Western Lies and False Narratives About Ethiopia

Graham Peebles

War is big, loud, significant and attracts an audience; media likes it. Foreign wars (commonly Middle Eastern or African) distract from domestic chaos and reinforce a long-held prejudice of savagery and race, and the opposite, equally false notion of western superiority.

In all conflicts mainstream media plays a crucial role, often inflammatory, feeding the discord through a particular narrative. Western media claims it is independent, but this is fallacious; corporate owned or State sponsored, it is conditioned by a particular world-view, ideologically/politically, nationalistically, historically.

After war erupted in Ethiopia in November 2020 western media have played a major role in spreading mis-/disinformation and, occasionally, outright lies. Together with foreign powers led by the United States, international human rights groups and elements within United Nations Agencies, they attacked and undermined the Ethiopian government.

Statements are issued and regurgitated in various outlets: BBC, CNN, France24, Al Jazeera, etc., seemingly without verification; the more often something is repeated, the louder the drumbeat of insistence on its truth, no matter how incredible it may be. In November 2021 e.g., media carried the totally untrue story that TPLF forces were “200 km, or 400 km away from the capital Addis Ababa and could take the city in weeks”. Was this story spread in all innocence by the media; why would a responsible editor publish such information without checking it?

Such stories sensationalize events, build tension and attract public attention. In Ethiopia they falsely portrayed the terrorist Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) as an ascendant force, the Ethiopian government as cruel and desperate, their forces deflated and inadequate.

The war was triggered by the TPLF’s preemptive attack on Federal Army bases on 4 November 2020; uncounted soldiers were killed, arms stolen. This fact (and the terrorist nature of the TPLF), is routinely disregarded by international media, and western governments, despite various TPLF spokespeople admitting it.

Imagine the outrage if such an assault took place against a western military base: there would be widespread fury, a sharp retaliatory response – or a protracted “war on terror” – unanimous support from allies, and wall-to-wall anger across the media. But, instead of condemning the terrorists, the US attacked the Ethiopian government, legitimized the TPLF, demanded PM Abiy Ahmed enter into negotiations with it. Again, would any western government be expected to negotiate with a terrorist gang that had carried out an act of treason? The hypocrisy, condescension and, yes, racism of the “international community” (the US and her bedmates), former or decaying imperialists, knows no limits.

Manufacturing Consent

An influential voice in the build-up to the conflict and a regular voice of media dis-/misinformation once fighting started, was the International Crisis Group (ICG). In a report published May 2021, Disinformation in Tigray – Manufacturing Consent for a Secessionist War, New Africa Institute (NAI) detail that, ICG “played a critical role in driving the world to believe that TPLF had the upper hand in any ensuing conflict”.

A week before the TPLF attacked the Northern Command ICG published, Steering Ethiopia’s Tigray Crisis Away from Conflict, stating, Tigray’s “well-armed regional paramilitary force is led by former national army generals. It also boasts a large militia full of war veterans. TPLF leaders say that many officers in the units of the Northern Command…would not be likely to support any federal intervention, and some could even break and join Tigray’s forces.” Such material, it is believed, emboldened the TPLF to launch their deadly attack, plunging Ethiopia into chaos.

NAI detail the extraordinary level of falsehoods, distortions and errors perpetrated by media; the dis-/misinformation campaign, they make clear, was an attempt “to manufacture consent for an unpopular irredentist, ethnic secessionist war that could not be justified in the eyes of the international public through honest reporting.” For Ethiopians it has been devastating, but within the halls of western power – Washington, mainly, but also London and, though less so, Brussels, it appears it was welcomed. A chance to destabilize not just Ethiopia under PM Abiy Ahmed, seen as too independent and potentially influential, but the Horn of Africa more broadly. The US and co. supported the TPLF politically, diplomatically and, many believe, militarily from the outset; mainstream news outlets obediently followed suit.

Media may refute the assertion of a conscious campaign of support for the TPLF; however, given the breadth of material published that either attacks the government, misleads the public or supports the terrorists, it is hard to deny.

Initially, a common excuse for the appalling coverage was the “communications blackout”. The Washington Post went as far as to blame the government for the dis-/misinformation, saying, “by blocking communications and access to Tigray, the [Ethiopian] government helped create conditions where disinformation and misinformation can thrive.” They only “thrive” if journalists/editors don’t do their jobs and check their material.

The menu of mis-/disinformation varies from the seemingly innocuous, e.g. describing the forced retreat of the TPLF to Tigray in December 2021, as a “withdrawal” (similar to reporting of the 2021 Gaza assault by Israel, in which BBC said X number of Palestinians had died and Y number of Israelis had been killed), to false accusations of “massacres, mass rape and sexual violence, looting, extrajudicial killings, genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.” Savage portrayals of Ethiopian and Eritrean forces – drawn into the conflict after the TPLF bombed the capital Asmara – that NAI make clear “draw on old colonial tropes of Africans.”

The oft-repeated media claims of rape and gang rape by Ethiopian Federal Forces and Eritrean soldiers feed into this perverse notion of primitive Africans. Sexual and gender based violence was highlighted in the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), joint report, 3 November 2021. Premature and partial, it is full of generalized accusations of criminality.

