Eighteen coal miners and villagers massacred by Indian army in Nagaland

Kranti Kumara

Indian Army and paramilitary forces killed 18 civilians, including at least 6 coal miners, in the northeastern state of Nagaland last weekend.

The wanton massacre of poor workers and villagers is the direct outcome of the regime of military impunity and terror that has been in force in much of India’s northeast under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act or AFSPA since 1958. Under the AFSPA, security forces in areas the central government declares “disturbed” have the “right” to shoot and kill anyone they claim is breaking the law or threatening public order, to conduct warrantless searches, and to detain people on mere suspicion.

The security forces’ killing spree began late afternoon Saturday, when an Indian Army Special Forces unit ambushed a pick-up truck near Oting, a Nagaland village close to India’s border with Myanmar, that was conveying coal miners to their homes after a day of hard work. Six of the miners died on the spot. Two others were critically wounded.

Indian courts continue to sanction open-ended imprisonment without trial

The military would subsequently claim the deaths were the outcome of a case of “mistaken identity” and that they had set up an ambush for separatist insurgents fighting for an independent “Nagalim” based on an “intelligence tipoff.” Neither the military nor India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which has issued a hollow “apology” for the coal miners’ deaths, questions the military’s right under the AFSPA to use deadly force without warning.

In two subsequent shooting incidents both directly tied to the first, the Indian Army killed a further 10 people. Eight of these died on Saturday, while two others succumbed Sunday to gunshot wounds from the previous evening. One of the victims had accompanied a local BJP official who was investigating reports that shots had been fired near Oting. The other nine were part of a large group of Oting villagers who went looking for the coal miners when they did not return from work.

These subsequent deaths arose from the Army Special Forces’ attempts to cover up their murder of the coal miners. According to the BJP official and the Oting villagers, when they came upon the slaughter site, military personnel were in the process of removing the corpses and dressing them in khaki-coloured clothes with the intent of claiming their victims were insurgents.

When the villagers realized what was happening, they set fire to three military vehicles. The soldiers, who were from the 21 Para (Special Forces), responded by firing indiscriminately at the villagers. According to the police report, the soldiers fled the scene “even firing in the coal mine hutments” as they retreated. In the melee, one soldier was killed. All told, the India Army killed 16 people and a further 14 were seriously injured. One soldier was killed in the clash with the villagers and a couple more injured.

Fearing further protests from a population that has repeatedly taken to the streets to demand the repeal of the AFSPA, the authorities invoked the draconian Section 144 of the Criminal Code Sunday. It bans all gatherings and restricts vehicle movement to emergency vehicles and those carrying essential commodities. The Nagaland state government also suspended mobile Internet and data services and bulk SMS for the entire Mon district to which Oting village belongs.

Nevertheless, there was a further bloody incident on Sunday. When the Konyak Union, which styles itself as the “apex body of the Konyak Naga tribe,” postponed a mass funeral for the military’s victims, hundreds of angry demonstrators attacked its offices in Tiru and the nearby camp of the Assam Rifles, a heavily armed paramilitary force long involved in counterinsurgency operations.

According to the state government report: “After almost an hour into the melee, the second round of continuous firing by the Assam Rifles resulted in the mob running for safety and protection. After the firing ceased, one protestor by the name of Leong of Chi village was confirmed to be dead on the spot and six others sustained bullet wound injuries.” One of the wounded subsequently died. Local media report two Assam Rifle soldiers also died; however this has not been picked up by the national press.

Nagaland’s state government is a two-party coalition, with the BJP serving as the junior party of the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP). State Chief Minister and NDPP leader Neiphiu Rio has announced a measly Rs. 500,000 ($6,750) in compensation to the families of the deceased. While shutting down the “internet” and imposing other “law and order” measures, Rio and his government, in a transparent attempt to deflect mass anger over the Indian Army’s actions, is now calling on the BJP-led central government to withdraw the AFSPA.

“AFSPA,” the Chief Minister demagogically declaimed, “gives powers to the Army to arrest civilians without any arrest warrant, raid houses and also kill people. But there is no action against the security forces.”

Nagaland, a small state with a population of just 2.25 million, has been ravaged for decades by atrocities committed by the Indian army, the Assam Rifles and other heavily armed paramilitary forces as they seek to ensure the Indian state’s unfettered dominance of the resource-rich and strategically significant northeast. As elsewhere in the region, the people of Nagaland have been subject simultaneously to neglect, brutal exploitation and repression by India’s capitalist ruling elite.

Much of the northeast’s population is comprised of tribal peoples and religious minorities. Christians, for example, make up close to 90 percent of Nagaland’s population.

Undoubtedly, the Narendra Modi-led BJP government’s relentless promotion of Hindu supremacism has increased tensions, fear and alienation in the northeast. The region has repeatedly been swept by mass protests against the BJP government’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, which for the first time makes religion a criterion for determining citizenship and threatens to strip millions of Muslims living in the northeast of their citizenship rights.

The BJP government has also been conspicuous in its brutal treatment of Rohingya refugees, who have sought refuge from persecution by the Myanmar government in India’s northeastern states and Bangladesh. Modi’s chief henchman, Home Minister Amit Shah, has repeatedly labelled these helpless victims a “security threat” who, along with other Muslim migrants, should be thrown into the Bay of Bengal.

While fuelled by genuine popular grievances, the various tribal-based secessionist movements that have arisen in the northeast over the past six decades offer no progressive alternative to Indian capitalism. Championing exclusivist national-ethnic demands, they have frequently clashed with each other. Many have subsequently been incorporated into the mainstream of establishment politics, becoming regional props of Indian bourgeois rule.

