Amid economic crisis, Sri Lankan president pledges to work with IMF

K. Ratnayake

Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse announced on Wednesday night that he had decided “to work with the International Monetary Fund” to resolve the country’s economic crisis and its dire foreign exchange situation.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, attends an event to mark the anniversary of country’s independence from British colonial rule [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

Rajapakse made the announcement in a 15-minute address to the nation, reversing his previous stance not to seek IMF assistance. His regime is now preparing to ruthlessly impose austerity measures and make workers and the poor pay for the worsening economic turmoil.

A day before his speech, Rajapakse met with IMF Asia and Pacific Department Director Changyong Rhee and Deputy Director Anne-Maria Gulde Wolf. The officials visited Colombo as international investors and rating agencies warned that Sri Lanka could default on repayments of foreign loans and sovereign bonds.

Rajapakse declared during his national address that he was “well aware of the shortages of essential items and increase in prices… issues such as gas shortage, fuel shortage and power cuts.” This situation, he said “will continue for reasons beyond our control,” despite “maximum possible efforts” by his government.

Notwithstanding his bogus concerns about working people, Colombo has been systematically attacking the social conditions of the masses, cutting imports of essential items, including food and pharmaceuticals and increasing their prices.

As a result, the year-on-year inflation rate has doubled since September and in February stood at 15 percent with food inflation at 25.7 percent. Millions are suffering from lack of essential food supplies, medicines and fuel as well as power cuts and transport breakdown. Over the past 12 months there have been strikes and protests by hundreds of thousands of workers from health, railways, education, postal, petroleum, ports and plantations over wages and allowances.

During his speech, Rajapakse declared he would “make tough decisions to find solutions to the inconveniences that the people are experiencing.” He did not elaborate what would these “tough decisions” would be.

An IMF Executive Board report on March 2, however, proposed a range of brutal measures, including fiscal deficit cuts, higher interest rates, devaluation of the rupee, restructuring of the state sector and other proposals.

In line with these demands, the Rajapakse government on March 7 floated the rupee, setting the stage for a massive devaluation. Since then the official value of the rupee against the US dollar has dropped at least 37 percent, pushing up the price of all goods and services, further fueling already rampant inflation.

Rajapakse also announced that he had established a National Economic Council (NEC) and an Advisory Committee and that he will monitor their decisions and their implementation. NEC members include Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse, and several other ministers, along with senior officials from the Central Bank and the finance ministry.

The Advisory Committee includes the owners and CEOs from some of the country’s biggest corporations, including Haley’s, Softlogic, Keels, Sunshine and Cargills as well as technocrats. The corporate elite has previously been pressing for the government to seek IMF assistance.

Rajapakse declared that he could “better understand and manage all the difficulties faced by the soldiers who were at the forefront of the war against brutal terrorism” and would now take similar action on behalf of the people.

Rajapakse’s reference to Colombo’s communalist war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is chilling. As Sri Lankan defence secretary in 2005, he supervised the bloody war until its brutal end in May 2009, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and the incarceration of 300,000 civilians in military-controlled camps. His regime will implement the IMF’s austerity demands and ruthlessly suppress any opposition.

In a shameless bid to absolve himself of responsibility, Rajapakse has repeatedly claimed that he did not “create the crisis” and that it was “beyond his control,” citing increased shipping costs, rising commodity prices and shortages of goods due to COVID-19.

As the World Socialist Web Site has explained from the outset, the COVID-19 pandemic has enormously accelerated an already existing and advanced crisis of the entire capitalist system. Capitalist governments everywhere—in the advanced and backward countries—have attempted to defend the profit system by pumping massive funds into the banks and corporations. This has only deepened this crisis.

Rajapakse provided figures to try and explain Sri Lanka’s exchange crisis and how to address it. Accordingly, he aims to reduce the trade deficit, which was $8.1 billion last year, to $7 billion this year. “We should aim for this target,” he declared, despite the fact that the rupee has been floated. At the same time, $6.9 billion has to be repaid this year for foreign loan and sovereign bond debts.

The president also announced that his government had “initiated discussions with international financial institutions as well as with our friendly countries regarding repayment of our loan instalments.”

The IMF program and similar financial arrangements are aimed at restructuring loan repayments, i.e., to secure more time on debt repayments. All such arrangements come with strings and will involve the sort of austerity measures already proposed by the IMF, including privatization and cuts to social spending including public education, health and welfare.

As Central Bank Governor Ajit Nivard Cabraal told the media last November: “The IMF could tell us to depreciate the rupee, raise the interest rates by 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent further, reduce the number of government sector employees, reduce or curtail pension benefits, and sell various state assets.”

Cabraal, who enjoys cabinet rank, admitted this previous reluctance to turn to the IMF was not because he and the government did not support austerity measures. Rather, they fear the inevitable opposition of workers and the poor.

