10,000 Alberta Superstore workers vote overwhelmingly in favour of strike action

Alexandra Greene & Roger Jordan

Ten thousand workers employed at Alberta’s Real Canadian Superstore grocery stores voted 97 percent in favour of a strike last week, with a strong province-wide voter turnout.

A Real Canadian Superstore in Alberta (WSWS)

Workers are determined to secure better wages, improvements to unpredictable scheduling practices and protection against COVID-19 infection.

The decisive vote comes as grocery store workers have endured months of highly unsafe conditions during the pandemic, while receiving only poverty wages as compensation. Of Alberta’s 40 Superstore locations, there have been COVID-19 outbreaks in at least 30 stores over the course of the pandemic. Several grocery store workers have died after contracting COVID-19 on the job.

The situation has dramatically worsened over the past two months following the July decision by hard-right United Conservative Party (UCP) Premier Jason Kenney to dismantle all remaining public health measures. This reckless move has exposed grocery store workers, and all other sections of the working class, to a horrifying fourth wave of the pandemic that has overwhelmed the province’s hospitals and resulted in some patients being denied life-saving care.

Loblaws Inc., the nationwide food retailing giant that owns Real Canadian Superstore, as well as several other retail and pharmaceutical chains, announced it would be giving its employees “hero pay” at the start of the pandemic. The measly $2 per hour wage increase was infamously clawed back just three months later in June 2020.

All the while, Loblaws executives have lavished themselves with gargantuan salaries and bonuses. The 2020 compensation package for Loblaws Executive Chairman Galen G. Weston Jr. amounted to a whopping $3.55 million, while departing company President Sarah Davis earned an obscene $6.4 million.

The Superstore workers in Alberta are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which stated that negotiations with Loblaws have been ongoing for more than a year. Despite this, the union has made no public indication that it intends to follow through on the strike mandate. On the contrary, it has all but ruled out job action. “Ironically, the point of taking a strike vote is to attempt to avoid a strike,” remarked Local 401 Secretary-Treasurer Richelle Stewart.

When interviewed by the Edmonton Journal, UFCW Local 401 President Thomas Hesse stated that bargaining was to resume between the union and Loblaws on September 27 and conclude on October 1. In a bargaining update released September 30, Local 401 said talks were progressing slowly.

A September 24 press release by UFCW Local 401 declared, “If the strike commences, your union will be asking you and your family not to shop at Superstore, nor any of the Loblaws-owned businesses such as No Frills, T&T Supermarket, or Shoppers Drug Mart. Unity and solidarity among Local 401 members will be a vital component of running a strong strike campaign.”

Such pathetic appeals have nothing to do with “unity and solidarity” but are aimed at giving the union cover in the event of a strike to isolate it and sell it out. “Unity and solidarity” among workers cannot be built by proposing a toothless consumer boycott that will have virtually no impact on a multibillion-dollar corporation like Loblaws, which controls more than a quarter of the grocery retail industry in Canada. Rather, it must be fought for politically.

Superstore workers, who face the daily threat of COVID-19 infection and earn miserably low wages, are in a strong position to take up such a struggle. An appeal by the Superstore workers for a unified fight against attacks on wages and working conditions would find a powerful response from the thousands of nurses in Alberta whose wages are being cut by the UCP government by 5 percent amid the pandemic, or from teachers forced to risk infection on a daily basis in unsafe classrooms. It would be enthusiastically welcomed by the tens of thousands of mostly low-paid public sector workers across the country, especially in New Brunswick, who have just voted by 94 percent in favour of a strike.

The UFCW’s record over the past year confirms its bitter hostility to the emergence of a mass working-class movement for better wages and conditions. At every point during the pandemic, the union has endeavoured to keep workers on the job under dangerous conditions and sabotage working-class opposition to the ruling elite’s “profits before lives” COVID-19 policy.

In March of this year, the UFCW refused point blank to defend Olymel meatpacking workers, who were recklessly herded into plants plagued by COVID-19 outbreaks of catastrophic proportions. A massive COVID-19 outbreak at Olymel’s Red Deer, Alberta plant saw at least 515 workers infected and 4 workers lose their lives.

When the Kenney government greenlighted the re-opening of the Red Deer slaughterhouse and meatpacking operations after a brief shutdown, even as the workforce still grappled with 91 active cases, the union raised no demands for additional safety measures to be taken. In comments to the media at the time, UFCW Local 401 President Thomas Hesse bandied around militant phrases, stating that the company was putting “pigs ahead of people.” He claimed to be grieving for the dead workers as much as the other workers in the Red Deer plant but proposed no action to confront the pandemic.

Hesse is employing a similar tactic this time around, posturing as a friend of the workers but proposing absolutely nothing to wage a successful struggle. “I’m seeing people terrified going to work in crowded public places,” he told the Edmonton Journal. “Their billionaire bosses gave them so-called hero pay and then took that away. It’s almost like the employer saw it as a calculation error in their enormous profits.”

Hesse’s sudden outrage at “billionaire bosses” is for public consumption alone. He calculates that striking a militant pose will place the UFCW in a better position to ram through a rotten concessions contract that has almost certainly already been cooked up with Loblaws behind the scenes.

He is a master at protecting the UFCW’s relations with the corporate elite and the state. In the spring of 2020, after three meatpackers died at Cargill’s High River plant and over 900 were infected, Hesse refused to support the highly exploited workforce in taking any job action to prevent a premature return to work. Under conditions where the virus was still spreading, Hesse asserted that any job action would be “illegal” under the workers’ collective agreement. Given the choice between protecting the “legality” of collective bargaining, i.e., the corrupt partnership between corporate bosses and union officials, or workers’ lives, Hesse and the UFCW bureaucracy chose the former.