In 2015, the BJP government signed a “framework peace agreement” with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland. However, talks toward implementing that deal have stalled due to continuing differences, and a minority continues to wage an insurgency with the aim of creating a sovereign Nagalim out of Nagaland, and parts of several neighbouring northeastern states and Myanmar.

At its adoption in 1958 under Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party government, the AFSPA was aimed at an earlier Naga separatist political movement and insurgency. Ultimately it came to be employed against ethno-secessionist movements in all seven states that today comprise the northeast, giving the military vast arbitrary powers, which it has used with impunity in ruthlessly suppressing opposition to the Indian state.

In 1991, it was invoked in Jammu and Kashmir—India’s lone Muslim majority state till it was stripped of that status in a 2019 constitutional coup—and for the past three decades it has provided pseudo legal-constitutional cover for savage state repression, including murder, torture, forced disappearances, and phony “encounter killings.”

Not least among the AFSPA’s many outrageous antidemocratic provisions is the stipulation that military personnel cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in government-declared “disturbed areas.”

In addition to Nagaland, it is currently in force in the northeast in the states of Assam, Manipur (apart from its principal city, Imphal), and parts of Arunachal Pradesh.

Human Rights Watch, in a report published in 2008 on the 50th anniversary of the AFSPA’s adoption, documented some of the gruesome acts of mass killing, rape, disappearances, and torture committed under its provision of blanket immunity. It also emphasized that civilians have been the principal victims of these crimes.

Whilst there have been mass protests for many years against the AFSPA in the northeast, the Indian military has bitterly opposed calls for its withdrawal or repeal and central governments, whether led by the Congress Party or BJP, have hastened to reassure the top brass that that is not in the cards.

Biden threatens economic sanctions and a repositioning of NATO troops in meeting with Putin

Clara Weiss

The UK-Russian confrontation in the Black Sea: An ominous warning At a two-hour video conference call with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden threatened Russia with “strong sanctions” and the repositioning of NATO troops in case of a war between Russia and Ukraine. It was the second meeting of both presidents this year following a summit in June, at which Biden appeared trying to ease tensions with Russia as part of his administration’s efforts to focus its war preparations on China.

Since then, however, military tensions between NATO and Russia have grown significantly, even as the US has escalated its war drive against China. Over the past month, the US has sent several warships to the Black Sea in what Putin has described as a “serious challenge” to Russia’s security interests. The EU and NATO have also provoked a geopolitical crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, where thousands of refugees from the Middle East have been trapped.

President Joe Biden meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Wednesday, June 16, 2021, in Geneva, Switzerland. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

While the regime of Alexander Lukashenko has begun deporting many of these refugees, the US and EU imposed new sanctions on Belarus last week which are expected to deal a serious blow to the country’s economy. Despite simmering tensions with the Kremlin, Minsk is the only state remaining in Eastern Europe that maintains extremely close economic and military ties with Russia.

These provocations have come after three decades, in which NATO has continuously pushed closer to Russia’s borders and staged two coups in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, to bring pro-Western governments to power. While Putin has described any further military buildup of Ukraine by the alliance as a “red line,” Biden has explicitly rejected acknowledging such “red lines” by the Kremlin.

The meeting was preceded by numerous threats against Russia from Biden, as well as Germany’s new Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, and a drum beat of war propaganda in the American and European press. The Washington Post and New York Times published reports this weekend alleging that Russia was planning an “invasion” of Ukraine with some 175,000 troops. As in all such war propaganda in previous years, these reports were based on leaks from anonymous intelligence officials.

At the meeting, which was described as “tense” by both sides, Biden threatened Putin with “strong economic and other measures in the event of military escalation” and “reiterated his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Putin reportedly refused to promise that Russia would pull its troops from the border with Ukraine (the exact number of which the Kremlin has never confirmed). He blamed NATO for the crisis, asking again and again without success, for guarantees from NATO that it would respect Russia’s security interests.

Earlier reports by CNN and Bloomberg indicated that US and EU officials are considering cutting off Russia from the SWIFT agreement. This step has been floated since 2014 as the “nuclear option” in the ongoing economic warfare against Russia. The SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) is the main framework for international monetary transactions and is critical, for instance, for international credits. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT could trigger a virtual economic collapse, affecting, in particular, the country’s finance sector and its exports of raw materials, upon which the entire economy is highly dependent. While the Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed the reports as “hysterical,” they sent shock waves throughout the Russian press.

Biden also warned that, in case of war, NATO would put to an end the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, a project of major economic and geopolitical significance for the Kremlin.

Whatever sanctions are in the works, they are certain to first and foremost hit the working class and not Russia’s oligarchs, who have long transferred a large portion of their fortunes to bank accounts abroad. The past seven years of economic sanctions by the US and EU have already significantly contributed to a precipitous decline in real wages for workers, while the oligarchs were able to continuously increase their wealth.

Biden further threatened that NATO could reposition its troops in Europe in case of a war in measures that the New York Times described as going well beyond what NATO did in the wake the 2014 coup. The US and NATO have pumped billions of dollars into the Ukrainian armed forces since the 2014 US-backed coup overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich. The US has also equipped the Ukrainian military with Javelin missiles.