During his speech Rajapakse issued a desperate nationalist appeal. “We are a nation that has experienced many adversities and at the same time conquered those challenges… We have faced foreign invasions, great famines, natural disasters and threats of terrorism,” he declared.

The population must understand, he added, “that we have to face difficulties when implementing solutions for the issues for a certain period of time.”

In other words, the masses must make sacrifices while the government unleashes a rampaging attack on the conditions of workers and the poor on behalf of international investors and big business. These assaults cannot be imposed peacefully and will see the government use repressive methods.

In the face of mounting concerns by workers and the poor, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya, (SJB) Sri Lanka’s main opposition party, called a rally in Colombo on Tuesday mobilising around 20,000 people. It called for Rajapakse to resign and for new presidential elections.

The SJB is not a political alternative to Rajapakse. Indeed, in recent months it has appealed to the government to implement an IMF program. The SJB is a breakaway from the right-wing United National Party and shares its long history of imposing pro-market restructuring on the working class.

Likewise, the trade unions have repeatedly lined up with the government. Union leaders declared again and again during last year’s strikes and protests that they “understand the economic crisis” and would not push for immediate salary increases.

In talks with Chinese president, Biden bullies China over Ukraine

Peter Symonds

US President Joe Biden held a lengthy phone call with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in an attempt to pressure China to distance itself from Russia amid the continuing war in Ukraine. While Biden threatened punitive measures if Beijing assisted Moscow in any way, Xi made clear that China was not about to be bullied.

President Joe Biden meets virtually with Chinese President Xi Jinping from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, on Nov. 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Yesterday’s call between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies, which lasted nearly two hours, took place amid the intensifying conflict in Ukraine fueled by the US and its NATO allies, which have imposed crippling economic sanctions on Russia and funneled billions of dollars in arms to the Ukrainian military.

The anodyne White House readout of the phone call reported that Biden had “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia.” But the threats failed to wring any concessions or agreement from the Chinese president, other than to maintain “open lines of communication” and manage “the competition between our two countries.”

No doubt what a senior Biden official described as “a direct, candid” conversation was considerably more heated behind closed doors. Xi is well aware that having recklessly engineered the crisis in Ukraine, which threatens a direct war between NATO and Russia, the Biden administration also has China, which the US regards as the chief threat to its global hegemony, within its sights.

On the eve of Biden’s phone call, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the media the US president “will make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression, and we will not hesitate to impose costs.” Blinken declared that China, with its close ties to Russia, had “a special responsibility” to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war, but “it appears that China is moving in the opposite direction.”

US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman piled on the pressure with a similar warning. Xi had to tell Putin “to end this war of choice” in Ukraine. She told CNN: “China needs to stand on the right side of history. It needs to ensure that it does not backfill, financially or in any other way, sanctions that have been imposed on Russia.”

Expressing the dissatisfaction in Washington over the phone call, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated the threats against China, saying the US had a “range of tools” at its disposal, including sanctions, if Beijing assisted Moscow. She said Biden would discuss a combined Western response when he travels to Europe next week to meet with NATO, European Union and G7 leaders.

All these comments and threats are steeped in hypocrisy and cynicism. Having armed the right-wing Ukrainian government and associated fascist militia ever since the US-backed coup ousted the country’s elected president in 2014 and pushed Russia into a corner, the US and NATO are now providing the Ukrainian military with huge quantities of sophisticated weaponry. Yet they are accusing China—without a shred of evidence—of considering military aid to Russia.

The Biden administration’s objective from the outset has been to isolate Russia and mire it in a war in Ukraine, with utter indifference to the calamity facing the Ukrainian people or the dangers that the conflict could escalate into a much broader war between nuclear-armed powers. Its failure to offer any guarantee that NATO would not further encroach on Russian borders by making Ukraine a member was the trigger for Russia’s desperate and reckless invasion.

China has not criticised the Russian invasion and has blamed the conflict on the actions of the US and NATO. At the same time, Beijing has not recognised Russia’s annexation of Crimea nor Putin’s declaration of the independence of two areas of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatists. Beijing has repeatedly called for peace talks and offered to mediate on the basis of recognising the legitimate security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine. 

According to Chinese media accounts of the phone call, Xi called on Biden for a “cool-headed and rational” approach to the conflict and stressed that “the Ukraine crisis is not something we want to see.” China has been driven into close relations with Russia as a result of Washington’s aggressive approach to both countries, but has significant ties with Ukraine. The war cuts directly across Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, involving massive infrastructure investment linking China to Europe.

Xi opposed the unilateral economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and its allies, and warned of the potentially disastrous consequences for the global economy. “Sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions would only make the people suffer,” Xi is reported as saying. “If further escalated, they could trigger serious crises in global economy and trade, finance, energy, food and industrial and supply chains, crippling the already languishing world economy and causing irrevocable losses.”

