Turkey plans deportation of 1 million Syrian refugees

Hasan Yıldırım

As a far-right anti-refugee campaign in Turkey has intensified in recent weeks, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has decided to deport 1 million Syrian refugees back to Syria, where NATO’s proxy war for regime change continues to rage.

Speaking via remote connection to a conference in Idlib, the northwest province of Syria occupied by Turkish forces and their Islamist proxies, Erdoğan said: “We are preparing a new project to enable the voluntary return of 1 million Syrian brothers and sisters we have hosted in our country. We will implement this project with the support of domestic and international non-governmental organizations.”

President Recep Erdoğan's government keeps refugees from reaching Europe. Credit: WikiMedia

He added, “About 500,000 Syrians have returned to the safe zones created since 2016, when Turkey launched its cross-border operations amid a deepening humanitarian tragedy in Syria.”

The “humanitarian tragedy” Erdoğan speaks of, in fact, is a product of the US-NATO imperialist war, which the Turkish government has supported since 2011, to topple the Russian- and Iranian-backed government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey invaded Syria not to end the humanitarian disaster it had helped create there but to prevent the emergence of a US-backed Kurdish nationalist enclave.

Contrary to Erdoğan’s claims, deportation would not be “voluntarily” chosen but imposed on refugees, due to the far-right anti-refugee campaign and dirty deals with the European Union. The vast majority of refugees understandably do not want to return to Syria, where the war still continues. Refugees who want to cross into Europe are blocked at the borders with Greece and Bulgaria and sent back to Turkey.

They do not even have a legal status of “refugees” in Turkey. They live in misery, deprived of basic rights, subjected to uncontrolled exploitation and targeted by the far right. The World Socialist Web Site rejects this campaign and emphasizes that it is essential for the international working class to defend the democratic rights of refugees in struggle against the bourgeoisie. In the case of Turkey, this means full citizenship rights for refugees and making education available for Arab as well as Kurdish people in their mother tongues.

Turkey hosts the highest number of refugees in the world, as a result of over 30 years of US-led imperialist wars across the region since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to a report by the Association for Refugees in Turkey, there are 3.75 million Syrians living in Turkey as of March 24. According to Erdoğan’s statement last December, there are over 5 million refugees in Turkey in total.

The far-right campaign against refugees in Turkey has escalated in recent weeks, with politicians and pundits promoting anti-refugee hashtags on Twitter. Chauvinist comments are increasingly common in the bourgeois and the pseudo-left press.

The entire political and media establishment scapegoats refugees and immigrants in Turkey, and internationally, because the bourgeoisie and the affluent middle class have no progressive response to the growing economic and social crisis. The ruling class strengthens fascistic movements by taking up the old, reactionary weapon of chauvinism to divide the working class and deflect growing social opposition.

The vast majority of Turkey’s population lives with spiraling high inflation, unemployment and deepening poverty, as the pandemic continues and the danger of world war grows. And the ruling class enriches itself at the expense of the health, lives and wages of the workers.

Throughout the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine in which NATO sanctions against Russia disrupted global supply chains, the already unbearable food prices and poverty in Turkey rose even faster. Protests and strikes that broke out in January and February were only the initial expressions of growing social unrest.

Now, establishment parties spread the lie that the cause of all the problems stemming from the capitalist system and bourgeois rule is the refugees. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), backed by the pseudo-left, criticized Erdoğan’s plan to deport 1 million refugees to Syria from the right. Adopting far-right rhetoric, he said: “Come off it! There are still flows of fugitives coming from the border. We will send the rest in two years, and we are all fed up with your fake projects.”

Right-wing parties like the fascistic Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the main ally of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), as well as the CHP’s partners—the Good Party, DEVA, Future Party and Felicity Party—also call to expel refugees from Turkey.

This bipartisan attack on defenseless refugees, who form an integral part of the working class, is clear proof that the CHP and its pseudo-left allies are no less reactionary and hostile to the working class than the Erdoğan government.

However, the most prominent in the anti-refugee campaign recently has been the Victory Party (Zafer Partisi). Founded by Ümit Özdağ, who left the far-right Good Party, this middle class party brands refugees as Turkey’s main problem and hysterically campaigns for their deportation. It claims that there would be a civil war in Turkey if refugees stay in the country, and it has started to gather far-right circles around it with its furious campaign.

On April 19, Özdağ announced a “Fortress Anatolia” project to send refugees back to their countries. This is a reference to the European Union’s Fortress Europe policy, which aims to prevent refugees from the Middle East and Africa from entering Europe. This policy has already caused thousands of refugees to drown in the Mediterranean Sea and Turkey and Greece to become refugee prisons.