Whilst admitting it is not an “exhaustive record of all relevant incidents”, its authors asserted that violations were committed by all parties to the conflict, including rape/gang rape. Assertions disputed by the Ethiopian government (which has said it will investigate) and refuted in Eritrea, where there is no culture of rape/gang rape, among society or the military. Within the TPLF however, rape/gang rape is part of its modus operandi.

TPLF military/para-military committed rape in the Ogaden region e.g., over a 25 year period of suppression of the ethnic Somali population. The same abuse took place against Oromo women for decades, and long before the conflict started in Tigray rape was a serious problem throughout the region; in 2019 a leading activist, Meaza Gidey tweeted: “rape culture is ubiquitous in Tigray oftentimes stigmatizing & shaming female rape survivors into marrying their rapist.”

While Tigray was in total chaos, on 11 February, 10 prisons in the region were emptied of all inmates. EHRC report that paperwork on the prisoners was destroyed, making, “Tracking major offenders nearly impossible and that it is one of the causes for the substantial increase of … major crimes.” The increase was so pronounced that the TPLF-mouthpiece Tigrai Media House (TMH) admitted that, “TPLF itself was responsible for the rise in crimes.” NAI report the TMH statement: “When news broke out that the Ethiopian army was making its way to Mekelle, the Tigray regional police forces and the prison forces disbanded abandoning their posts. As a result of this, the prison doors were left open and all the hardcore criminals escaped into the community.”

None of this information was reported by western media; misrepresentation through omissions, like this, has been widespread throughout.

Another example is the absence of coverage or condemnation of the Mai Kadra Massacre, one of many such TPLF atrocities. In November 2020 the village of Mai Kadra was the scene of a brutal attack by TPLF militia, the Samri and Tigrayan special police forces. The EHRC found that, “Samri, …local police and militia….killed hundreds of people beating them with batons/sticks, stabbing them with knives, machetes and hatchets and strangling them with ropes.” This atrocious, ethnically motivated attack, EHRC states, “May amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.” The massacre was largely overlooked by mainstream media and ignored by foreign governments; after all, those slaughtered were savages – poor (black) Africans, murdered by other poor (black) Africans.

Mai Kadre is included in the OHCHR/EHRC report, though estimating the deaths at 200, in contradiction to the 600+ Amnesty International say were murdered. To “balance” this appalling atrocity the report refers to a highly disputed incident by the Ethiopian Defense Force (EDF) in Axum, where it is claimed more than 100 people were killed. Despite the fact that there is no evidence of such an attack and no bodies have ever been discovered the story was all over mainstream media.

Then there is the oft-repeated claim that the Abiy government blocked humanitarian aid to Tigray. In January 2021 The Economist announced that food was being used as a weapon by the government, and quoted that the US run Famine Early Warning Systems Network, saying that, “parts of central and eastern Tigray are probably one step from famine.” There was no famine (terrible hardship as in all war zones, yes), and according to Ethiopia’s National Disaster Risk Management Commission, by May 2021 all 4.5 million Tigrayans in need of food had received assistance, 70% of it subsidized by the government.

The whole area of UN humanitarian work was polluted by TPLF moles, including within the World Food Programme (WFP). In October 2021 whistleblowers from UN Ethiopia revealed that the “TPLF……. have networks within UN system.” In an attempt to purge the organisation of TPLF infiltrators on 27 September the Ethiopian government expelled seven UN officials for, “Dissemination of misinformation and politicization of humanitarian assistance;” the “diversion of humanitarian assistance to the TPLF; Transferring communication equipment to be used by the TPLF;” and, unbelievably, “reticence in demanding the return of more than 400 trucks commandeered by the TPLF for military mobilization and for the transportation of its forces since July 2021.” None of this was reported by international media or commented upon by the US administration, or any other western government.

The spirit of unity

The examples of betrayal and western media dis-/misinformation over the course of the conflict are endless. The sources of material and the way stories evolve and become disseminated is often convoluted, facts ignored, evidence found wanting, or manufactured entirely, as with the so-called “Axum massacre”, examined in detail by NAI. Various players, including Europe External Programme with Africa (EEPA), where it apparently originated, and discredited ex-BBC Africa journalist Martin Plaut, contributed to a concocted narrative, accepted by Amnesty International and forming the basis for a human rights report.

A positive consequence of the west’s betrayal has been the heartening community spirit engendered among Ethiopians. Divided for decades by manipulative TPLF ethno-policies, Ethiopians, at home and abroad, have united against this group of self-supporting interconnected adversaries: The terrorist TPLF, “The West”, specifically the United States and the international mainstream media.

And now, as the fighting subsides and the country collectively draws breath the work of reconciliation and healing must begin.

To this end, in the hope of facilitating “national reconciliation”, PM Abiy announced the extraordinary step, which angered many Ethiopians, of granting an amnesty for some of the country’s most high-profile political prisoners and parliament has established a “Commission for National Dialogue”, “to pave the way for national consensus and keep the integrity of the country.” Despite the TPLF and their partners in crime, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), refusing so far to participate, this is encouraging.

Ethiopia has suffered terribly over the last year or so, and it will take time to recover. But, if the sense of national unity that has been created over the past year or so is maintained, healing will come more readily and this wonderful country will emerge stronger than ever.

As India passes 41 million official COVID-19 cases, Modi boasts of his “great success”

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Citing the highly undercounted official COVID-19 infection and death figures, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is playing down the threat posed by an Omicron-led third wave of the pandemic. Modi claims the “vaccination of 75 percent of the adult population” shows his “success,” though countless reports have revealed the ineffectiveness of vaccine-only policies to check highly infectious variants like Omicron.