As for its role in the food retail sector, the UFCW has been instrumental in allowing a steady worsening in workers’ wages and conditions. In 1990, the union set the bar for the destruction of full-time grocery jobs when it allowed Loblaws in Ontario to do away with across-the-board wage increases in favour of a new wage structure tied to hours worked.

In 1993, union executives convinced workers it represented in Alberta’s Safeway grocery chain that the company would close stores if they did not accept wage and job cuts and concede to the company’s right to employ a virtually unlimited number of part-time workers.

Far from being exceptional, the UFCW’s record of imposing low wages and precarious conditions over the past 30 years in the food retail sector is of a piece with what the trade union bureaucracy has done throughout all sectors of the economy. This is why Superstore workers must break from the UFCW if they are to take their struggle forward.

India to provide pittance in “compensation” to families of COVID-19 dead

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has announced that a paltry 50,000 rupees (about US$670) in disaster relief compensation will be paid to the families of Indians who have died from COVID-19.

Health workers screen residents for COVID-19 symptoms at Deonar slum in Mumbai, India, Saturday, July 11, 2020. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

The compensation plan, which the government only brought forward after being sued in court, is akin to rubbing salt in a gaping wound.

Millions who watched in horror as their relatives died during India’s second pandemic wave last spring because of shortages of hospital beds, oxygen, drugs, and trained personnel will now have to jump through various bureaucratic hoops to prove to the satisfaction of Indian authorities that they succumbed to COVID-19. And all for a princely sum that in most cases will not even cover a fraction of their loved one’s medical and cremation (or burial) expenses, let alone provide them compensation for the loss of a breadwinner or their mental anguish.

The 50,000 rupee payment is one-eighth of what disaster victims are entitled to under India’s National Disaster Management Act, 2005. Yet on Monday, Indian’s Supreme Court gave its approval to the compensation scheme. Grotesquely, Indian’s highest court went out of its way to praise the government’s generosity and its calamitous response to the pandemic. “We are very happy that something is being done to wipe out the tears of those who suffered,” declared Justice M.R. Shah. “We have to take judicial notice of the fact that what India has done, no other country could do.”

In reality, Modi and the Indian ruling class have perpetrated a crime against humanity. Officially, India with just under 450,000 COVID-19 deaths has the world’s third highest COVID death toll. But a spate of scientific studies of excess deaths in India during the pandemic have demonstrated that COVID-19 has killed 5 million or more Indians.

Like the North American and European imperialist powers, Modi and his BJP government have systematically prioritised corporate profits over saving human lives. In the spring of 2020, they imposed a short-lived, ill-prepared lockdown which, by depriving tens of millions of migrant workers of any livelihood overnight, helped spread the dearly virus across rural India, where most of the population lives. They then pivoted to recklessly reopening the economy and continued to do so as infections and deaths rose exponentially for the next five months.

India’s even more devastating second wave of the pandemic, from March through June 2021, was, if anything, even more manifestly criminal. For weeks, the government dismissed the warnings of scientists, including its own medical experts, about the emergence of the Delta variant and a burgeoning tsunami of new infections, and bitterly resisted calls for urgent measures to halt the virus’s spread. As India was setting new records for daily infections and deaths, Modi went on national television to vow he would “save” the country “from lockdown,” not COVID-19.

The Modi government has vehemently condemned the studies that show India’s COVID-19 fatalities are a gross—and it should be added, deliberate—undercount. In this they have been assisted by the corporate media, which has helped it bury the issue, and the opposition parties, which have implemented the profits-before-lives policy wherever they form the state government.

However, as part of its efforts to get the Supreme Court to sanction compensation payments one-eighth the statutorily mandated amount, New Delhi has agreed that payments should be made to more than just the families of those who have COVID-19 or mucormycosis (black fungus, a COVID-related disease) listed on their death certificates as the cause of death. Under the court-approved plan, the families of anyone who died within 30 days of a positive COVID-19 test will be eligible for the meagre 50,000 rupee payment.

No doubt this was based on a macabre calculus—that to somewhat expand the eligibility for a “compensation” payment that is only one-eighth the legally mandated sum of 400,000 rupees ($5,345) will prove less costly than paying the full amount to the families of those currently recognised as having died from COVID.

The government knows full well that its expanded eligibility criteria will make little difference to the families of the vast majority of the 5 million COVID-dead. Even in pre-pandemic times, proper death certificates were issued in less than one in four deaths. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of those infected were never tested by India’s dilapidated health care system, which has been systematically underfunded by successive governments, whether headed by the BJP or Congress, for decades. According to seropositive studies carried out by health authorities, just one in every 100 infections were detected in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and just one in 120 in Bihar, the third most populous.

Cynically, the National Disaster Management Agency, which is personally headed by Modi, cited the likelihood that the number of COVID dead will grow to argue that compensation payments should be slashed. “Financial prudence,” it wrote, “demands that we plan in a manner that assistance can be provided to larger number of people should the number of deaths rise.”

This is, in effect, an admission the government knows that its current drive to remove what few COVID restrictions remain and reliance on a disorganised vaccine rollout as the sole defence against the virus are creating conditions for a massive third wave of infection and deaths.