While the coverage of Xi’s remarks is relatively muted, other Chinese officials hit out at the US before and after the phone call with Biden.

As reported in the state-owned Global Times, an unnamed official warned: “China will never accept US threats and coercion, and if the US takes measures that harm China’s legitimate interests and the interests of Chinese enterprises and individuals, China will not sit idly by and will make a strong response.” The official stressed that the US should not have any illusions or miscalculations about this.

The Global Times declared that these “strong signals were sent as the Biden administration has intensified its disinformation campaign over China’s ‘military support’ to Russia and attempted to threaten China with ‘dire consequences.’”

Responding to Deputy Secretary of State Sherman’s remarks, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying tweeted: “It is the US that is on the wrong side of history.” If the US had “refrained from repeatedly expanding NATO and pledged that NATO would not admit Ukraine, and had not fanned the flames by supplying weapons and ammunition to Ukraine, the situation would have been very different.”

Beijing is particularly concerned at the parallels between Washington’s provocative actions in Ukraine and its inflaming of tensions over the dangerous flashpoint of Taiwan. The Biden administration has accused China of preparing to invade the island while at the same time deliberately undermining the “One China” policy that is the foundation of US-China relations.

Under the One China policy, the US has de facto recognised that Beijing is the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan, while opposing any forcible reunification of the island with China. Beijing has repeatedly warned it would respond with force to any formal declaration of independence by Taipei.

According to the Chinese media, Xi told Biden that the China-US relationship had not got out of the predicament created by the Trump administration. Some people in the US had sent a wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” forces, Xi said, and  added, “This is very dangerous.”

While Biden reportedly declared that US policy on Taiwan had not changed and emphasised that Washington opposed any unilateral changes to the status quo, his administration has junked the long-established diplomatic protocols that underpinned the One China Policy, which limited contact between US and Taiwanese officials.

The lack of any agreement as a result of the Biden-Xi phone call underscores the recklessness of US actions in Ukraine and the danger the war could rapidly escalate into a far broader conflict by drawing in other powers, including China. Just as the Biden administration backed Russia into a corner, so its escalating criticisms of, and threats against, China can only heighten the already sharp tensions in the Indo-Pacific.

Zelensky appeals to Germany’s militaristic traditions

Peter Schwarz

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the German Bundestag (parliament) via video link on Thursday. His speech was an appeal to the worst traditions of German history.

Members of the German parliament Bundestag give Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a standing ovation after he speaks in a virtual address to the parliament at the Reichstag Building in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, March 17, 2022. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

80 years after the German war of extermination against the Soviet Union, which claimed the lives of 27 million of its inhabitants, he accused Germany of not acting aggressively enough against Russia, where memories of the terror of Hitler’s Wehrmacht (army) are still extremely vivid.

By sticking to the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline for so long, refusing preventive sanctions against Russia and refusing to admit Ukraine to NATO, Germany had helped to isolate his country and hand it over to Russia, Zelensky accused the assembled parliamentarians, whom he said lacked “strength” and “leadership.”

He invoked Cold War anti-communism, accusing his audience of hiding behind a wall—a “wall in the middle of Europe, between freedom and unfreedom”. He quoted US President Ronald Reagan, who had shouted in front of the Berlin Wall, “Tear down this wall!” He called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “Destroy this wall. Give Germany the leadership it deserves.”

Zelensky demanded the imposition of a full trade embargo on Russia and more direct NATO involvement in the war effort—even if that means risking a third world war.

The day before, he had already demanded the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine in a video address to the US Congress. He repeated this demand in the Bundestag. Germany must help make the skies over Ukraine safe and prevent Russian air attacks, he said.

Military experts agree that the establishment of a no-fly zone would be tantamount to NATO officially entering the war. Former Bundeswehr Inspector General and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee Harald Kujat called the demand irresponsible.

“Apart from the fact that there would be no UN mandate for no-fly zones, a no-fly zone would be tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia,” he said. “In order for NATO fighter jets not to be shot down, Russia's air defence systems would first have to be taken out. Even if this were to succeed, air battles would follow. NATO and Russia would be at war with each other and on the brink of nuclear war.”

Nevertheless, the demand is gaining support in the US and Europe.

In the Bundestag, Zelensky did not even shy away from invoking the victims of Nazi terror to justify it. “I address you on behalf of the elderly Ukrainians, the many who survived the Second World War, who managed to save themselves during the occupation 80 years ago. Of those who survived Babi Yar,” he said.