Students wear face masks and wait outside a school on the day schools partially reopened after they were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

Resorting to his regular practice of self-congratulation, Modi boasted on January 30, the day India passed the 41 million mark for COVID-19 infections, that “India is fighting with great success with the new wave of corona,” calling it is a “matter of pride.” Modi’s “success” story is exposed as a sinister farce: the first month of 2022 alone saw over 6 million cases of COVID-19 in India.

Modi’s criminal profits-over-lives policy has already created a massive humanitarian crisis in the world’s second most populous country. With 497,975 COVID fatalities as of February 2, according to vastly undercounted official figures, India is about to pass half a million official COVID-19 deaths. Last year, however, the US-based Center for Global Development showed that India’s actual coronavirus death figure was four million, eight times higher than the official toll.

These deaths include thousands of children, as pointed out by leading health experts. In The Hindu, Dr. Dhanya Dharmapalan, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist in Navi Mumbai, and Dr. T. Jacob John, a retired Professor of Virology at Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, showed that 0.4 percent (or 1,944) of India’s official 486,000 COVID deaths (as of January 12) are children. Referring to analyses estimating “a six to seven-fold higher number of deaths,” the experts wrote that this is “suggesting a far higher number of child deaths” in India.

Some data given by exports highlight the disastrous prospects as millions of unprotected children are exposed to an Omicron-led surge that is spreading like wildfire. There are vast numbers of children living with diabetes, chronic heart/lung/kidney/neurological disease, obesity, or in immune-compromised states due to immunodeficiency syndromes or immunosuppressant therapies. They are at high risk of severe cases of COVID-19.

This includes:

• An estimated 200,000 children born with congenital heart defects every year in India;
• About 50,000 new cases of cancer in children per year;
• About 14.4 million obese children, the second-highest number in the world
• About 140,000 children annually suffer from childhood nephrotic syndrome;
• Over 1 million children have primary immune deficiency disease.

The danger faced by millions of children is surging as States and Union Territories reopen schools, and the Union Health Ministry works on its “national plan to reopen schools.” Reopened schools will be breeding grounds for COVID-19, infecting more and children, leading to rising hospitalizations, and dangerously threatening children with co-morbidities.

Neither Modi nor his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have ever expressed regret over the shocking figures on COVID fatalities. Nor do they intend to correct false COVID death tolls that criminally forget millions of victims.

Yesterday, according to the Health Ministry’s figures, India reported 1,733 deaths within 24 hours on February 2, and India’s 7-day average of daily deaths stood at 979. This is a sharp increase from the beginning of the year, when the 7-day average of COVID fatalities was 281. About 13,564 people were confirmed to have died of COVID-19 in January.

The Indian government and media have begun to fraudulently boast of falling infection numbers to justify abandoning whatever remaining COVID restrictions are in place in India. In doing so, they are silent on the falling numbers of tests to make a rosy picture on the situation. On January 23, there were 2.18 million daily tests and 333,533 daily infections, but this fell to 1.74 million tests, finding 161,386 cases on February 2. This strongly suggests that the fall in the number of daily tests is driving the fall in the number of cases that are detected.

On February 1, the Times of India pointed to a number of elements that may be giving “misleading picture of the extent of the pandemic’s spread during the third wave.” It noted that there is no proper mechanism to systematically collect data on COVID patients asked to “self-isolate” at their residence. People who “may have tested positive using self-test kits used at home, may not have reported themselves to the civic authorities which do not have the means to track buyers of such (test) kits,” the TOI wrote.

The Modi government and various state governments controlled by ruling BJP and other political parties, including the Congress and the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), all exploit these distorted figures to call to fully open schools and work places. Like many other capitalist regimes across the world, particularly the US and UK, the Indian ruling elite is pursuing a murderous herd immunity policy, allowing the coronavirus to rip through the population.

Modi’s rhetoric about “fighting with great success” against COVID-19 was thoroughly exposed when the Union Budget 2022-23 presented on February 1 cut the allocation for health. According to Dr. Anant Phadke on February 3, “[A]llocation to health and related programmes reduced in real term in the budget 2022-23 by 7 percent compared to Revised Estimate of 2021-22,” the Indian Express wrote on February 3.

The doctors showed that the health budget “completely overlooked the lessons of the COVID-19 epidemic and fails to allocate much-needed increases in public health system strengthening, the National Health Mission Programme, COVID-related provisions which remain a continuing requirement, protection and remuneration for health workers…” They added that “to cover up these multifaceted failures, the presentation of data in the current health budget has been made deliberately opaque and difficult to compare with earlier years.”

The Economic Survey 2021-22 was tabled in the Parliament on January 31. An article in The Print noted that the government’s survey “leaves no scope of any inquiry of under-reporting of COVID-19 deaths in India”; and “does not say anything about lack of primary health centres, community health centres and sub-centres, on which the majority of the population depends.”

The 2018-19 Economic Survey said that as many as 60 percent of primary health centres of India were manned by only one doctor. The Print notes that the government “skipped the fact that India’s out-of-pocket expenditure on health still continues to remain one of the highest in the world,” since “out of the total expenditure on health happening in the country, as much as 50 percent is spent by the people themselves.”