On May 25, in the wake of India’s disastrous second wave, advocates Gaurav Kumar Bansal and Reepak Kansal petitioned the Supreme Court to order the government, which had declared the pandemic a national disaster under the National Disaster Management Act, to provide the 400,000 rupee compensation stipulated in the Act’s Section 12 (iii) to all families of those who had died from COVID or mucormycosis. By rejecting their petition, the Supreme Court has created a precedent that will allow India’s government to reduce compensation payments to families affected by future disasters.

Time and again, India’s highest court has given its legal imprimatur to the Modi government’s authoritarian actions and Hindu communalist provocations, from its August 2019 constitutional coup stripping Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, of its semi-autonomous status, to the building of a temple to Lord Ram, on the site of the razed Babri Masjid mosque. But even more fundamentally, the court is a bulwark of capitalist rule. The court’s sanctioning of the government’s sham COVID-19 compensation scheme is part of a series of judgments it has made that have upheld and enforced the Indian ruling elite’s criminal pandemic policy.

Even if the court-sanctioned 50,000 rupee payment were made to the families of all 450,000 official COVID-19 dead or for that matter such compensation paid for all 5 million of India’s pandemic deaths, it would still represent little more than a drop in the ocean compared to the vast wealth accumulated by India’s super-rich during the pandemic.

In the first case, such compensation would total barely US$300 million, and in the latter US$3.35 billion. By contrast, the wealth of India’s billionaires has increased by several hundred billion dollars since March 2020.

Syrus Poonawalla, who heads the Serum Institute of India, India’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is a case in point. According to the Hurun India 2021 Rich List, which was published last week, he has seen his fortune shoot up by over $9 billion over the past year—a 70 percent increase. Much of this increase is attributable to the BJP government’s decision not to use India’s state-owned medical sector to manufacture vaccines and its stubborn months-long refusal to provide free COVID-19 vaccines to all, forcing people to pay for the life-saving jab out of their own pockets and for a higher price.

Hurun reports that over the past year, the ranks of India’s billionaires swelled by 58 to 238. Earlier in the pandemic, Oxfam’s “Inequality Virus Report” released at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, showed that India’s billionaires had increased their wealth by 35 percent or US$185 billion, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the Modi government, which has pumped billions of dollars into the banks and financial markets, helping pave the way for the massive increase in the wealth of India’s rich and super-rich, it is unthinkable to appropriate even a tiny fraction of these ill-gotten gains to support the millions of people who have been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

While state funds have flowed seamlessly into the bank accounts and stock portfolios of the super-rich during the pandemic, the Modi government is ensuring that the process of accessing the derisory COVID-19 disaster compensation payments will be as cumbersome as possible. It has ordered the state governments to provide the ex-gratia assistance from the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) rather than allocating money from the National Disaster Relief Fund. This will put an additional burden on the already cash-strapped states.

This decision has been denounced by some states governed by opposition parties. In Rajasthan, Congress Party state president and Minister of State for Education Govind Singh Dotasara told the Indian Express, “You can’t impose [the ex-gratia payment] on states. … It should be done by the Centre through their relief fund. ... It’s not that only one state has been affected by it, it’s a pandemic. It should be covered under the National Disaster Relief Fund.”

The truth of this statement is itself a damning indictment of Congress, which has marched in lockstep with Modi in the implementation of a “herd immunity” pandemic policy. While Congress politicians may squabble with the Centre over who should pay the bill for the sham compensation scheme, they are similarly culpable for the waves of mass infection and death that have swept across the Indian population.

Paris demands aggressive EU policy after AUKUS treaty signed against China

Alex Lantier

After Australia’s sudden repudiation of a €56 billion submarine contract with France as it made its AUKUS alliance with the UK and the United States against China, French President Emmanuel Macron is intensifying calls for an independent European Union (EU) military policy.

French President Emmanuel Macron visits a call centre of the French Social security insurance dedicated to Covid-19 vaccinations, Monday, March 29, 2021 in Creteil, outside Paris.

Arriving at an October 5 EU summit at Brdo castle outside Lubljana, Slovenia, Macron pointed to the signing of the AUKUS treaty and the humiliating US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. While calling for “clarification and re-engagement” from Washington in the NATO alliance, he added: “But we must be clear with ourselves on what we want for ourselves, our borders, our security, and our energy, industrial, technological and military independence.”

Macron made clear the signing of the AUKUS treaty had caused lasting damage to EU relations with America. “We must be realistic about the decisions that have been taken by our allies. There were choices that were made which I cannot say were signs of respect [for] France or Europe,” Macron said. He said the EU’s goal at the Lubljana summit was to “continue to work in good faith with its historic partners and allies, but also to increase its independence and sovereignty.”

This means that, even as the EU countries insist they do not have money needed for critical public health policies to eradicate the coronavirus and halt the COVID-19 pandemic, leading EU powers are pledging to massively increase military spending to further their geopolitical ambitions. Both Berlin and Paris, which will hold the EU’s rotating presidency for six months at the beginning of 2022, have aggressively pushed for an EU military build-up.

The Lubljana summit underscored that US threats against China are intensifying US-EU tensions and the European imperialist powers’ aggressive moves in the Balkans and the Mediterranean.

The same day, just before arriving at the summit, Macron had received in Paris US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for talks on improving US-French relations.

Prior to Blinken’s arrival, Macron made clear that Blinken’s visit would not by itself resolve the crisis over AUKUS. He said, “We are obliged to observe that, for somewhat over 10 years, the United States first have concentrated more on themselves and on refocusing their strategic interests on China and the Pacific. That is their right, it is their own sovereignty. And I respect popular sovereignty, but there too, we would be naive, or rather we would commit a terrible error, if we did not draw our own conclusions from this.”