These missiles have so far not been used by the Ukrainian army, but US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, who herself played a critical role in the orchestration of the 2014 coup, declared on Tuesday that this would have to change. She said, “The Ukrainians are having to think differently about their own security, and in fact, some of the defensive lethal support that the U.S. has given Ukraine over the years they’ve had in storage containers, and I think we’ll now see them have to put that stuff out and be thinking very hard about their own civil defense.”

Just after the meeting, it was revealed that the new US defense budget proposed by Congress will involve $4 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative, which is above all directed against Russia. The amount is over $569 million more than had initially been requested by the White House. While the budget will apparently not include new sanctions on the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, Ukraine is slated to receive $300 million from the Pentagon, $50 million more than initially requested.

The ongoing threats and the military buildup by NATO in the region have created a highly unstable and dangerous situation that threatens to escalate into a regional war that could quickly draw in Russia and the major imperialist powers. On Friday, a Russian Aeroflot passenger flight from Moscow to came within 20 meters of a US spy plane over the Black Sea, forcing it to change its route. The Kremlin later denounced the US Air Force for nearly creating a “catastrophe”. On Saturday, Belarus accused Ukraine on Saturday of violating its airspace as Ukrainian troops were engaged in military exercises on the Polish-Belarusian border.

Emboldened by the NATO military buildup in the Black Sea and Tel Aviv’s hysterical war propaganda in the Western press, the Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky has engaged in open saber rattling vis-a-vis Russia. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government issued a new national security strategy, announcing its intention to “recover” Crimea, the peninsula in the Black Sea that was annexed by Russia after the 2014 coup, and the Donbass. The strategy was effectively a declaration that Ukraine was preparing for war against Russia.

A day before the meeting between Biden and Putin, Zelensky visited Ukrainian troops stationed at the front lines of an ongoing civil war in East Ukraine with pro-Russian separatists. Speaking to the troops, he said that he was confident that, with such soldiers, Ukraine would “win” any conflict.

In a statement published on Monday in honor of the Ukrainian army, Zelensky declared, “Having absorbed the best national military traditions that have been formed in the difficult, bloody wars and armed conflicts of the past, during its most recent history the Ukrainian army has come a difficult way to form a capable and highly organized combat structure, confident in its strength and able to destroy any aggressive plans of the enemy.”

The statement was a thinly veiled appeal to far-right forces in Ukraine which have been systematically integrated into the state apparatus and the military since 2014. The only significant “national military traditions” of the Ukrainian army, beyond the ongoing civil war against the separatists, involve the role of paramilitary, far-right nationalist organizations in World War II. Fighting alongside the Nazi regime against the Red Army, they participated in numerous massacres of the Jewish and Polish population. It is these forces that are again being mobilized in the interests of imperialism.

Dirty Gold Destroys Lives and the Environment

Cesar Chelala

Since before Cleopatra, gold jewelry has been a prized gift. But gold can also be a curse. “Dirty gold” is gold produced using poor environmental practices, substandard working conditions or illegal dealings. Dirty gold mining uses cyanide and mercury, which are both poisonous chemicals. Over 90 percent of the world’s gold is extracted using these chemicals.

In Peru, the world’s sixth largest producer of gold, approximately a quarter is produced illegally. Gold mining attracts foreign companies who employ thousands of miners. But human and environmental costs outweigh temporary benefits. On November 19, 2021, Peru’s Prime Minister Mirtha Vásquez said the government would ban four mines in the southern Ayacucho region from further expansion because of their negative impact on the environment. She also said that the government would close illegal mines as soon as possible.

Gold mining in the Amazon rainforest has increased in recent years, driven by the high price of gold. Jungle mining concessions have been granted by the energy and mines ministry. But these concessions have grown out of control. Aerial images taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station are clear proof of the invasive nature of artisanal mining and the inability of authorities to curb it.

For several years, the mining industry in Peru has been linked to deforestation and pollution of air and rivers. Environmental activists have also lost their lives. OjoPúblico, a digital venue for investigative journalism in Peru, cites data from Peru’s National Coordinator for Human Rights (CNDDHH); twenty environmental activists have been killed in the Peruvian Amazon since 2013, including twelve indigenous leaders.

During gold extraction, large volumes of earth are scoured away and searched for trace elements. According to the environmental group Earthworks, to produce enough gold to make a single ring 20 tons of rock and soil have to be dislodged and discarded. The waste from this process carries mercury and cyanide, used to extract gold from the rock. The contaminated erosion products clog streams and rivers and taints marine ecosystems downstream from the mining sites. Gold mining releases hundreds of tons of airborne elemental mercury and compromises air quality.

Mercury contaminates waterways becoming a serious threat to human health. Chronic exposure to mercury causes damage to the brain, spinal cord, kidneys and the liver. Although environmental contaminants affect all members of society, children reflect their impact the most because their immune system and detoxification mechanisms are not fully developed.

In pregnant women, mercury compounds cross the placenta and can interfere with the development of the fetus. Mercury can also cause attention deficit disorders and developmental delays. Aside from the environmental impact, illegal gold mining has significantly increased the number of teenage girls and young women forced into prostitution rings. Young women are brought from all over the country to brothels in mining camps. Many of these women are never seen again.

Mercury is also a toxin to fish. Fish in the area contain three times more mercury than the safe levels permitted by the World Health Organization. The World Wildlife Fund states, “After fossil fuel burning, small-scale gold mining is the world’s second largest source of mercury pollution, contributing around 1/3 of the world’s mercury pollution.”