This underscores the criminal indifference of Modi and Indian ruling elite as a whole to the fate of India’s multi-million working class and rural toilers.

Johnson government to end daily reporting of UK COVID deaths

Robert Stevens

The UK government plans to end the daily reporting of COVID deaths in April or even earlier.

The i news website reported the governments’ intention in an exclusive Tuesday evening headlined, “Daily Covid death toll will no longer be published by Easter under plan to ‘live with Covid’, source says”.

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson makes his keynote speech at the Conservative party conference in Manchester, England, Wednesday, October 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

This plan is revealed as the UK is still announcing hundreds of deaths daily, with the exclusive published two days before the UK reported another 534 fatalities—the highest number in almost a year.

According to the i, “a senior Whitehall source familiar with the plans said, ‘The Prime Minister has pencilled in Easter as the latest date by which the daily Covid statistics will be published in their current form. In an ideal situation he will bring an end to them sooner if the current downward trend in deaths continues.” From mid-April, the “publication of infections, hospital admissions and death data” will stop.

Daily reporting of COVID cases and fatalities is already heavily manipulated, with a death being recorded only if it occurred within 28 days of a person testing positive. On this measurement, 157,730 have died. According to the more accurate figure provided by the Office for National Statistics, by this week 180,662 people had died with COVID mentioned on the death certificate.

Infection rates are also significantly downplayed. The i reported January 28, “More than 350,000 people a day are estimated to have been infected with Covid-19 in early January, more than double the official figure reported on the Government’s virus dashboard over the same period.

“The analysis, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), shows just how many new cases of coronavirus are still being missed in the official figures.

“An average of 163,600 new cases per day were recorded from 2 to 8 January, according to the dashboard. But the true number was likely to be nearer 358,500 a day, according to the ONS modelling.

“And while the dashboard recorded an average of 173,500 new cases a day for December 26 to January 1, the ONS puts the figure at 479,100 a day.”

Ending daily reporting is the first step towards ending all reporting. The i revealed that when daily reporting ends, “Covid statistics for England would still be available in the weekly update from the Office for National Statistics until it decides to cease its regular publication of the figures.”

Screenshot of the daily COVID death figures reported on the government's dashboard web site (Source: coronavirus.data.gov.uk)

This plan is critical to the Johnson government’s herd immunity agenda of allowing the deadly disease to become “endemic” in the population. It follows Johnson’s scrapping of all “Plan B” COVID restrictions beginning January 19, when mask wearing in schools and guidance to work from home were immediately ditched. The requirement for COVID passes to enter entertainment venues ended a week later, along with the requirement to wear a mask in public spaces. Also ditched were restrictions on the number of visitors care home residents can receive.

Following the planned termination on March 23 of the legal requirement for infected people to self-isolate, the end of the daily reporting of deaths signals the ruling elite’s intention to refuse even to acknowledge the existence of COVID. According to the logic of the social murderers in the government, there will no longer be a pandemic to report.

Not reporting any COVID figures is pivotal to accustoming everyone to “living with the virus”. But what this means in reality is millions more people infected and thousands getting hospitalised and dying with the virus.

The cabal in Downing Street were, along with Sweden, the pioneers of the herd immunity adopted by ruling elites globally. Unlike in the United States, where the US Department of Health and Human Services this week ended its system for hospitals to report COVID-19 deaths daily to the federal government, the proposal to stop reporting UK COVID deaths comes directly from the prime minister himself.

Before being forced into a lockdown in March 2020, Johnson’s government had insisted that the mass infection of the population was “desirable” and that everyone should “take it on the chin” as they discussed scenarios in which 800,000 people would die.

Over 25 percent of the entire UK population have already been infected with COVID: a staggering 17.6 million people. Over 2.6 million people have an active infection. Only France, with 20.1 million infections, has a higher number of COVID cases in Europe. Globally, the UK is behind only four other countries in terms of total infections—the United States, India, Brazil and France.

Johnson originally planned to ditch every public health measure and end the reporting of COVID statistics last summer, as the economy was flung open on “Freedom Day” July 19, 2021.

His motivations were spelt out by the Daily Mail that August, in a piece headlined, “Is it time to stop obsessing over Covid figures?”. The article pointed out, “In January [at the height of the pandemic when deaths rose above 1,800 a day], the online Covid dashboard attracted 76 million views in a single day”. Last month the Mail, citing pro-herd immunity scientists, stepped up its complaints, declaring that the “government should stop publicising its daily Covid figures because they are becoming ‘misleading’ and fuelling an ‘unhealthy addiction’ to the stats.”

The emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, first detected in two people in Britain on November 27, forced the ruling class to delay its plans, but with only the most minimal interventions.

Omicron has since run rampant throughout the population, with more than seven million Britons infected in just the 67 days since. This surge was propelled by the infection of hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who returned to classrooms without a single mitigation in place in January.

The infection of the young is still out of control. The Independent reported yesterday, based on ONS figures, “An estimated 13.1% of children in England between the age of two and school year six were likely to have had Covid last week, up from 11.8% the previous week.”

After months of churning out propaganda that Omicron is mild, the government now hails the variant as the boon that everyone was waiting for, based on claims that it has accelerated infections and hence immunity in the population, without overwhelming the National Health Service. COVID is now spoken of by the government and its echo chamber media as being nothing more serious than the common cold, or at worst the flu.