“This is a crisis which is set to last, from which we can get out only by concrete actions,” an anonymous French official told Le Monde.

Blinken also met his French counterpart, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, but no joint press conference was held. Explaining this unusual decision, a French official curtly said: “The two ministers will speak once they have something to say.”

Macron is scheduled to have a telephone call with Biden in the middle of the month, before meeting him in person at the October 30-31 G-20 summit in Rome.

The debacle of decades of escalating US-led wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and across the Middle East and Central Asia has not resolved but has intensified international conflicts and the danger of war. Thirty years after the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union deprived the NATO powers of a common enemy, US-EU tensions are deep and growing. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving a power vacuum in Central Asia, is intensifying great-power rivalries across Eurasia and the danger of a new, US-led war.

After Washington and the EU clashed over US attempts to arm far-right Ukrainian militias for war with Russia in 2014-2015, however, there is growing opposition in EU ruling circles at US war threats against China. In a briefing titled “France’s Indo-Pacific ‘Third Way,’” the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace think tank points to differences between Washington and the EU powers revealed by the AUKUS treaty.

“Despite statements about rallying like-minded democratic countries, the Biden administration failed to anticipate France’s reaction. This will have long-term negative consequences on the United States’ image and on transatlantic relations, already damaged by Donald Trump’s presidency,” it wrote, adding, “there is a growing sentiment—including in France’s neighbor Germany—that Washington’s new focus on the Pacific is not in line with EU interests.”

The French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) think tank criticized the escalating danger of war, including nuclear war, provoked by the AUKUS treaty targeting China.

The IFRI warned that the signing of “AUKUS may trigger an (nuclear) arms race and that the move dangerously exacerbates tensions in East Asia.” It listed Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, as well as Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, as regional powers angered by the AUKUS deal. It cited the Indonesian government’s statements that it was “deeply concerned over the continuing arms race and power projection in the region” and calling on Australia to “maintain its commitment towards regional peace, stability and security.”

Pointing to France’s position in the Indo-Pacific region via its island possessions such as Réunion or New Caledonia, the IFRI concluded, “France is not the only country in the Indo-Pacific which doesn’t want to follow the US blindly and unconditionally on its risky path against China.”

The drive to war and great-power conflict is, however, not only the product of aggressive US foreign policies but, more fundamentally, of the capitalist nation-state system itself. The geopolitical methods of the EU imperialist powers are not fundamentally different from the more openly aggressive policy of Washington.

With the more limited but still substantial military forces at their disposal, they laid out a policy of consolidating their strategic influence in Europe’s southern and eastern periphery. This includes moves to absorb former Yugoslav states bombed by Washington and the EU powers in the 1999 NATO war in Yugoslavia, to arm Greece against Turkey, and to escalate France’s neocolonial war in the African country of Mali.

The Lubljana summit called to prepare to “enlarge” the EU into the former Yugoslavia. The summit communiqué declared, “The EU reaffirms its unequivocal support for the European perspective of the Western Balkans.”

After the summit, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic suggested that Serbia would likely not be able to join the EU without first recognizing the breakaway republic of Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence with NATO backing in 2008. Vucic said, “Without resolving issues with Pristina [the capital of Kosovo], Serbia would not be able to join the EU.”

Nonetheless, the EU powers stepped up calls for an aggressive intervention. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said enlarging the EU to include former Yugoslav republics was geopolitically critical. “If the European Union does not offer this region a real perspective, we have to be aware that other superpowers—China, Russia or Turkey—will play a bigger role there. The region belongs to Europe geographically, and it needs a European perspective,” Kurz said.

France also has announced a €3 billion deal to sell three naval frigates to Greece as part of its continuing conflict with Turkey in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Seas. This sale, criticized by Turkey as a threat to “regional peace and stability,” was ratified yesterday by the Greek parliament. The deal also reportedly commits the Greek armed forces to sending forces to the French war in Mali and across the Sahel region.

Why the World’s Eyes Are on the Afghanistan-Tajikistan Border

Vijay Prashad

Afghanistan and Tajikistan share a 1,400-kilometer border. Recently, a war of words has erupted between Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and the Taliban government in Kabul. Rahmon censures the Taliban for the destabilization of Central Asia by the export of militant groups, while the Taliban leadership has accused Tajikistan’s government of interference.

Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troops to the border, and held military exercises and discussions with Russia and other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the Afghan government—Zabihullah Mujahid—tweeted pictures of Afghan troops deployed to Takhar province on the border of the two countries. The escalation of harsh language continues. Prospects of war between these two countries should not be discounted, but—given the role Russia plays in Tajikistan—it is unlikely.

Panjshir Exiles

On September 3, 2021, Afghanistan’s former Vice President Amrullah Saleh tweeted, “The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue. I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity.” A few days later, the Taliban took the Panjshir Valley, where Saleh had taken refuge for the past fortnight, and Saleh slipped across the border into Tajikistan. The resistance inside Afghanistan died down.

From 2001, Saleh had worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and then had become the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (2004-2010). He had previously worked closely with Ahmad Shah Massoud of the right-wing Jamiat-e Islami and of the Northern Alliance.