On 29 and 30 September 1941 in the gorge of Babi Yar, the Wehrmacht had shot 34,000 Jews from Kiev—men, women, and children—within 36 hours. The victims had to lie on their stomachs on the corpses of those already murdered before they were killed themselves. The mass murder was part of a strategy to create “Lebensraum” ('living space') for German settlers in the East. It was the prelude to the Nazis’ systematic murder of millions of Jews, communists, and Red Army soldiers.

If Zelensky had recalled these crimes against humanity to ask the German government to work for an immediate ceasefire, this would have been understandable. Instead, he is asking them to pour oil on the fire and show “leadership”.

The Bundestag thanked him with a standing ovation. From the Left Party to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), in which numerous neo-Nazis can be found, all the parliamentary deputies rose to their feet. Even long-time AfD leader Alexander Gauland, who calls Hitler and the Nazis just so much “bird shit” in a thousand years of glorious German history, applauded.

For Germany’s ruling elites, the Ukraine war serves as a welcome occasion to realise the rearmament and great power plans they have been long preparing. In February 2014, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then Foreign Minister and now German President, was directly involved in the right-wing coup that sowed the seeds for the current war. He met in Kiev with Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the far-right Svoboda party, among others. In the same month, the German government announced the “end of military restraint” and its intention to once again play a role in world politics commensurate with Germany’s economic weight.

This return to militarism was accompanied by a revision of German history. Der Spiegel published the article “Culpability Question Divides Historians Today”. In it, historian Jörg Baberowski from Humboldt University attested that Hitler had “not been cruel”. And defended the Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte, who had described Nazism as an understandable reaction to Bolshevism.

“The revival of German militarism requires a new interpretation of history that trivialises the crimes of the Nazi period,” the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) and its youth organisation IYSSE wrote at the time. Because they criticised these and similar statements by Baberowski and opposed the return of German militarism and fascism, they were fiercely attacked by the university administration, the media and all parties and put on the list of “anti-constitutional” organisations by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

If Zelensky is now also calling on Germany to return to its militaristic traditions and play a “leading role”, this is not a misunderstanding. Ukrainian nationalists like Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Hitler’s Wehrmacht in World War II and participated in its mass murders, are highly regarded in Ukraine. They are publicly honoured with monuments and commemorations.

Ukrainian Ambassador Andriy Melnyk, who sat in the Bundestag public gallery during Zelensky’s speech, had just the day before publicly defended the Azov Batallion, which is composed of right-wing extremists and wears Nazi symbols on its uniform. “Please stop demonising the Azov Batallion and playing into the hands of propaganda—now also in the middle of the RUS war of extermination,” he wrote on Twitter. “These brave fighters are defending their homeland, especially the besieged city of Mariupol. Leave them alone.”

Melnyk’s protest was directed against an article in Die Zeit that had described the far-right troops as “militarily drilled neo-Nazis with combat experience, with bazookas and assault rifles” who were “unlikely to simply submit to a democratically elected president again” once the conflict was over.

The Kiev government’s sponsorship of fascist groups does not justify Russia’s reactionary military attack. But it does expose the lie that the war is about democracy and freedom, and shows that the main responsibility for the war and the suffering of the Ukrainian people lies with the NATO powers.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these powers have pursued the goal of eliminating Russia as a geostrategic rival and gaining access to its vast raw materials and land. To defend their position, they waged wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria in violation of international law and expanded NATO ever further eastwards.

In Ukraine, which is economically and culturally closely linked to Russia, they deliberately promoted right-wing nationalists and neo-Nazis. Since the right-wing coup of 2014, which they supported and promoted, they have systematically rearmed the country, pumped in billions worth of weapons, and trained its army.

The current conflict is a proxy war between Russia and NATO, being fought on the backs of the Ukrainian population and financed by NATO. In the newly adopted US budget, 14 billion dollars have been earmarked for Ukraine, twice as much as its own military budget. Since the beginning of the war, $550 million of this has now been spent, and President Biden has already released another $800 million. The other NATO members are also flooding the country with military aid and weapons.

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What the Ukraine War Means for China: a View From Beijing

Tom Clifford

“Embassy alley” in Beijing, in reality a patchwork of tree-lined streets with two story houses, mostly built in the 1960s in a style reminiscent of the 1930s, seems far from the madding crowds. Heavily guarded and monitored, it does not attract, let alone welcome, casual strollers. Which is why few people in the city have noticed that most Western embassies are displaying Ukrainian solidarity signs near their entrances. Indeed, a rupture has taken place that many are unaware of. “Friendship between the two states has no limits” Chinese president Xi Jinping said after he signed a joint statement with Russian president Vladimir Putin less than a month before the Ukraine invasion. For this reason Xi will not, yet, try to persuade his friend to curtail the attack. But those limits have, in fact, been reached. China’s relationship with Russia has always been more complicated, less solid, than it appears.  Just a couple of months after the two leaders declared their “no limits” partnership, it is clear that there are, in fact, boundaries to how much support Beijing will offer Moscow. Xi has no interest in being entangled in foreign wars and the precariousness of the Chinese economy has his full attention.