No-one can believe any of these lies. With the 303 additional deaths reported Thursday, on top of the 534 the previous day, the UK has recorded nearly 1,800 deaths in the last seven days. On Thursday, the latest death of a child in England from COVID was reported, bringing to 145 the number of under-18s killed. In January alone, 16 children died from COVID in England, topping the previous monthly high of 11.

This threatens to be the tip of the iceberg, with the strategy of letting the virus rip creating the ideal conditions for the mutation of COVID, yet again, into a new variant either more infectious, immune-evasive, deadly, or all three. According to a Reuters analysis, reinfections account for 10 percent of England’s COVID cases so far this year, thanks to the Omicron variant.

In parallel with calls to stop the reporting of cases and deaths, demands are being made in ruling circles to complete the COVID cover-up by ending all testing as well. A group of scientists who have routinely backed the government are being deployed to this end. Professor David Livermore, a medical microbiologist, told MailOnline, “It is the right thing to do: daily case statistics and mass testing both need to be wound down. The virus has mutated to a milder form, and there is substantial population immunity from recent infection and vaccination.”

Poorer countries facing sovereign debt crisis

Nick Beams

The move by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks to lift interest rates in response to rising inflation threatens to set off a sovereign debt crisis for many so-called emerging market economies and low-income countries.

International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington [Source: Wikimedia]

Numerous warnings to this effect have been made since the beginning of the year as it has become clear that the Fed is planning a “lift-off” in rates, possibly as early as March.

Economists William Rhodes and John Lipsky, who lead the Sovereign Debt Working Group at the Bretton Woods Committee—a semi-official US economic think tank—wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week about growing “challenges” in the sovereign debt market.

“The warning signs of a crisis are already clear,” they stated. “According to International Monetary Fund figures, interest payments on public debt as a percentage of public revenues are four times as high in low-income countries as in advanced economies, while the same ratio in emerging economies is twice as high.”

A decade ago this ratio was similar across all countries, but today, according to the World Bank, some “60 percent of low-income countries are either suffering from debt distress or at high risk of doing so.”

Rhodes and Lipsky noted that mechanisms for dealing with debt restructuring through the so-called Paris Club, an informal grouping of official lenders to debtor countries, had “become muddled and ineffective” and the lack of a debt restructuring process created “market volatility and risk, damaging a broad range of financial market participants.”

In other words, a sovereign debt crisis, in the absence of “restructuring” arrangements, could impact on the global financial system.

Last week Argentina entered a “restructuring” agreement with the International Monetary Fund on a $57 billion loan in order to avoid a default. In the Financial Times (FT), Gillian Tett wrote that the deal should be a “wake-up” call not just in regard to the problems of Argentina, but because it posed the bigger question of “what will happen to the rest of the world’s troubled sovereign debt this year.”

An FT report last month noted that the world’s poorest countries face an increase of $10.9 billion in debt repayments this year. They must repay an estimated $35 billion to official and private-sector lenders in 2022, a 45 percent increase from 2020.

One of the most vulnerable countries is Sri Lanka. The rating agency S&P Global warned last month the country faced a possible default this year as it downgraded its sovereign bonds.

In an interview with the FT at the end of January, Sri Lankan Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse said the government was “negotiating with everybody” and “trying all our options” to avert a default.

Sri Lanka has almost $7 billion in debt repayments due this year but less than $3 billion in foreign currency reserves. More than one third of the debts are owed to international bond holders and the crisis has already led to power cuts and shortages of imported goods, such as fuel and milk powder. Long-dated government bonds are already trading at half their face value.

In Sri Lanka, as in all highly indebted countries, a “restructuring” or outright default will inevitably be accompanied by deepening attacks on the working class, as international finance capital demands that the flow of money into its coffers continues.

Officials at leading international institutions have warned of a growing crisis. World Bank president David Malpass has said the demands of creditors mean “the risk of disorderly defaults is growing.

“Countries are facing a resumption of debt payments at precisely the time when they don’t have the resources to be making them.”

With many countries having to take on more debt to deal with the effects of the pandemic, debt repayments were suspended in 2020. But that period has now ended with an initiative supposedly aimed at relieving debt burdens proving, in the words of the FT, to be a “damp squib.”

A debt suspension plan, aimed at deferring about $23 billion of debt owed by 73 countries, launched in April 2020 and extended to the end of last year, saw only 42 countries obtaining relief totaling just $12.7 billion.

Rebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, told the FT: “The problems of debt are mounting and the fiscal space of the developing world will continue to shrink. We really are at the risk of another lost decade for developing countries.”

In 2020 and 2021, when the world was awash with money because of the ultra-loose monetary policies of the major central banks, developing countries were able to access international capital markets for funds. But the situation is now changing rapidly as inflation surges around the world.

According to Ayhan Kose, head of the World Bank’s forecasting unit: “Market access is a wonderful thing to have when there is cheap money out there, but there might be a different view as conditions tighten.”

Poorer countries are caught in a dilemma. They can seek relief through an arrangement with the IMF and bilateral creditors to secure new terms and then try to obtain the same arrangement from private creditors. But, as Grynspan noted, if a country publicly admits it has debt repayment problems “the private sector will punish them.”

The turbulence in financial markets, particularly the violent swings in the value of bitcoin, is also causing major problems.