According to the Amazon Conservation Association, between 30 and 40 tons of mercury are dumped annually into the rivers of Madre de Dios, a rich area in biodiversity in southeastern Peru, poisoning the food chain. If the Peruvian authorities persist in their decision to eliminate excessive and unregulated mining, it will be an important step to protect the Amazon and the lives of those who live there.

Europe passes 75 million COVID cases, as Omicron variant found in at least 17 countries across the continent

Robert Stevens

Europe has passed 75 million cases of COVID-19, as deaths on the continent surge towards 1.5 million.

The 75 million tally was reached last Friday, as a massive 418,190 new cases were recorded. That was the sixth time daily cases in Europe have topped 400,000, according to Our World in Data, since first passing that mark on November 24.

People wearing face masks ride a tram in downtown Lisbon, Monday, Dec. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

In the seven days to Monday, 2,566,508 million cases were recorded across the continent, a 1 percent increase on the previous week. That there is no let-up in infections is seen in the fact that by Monday evening, with a number of high-population countries yet to publish figures, total cases had almost hit 76 million.

According to a Reuters analysis, in 2021 “Europe has reported highest daily average of 359,000 new cases in second half as compared with highest daily cases of about 241,000 a day in the first half of the year.

“It took 136 days for the European region to go from 50 million cases to 75 million, compared with 194 days it took to get from 25 to 50 million while the first 25 million cases were reported in 350 days.”

In France, where total cases stand at almost 8 million, there has been a 45 percent increase over the last seven days with almost 300,000 new infections recorded. Italy saw an increase of almost 25 percent over the same period from 82,128 to 101,267. Norway saw an increase of 36 percent, Finland 20 percent, Switzerland 19 percent, Portugal 18 percent and Ireland 10 percent.

Another 26,913 lives were lost in the week to December 5 in Europe. The weekly number of deaths has not dipped below 25,000 for nearly a month, with the dire forecast by the World Health Organization last month that up to 700,000 more people could die in the European region by next March becoming a reality.

The rise in cases and death could soon be exponential with the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, which is now present in at least 17 European countries.

On Sunday, Denmark announced that 183 known cases of Omicron had been detected, more than tripling the total number of suspected cases of the new variant reported just two days earlier.

In Britain, Boris Johnson’s murderous government has led the way in the spread of COVID throughout Europe. In an island country with a relatively small population of 68 million, over 10.5 million people have been infected (almost 14 percent of all infections in Europe). The 51,459 infections reported Monday was the third time in the last week that more than 50,000 cases have been recorded on a single day in this phase of the pandemic. Britain’s population has suffered more than 167,000 deaths and its 153,744 infections per million of population is a higher rate than the United States, India, Brazil, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and South Africa.

People queue at a vaccination centre on Euston Road in London, Britain on December 3, 2021 (WSWS Media)

The Johnson government ditched all COVID restrictions in July, allowing the virus to spread unhindered, including in schools. On Sunday, a further 86 cases of Omicron were reported, taking the total to 246, an increase of more than 50 percent since Saturday. On Monday, another 90 cases took the official total to 336.

Scientists are warning that it is likely there are already far more cases of Omicron in circulation and that it could become the dominant variant in Britain within weeks.

On Monday, Professor Paul Hunter, from the school of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told BBC Breakfast that Omicron “is spreading rather more quickly than the Delta variant”. Hunter estimated that there could be 1,000 Omicron infections, which at the time of the interview was four times the number of officially confirmed cases. He added, “How it’s likely to spread in the UK is still uncertain, but I think the early signs are that it will probably spread quite quickly and probably start outcompeting Delta and become the dominant variant probably within the next weeks or a month or so at least.”

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at the University of Reading, said that Omicron could be so transmissible that it could cause an increase in coronavirus hospitalisations on a similar scale to January this year—the previous height of the pandemic in Britain. He told MailOnline, “It’s not uncommon for a more transmissible but less disease-causing pathogen to cause a bigger problem than a virus that is less lethal. If it infects a very large number but only hospitalises a small percentage, we could still end up with an awful lot of people in hospital.”

It was only 10 days ago that the first two cases of the Omicron variant were detected in Britain in Chelmsford and Nottingham, on November 27.

Johnson responded then by announcing only that travel restrictions would be imposed to “buy time” and the situation reviewed after three weeks. No decision would be taken on any restrictions coming into effect until December 17, by which time the main profits to be made in the busy pre-Christmas period would have been secured.

Christmas markets, festive events and bookings at restaurants and pubs are estimated to be worth over £11 billion to the UK economy.

Nothing is being done to stop the spread of the virus, despite Health Secretary Sajid Javid telling Parliament on Monday that Omicron was now present in at least 52 countries, “with 11 countries which include Romania, Mexico and Chile, all reporting their first cases this weekend.”

Confirming the rise in Omicron cases in Britain, Javid said, “This includes cases with no links to international travel so we can conclude there is now community transmission across multiple regions of England.”

The inaction of the Johnson government will see many more thousands of deaths. Javid declared that recent analysis from the UK Health Security Agency suggests that “the window between infection and infectiousness may be shorter for the Omicron variant than for the Delta variant”.

The Johnson government has been backed in the downplaying of Omicron by its official yes-men, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Chief Science Officer Sir Patrick Vallance.

The Mail reported that “Dr Clarke”, in comments no doubt aimed at Whitty, Vallance and their ilk, “warned that scientists risked ‘whitewashing’ the dangers of Omicron and giving people ‘a false sense of security’ by peddling claims it is just a mild illness.”