Nor can China, for all its economic clout, step in and ease the pain of Western economic sanctions. Russia is China’s third-largest supplier of gas, behind Australia and Turkmenistan. About one-third of Russian exports of crude oil went to China in 2020. But China imported only 10bn cubic meters of natural gas from Russia in 2021 via the only pipeline from Siberia that links the two countries. This pales in comparison to the 175bn cubic meters imported by Europe. The pipeline infrastructure for fossil-fuel exports between China and Russia is woefully inadequate.

The West wants China to use its influence over Russia. But intervening too early risks, in Beijing’s view, weakening the Russian president. Better wait, to see if he can take Kiev, before stepping in. But the obvious consequence of this approach is that Xi will be tarnished as a cynical opportunist who lacks the leadership qualities needed by a leader on the world stage.

War is raging in Europe and China hopes this will help it to achieve a long-cherished strategic goal. Like imperial powers of 140 years ago, Beijing wants the world carved up. China to dominate Asia and Africa, Russia to get a veto over European security and America to retreat back to the Monroe Doctrine and South America. Russia’s war in Ukraine could accelerate this global scenario, some in Beijing think. They are wrong. China wants the US to accept its decline. But China too is declining. It’s not the power it was, even just a few years ago. Covid and corruption are playing havoc with its construction-scandal weakened economy. It remains powerful but growth is uneven and stalling. Russia, as an ally, is diminished. China’s wait-and-see-inaction seems sclerotic. Chinese officials have sent out confusing and frankly incoherent statements. They stress, parrot like, the importance of territorial integrity but blame the US for the crisis.

China is not having a good war and the US and its allies, after the fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, are again united. NATO, which declared China a security risk in 2021, is rejuvenated. Germany is rearming, a prospect that needs to be examined far more comprehensively than it is. European governments now look at defense spending as a priority. The Chinese leadership gives an impression of being caught wrong-footed by a world that is changing rapidly.

To China, Ukraine is not a far away country. As recently as January, Xi and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky exchanged congratulatory messages on 30 years of ties and vowed to strengthen their “fruitful” cooperation. Ukraine is a key part of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s signature infrastructure and foreign policy project. That too seems a casualty of war.

But Beijing will not ditch Moscow, condemn the invasion, and emerge as a peacemaker. Russia is still a useful ally to Beijing in what is sees as its real struggle, with the US.

Normal Butcheries: Saudi Arabia’s Latest Mass Execution

Binoy Kampmark

execution capital punishment

Great reformers are not normally found in theocratic monarchies.  Despite assertions to the contrary, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains archaic in the way it deals with its opponents.  In its penal system, executions remain standard fare.  With liberal democratic countries fixated with the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was prudent for Saudi authorities to capitalise.

On March 12, the Saudi Ministry of the Interior announced the execution of 81 Saudi and non-Saudi nationals, bringing the total of those put to death by Riyadh in 2022 to 92.  The last grand bout of killing was in 2019, when 37 people, including 33 Shi’a men, were put to death after being convicted by customarily dubious trials.

Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, claimed that this orgy of state killing was “all the more chilling in light of Saudi Arabia’s deeply flawed justice system, which metes out death sentences following trials that are grossly and blatantly unfair, including basing verdicts on ‘confessions’ extracted under torture or other ill-treatment.”

Another sordid feature of the system described by Maalouf is the tendency of authorities to underreport the number of trials that result in death sentences being meted out.  Death row, in other words, is a burgeoning feature of the Kingdom’s repertoire.

The executed victims were convicted of a whole miscellany of charges.  According to Human Rights Watch, 41 of the men, as has become a standard practice, were of the Shi’a group. The crimes ranged from murder, links to foreign terrorist groups and the vaguely worded offence of “monitoring and targeting officials and expatriates”.  Other offences included planting landmines, the attempted killing of police officers, the targeting of “vital economic sites” and weapons smuggling “to destabilize security, sow discord and unrest, and cause riots and chaos”.

Mohammad al-Shakhouri, sentenced to death on February 21 last year, was accused of violent acts while participating in anti-government protests.  Through the course of detention and interrogation, he lacked legal representation.  His family were not permitted to see him till eight months after his arrest.

The judge of the Specialised Criminal Court (SCC) overseeing his trial took only qualified interest in the evidence submitted by the accused that he had been tortured.  He had also lost most of his teeth due to the handiwork of security officers.  Al-Shakouri’s withdrawal of the worthless confession extracted under such pressure meant that he was given a discretionary death sentence.

In addition to al-Shakouri, Human Rights Watch also noted that in four other cases – Aqeel al-Faraj, Morada al-Musa, Yasin al-Brahim and Asad al-Shibr – due process violations were rife.  All spoke of torture and ill-treatment under interrogations; all claimed that their confessions had been extracted under duress.