Moreover, a short film named Silent Invasion, broadcast on journalist Hande Karacasu’s YouTube channel on May 3 and which Özdağ personally financed, further escalated the anti-refugee campaign. Karacasu’s fascistic film, full of distortions and lies, quickly moved to the top of the press and social media. Over 3 million saw it in three days on YouTube.

According to the script of the film which seeks to exploit the racial fears of the affluent middle class, Arabs become the majority in Turkey in the year 2043. The Turkish minority is exposed to oppression, discrimination and violence. Most Turkish youth are unemployed, and a small number of them consider themselves lucky as they have jobs. The state administration has passed into Arab hands, with Arabic made an official language. Turkish language and culture are being destroyed.

Shortly after the film was released, the Turkish National Police issued a press release, fearing that the situation would explode out of control. The press release announced that Hande Karacasu and the user of the “Militer Doktrin” Twitter account were detained and legal proceedings initiated against them for manipulation. Karacasu was released the next day.

Such far-right provocations have previously led to killings of refugees and pogrom attempts by far-right elements. Three Syrian refugees were burned to death in Izmir last November, and a far-right mob raided a Syrian neighborhood in Ankara in August.

The events in Doğankent, a district in the southern city of Adana, on May 1 are another serious warning. After a quarrel between Syrian refugees and Turkish citizens broke out, attacks were reportedly carried out on the homes of Syrians, and four people were injured.

White House will do nothing as COVID-19 cases surge

Benjamin Mateus

The United States is in the midst of its seventh wave of COVID-19 infections, with the combination of the BA.2 and the BA.2.12.1 subvariants dominant, while the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants that are currently causing a surge of infections in South Africa are waiting in the wings.

However, not a finger is being lifted to address the danger to the population.

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, stands for a portrait, Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020, in Newton, Mass. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Despite the acknowledgment by the mainstream media that more than 1 million Americans have died from COVID-19, there is absolutely no urgency on the part of the White House or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to act or warn the public of the dangers posed by this new surge.

Yesterday, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, was interviewed on NBC TV’s “Today” program by host Hoda Kotb. The interview conveyed the official laissez-faire attitude to the dangerous pathogen that is making its latest assault on the population.

Kotb noted that new cases of COVID-19 are up 70 percent over the last three weeks (currently at 66,000 per day, on average), and deaths are up 30 percent. Citing suggestions that New York might reimpose a mask mandate, she asked Jha if there was a correlation between the new surge and the lifting of mask mandates on airplanes and public transportation more broadly after the Florida judge’s ruling three weeks ago.

Also she alluded to last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, attended by President Biden and some 2,500 reporters, media personalities, celebrities, politicians and assorted billionaires, virtually none wearing masks—a list that included Jha himself. The superspreader event has already resulted in numerous reported COVID-19 infections.

Kotb asked, “If you had a do-over, would you have told the president not to attend?”

Jha responded with the standard comeback that everyone had tested negative at the dinner, and the president had made his personal choice. He went further, presenting the gala as an example of how such events should be conducted.

Although acknowledging that there were “worrisome” trends, he then deflected concerns by blaming the BA.2 variant’s highly infective qualities, saying, “That’s the prime driver!”

His response was a non-sequitur. The question was not about the virus but the policies that allow for a more significant social mixing of the population. That the virus is so contagious makes all the more critical a vigorous response, involving the immediate implementation of broad-based public health measures to stem infections.

Indeed, it has been confirmed by real-world data from China that comprehensive measures can turn a wave of infections, including from Omicron variants. Cases are down more than 80 percent since their highs three weeks ago, to less than 5,000 for a country with 1.4 billion people.

By comparison, on May 4, 2022, the New York Times tracker reported that close to 2,000 people died and more than 100,000 were infected that day in the US. The epidemiological curve of average deaths has sharply increased in conjunction with hospitalizations, and COVID-19 cases are rising in almost every state.

A recent study out of Harvard, Jha’s alma mater, shows that the Omicron variant is intrinsically as severe as previous variants, affirming the dangers that principled health experts have raised since the beginning of the Omicron phase of the pandemic. Refuting the lie promoted by the government and the media that Omicron is “mild,” the authors noted that “the risks of hospitalization and mortality were nearly identical” between Omicron and previously dominant variants.

From January 10 to February 22, 2022, the BA.1 subvariant of Omicron was killing more than 2,000 people daily. BA.1 killed 170,000 Americans during the three months it spread uncontrolled in every community across the country. Almost 60 percent of the population has now been infected with the virus.