In an interview with the FT this week, Tobias Adrian, the head of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department, said the price swings in crypto currencies were “destabilising” capital flows in emerging markets.

“Crypto is being used to take money out of countries that are regarded as unstable [by some external investors],” he stated. This posed “a big challenge for policymakers in some countries.”

Adrian said some emerging and developing economies faced “immediate and acute risks” as a result of their established currencies being replaced by crypto assets.

There was also a risk that sell-offs in crypto currencies feed into equity markets and vice versa, creating turbulence that heightens financial risks for highly indebted economies.

Declassified NSA oversight report shows illegal surveillance by US government continues unimpeded

Kevin Reed

The government watchdog group set up to monitor the activity of the US National Security Agency (NSA) has once again found that the secretive intelligence organization has no intention of adhering to its own rules and continues to violate the democratic rights of the American population.

Aerial photograph of the National Security Agency by Trevor Paglen. Commissioned by Creative Time Reports, 2013.

On Monday, the NSA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its semiannual report to Congress for the period ending September 30, 2021. The 48-page report is the declassified result of “22 audits, inspections, evaluations, and other oversight products” carried out by the OIG over a “wide swath” of the NSA’s work.

The report opens with a message from Robert P. Storch, the first presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed inspector general of the NSA. He was initially appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 and is currently a nominee for the position by President Joe Biden. Storch states in his introduction that his oversight team “experienced no attempts by the Agency to interfere with our independence” and that the NSA “did not refuse to provide or attempt to delay or restrict access to records or other information.”

The fact that Storch, an official appointed by the President and empowered by Congress to oversee the activities of the intelligence agency, is compelled to mention the fact that the NSA did not “interfere” with his audits indicates that what happened during the review period was quite the opposite.

In any case, the latest semiannual report is the eighth one issued to Congress by the NSA OIG and the eighth time that the oversight agency has reported that the agency is continuing to use sophisticated surveillance technologies to comb through the electronic communications of American citizens.

Amid the two dozen “concerns” and 469 “recommendations” across the vast array of functions and activities of the NSA, the paragraphs following a subhead entitled, “Evaluation of United States Person (USP) Identifiers Used to Query FISA Section 702 Data” proves this to be the case.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 2008 permits the US government to conduct “targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the US” without a warrant. This means that the intelligence agencies can legally gather communications such as email and text messages and phone records of individuals who are not US citizens and are not inside the US without court approval for the purpose of gathering “foreign intelligence.”

While Section 702 ostensibly prohibits the intelligence and law enforcement agencies from targeting US persons, it provides a loophole that allows the NSA and the CIA to query 702-gathered information for records of American citizens if “a query is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.”

According to the law, in order to perform this type of data query the NSA must follow a series of internally documented policies and procedures for conducting them. These rules have been put down on paper for purported purposes of protecting the privacy and constitutional rights of American citizens.

However, the Inspector General’s report says, “USP queries performed against FISA Section 702 data did not always follow NSA procedural and policy requirements.” Although the report does not say how many times FISA laws were violated and does not give any specific examples of the violations, it says that agency queries were performed on acquired “content and metadata” with “USP selectors” that “did not always follow” their own internal policies and procedures.

In other words, there is a massive database of worldwide electronic communications content and metadata that has already been gathered by the NSA and agency analysts are constantly querying this data with “selectors” (search terms) that include the information of “USP” (US persons).

The report then goes on to say, “While NSA has implemented both preventative and detective controls, the Agency has not completed the development of a preventative system control that performs pre-query validation to notify analysts of potential noncompliance with NSA query procedures or policy problems prior to query execution.”

And furthermore, “An NSA query tool did not prevent certain queries containing known USP selectors from processing.”

What this means is that more than eight years after the exposures by the former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Edward Snowden of criminal surveillance by the NSA of all electronic communications around the world, the claims by the US government that these activities have been halted are once again exposed as false. The agency has not even undertaken the most elementary software modifications to prevent its spying tools from being used illegally.

Snowden provided extensive proof of specific software tools being used by the NSA—such as XKeyscore which gathers everything an individual does on the internet including email messages, account credentials and web browsing and search activity—to monitor anyone and everyone at any time.

Referring to the OIG oversight program, Snowden responded via Twitter on Tuesday to the revelations of ongoing NSA spying, noting, “This has happened year after year since the program began.”

The NSA itself refused to confirm or deny that it is continuing to spy on US citizens. In answering a question from CNN about the OIG report, a spokesman said, the agency “remains fully committed to the rigorous and independent oversight” and “continues to employ measures to assist analysts in conducting their work compliantly with civil liberties and privacies protections.” This is not a commitment to stop the government agents from violating the US Constitution.

New Dutch government lifts COVID-19 measures as infections skyrocket

Daniel Woreck

At a press conference on January 26, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) and newly-appointed Health Minister Ernst Kuipers (D66), declared that many of the COVID-19 measures put in place on December 19 would be relaxed.

President Joe Biden greets Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte during the Global Summit on Supply Chain Resilience Sunday, October 31, 2021, at La Nuvola Convention Center in Rome. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

The relaxation of watered-down “lock-down” measures take place as daily infections due to the Omicron variant have shot up to about 70,000 per day, surpassing 100,000 as of the beginning of February. This is the highest recorded level since the pandemic began, and hospitalisations are rising for the first time in two months. New rules will let cafes, restaurants and bars, cinemas, theatres, music venues, museums, zoos and amusement parks open for the first time in weeks, from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Rutte opened his recent press conference by calling it an “important moment” in the course of the pandemic. “We are dealing with a sky-high number of infections and an increase in the number of hospital patients, and yet we are taking a new step forward. In doing so, we are taking another risk, but for good reason. Living even longer with restrictive measures damages our health and society,” he insisted.