Saleh fled by helicopter to Tajikistan with Massoud’s son Ahmad. They were later joined in Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe by Abdul Latif Pedram, leader of the National Congress Party of Afghanistan. These men followed the lead of the Northern Alliance, which had taken refuge in Tajikistan’s Kulob region after the Taliban victory in 1996. The personal ties between Ahmad Shah Massoud and Tajikistan’s President Rahmon go back to the early 1990s. In March 2021, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Tajikistan Mohammad Zahir Aghbar remembered that in the early 1990s Massoud told a group of Tajik fighters in Kabul, “I do not want the war in Afghanistan to be transferred to Tajikistan under the banner of Islam. It is enough that our country has been fraudulently destroyed. Go and make peace in your country.” That Massoud had backed the anti-government United Tajik Opposition, led by the Islamic Renaissance Party, is conveniently forgotten.

After the Taliban took Kabul on August 15, 2021, and just before Saleh and Massoud escaped to Dushanbe, on September 2 Rahmon conferred upon the late Ahmad Shah Massoud the highest civilian award of Tajikistan, the Order of Ismoili Somoni. This, the protection afforded to the Saleh-led resistance movement, and Tajikistan’s refusal to recognize the Taliban government in Kabul sent a clear signal to the Taliban from Rahmon’s government.

Rahmon says that the main reason is that he is dismayed by the Taliban’s anti-Tajik stance. But this is not entirely the case. One in four Afghans are Tajiks, while half of Kabul claims Tajik ancestry. The economy minister—Qari Din Mohammad Hanif—is not only Tajik, but comes from the Badakhshan province that borders Tajikistan. The real reason is Rahmon’s concerns about regional destabilization.

Tajik Taliban

On September 11, 2021, Saidmukarram Abdulqodirzoda, the head of Tajikistan’s Islamic Council of Ulema, condemned the Taliban as being anti-Islamic in its treatment of women and in its promotion of terrorism. Abdulqodirzoda, the lead imam in Tajikistan, has led a decade-long process to purge “extremists” from the ranks of the mosque leaders. Many foreign-trained imams have been replaced (Abdulqodirzoda had been trained in Islamabad, Pakistan), and foreign funding of mosques has been closely monitored.

Abdulqodirzoda frequently talks about the bloody civil war that tore Tajikistan apart between 1992 and 1997. Between 1990, when the USSR began to collapse, and 1992, when the civil war began, a thousand mosques—more than one a day—opened across the country. Saudi Arabia’s money and influence rushed into the country, as did the influence of the right-wing Afghan leaders Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Rahmon—as chair of the Supreme Assembly of Tajikistan (1992-1994) and then as president (from 1994)—led the fight against the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), which was eventually crushed by 1997.

The ghost of the civil war reappeared in 2010, when Mullah Amriddin Tabarov, a commander in the IRP, founded Jamaat Ansarullah. In 1997, Tabarov fled to join the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), one of the fiercest of the extremist groups in that era. The IMU and Tabarov developed close ties with Al Qaeda, fleeing Afghanistan and Uzbekistan after the U.S. invasion of 2001 for Iraq, later Syria. Tabarov was caught by the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani in July 2015 and killed.

As the Taliban began to make gains in Afghanistan late last year, a thousand Ansarullah fighters arrived from their sojourn with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. When Darwaz fell to the Taliban in November 2020, it was these Ansarullah fighters who took the lead.

Tajikistan’s Rahmon has made it clear that he fears a spillover of Ansarullah into his country, dragging it back into the war of the 1990s. The fear of that war has allowed Rahmon to remain in power, using every means to squash any democratic opening in Tajikistan.

Regional Balm

In mid-September, Dushanbe hosted the 21st meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Council of the Heads of State. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan had several talks with Rahmon about the situation in Afghanistan. As the war of words escalated, Khan called Rahmon on October 3 to ask that the tension be reduced. Russia and China have also called for restraint.

It is unlikely that guns will be fired across the border; neither Dushanbe nor Kabul would like to see that outcome. But both sides are using the tension for their own ends—for Rahmon, to ensure that the Taliban will keep Ansarullah in check, and for the Taliban, for Rahmon to recognize their government.

What Does India Get Out of Being Part of ‘The Quad’?

Prabir Purkayastha

The recent Quad leaders meeting in the White House on September 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue between four countries, the United States, India, Japan and Australia. Instead, the United States seems to be moving much closer to Australia as a strategic partner and providing it with nuclear submarines.

Supplying Australia with U.S. nuclear submarines that use bomb-grade uranium can violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) protocols. Considering that the United States wants Iran not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent, this is blowing a big hole in its so-called rule-based international order—unless we all agree that the rule-based international order is essentially the United States and its allies making up all the rules.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had initiated the idea of the Quad in 2007 as a security dialogue. In the statement issued after the first formal meeting of the Quad countries dated March 12, 2021, “security” was used in the sense of strategic security. Before the recent meeting of the Quad, both the United States and the Indian sides denied that it was a military alliance, even though the Quad countries conduct joint naval exercises—the Malabar exercises—and have signed various military agreements. The September 24 Quad joint statement focuses more on other “security” issues: health security, supply chain and cybersecurity.

Has India decided that it still needs to retain strategic autonomy even if it has serious differences with China on its northern borders and therefore stepped away from the Quad as an Asian NATO? Or has the United States itself downgraded the Quad now that Australia has joined its geostrategic game of containing China?

Before the Quad meeting in Washington, the United States and the UK signed an agreement with Australia to supply eight nuclear submarines—the AUKUS agreement. Earlier, the United States had transferred nuclear submarine technology to the UK, and it may have some subcontracting role here. Nuclear submarines, unlike diesel-powered submarines, are not meant for defensive purposes. They are for force projection far away from home. Their ability to travel large distances and remain submerged for long periods makes them effective strike weapons against other countries.

