morning Star, promoting a Labour Party meeting on “the socialist response to violence against women”, cast all men as potential rapists, asserting that “fear of violence by men is an everyday presence for most women”.

The Socialist Party asserts that what is urgently required is a “trade union and student-led inquiry into the true extent of sexual harassment and violence” in education, that could transform “reporting procedures,” scrutinise implementation and ensure they “are properly enforced in practice.”

In support, one of its members revealingly explains how “the more insidious instances [of sexual harassment] are usually from guys you actually have an initial attraction to. There are long-term mental health effects to this type of sexual abuse. I personally ended up in a situation at a party. I still find myself unsure whether the incident actually qualifies as sexual abuse, since I was a willing participant...”

The “rape culture” campaign is anti-democratic and misanthropic. Its injection into schools will prove immensely damaging. Calls by the unions and pseudo-left for it to be “properly enforced” makes clear their support for punitive state intervention, including openly authoritarian measures, in the name of “progressive” values.