Health Minister Kuipers supported Rutte. Even while admitting that relaxing COVID-19 measures could push daily infections to between 75,000 and 100,000, Kuipers chimed in: “Keeping the most restrictive measures in effect for much longer damages our health and our society.”

Such statements illustrate the utter contempt for the health of the people that animates the new Rutte government. Installed after nine months of closed-door talks between the parliamentary parties, it is in all essentials the same Rutte government forced to resign last January. Its calculations, as laid out by Kuipers and Rutte, boil down to the following: in a country of just 17.5 million people, that has already seen 4.4 million infections and 32,000 deaths, it should take around 20 weeks to infect the entire Dutch population.

On January 10—that is, 271 days after last year’s election—Rutte’s VVD formed a “new” government with a coalition of three other parties: D66, the Christian-Democratic CDA and the Christian Union. These four big business parties have a disastrous record of handling the pandemic, and are stepping up the assault on public health.

It is not hard to see that unprecedented mass infections, part and parcel of the “herd immunity” policy successive Rutte governments have pursued since the pandemic began, will lead to mass suffering, hospitalisations and deaths.

At the end of 2021, as hospitalisations rose past 68,000, the Groningen University Medical Centre was several weeks technically on ‘Code-Black,’ forced to practice triage. Now with the spread of Omicron and breakthrough infections amongst the fully vaccinated, mass infections will bring the chronically underfunded Dutch health care system to the brink of collapse.

This is the shameless, politically criminal record of the Dutch political establishment—from the social democrats to the ultra right, including pseudo-left groups and various trade union confederations. They are part and parcel of a policy of mass infection pursued by the entire European bourgeoisie.

From day one of the pandemic, the Dutch ruling elite’s official policy—like that of its counterparts internationally—was neither based on science nor on defending public health, but on placing profit before the lives of millions of people.

At the same press conference, Rutte and Kuipers announced further drastic changes to self-quarantine protocols, which have kept changing throughout the pandemic. These changes fly in the face of international medical protocols and basic sound science. As of the “new rules,” an individual who has tested positive for COVID-19 but has “no symptoms” should no longer self-quarantine, but can return to work. The reactionary and unscientific policy of the European bourgeoisie is thus going from “living with Covid” to “working with Covid.”

The youth are prime victims of this policy, with a “back-to-school” policy condemning teenagers, children and even infants to mass infection. According to the RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), an estimated 2,817 people test positive for every 100,000 residents in the Netherlands. “The highest number of infections per 100,000 inhabitants was seen among 13-to-17-year olds, whereas the largest increase in the past week was recorded in the age groups 0 to 12 years, and 13 to 17 years,” the RIVM stated.

The trade unions are playing a particularly vicious role in keeping schools open, despite growing concerns of the teaching staff at unprecedented levels of mass infection, as well as keeping workplaces and other nonessential services running unhindered, including retail business.

The proposal advanced by the Federation of Dutch Unions (FNV), the largest Dutch trade union confederation, is to insert “shop with moderation” signs in retail stores’ advertisements. “We want the chains to be more sensible with their advertising policy and to call on customers to shop responsibly,” said Linda Vermeulen, director of FNV Handel. This yet again demonstrates the commitment of these well-paid, co-managerial bureaucrats to corporate profits over the lives of the sick, even as workers’ corpses pile high in the thousands.

The Netherlands championed a policy of mass infection from the outset of the pandemic, thrusting aside countless warnings and findings from scientists and other medical personnel in the country and internationally. Rutte, who has been prime minister throughout the pandemic, reluctantly introduced limited public health restrictions but always rejected a strict lock-down. He scaled back these rudimentary measures starting in April 2021, accelerating the lifting of all measures in stages between June and September of last year.

The wholly inadequate social and health policies adopted by Rutte’s previous and current government aim not to reverse their horrific record of public health, but to impose mass infections on growing opposition in the working class. Particularly over the last four years, the Netherlands have seen a re-eruption of working class struggles as part of a growing global upsurge of the international working class.

US claims assassination of ISIS leader in Syria

Bill Van Auken

President Joe Biden delivered a statement from the White House Thursday celebrating what the Pentagon described as a “successful” assassination mission carried out against the purported leader of the Islamic State (ISIS) group in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province.

President Biden, Vice President Harris and US national security officials watching live-feed from assassination operation in Syria.

The target of the attack, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed along with at least a dozen others after a helicopter-borne US kill team backed by warplanes laid siege to his home in the town of Atmeh, near Syria’s border with Turkey.

Rescue workers told Al Jazeera that they pulled 13 bodies from the rubble of the three-story house after the US troops departed. Among the dead, they said, were four women and six children.

There were no US casualties. While a helicopter was lost in the operation, the Pentagon insisted that it was deliberately destroyed after mechanical problems and not brought down by hostile fire.