The AUKUS agreement means that Australia is canceling its earlier French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines. The French are livid that they, one of NATO’s lynchpins, have been treated this way with no consultation by the United States or Australia on the cancellation. The U.S. administration has followed it up with “discreet disclosures” to the media and U.S. think tanks that the agreement to supply nuclear submarines also includes Australia providing naval and air bases to the United States. In other words, Australia is joining the United States and the UK in a military alliance in the “Indo-Pacific.”

Earlier, President Macron had been fully on board with the U.S. policy of containing China and participated in Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea. France had even offered its Pacific Island colonies—and yes, France still has colonies—and its navy for the U.S. project of containing China in the Indo-Pacific. France has two sets of island chains in the Pacific Ocean that the United Nations terms as non-self-governing territories—read colonies—giving France a vast exclusive economic zone, larger even than that of the United States. The United States considers these islands less strategically valuable than Australia, which explains its willingness to face France’s anger. In the U.S. worldview, NATO and the Quad are both being downgraded for a new military strategy of a naval thrust against China.

Australia has very little manufacturing capacity. If the eight nuclear submarines are to be manufactured partially in Australia, the infrastructure required for manufacturing nuclear submarines and producing/handling of highly enriched uranium that the U.S. submarines use will probably require a minimum time of 20 years. That is the reason behind the talk of U.S. naval and air bases in Australia, with the United States providing the nuclear submarines and fighter-bomber aircraft either on lease, or simply locating them in Australia.

I have previously argued that the term Indo-Pacific may make sense to the United States, the UK or even Australia, which are essentially maritime nations. The optics of three maritime powers, two of which are settler-colonial, while the other, the erstwhile largest colonial power, talking about a rule-based international order do not appeal to most of the world. Oceans are important to maritime powers, who have used naval dominance to create colonies. This was the basis of the dominance of British, French and later U.S. imperial powers. That is why they all have large aircraft carriers: they are naval powers who believe that the gunboat diplomacy through which they built their empires still works. The United States has 700-800 military bases spread worldwide; Russia has about 10; and China has only one base in Djibouti, Africa.

Behind the rhetoric about the Indo-Pacific and open seas is the U.S. play in Southeast Asia. Here, the talk of the Indo-Pacific has little resonance for most people. Its main interest is in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was spearheaded by the ASEAN countries. Even with the United States and India walking out of the RCEP negotiations, the 15-member trading bloc is the largest trading bloc in the world, with nearly 30 percent of the world’s GDP and population. Two of the Quad partners—Japan and Australia—are in the RCEP.

The U.S. strategic vision is to project its maritime power against China and contest for control over even Chinese waters and economic zones. This is the 2018 U.S. Pacific strategy doctrine that it has itself put forward, which it de-classified recently. The doctrine states that the U.S. naval strategy is to deny China sustained air and sea dominance even inside the first island chain and dominate all domains outside the first island chain. For those interested in how the U.S. views the Quad and India’s role in it, this document is a good education.

The United States wants to use the disputes that Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have with China over the boundaries of their respective exclusive economic zones. While some of them may look to the United States for support against China, none of these Southeast Asian countries supports the U.S. interpretation of the Freedom of Navigation, under which it carries out its Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPS. As India found to its cost in Lakshadweep, the U.S. definition of the freedom of navigation does not square with India’s either. For all its talk about rule-based world order, the United States has not signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) either. So when India and other partners of the United States sign on to Freedom of Navigation statements of the United States, they are signing on to the U.S. understanding of the freedom of navigation, which is at variance with theirs.

The 1973 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created two classes of countries, ones who would be allowed to a set of technologies that could lead to bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, and others who would be denied these technologies. There was, however, a submarine loophole in the NPT and its complementary IAEA Safeguards for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Under the NPT, non-nuclear-weapon-state parties must place all nuclear materials under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, except nuclear materials for nonexplosive military purposes. No country until now has utilized this submarine loophole to withdraw weapon-grade uranium from safeguards. If this exception is utilized by Australia, how will the United States continue to argue against Iran’s right to enrich uranium, say for nuclear submarines, which is within its right to develop under the NPT?

India was never a signatory to the NPT, and therefore is a different case than that of Australia. If Australia, a signatory, is allowed to use the submarine loophole, what prevents other countries from doing so as well?

Australia did not have to travel this route if it wanted nuclear submarines. The French submarines that they were buying were originally nuclear submarines but using low-enriched uranium. It is retrofitting diesel engines that has created delays in their supplies to Australia. It appears that under the current Australian leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia wants to flex its muscles in the neighborhood, therefore tying up with Big Brother, the United States.

For the United States, if Southeast Asia is the terrain of struggle against China, Australia is a very useful springboard. It also substantiates what has been apparent for some time now—that the Indo-Pacific is only cover for a geostrategic competition between the United States and China over Southeast Asia. And unfortunately for the United States, East Asia and Southeast Asia have reciprocal economic interests that bring them closer to each other. And Australia, with its brutal settler-colonial past of genocide and neocolonial interventions in Southeast Asia, is not seen as a natural partner by countries there.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have lost the plot completely. Does it want strategic autonomy, as was its policy post-independence? Or does it want to tie itself to a waning imperial power, the United States? The first gave it respect well beyond its economic or military clout. The current path seems more and more a path toward losing its stature as an independent player.