Only the Alpha wave in January 2021, when barely anyone had received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, killed more and for a longer time. (From December 2, 2020 to February 19, 2021, there were more than 2,000 deaths per day on average.)

Since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, some 575,000 lives have been lost to the contagion. In January and February of this year, 52,000 fully vaccinated individuals died of their infection.

When Kotb asked Jha, “Can we expect mask mandates to be reinstated?” Jha diverted attention to the CDC’s COVID-19 map, noting that more than 80 percent of the country remains in the green. He failed to explain that the CDC had deliberately changed its classification for risk to ensure that the mask mandates would be repealed, in line with the demands of Wall Street executives to end all pandemic measures and transition immediately to “normalcy.”

Jha added that decisions on mask mandates and other mitigation measures would be taken locally. This rejection of any comprehensive science-based policy to contain and eliminate the virus—which requires not only a coordinated national, but international response—is in line with the mantra that individuals have to decide how to navigate these life-and-death issues on their own.

The import of these comments is that the population will have to learn to live permanently in the presence of SARS-CoV-2 and that no serious public health measures will be taken to impede the virus. This essentially repudiates the entire understanding of community disease and the critical principles of public health that have been established over centuries of experience.

Vaccines are a crucial part of a comprehensive program of public health measures. But the Biden administration has adopted a vaccine-only policy in keeping with the demands and interests of the corporate elite. He has enforced the reopening of schools and businesses and rejected any lockdowns, so as to ensure an uninterrupted flow of workers to pump out surplus value and profit.

That the loss of life has been so pronounced in 2021 and into 2022, on the basis of the vaccine-only strategy, remains unexplained by Jha and the Biden administration.

New strains with immune-evading characteristics are evolving as a result of a policy that uses the existence of vaccines to force the population back into unsafe factories and workplaces. Studies highlighting the rapid loss of immunity and rise in reinfection rates are ignored by the health officials whose duty is to translate these findings into practical measures to protect the population. Funding by Congress to pay for antivirals, respirators, testing centers and proper tracking is denied.

One must ask why Jha has chosen to study public health, his expertise, when he dismisses its importance in protecting society. This, however, is the universal line of virtually every government around the world, which claims that the pandemic is “over” and has entered a new “endemic” phase—a falsification of both the facts and the scientific meaning of “endemic.”

Who benefits? The capitalist ruling elites, who reject the necessary public health measures to protect human life because they cut across the drive for profit.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion: The spearhead of a massive assault on democratic rights

Eric London

The Supreme Court’s draft ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization not only abolishes the basic democratic right to abortion, but it is an attempt to radically transform the country’s legal superstructure by stripping the population of the democratic protections established in the American Revolution and Civil War.

The opinion would overturn the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade in the most sweepingly reactionary way imaginable. It establishes a new test in which (1) constitutional rights previously upheld by clear legal precedent can be stripped away without warning, and (2) rights not listed verbatim in the Constitution are deemed unenforceable if they were not widely recognized in 1791, a time when the US was home to three million people who used horses for transportation and candles for lighting.

An anti-scaling fence surrounds the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday, May 5, 2022 in Washington. [AP Photo/(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)]

In the Dobbs decision, the Republican majority curls a beckoning finger toward its far-right partners, imploring legal challenges to a host of other basic rights. It suggests that the new legal test could be applied to all “fundamental rights that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution” and calls all “unenumerated rights” into question by referring to them as “putative rights,” i.e., rights which have been assumed to exist but which may not exist in reality.

The decision criticizes the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. It rejects the constitutional right to privacy, claiming that this right “is also not mentioned” in the text of the constitution, paving the way for a massive intrusion of the state into the private lives of individuals. Homosexuality was not accepted in society in 1791, after all, and neither was interracial marriage.

The right-wing is scanning the darkest periods of American history to inspire its political strategy today. Alongside the specter of “morality squad” police raids on gay bars and private homes, Republican leaders are planning to re-introduce segregation, this time with immigrants as the victims.

The day after the decision was leaked, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he will ban the children of undocumented immigrants from attending public schools, the modern revival of Governor Wallace’s pledge to “stand at the schoolhouse doors.” The law would involve fines or criminal prosecution if immigrant children are caught on school grounds (and perhaps for using drinking fountains intended for “Citizens Only”). Abbott said states should enact their own restrictions on immigration and wage legal battles to overturn a 2012 Supreme Court decision barring Arizona from declaring that undocumented immigrants had no constitutional rights and could be jailed simply for being undocumented.