How dangerous Omicron could be is evident in the fact that more than half of those infected with the variant in England had received their first two vaccine doses.

Despite the mass of evidence that schools are critical to the transmission of COVID-19, they remain open across Europe.

Data released by the UK’s Office for National Statistics on Friday found that the highest increase of the rate of infection (4.3 percent) among any age group in England was in children aged two to 11. The Johnson government has no mitigations in place to stop the spread in schools and is stepping up its persecution of parents who are keeping their children away from COVID infested classrooms.

The policy is much the same continent-wide. In Belgium, where the first case in Europe was detected, the government is only requiring schools to close a week earlier than normal before Christmas and this minimal measure is a bigger step than most countries will take.

French troops fire on growing protests against French presence in Africa

Kumaran Ira

Nearly nine years after France invaded Mali and launched military operations throughout the Sahel, popular anger and opposition to the French military presence is erupting across the region. Masses of people hold French forces and the European allies responsible for escalating bloodshed, accusing the French military of secretly arming Islamist militias they are supposedly helping to fight.

Last month, protesters in Burkina Faso and Niger blocked a large French military convoy, escorted by local forces, traveling from Ivory Coast to Niger, as they believed the convoy was carrying weapons to arm terrorist groups. French troops fired on crowds who were blocking their path, killing two people and wounding dozens.

French troops confront African youth (Source: Twitter/ Mika Chavala)

“We asked them to open their vehicles so that we have an idea of the contents,” one protester, Bassirou Ouedraogo, told Reuters. “We know what is inside: suspect items.”

Another protester said: “We are ready to burn any French material passing by. We do not need France in this country anymore. That’s our will.”

The military convoy was reportedly stranded in Burkina Faso for more than a week, as protesters prevented it from moving. At the town of Kaya in northern Burkina Faso, protesters reportedly approached the convoy on a strip of wasteland where it had spent the night, carrying handwritten signs that said: “Kaya says to the French army go home.”

Several protesters were injured at a protest in Kaya when French and Burkinabè troops tried to force protesters to let the convoy leave, and French troops fired at the crowd. Medical personnel told African News that “the emergency department at the Kaya hospital received four people with gunshot wounds.”

A protester in Kaya explained that he wanted to know where the Islamist militant groups obtain weapons. He told VOA, “From where do the jihadists get their weapons? It’s from the French. That’s why we have blocked the convoy in Kaya. They shot at us yesterday and three people were injured. We were there yesterday, and today we are back again to block the convoy.”

“Today they shot at us with heavy weapons. They first shot in the air and after they shot and wounded people. Is that normal?” protester Mahamadi Sawadogo told AP. “You’re in our country, even though you colonized Africans there are things you must not do.”

After the convoy left Burkina Faso, protesters began blocking the convoy once it crossed into western Niger. According to Nigerian authorities, two protesters were killed and 16 injured on November 27. Eyewitness told the French TV station TV5 Monde that they saw French soldiers firing into the crowd.

The French military did not deny firing at the crowd, but implausibly denied that they had hit the protesters. Colonel Pascal Ianni, the spokesman for the French Army Chief of Staff, told VOA: “I repeat what I just said, the French forces did not shoot at the crowd,” adding: “French forces fired above the crowd and fired in front of the crowd, at the feet of the crowd, to stop the most violent demonstrators.”

The French war in Mali is a neo-colonial war of plunder, and French troops should be withdrawn from Africa immediately. The war in Mali, also involving German and other European Union (EU) troops as well as soldiers from neighboring African states allied to Paris, has nothing to do with opposition to Islamist terrorism. Rather, it was the continuation of the bloody 2011 NATO war in nearby Libya, in which Paris armed Islamist and tribal militias against the Libyan government.

The NATO powers deepened their ties to Al Qaeda-linked militias in their proxy war in Syria, where these ties became public knowledge and the subject of testimony to the US Congress. Successive French governments intensively courted Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms that fund Islamist terror networks but also buy large quantities of French-made weapons and recycle their oil earnings into European financial markets.

The neo-colonial war in Mali was an integral part of this imperialist looting of Africa and the Middle East. Placing French troops near Algeria’s massive natural gas reserves and Niger’s key uranium mines, the war gave Paris lucrative strategic leverage across the region.

Explosive anti-colonial sentiment and accusations of French complicity with Islamist terror groups, which also carried out terror attacks within France, have shaken the French ruling class. In Le Monde Diplomatique, Caroline Roussy of the Institute of Strategic and International Relations (IRIS) think-tank hysterically denounced African workers’ and rural toilers’ accusations of French economic plunder and complicity with terror groups as a “sick conspiracy theory.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told French television that “manipulators” are behind opposition to the French military presence, but that he hoped a solution would be found.

The reality is that since the French invasion of Mali in January 2013, violence and the influence of Islamist militias have surged in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and across the region. As it pursued a policy of divide-and-rule to maintain its control over the area, France and its NATO allies stoked ethnic conflicts and backed various rival militias, resulting in a resurgence of bloody massacres across the region. Accusations that certain ethnic groups were more favorable to Islamist militias also ignited inter-communal violence in areas across the region.

In recent months, jihadist violence has been rapidly escalating across the Sahel. According to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, “more than 1,500 civilians have been killed across the Central Sahel during 2021. In the volatile Tillabéri and Tahoua regions of western Niger, more than 600 civilians have been killed this year, over five times more than in 2020.”