These state killing sprees are not out of the ordinary in Saudi Arabia.  On January 2, 2016, 47 people were executed, the largest since 1980.  A prominent figure in the death list was Shi’a cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a critic of the House of Saud.  He died along with other members of the Shiite community and captives accused of terrorist related charges after, in the words of the Interior Ministry, much “reason, moderation and dialogue”.

The governing formula for Saudi Arabia’s rulers has been to maintain an iron hand over protest and dissent while fashioning Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a visionary reformer.  In 2020, the same petulant figure behind the brutal murder of the journalist and Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi, gave signals that a generous resort to the death penalty would be stopped.  Islamic scripture would guide the future use of capital punishment.

This was hardly reassuring.  The legal reforms announced on February 8, 2021, which include the first written penal code for discretionary crimes – those under Islamic law not defined in writing and not carrying pre-determined penalties – is being undertaken without civil society involvement.  This promises to be a very top-down affair.

The calendar events of state inflicted death may well cause outrage, but governments and companies continue to deal with the Kingdom with business-minded confidence.  Unlike the treatment now handed out to Russia, there has never been a mass cancellation of its officials from public appearances for its butcheries, be they legally sanctioned at home, or in such theatres in Yemen. Anger and disapproval, if expressed, are only done so in moderation.  Debates about the death penalty remain confined to such theatres as the UN General Assembly.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with typically bad timing, also showed why Riyadh has nothing to be worried about when it comes to its treatment of dissidents and convicts.  The UK continues to find the Saudis appreciative of made-in-Britain weapons, which are used readily in the war against the Houthis in Yemen.

The priority now is less reforming barbaric legal measures than finding alternative energy suppliers.  Johnson hopes to wean Britain and Western countries off their “addiction” to Russia’s hydrocarbons.  “We need to talk to other producers around the world about how we can move away from that dependency.”

This entailed a visit to the Kingdom, which Johnson gave no indication of calling off.  Mark Almond, director of the Crisis Research Institute, is very much in support of this morally bankrupt calculus.  “The realpolitik of this situation is that to free ourselves from our dependence on Russian fossil fuels, we will have to turn a blind eye to other evils in other regimes.”

The trip proved fruitless.  The Prime Minister failed to secure an agreement to increase oil production, a point brushed aside in Downing Street by a spokesman’s platitudes.  “Both the Crown Prince of the UAE and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia agreed to work closely with us to maintain stability in the energy market and continue the transition to renewable and clean technology.”

So cocky has Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince become, he even refused to take the call of US President Joe Biden on opening negotiations on the rising oil prices. And he can point out that allied countries such as the United States still maintain capital punishment in their chest of judicial weapons against the errant and deviant.  Things have never looked better for the murderous schemer.

NATO plays Russian roulette with nuclear weapons

Peter Schwarz

Three weeks into the Ukraine war, all of the sides involved are taking ever greater risks. The hitherto unthinkable, a nuclear exchange in Europe, is being openly considered and built up as a threat. Voices of caution, restraint and appeals to reason have largely fallen silent. Despite the looming catastrophe, NATO is not prepared to compromise.

In a televised speech the day before the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president Vladimir Putin had already issued this threat: “Whoever tries to get in our way and create further threats to our country and our people must know that Russia’s response will come immediately and will lead to consequences without precedent in history. All the necessary decisions have been taken. I hope you hear my words.”

This was a clear reference to Russia’s nuclear arsenal which, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, consists of more than 6,000 warheads, 900 of which are immediately operational, according to NATO.

Instead of de-escalating the situation, however, NATO has poured oil onto the fire. It has categorically rejected Putin’s request for security guarantees, which the latter—following decades of NATO eastward expansion, extensive NATO manoeuvres along the Russian border and direct NATO interference in Ukraine and Georgia—must have taken as an existential threat.

Since the beginning of the war, NATO has done everything in its power to cut off any chance of retreat for Putin—ranging from draconian economic sanctions to the threat of dragging him before an international tribunal. NATO is not waging war itself in name only. It is flooding Ukraine with high-tech weapons, concentrating its own troops on the border and intervening ever more directly in the war.

So far, the alliance has shied away from open military action against Russia. On March 11, US President Joe Biden insisted on Twitter that “we will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO.” He rejected direct military intervention in Ukraine, however, writing: “A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

But even this hurdle is disappearing rapidly. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, several Eastern European heads of government, as well as other political figures in Europe and the US, are emphatically calling for the establishment of a no-fly zone, which would be tantamount to NATO officially entering the war.