Police organizations are also preparing to argue that there is no constitutional right to Miranda warnings or other protections for arrestees and criminal defendants, opening the door to even more brutal waves of police violence. The fascist Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) declared on a podcast Thursday that the decision “is a big tool in our arsenal” and is “shaking things up in a way that could help us in the long game.” After all, since police forces did not exist at the time the Constitution was ratified, necessary democratic protections against police abuse could not have been rooted in the traditions of the time.

The Supreme Court’s ruling did not arise from nowhere, it is another manifestation of the disintegration of bourgeois democracy in the United States and the uncontrollable drive toward ever more extreme forms of political reaction. To understand what this decision arises out of is to understand how to fight it.

The ruling class has cultivated and promoted obscurantist and fascistic layers for decades as a bulwark against the working class. Under conditions of permanent war and social counterrevolution—led by both parties—these figures have become the dominant force in bourgeois politics and within the state’s repressive apparatus.

The last half century has been defined by financial parasitism, militarism, nonstop attacks on democratic rights, the end of restrictions on campaign finance, and unrelenting efforts to prevent masses of people from having any say on government policy. America’s 50 richest families now possess $1.2 trillion in assets. The oligarchic principle is manifest in the entire two-party, bicameral set up, characterized by undemocratic and unrepresentative structures from top to bottom.

As Oxford University professor Joe Foweraker wrote in his recent work Oligarchy in the Americas, “High returns to capital and super-rents deriving from market power and monopolies have created a new financial oligarchy and a step-change in the private command of public policy, leaving the oligarchy largely unaccountable to democratic government.” (Emphasis added). The oligarchy, Foweraker writes, “is so far detached from the society from which it extracts its wealth that it can act entirely independently of it.”

The character of the entire political establishment and corporate media flows from this fact. But despite this, the American ruling class declares itself the champion of democracy in the fight against Russia. Every day provides new confirmation that this is a lie.

This includes recent revelations that Donald Trump proposed launching missile strikes against Mexico and ordered the military to fire live rounds against those protesting the police killing of George Floyd, that Fascist Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes was in contact with the Trump team in preparing to administer “lethal violence” on January 6, and that Joe Biden privately confided to a Democratic Congressman in the days before the 2020 election that if he didn’t win, “I’m not sure we are going to have a country.”

Despite this, the leading conspirators in the plot of January 6 remain are at liberty to plan their next steps, including Trump and every one of his congressional conspirators. The Democratic Party continues to insist on “bipartisanship” even with those “Republican colleagues” 

The Democrats will do nothing to reverse the attack on the right to abortion. When it comes to pouring missiles into Ukraine, there is no risk the Democratic Party is not willing to take, not even risks that bring the world to the edge of nuclear war. But when it comes to defending basic democratic rights, there is always a Joe Manchin or a Senate Parliamentarian to blame for their own fecklessness.

In reality, the Democrats’ political trajectory is entirely of a piece with the Republicans’ transformation into a party of open authoritarianism. The Democrats abandoned social reform decades ago and transformed themselves into a vehicle for the race and gender-obsessed upper middle class, which the Democrats view as a necessary constituency for waging imperialist war. The politics of identity does not represent an opposition to the right-wing degeneration of the Republicans; it is merely another expression of the rot at the heart of the entire two-party system.

The extremely anti-democratic character of the Dobbs decision is a sign that basic democratic rights can only be secured through social revolution. As Lenin wrote in his 1916 work Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, “The difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because they are both rotting alive.”

Contractors linked to fascist paramilitary groups paid to train police in at least 12 US states

Jacob Crosse

A new report by Reuters details ties between Trump-aligned fascist militia groups and police departments across the country. The report identifies five “police trainers” who have been paid, with tax-payer money, by police departments in at least 12 states, including, Idaho, Washington, Texas and Missouri.

The report asserts that the trainers have ties to the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and Proud Boys militia groups. Members of these groups are currently facing the most serious charges stemming from Trump’s failed coup of January 6, 2021, including seditious conspiracy, to which three Oath Keepers have already pled guilty.

One of the trainers identified by Reuters is Richard Whitehead, the current owner of Richard Whitehead & Assoc. LLC. The company, per Reuters, is one of “35 training firms that advertised at least 10 police or public-safety training sessions in 2021” on policetraining.net, a website used by police departments around the US to find for-profit trainers.

In addition to being a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers from 2016 to 2017, Whitehead ran for sheriff of Kootenai County, Idaho in 2020. Prior to, and during the campaign, he openly aligned himself with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a far-right movement founded by former sheriff and Oath Keeper co-founder Richard Mack.

Whitehead cut a promotional video with the Three Percenters group as part of his campaign, Reuters notes.