In August, suspected jihadists slaughtered more than 40 civilians in northern Mali and killed 12 troops in an ambush in neighboring Burkina Faso. In the same month, they killed 80 people including 59 civilians and government forces in northern Burkina Faso. In June, gunmen carried out the bloodiest massacres, killing 160 people in northern Burkina Faso’s Yagha province, bordering Niger.

Last month, gunmen killed 69 people and 25 people in two separate attacks in southwest Niger, and 49 military police officers and four civilians in Burkina Faso.

On December 3, at least 30 people were killed and dozens injured in an attack near Bandiagara in central Mali, with the Malian military regime reporting 31 dead and 17 injured. So far, the attack has not been claimed by any of the Islamist armed groups operating in the region.

“The civilians were in a transport vehicle. The passengers were machine-gunned and the vehicle was burnt. The state has sent security forces to the scene,” local authorities in the Mopti region told Agence France-Presse. An elected official in the town of Bandiagara confirmed the death toll, adding that among the victims were “children and women and those who disappeared.”

Solomon Islands’ government defeats parliamentary no confidence motion

Patrick O’Connor

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare yesterday defeated an attempt to oust him via a no confidence motion, with US-backed opposition forces only able to muster the votes of 15 out of the 49 parliamentarians.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare (Photo: solomons.gov.sb)

The parliamentary effort to remove the government came directly after an unsuccessful violent coup attempt instigated by opposition forces. Over three days between November 24–26, approximately 1,000 people burned and looted dozens of buildings in the capital, Honiara, killing three people.

The crowd attempted to storm the parliament and after being beaten back by riot police, razed to the ground a building next to parliament, a building at the prime minister’s residence, as well as a police station, high school, and 60 other buildings, with ethnic Chinese-owned businesses especially targeted.

The country’s central bank last week estimated that the rioting would see the national economy contract in 2021 by 0.6 percent, down from the already COVID-affected projected growth rate of plus 0.4 percent.

The destruction was the culmination of a US-supported, two-year campaign against the Solomon Islands’ diplomatic recognition of China. The October 2019 switch from Taiwan to Beijing aligned the Pacific country with the vast majority of UN member states in recognising the Chinese government.

Washington, however, regarded this sovereign decision of the Solomons’ government as an obstacle to its drive to counter China’s challenge to its dominance of East Asia and the Pacific, including by boosting Taiwan.

Republican congressman and Trump ally Marco Rubio publicly threatened to destroy the impoverished country’s economy. A less prominent, but no less provocative, message was delivered to Solomon Islands by a team of US government officials that in late 2019 travelled to Malaita province and held secret talks with Premier Daniel Suidani. The provincial leader subsequently denounced diplomatic ties with China, promoting anti-communist and Christian fundamentalist demagogy. The US government funnelled investment money and $US25 million in direct cash aid as an effective reward for Suidani’s efforts to sabotage the national government’s foreign policy.

Suidani is closely allied with a group promoting Malaitan independence from Solomon Islands, Malaita for Democracy (M4D). This outfit led the violent rioting late last month. Hundreds of people were ferried from Malaita to the capital for the coup attempt, with others prevented by police from landing on an additional ferry on November 24. The government has since proscribed M4D, characterising its members as “domestic terrorists.”

In the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt, Suidani has doubled down on his efforts to oust the government and instigate the reversal of the recognition of China. He addressed the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club on December 3, flaunting his US backing by wearing a polo-shirt with a prominent USAID logo. Suidani declared his support for ongoing anti-government protests and insisted that diplomatic recognition of China would end if the government was removed. These remarks were prominently reported in a Washington Post article.

Prime Minister Sogavare yesterday delivered a nearly two-hour long speech on the parliamentary floor opposing the no confidence motion advanced by the opposition leader Mathew Wale.

The address outlined important additional details on the planning and calculations behind the rioting. As the World Socialist Web Site analysed, the violence emerged not from any spontaneous uprising but rather was part of a reactionary coup attempt.

Sogavare characterised the riots as an “an attempted coup to overthrow the elected government.” He said that people travelling from Malaita to the capital on November 24 were given discounted or free ferry tickets, adding that the plan had been to “storm parliament and lock us [parliamentarians] in until I resigned.”

The prime minister accused opposition parliamentarians of conspiring with the Malaitan provincial administration and M4D. These forces gathered in Malaita on November 18, where Suidani had organised a public rally. Opposition parliamentarians were among those who delivered incendiary anti-government speeches. Sogavare quoted parts of these speeches, in the pidgin language in which they were delivered, and said they were an incitement for “people to take the law into their own hands.”

The prime minister added that Suidani had travelled throughout Malaita ahead of the riots, allegedly spreading “disinformation” and building support for an effort to overthrow the government, and had also met with Malaitan people in the settlements on the outskirts of eastern Honiara. Many of the rioters reportedly came from this area, an impoverished slum.

Sogavare told the parliament: “This [no confidence] motion was made against the backdrop of an illegal attempted coup. Violence, intimidation and fear—these actions are illegal and unlawful and were an attack on the principles of democracy.”

The WSWS opposes the US-backed provocative efforts to destabilise and remove the Solomon Islands government, while at the same time extending no political support whatsoever to the Sogavare government.

The prime minister is now manoeuvring to curry favour with the US and Australian governments. His address to parliament notably failed to make any reference to Washington’s support for Suidani and the campaign to reverse the country’s recognition of Beijing. He carefully restricted his condemnation of foreign powers to Taiwan, accusing the opposition of being its agents.