Biden and the Pentagon had a ready-made alibi for the civilian deaths from their extra-legal assassination raid. They claimed that the alleged ISIS leader had detonated explosives as the US commandos approached. The children had been “human shields,” as the Pentagon put it, and all of the casualties were the result of al-Qurayshi’s “final act of desperate cowardice,” in the words of Biden.

Neighbors, however, reported that the US Special Operations troops had broadcast warnings that anyone who failed to leave the house would die. One told Al Jazeera of hearing a “barrage of attacks” at 3 a.m., two hours after the special forces unit had landed.

The raid follows last month’s publication by the New York Times of previously classified documents showing that US air strikes had killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria during the war against ISIS, with the Pentagon systematically covering up their deaths.

As with previous assassination missions against Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden under President Barack Obama in 2011 and former ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi under President Donald Trump in 2019, Thursday’s killing was followed by claims that the operation had made the American people safer. As with these previous episodes, it was treated as an occasion to appeal for national unity and glorify American militarism.

In his speech from the White House, Biden described the US military as “the solid-steel backbone of this nation.” He added, “This operation is testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide anywhere in the world.”

Coming in the midst of the feverish campaign for war against Russia, the operation is being used as an example of the capacity to project US military power on a global scale.

As for promoting national unity, this has diminishing returns after a more than two-decade “global war on terror” that has seen the killing of over a million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, along with the deaths and maiming of thousands of US troops and the expenditure of trillions of dollars by the Pentagon.

Unlike bin Laden and al-Baghdadi, no one had ever heard of al-Qurayshi, and while Biden described him as “this horrible terrorist leader,” no US official has linked him to any specific terrorist plot.

There is even less reason than in the deaths of his predecessors to believe that the assassination of al-Qurayshi has any strategic significance or will achieve anything in terms of reducing terrorist threats. In the US, in any case, such threats have come increasingly from a fascistic layer that constitutes a constituency of the Republican Party, with which Biden seeks unity.

The attempts to cast this latest kill mission as a triumph of US intelligence prowess and military daring strain credulity. Al-Qurayshi undoubtedly met his fate at the hands of US troops because protection he previously enjoyed had been withdrawn.

The killing took place in an area of Idlib province that is under the control of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the “rebel” front that includes the al-Nusra Front, the former Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, and its allies. Just miles from the Turkish border and home to Syria’s largest refugee camp, the area is heavily monitored by the Turkish military, which has 15,000 troops in Idlib, along with Ankara’s intelligence agencies.

HTS, with Turkish backing, has tried to rebrand itself as part of the “democratic” opposition to the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and to shed its Al Qaeda legacy and terrorist designations. Al-Qurayshi may well have been offered up to the Americans as part of this effort. To the extent that his whereabouts were communicated earlier to Washington, the White House made a determination that his assassination would be politically useful, no doubt in part to offset the humiliation of the US evacuation from Afghanistan.

The US raid in Idlib comes barely a week after the bloody suppression of an ISIS takeover of a prison in the northeastern city of Hasaka through a combined assault on its gates and an inmate revolt.

Washington’s main proxy ground force in Syria, the predominantly Kurdish SDF militia, backed by US troops, armored vehicles and air strikes, retook the prison, leaving nearly 500 dead, including civilians in surrounding neighborhoods. It was the largest US military action since the fall of the last ISIS strongholds in Syria in 2019.

The Syrian government protested the action at the United Nations, aptly accusing Washington of attempting to “recycle” ISIS to justify the illegal occupation of northeastern Syria and its oil fields by some 900 US special forces troops.

Syrian officials have accused both the SDF and US forces of transferring captured ISIS fighters to government-held areas to carry out attacks.

The trajectory of al-Qurayshi himself points to the tangled web linking US imperialism to ISIS, its Frankenstein’s monster in the Middle East.

Born in Iraq, al-Qurayshi joined the Sunni Islamist resistance to the US occupation in 2007 and was captured and imprisoned by the Americans in early 2008. He was held at Camp Bucca, where he met al-Baghdadi and where the Islamists were given a free hand to recruit and indoctrinate new adherents.

Al-Qurayshi reportedly was dubbed the “canary caliph” because of his willing collaboration with his American interrogators. Declassified US documents reveal that he fingered at least 68 fellow Iraqi Sunni Islamist militants, including their second-highest leader, who was killed in a US raid. The documents described al-Qurayshi as a “model prisoner.”

It is not known when al-Qurayshi was released, but clearly he was someone well known to American intelligence and likely an “asset” of some faction of the CIA or the military.

He joined a faction affiliated with Al Qaeda, which was itself a product of the CIA-orchestrated war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The organization he joined grew thanks to mass hatred of US crimes in Iraq and the deliberate fostering of sectarian divisions as part of Washington’s divide-and-rule strategy in the country.

ISIS grew rapidly after moving into Syria to join the US-backed war for regime-change against President Assad, fattening off the arms, money and foreign recruits poured in by the CIA and Washington’s regional allies. ISIS became a problem for US imperialism only after it turned back into Iraq in 2014, overrunning a third of the country and routing the US-trained security forces.

The US raid that killed al-Qurayshi is part of stepped-up US military operations in Syria and throughout the Middle East, including the Pentagon’s participation in the near-genocidal Saudi-led war against Yemen.

Even as Washington shifts its main focus to preparing war against Russia and China, the oil-rich Middle East remains a key battlefield in US imperialism’s increasingly desperate bid to reassert its global hegemony and offset its profound economic and social crisis by military means.