What price an Afghan life? Report lists hundreds of civilians killed by UK in Afghanistan

Jean Shaoul

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has paid compensation for the deaths of at least 289 Afghan civilians killed and 240 injured between 2006 to 2013 during the UK’s military operations.

This is the first official indication of the number of civilian deaths caused by British troops as the UK government has sought for years to systematically suppress the extent of casualties, including lying about the existence of its own documents and emails revealing official concerns about the killing of innocent Afghans.

The British government frequently reports that 457 British soldiers lost their lives and 616 soldiers suffered serious or very serious injuries but has failed to report Afghan casualties or to provide any estimate of the overall harm caused by British operations in its largest deployment since World War II. Yet the war has led to between 170,000 and a quarter of a million Afghans, hundreds of thousands of wounded, and millions forced from their homes.

British Army soldiers in Afghanistan [Photo: British Army]

The military intervention in Afghanistan, planned well in advance of the bombing of the twin towers in New York in 2001, was not launched to prosecute a “war on terrorism” but rather to project US military power into Central and South Asia. The US was intent on seizing control of a country rich in untapped mineral resources that bordered on the oil-rich former Soviet republics of the Caspian Basin, as well as China, with the support and cover of its NATO allies.

Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair seized the opportunity to push himself forward as US President George W. Bush’s chief emissary for the “global war on terror”. In so doing, he sought to bolster Britain’s much-diminished global position while preventing Washington from pursuing a unilateralist course and the European Union from developing a policy that would leave Britain out in the cold.

Blair, like Bush, has never been held to account for his role in ordering the invasion of Afghanistan and later that of Iraq, which gave rise to unspeakable crimes, including torture, “extraordinary rendition”, the indefinite military detention of US-proclaimed “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay and the cold-blooded murders of civilians.

With the typical duplicity, UK junior Armed Forces Minister James Heappey claimed that the cost of Operation Herrick was £22.2 billion, omitting to say that this operation, which officially ended in 2015, covers only part of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Frank Ledwidge, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, who wrote Investment in Blood in 2013, believes that this will have risen to a staggering £38-£39 billion now, without considering the ongoing costs of caring for wounded veterans.

According to Boston University’s Cost of War project, around 47,245 Afghan civilians suffered violent deaths as a direct result of the conflict between 2001-2019. The UK-based charity Airwars estimated, using United Nations and the Nation data, that a minimum of 4,815 civilian deaths were the direct result of US airstrikes.

In the case of Britain, the charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), which analysed nearly 7,000 compensation claims paid out by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), found that of the 289 pay outs, 84 were for children, and at least 43 were for females. The MoD only made the compensation claims available in response to numerous Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.

AOAV has a well-founded belief that this number of civilian deaths linked to British military operations in Helmand province is likely to be an underestimate of the real numbers, given the difficulty Afghan citizens would have had in applying for military compensation. Records show that the MoD rejected most compensation claims submitted by the families, denying responsibility for 885 claims of death and 285 claims of injury.

Overall, the British military paid out a miserly £688,000 for 289 deaths, an average compensation of £2,380. Even this inflates the value placed on an Afghan life, as some of these pay outs were combined with injuries and property damage.

One family received £586.42 for the death of their ten-year-old son in December 2009 and another just £104.17 for a confirmed fatality and property damage in February 2008, less than others received for a damaged crane (£873), for the death of six donkeys “when they wandered on to the rifle range” (£662), for “Warthog damage” in Nahr-e-Saraj, Helmand (£240) and less than the £110 for a lost mobile phone in Camp Bastion.

The sums paid were far lower than for claims in Cyprus and other European countries. AOAV stated that Britain paid out 36 percent more in the two decades of the War on Terror to claims originating in Cyprus (£8.44 million) than in Afghanistan (£6.18 million). The MoD paid out more in Cyprus (£1.04 million), where most claims were for crop or livestock damage, or in Europe (£1.17 million), mostly for traffic accidents, than for the 289 civilian deaths in Afghanistan (£688,000).

The MoD also recorded payments to operations involving the elite Special Air Service (SAS), which has been accused of involvement in the execution of civilians, including paying £3,634 to the family of three Afghan farmers allegedly killed in cold blood in 2012 within three weeks of the incident. This unusually prompt payment was recorded as an “assistance payment to be made to calm local atmopherics [sic].”

AOAV say that based on documents they obtained from the MoD under an FoI, 17 British military personnel have been charged in relation to civilian casualties and 15 prosecuted in relation to the 529 deaths and injuries for whom the MoD paid compensation.

What happened to Sergeant Alexander Blackman is illustrative of British imperialism’s attitudes to such crimes.

In 2011, Blackman was filmed by a fellow soldier shooting a man, already seriously injured by gunfire from an Apache helicopter, in the chest at close range with a 9mm pistol. After he shot the prisoner, Blackman was captured on camera stating, “There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil you c***. It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.” He turned to those watching and stated, “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I just broke the Geneva Convention.”

The Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of captured and wounded prisoners of war requires that those who have laid down their arms or who cannot fight due to sickness, wounds or detention should be “treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.”

In 2013, Blackman was found guilty of murder by a military court and sentenced to 10 years in prison, reduced on appeal to eight years. In 2017, five senior judges at London’s Court Martial Appeal Court downgraded the original finding from murder to manslaughter, accepting a plea of diminished responsibility and allowing him to be released from prison after serving just three and a half years.

The government has introduced legislation that will put a five-year limit on prosecutions for soldiers serving outside the UK. With its “presumption against prosecution” that gives the green light to future war crimes, including the mass murder of civilians, the law will free the military from all constraints.