Yesterday’s defeat of the no confidence motion will not resolve the political turmoil in the Solomons. It remains to be seen whether the Australian government will throw its weight behind the campaign to oust the government.

More than 100 Australian soldiers and riot police are now stationed in Honiara, after Sogavare invited the intervention force to halt the rioting. The Australian government has repeatedly insisted that this force will remain in Solomon Islands only for weeks, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison has insisted that Canberra would not take sides in any internal political disputes.

This stance is coming under mounting criticism from within the Australian foreign policy establishment. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer last week wrote a comment piece for the Australian Financial Review, insisting that ending the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) intervention force in 2017 had proved a mistake. He stated that Australia should have a permanent military-police presence in the country, effectively calling for its conversion into an Australian semi-colony.

The Murdoch media has published a series of articles in recent days hostile to Sogavare and his government, including pieces recycling the Solomons’ opposition accusations of corruption. In 2006-2007, when a previous Sogavare government was the target of a protracted “regime change” operation orchestrated by Canberra, the Murdoch press functioned as a conduit for Australian government propaganda.

An article in the rightwing Spectator magazine on Saturday criticised the Morrison government for allegedly having “tipped the balance of favour toward Xi Jinping’s interests” by deploying an intervention force that it alleged has stabilised the situation in the Sogavare government’s favour. It continued: “Maybe it’s time Australia started ‘picking winners’ in the Pacific? If we don’t play the game, China will walk in a victory. The longer the communist nation is left to its own devices, the worse the inevitable conflict will be. Australia can’t outspend China’s magical wallet, but it can support grassroots rebellions when they occur.”

The fraught situation in Solomon Islands underscores the enormous stakes throughout the Pacific as US imperialism and its allies attempt to counter China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence. Washington and Canberra will not hesitate in promoting coups, riots, and state breakdown, if such methods are seen as the most effective means of advancing their geopolitical interests.

14,000 Airbus workers take part in “warning” strikes in Germany

Gustav Kemper

Last week, over 14,000 employees of Airbus and its subsidiary Premium Aerotec took part in “warning” strikes across Germany. According to the trade union IG Metall entire production shifts were cancelled at the company’s north German plants in Bremen, Hamburg, Nordenham, Stade and Varel, as well as in Augsburg (Bavaria). The work stoppages began on December 2 and were expected to continue until the weekend.

Airbus plant Finkenwerder, Hamburg (Photo: David McKelvey / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The protest is directed against plans announced in April to cut thousands of jobs in civil aircraft production across Europe. Due to the corona pandemic, there were no pickets or protest events, only an online event. With growing anger against the planned cuts, IG Metall called the limited actions to let off steam. The union is completely prepared to accept the job cuts and other cost-cutting measures, as long as union officials are involved in the planning and execution of the cuts.

In July 2020, when a drop in aircraft orders and the postponement of deliveries led to rumours of massive cuts, IG Metall officials stressed their understanding for the cost-cutting measures and praised the union’s long-standing collaboration with management, officially embodied in the German system of “social partnership.” The union recognised it must take into account the interests “of the company to make profits” as well as the interests of shareholders by “guaranteeing them a good return on investment,” assured Michael Leppek, head of IG Metall in Augsburg, in a podcast interview with a local newspaper.

Over a month ago, at the end of October, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury announced company profits of €4.5 billion (before interest and taxes) for the first nine months of the year. These profits are the result of the “Odyssey” rationalisation programme unveiled in summer 2020, which envisages cuts of 15,000 jobs worldwide, including 5,000 in Germany.

Most of the planned job cuts at German sites have already been implemented, with workers at Airbus and Premium-Aerotec forced out with severance payments or early retirement schemes, which IG Metall claimed avoided compulsory redundancies. Daniel Friedrich, the district leader of IG Metall Küste, declared, “The threatened redundancies are off the table. Instead, there are intelligent solutions.” This is all IG Metall and the works councils have to offer workers after months-long “negotiations” with management.

The company’s German works council complained after Airbus management informed the European Works Council on 21 April about its plans to restructure the company. The new programme is supposed to affect the aircraft components division, especially fuselage sections, floor structures, wing components, cargo doors and/or pressure bulkheads, from as early as next month. These components are currently manufactured in the Airbus wholly owned subsidiary “Premium Aerotec” with factories in France, Germany and Romania. The division of the former subsidiary is being reintegrated into the main company.

The production of individual parts and small components that also takes place at Aerotec is to be diversified into an independent company that could also manufacture products for other aviation companies. There are 3,500 workers currently employed in the production of such parts in Varel, Augsburg and in Brasov, Romania. This company, under the name ASA, is being offered to investors for purchase.

The latest restructuring affects about 13,000 workers. IG Metall refers to it as a “senseless split” yet when it comes to workers, it is the unions which are splitting and dividing them in the company’s European plants.

Airbus SE is a global aerospace company with over 170 locations worldwide. Without a common European struggle of Airbus workers not a single job can be defended. The various national trade unions act according to the principle of divide and rule. IGM executive member Jürgen Kerner, for example, complained that German factories were being treated less favourably than French locations. “Airbus is mutating more and more into a French listed company with a German branch,” Werner complained.

When 22,000 engineering workers in Cadiz, Spain went on strike for a week last month to keep defend their Airbus plant, IG Metall in Germany did not say a word. Airbus plans to close the entire plant in Puerto Real, a district of Cádiz, by 2024. Together with workers in the supplier industry, the closure of the plant would wipe out over 2,200 jobs. This would be a disaster for the city, which already has an unemployment rate of 34 percent.