Thomas Enders 2018 at the ILA Schönefeld (Image: Matti Blume / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia

Thomas Enders, CEO of Airbus until 2019 and since then president of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), is particularly aggressive in this respect. “Establishing such a no-fly zone over western Ukraine is not just feasible; it is necessary,” he wrote in an article for Politico. “It is time for the West to expose Putin’s nuclear threats for what they really are—a bluff to deter Western governments from military intervention.”

What, however, if Putin’s nuclear threats are not a bluff? What if he makes good on them because his back is against the wall? Kaliningrad is only 530 kilometres from Berlin. The nuclear-capable medium-range missiles stationed there would take just four-and-a-half minutes to reach the German capital with its almost four million inhabitants. In between lie Warsaw and many other cities.

Enders is playing Russian roulette with nuclear weapons. He risks the nuclear destruction of Europe and large parts of the globe. And to what end? It would be absurd to think the aim is to simply allow bitterly poor Ukraine to become a member of the European Union and NATO!

Enders speaks for a ruling class that has lost its moorings and, faced with the insoluble contradictions of the capitalist system, is once again striving for conquest and dictatorship; that regards the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to realise the biggest rearmament programme in Germany since Hitler.

He speaks for a ruling class which, in Germany alone, sacrifices 250 lives every day to a pandemic which—as China has shown—can be controlled; which, despite record infections, is lifting all Corona protections, driving social inequality to unprecedented extremes and can only maintain its over-indebted financial system by declaring war on the working class.

Three years ago, Enders, onetime head of Europe’s largest arms company, Airbus, spoke out in favour of “an open, non-ideological, strategic debate” on a military and great power policy for Germany, which he likened to a vegetarian in a “world full of carnivores.”

Two years ago, in Die Zeit, he declared: “We need to talk about nuclear weapons.” The time was “ripe for a bold step towards a new European security architecture,” he wrote. This would include “our own nuclear umbrella.” If Europe were to learn “the language of power” again, “so as not to be crushed between the old and new great powers,” it would have to “become a military power again.” The “construction of a powerful European Defence Union” is “absolutely inconceivable without nuclear backing. ”

The war in Ukraine serves to realise these militaristic goals. The Ukrainian population, which is bearing the brunt of the war, is merely a pawn on the chessboard of the imperialist powers. They will suffer the same fate as the Iraqis, Afghans and Libyans, all of whose countries sank into chaos and misery after being “liberated” by the US and its NATO allies.

The disastrous consequences of the dissolution of the Soviet Union thirty years ago are now becoming fully apparent. Former Stalinist secret service agent Putin was among those who fully supported the plundering of the economy by oligarchs, dreamed of their wealth to come and derided the term “imperialism” as an invention of Lenin—or even worse, Leon Trotsky.

The Bolshevik leaders had insisted that wars were inevitable as long as capitalism was not overthrown by the working class. Imperialist war, Trotsky wrote in 1940, derives “its origin inexorably from the contradictions of international capitalist interests. Contrary to the official fables designed to drug the people, the chief cause of war as of all other social evils—unemployment, the high cost of living, fascism, colonial oppression—is the private ownership of the means of production together with the bourgeois state which rests on this foundation.”

Now, the imperialist powers are using Putin’s reactionary war against Ukraine to strangle Russia economically, even at the risk of wiping out humanity. They are even confiscating the yachts of Russian oligarchs, whose unrestrained enrichment they had once hailed as a “victory of freedom.” The oligarchs will of course get their yachts back if they turn against Putin. The Ukrainian oligarchs are allowed to keep their boats; after all, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk also cruise the world’s oceans on $500 million yachts.

Johnson’s cap-in-hand appeal for Saudi Arabia and UAE to increase oil supplies fails

Jean Shaoul

With the US/NATO-provoked war in Ukraine and associated sanctions causing a devastating shortage of oil on world markets, pushing up prices to $130 a barrel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) begging them to pump out more oil.

Johnson is desperate to avoid a repeat of the 1970s energy crisis that saw oil prices soar, corporate bankruptcies and bitter class struggles that brought down the Conservative government in February 1974.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson walks around Riyadh Boulevard with Al Wasabi, Minister of Commerce during his tour of the Gulf Regions. (Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street/Flickr)

His visit this week exposes the hypocrisy and cynicism of the British government whose foreign policy is dressed in claims about protecting democracy, human rights and national sovereignty, while committing and courting the perpetrators of some the world’s greatest crimes. It comes just days after the House of Saud, a long-time US and UK ally, executed 81 prisoners, the largest mass execution for decades. The despotic regime had tortured the unnamed prisoners, denying them even the semblance of a public trial or legal representation.

Their crime? According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, 41 of the victims, Shias from Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing Eastern Province, had taken part in anti-government protests in 2011-12.

Days earlier, Johnson had praised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for promising to modernise the justice system, only begging the question whether beheadings were to be replaced with a firing squad. While Johnson was in Riyadh, three people were executed, bringing the total this year to 100.