It is not just those soldiers who perpetrated these crimes on behalf of the imperialist powers, but crucially those at the very top of the political and military ladder who planned and executed this criminal war, that have escaped punishment.

Instead, the only two people who have faced criminal repercussions are those who reported the crimes: Chelsea Manning, who has endured a decade of persecution, and Julian Assange, who—after first being arrested in London over in 2010—is imprisoned in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison awaiting a US appeal to the Supreme Court for his extradition to the US where he faces 175 years imprisonment under the Espionage Act.

After the German elections: Mass layoffs and plant closures begin

Ulrich Rippert

On the advice of the trade unions and establishment political parties, many companies had postponed their announcements of rationalization measures, mass layoffs and plant closures until after the election.

The aim was to prevent further workers’ protests during the election campaign and on election day, in addition to the strike by train drivers, the protests by Siemens Energy workers in Berlin against massive job cuts at the gas turbine plant, and the strike by workers at Berlin’s two largest hospital groups.

But as soon as the polling stations were closed, there was a hail of bad news from factories and corporate headquarters.

Opel Eisenach

Company management suddenly announced short-time working until the end of the year, which means massive wage losses for employees. There are also clear indications that the production stop will be used to prepare the closure of the plant in close collaboration with the works council and IG Metall union.

Opel plant in Eisenach (Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

Ford Saarlouis and Cologne

On the sidelines of the Automotive Congress in Saarbrücken last week, Ford workers again demonstrated against the massive job cuts at the Saarlouis plant. The future of the historic plant, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with great pomp, is completely uncertain. In his provocatively arrogant manner, Ford Germany boss Gunnar Herrmann told the Saarbrücker Zeitung that if there was any future at all for the plant, it would only be if all employees brought “gigantic flexibility with them” in the future. “Gigantic flexibility” is apparently the new term for the slave-like exploitation of labour.

In Cologne, Ford has stopped Fiesta production until the end of October because of the shortage of materials. What will happen to the plants after the crisis is still completely unclear. Last week, the group’s management suddenly announced that it would focus its transition to electric mobility heavily on the US and build new plants in the states of Kentucky and Tennessee.

VW Wolfsburg

“Gigantic flexibility” is also to be introduced at VW. Company management announced a “radical restructuring” to “compete against Tesla and the competition from China.”

Last Thursday, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess and brand boss Ralf Brandstätter called all 120 top managers together in Wolfsburg for a crisis meeting. They said there had to be “a revolution” at the main plant, similar to “open-heart surgery.” The VW bosses stressed: Without a massive increase in productivity and profitability, the group would not be able to hold its own in the international market.

Tesla, but also the many new Chinese manufacturers, produce more cheaply and faster. At the same time, the quality of their vehicles is improving all the time and has now reached European standards. As a result, more than 70 percent of Chinese customers have already decided to buy their next premium vehicle from a Chinese manufacturer, according to automotive experts from the consulting firm Kearney. In addition, a Tesla 3 is built in ten hours, more than three times as fast as a VW ID.3 in Zwickau. This puts Tesla in a different dimension in terms of productivity and profitability.

Bolta-Werke

Bavarian automotive supplier Bolta Werke from the Nuremberg region has filed for bankruptcy. Bolta says it has around 1,000 employees at its Diepersdorf headquarters. In terms of the number of employees, it is one of the largest companies in the Nuremberg region. The company has subsidiaries in the south of the USA and in Mexico. Worldwide, 2,400 people work for the Bolta Group.

FAM

The long-established machine and plant manufacturer FAM is cutting 100 of the total of almost 600 jobs at its Magdeburg site. According to the report, employees were informed of details of the job cuts at a works meeting last Wednesday. To prevent protests, the works council and IG Metall immediately announced there would be a transfer company and severance pay for those affected.

Blohm+Voss

The long-established Hamburg shipyard Blohm+Voss is facing mass layoffs. At a staff meeting last Friday, the management of the parent company Lürssen, from Bremen, announced that a large part of the workforce will have to leave. Currently, the shipyard has about 580 employees. The union announced it would hold negotiations.

Evonic

The Essen-based Dax-listed group made a surprise announcement a week ago that the Niederkassel-Lülsdorf site, in the Rhine-Sieg district of North Rhine-Westphalia, is to be abandoned in the foreseeable future. The aim is to sell the entire Niederkassel site to a new owner. The future of the 600 employees is completely uncertain.

This list could go on and on, and it grows longer every day.

After the elections, the ruling class is implementing a general attack on workers. The hundreds of billions of euros that flowed primarily into the large companies and banks in the course of the so-called coronavirus rescue packages are now being recovered. At the same time, the German economy is to be made more profitable in the face of international competition. All this requires massive attacks on wages, working conditions and jobs. In the auto industry alone, half a million jobs are at stake.

Workers who take up the fight to defend jobs, and against social cuts and wage reductions, are confronted not only with all the parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament), but also with the unions and works councils, which form a close pact with management and corporate executives. They act as co-managers and develop concepts for the corporations and government to assert the interests of German industry in the global competition for markets and profits.

In doing so, they use their extensive apparatus of functionaries, including works council representatives and shop stewards, to suppress a real struggle to defend jobs, wages and social standards. This strategy also includes pseudo-protests that serve only to spread frustration and site-specific campaigns that divide and pit workers against each other. But the unions are increasingly failing to control and suppress the growing resistance in the workplaces.