The massive strike action by the workforce was suppressed by the Spanish unions, which are no different from IG Metall. Airbus management, the social democratic trade union federation UGT and the Stalinist trade union CCOO, the Spanish coalition government of social democrats and the pseudo-left Podemos together with the Federation of Metal Companies of Cadiz (FEMCA), all agreed to close the Puerto Real plant and make the factory premises available for an unspecified “Industrial Centre for Aviation 4.0.”

Jobs are supposedly secured by the proposal, but this is nothing more than a hollow promise aimed at ending the strike.

The same problems face workers in Germany and all over the world. The unions are imposing job cuts to protect the profits of the corporations. While they organise protests to vent anger, they are feverishly working behind the scenes to finalise the agreements for layoffs and factory closures in exchange for “compensation” or promises of investment plans that are never fulfilled.

US announces boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics

Peter Symonds

Less than a month after US President Joe Biden held his first formal summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, the US has announced a provocative diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics, due to open in Beijing in February.

The famous "Cinderella's shoe" big air venue built especially for the 2022 Winter Olympics (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told a press briefing that the US would send no official delegation to the Beijing Olympics. That would register its opposition to China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.” American athletes will compete nevertheless.

The decision follows an increasingly hysterical campaign in the US media and political establishment, clamouring for a boycott on the basis of lies about China’s “genocide” of the ethnic Uyghur population in China’s western province of Xinjiang.

The Biden administration has offered no substantive evidence of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang, let alone that Beijing is engaged in “atrocities” and “genocide.” The use of the term “genocide,” without a shred of proof, degrades its meaning and the very real crimes of the past, such as the Nazi holocaust.

Allegations of widespread surveillance, detentions and infringement of religious freedom rest on the tendentious claims of a handful of far-right, anti-communist academics, along with the uncorroborated stories of Uyghur exiles connected to organisations such as the US-funded World Uyghur Congress and the American Uyghur Association.

In the dying days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo first accused China of genocide in Xinjiang. That lie was rapidly taken up by the Biden administration as part of its vilification of China. The propaganda campaign is one element of the aggressive US strategy of confronting and undermining China on all fronts over the past decade, including a military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific in preparation for war.

The US is again cynically raising the banner of “human rights” as the pretext for its actions, with Psaki declaring that “we have a fundamental commitment to promoting human rights.”

The rank hypocrisy of this statement is clear from the US-led boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow in 1980 to protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Carter administration, which staged the boycott, was instrumental in the huge CIA operation to fund and arm Muslim jihadists against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, including the foreign fighters funneled in via the organisation known as Al Qaeda.

Two decades later the “blowback” from the CIA’s dirty war in Afghanistan resulted in the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda in the US on September 11 2001. Washington seized on the attacks to carry out the illegal invasion and neo-colonial occupation of Afghanistan that reduced the country to ruins and destroyed countless lives. It proved to be a quagmire for US imperialism in the same way that it had been a disaster for the Soviet Union.

As in Afghanistan, the US has repeatedly exploited the issue of “human rights” as the justification for its crimes and atrocities in its “war on terror.” Its wars include the invasion of Iraq and military interventions in Syria and Libya, which involved the destruction of entire societies. Such acts of sociocide constitute real crimes against humanity.

At the same time, the total disregard of US imperialism for human life is also being visited upon the working class at home. Some 800,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 as a result of the criminal policies of the Trump and Biden administrations that have dropped virtually all health restrictions so as to boost corporate profits and the wealth of the super-rich at the expense of the health and lives of ordinary working people.

In a salutary comparison, more people continue to die from the virus every week in the United States than the total death toll in China since the start of the pandemic. Yet no action is taken against those responsible in the White House.

The pandemic, which is now threatening a massive worldwide resurgence of the Omicron strain, has enormously heightened the social, political and economic crisis facing the Biden administration and the political establishment in Washington as a whole. The demonisation of China is a crude attempt to turn the social tensions at home outward against a foreign enemy.

The Biden administration is staging another contemptuous “human rights” exercise this week, billed as the US Summit for Democracy, to which allies are invited and rivals excluded with scant regard for their record on democratic rights. Biden has pointedly invited Taiwan, despite the fact that the US regards the island as part of China under the One China policy. The event will undoubtedly be used as another forum to condemn China, while encouraging allies to strengthen ties with Taiwan.

Washington will seek to also marshal support for an international boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Governments in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have indicated that a boycott is under consideration.

China reacted angrily to the announced boycott. Its Washington embassy dismissed the announcement as “a pretentious act” and a “political manipulation.”

Foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, declared yesterday: “I want to stress that the Winter Olympic Games is not a stage for political posturing and manipulation. It is a grave travesty of the spirit of the Olympic charter, a blatant political provocation and a serious affront to the 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

Zhao warned of “resolute countermeasures” but Beijing has so far not indicated what it might do.

The boycott is one more sign that the US is deliberately intensifying and accelerating its confrontation with China. The vilification of Beijing over “human rights,” along with the Wuhan Lab lie that China is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is going hand in hand with the maintenance of trade war sanctions and other punitive penalties and the US military encirclement of China.

While the boycott recalls the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the US is not preparing for a protracted standoff with China. Unlike its standoff with the Soviet Union, the US regards China’s extraordinary economic growth as the prime threat to its global dominance and will stop at nothing, including war if necessary, to prevent its eclipse by China.