The Saudi-led coalition that includes the UAE, backed and militarily supported by the US and Britain, has been waging a criminal war on Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, since April 2015 in a bid to suppress the Houthi-led insurgency that toppled Saudis’ puppet regime. Countless war crimes have been committed through the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure.

The UN has estimated that the war had killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021 directly and indirectly due to hunger and disease. Of 31.9 million people in Yemen, 23.4 million need humanitarian assistance, of which 12.9 million are in acute need, with 161,000 people likely to experience famine later this year.

None of this counts for anything. As far as Johnson is concerned, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are our “key international partners.”

In a break with tradition, journalists did not accompany him on his trip, indicating Johnson’s desire to ward off any awkward questions. In recent weeks, he has been travelling with just one broadcaster and a journalist from the newswires.

Johnson had to make the trip to Riyadh because the British government is no longer able to call on the disgraced Prince Andrew, their go-to man for behind-the-scenes business relations in the Gulf. The prince is in disgrace over his close relationship with convicted US sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the legal case brought against him in New York by Virginia Giuffre.

Johnson has close relations with bin Salman. In 2018, when he was foreign secretary, he praised him as a reformer who “deserves our support… I believe that the crown prince, who is only 32, has demonstrated by word and deed that he aims to guide Saudi Arabia in a more open direction.”

A few days before the gruesome murder and dismembering of former regime insider turned dissident Jamal Khashoggi, which even US intelligence agencies concluded was approved by bin Salman, Johnson accepted a £14,000 trip to Saudi Arabia from the country’s foreign affairs ministry.

His courtship of bin Salman is part of efforts to attract more Saudi investment in Britain and seal a trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council in keeping with his post-Brexit plans for a “global Britain.” To this end, bin Salman sent Johnson a text asking him to intervene to ensure that the proposed £300 million takeover by a Saudi-led consortium of the Premier League football club Newcastle United went ahead, despite the Premier League’s “wrong” decision not to allow it. The Premier League “corrected” its decision after “undertakings” that the Saudi government would not control the club.

Last week, highlighting official cynicism over Ukraine, Newcastle played Chelsea, the club facing possible bankruptcy following sanctions imposed on Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer sought to make political capital out of the whole affair, lambasting Johnson for “going cap in hand from dictator to dictator” and switching reliance on Russian oil to Saudi oil. But he singularly failed to demand Johnson cancel his trip.

Johnson’s trip was in the end fruitless. When asked whether Riyadh had agreed to increase output to tackle soaring crude oil prices, he replied, “I think you'd need to talk to the Saudis about that.”

He said, in response to a journalist’s question about the executions, “I always raise human rights issues, as British prime ministers before me have done, time after time. It’s best if the details of those conversations are kept private, they’re more effective that way.”

Johnson’s trip to the Gulf despots comes days after the government announced it would end the import of Russian oil by the end of this year—Russia provides 18 percent of Britain’s diesel—and was considering whether to extend the ban to Russian gas, making up 4 percent of Britain’s supplies. The government’s new energy “independence” plan will be published later this month and is expected to place increased reliance on renewable energy, nuclear energy and boosting production in North Sea gas and oil fields that have been winding down production.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Johnson said ending reliance on Russian energy would be “painful,” meaning expensive. It is workers and their families who will have to pay the direct and indirect costs of the US/NATO war.

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the only oil producers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) with spare capacity, are in no mood to increase supplies. The world shortage provides an opportunity to refill their coffers after recent lean years.

The incoming Biden administration had sought to distance itself from bin Salman over the killing of Khashoggi in October 2018 and civilian casualties in his war in Yemen. It has removed the Houthis from its global terror list while London has thus far failed to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organisation. Washington is also trying to resuscitate the 2015 nuclear accords with Iran, the Sunni Arab states’ long-time foe. At the end of last year, in what appeared a snub to its Gulf allies, Downing Street transferred the responsibilities of the Foreign Office Middle East Minister to the Minister for Asia.

Since late 2016, OPEC has been coordinating oil production decisions with Russia, enabling Moscow to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to keep the lid on oil supplies, limiting the monthly increase to 400,000 barrels a day, while Riyadh is considering pricing some of its oil sales to China in yuan instead of the US dollar.

It is in order to find alternative supplies of oil that Johnson has made overtures to Iran, finally agreeing to repay the £400 million refund due to Tehran after Britain cancelled its order for tanks and armoured vehicles after the toppling of the Shah’s regime in 1979, in the process finally securing the return to Britain of dual-nationals Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori after years of detention in Iranian jails.

While the media has focused on whether the government in effect paid a ransom for their release, London and Washington are indicating their preparedness to drop sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, at least for the time being, to create some distance between Tehran and Moscow and to boost the world’s oil supplies.