Public records analyzed by the news agency show that Whitehead has taught “at least 560 police officers and other public safety workers in 85 sessions in 12 states over the past four years.”

Trump supporters storm the Capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Whitehead boasts that prior to training police full-time, he spent 33 years in law enforcement, including leading “homicide, SWAT, communications and intelligence” sections. He claims to have “trained investigators of all types in statement analysis,” including detectives, private eyes and members of the Texas Rangers.

Reuters wrote that its review of Whitehead’s social media postings found that he previously called for the “execution of government officials he sees as disloyal” to Trump. In language echoed by Michigan Boogaloo Boys militia members who plotted to kidnap and possibly assassinate Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the lead-up to the November 2020 elections, Whitehead called on police to ignore COVID-19 public health orders issued by “tyrannical governors,” warning, “We are on the brink of civil war.”

Whitehead is currently scheduled to host training courses for police in May, June, July, August, September and October 2022, per policetraining.net. The courses are scheduled to take place in Belton, Harker, Heights and McKinney, Texas; Missoula, Montana; Neosho, Missouri; Fruitland, Idaho and Seattle, Washington.

Another far-right police trainer identified by Reuters is Ryan Morris, founder of Tripwire Operations Group. Morris claims his company held some 50 training classes in 2021, “about half” of which were attended by law enforcement types.

In an interview with Reuters, he admitted that he and other Tripwire trainers were in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. Prior to January 6, Tripwire’s social media accounts promoted Trump’s lies about the election having been stolen. In one post, written a month before the attack on the US Capitol, Morris called Biden’s victory a “coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, the end of our constitutional republic and the merge [sic] of capitalism into the slide toward socialism.”

In his interview, Morris admitted that he and “several other” Tripwire trainers were employed at the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021.

Morris refused to tell Reuters who hired him, or in what capacity Tripwire trainers were employed at the rally, but he did say they were sometimes hired to “help law enforcement agencies” or “protect high-level executives.”

Another fascist police trainer identified in the report is an individual named Tim Kennedy, who told Reuters he held “about 200 training sessions across the United States in 2021” for police officers. The previous year he shared a post in which he aligned himself with the Boogaloo Boys.

In that post he wrote about his desire to “boogaloo,” a euphemism for violent race war. Two months later, Kennedy posted a photo of himself wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the unofficial uniform of the Boogaloo movement, while aiming an assault rifle. The picture was captioned: “If you choose to be an asshole... I picked out a special shirt for the occasion.”

According to Reuters, in addition to promoting the Boogaloo Boys on social media, Kennedy interacted frequently with Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs. Biggs is currently incarcerated for his actions on January 6.

A US Army veteran and correspondent for the fascistic “Infowars” program hosted by Alex Jones, Biggs is facing multiple charges, including obstruction of Congress, obstruction of law enforcement, destruction of government property, and assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement.

Reuters notes that “Kennedy’s Twitter account shows that he has been an associate of Joe Biggs… their online interactions were as recent as May 2018, several months before Biggs’ Twitter account was suspended.” In the Twitter posts, Kennedy discussed going on motorcycle rides with Biggs and offering him the position of interior secretary in his imagined administration.

The pair also discussed an alleged Antifa rally, with Biggs writing, “Going downtown to cause havoc,” to which Kennedy replied enthusiastically, “Same. Sounds like a date!”

Biggs, whose trial is set for August 8, was photographed at the Trump International Hotel with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in November 2019.

That police departments and federal agencies around the country employ the services of fascistic paramilitary types with ties to militia groups to “train” their forces will not come as a surprise to regular readers of the World Socialist Web Site.

Last year, the WSWS reported that during the January 6 attack on Congress, the US Capitol Police’s Containment Emergency Response Team, or CERT, which was tasked with evacuating members of Congress, failed to respond to calls for help.

In testimony before Congress, now-retired Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton revealed that the Capitol Police had paid a private contractor, Northern Red LLC, over $90,000 in 2018 and 2019 to train CERT. According to a report authored by Bolton, the CERT team refused to fire its “less-lethal” rounds to protect Congress.

The founder and CEO of Northern Red, John-David Potysnky, is a former US Army Special Forces soldier who continues to this day to use neo-Nazi iconography in his company’s logo and uniform patches, and on his website. Bolton warned in his testimony that it was urgent for the Capitol Police to immediately sever all ties with the neo-fascist outfit. It appears, however, that other US government agencies did not feel the same way.

On the Northern Red website, the company continues to advertise training services for police and military members “only.” The website notes that in March, Northern Red held a “Close Quarters Combat” course for military and police personnel at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, commonly known as Fort Dix, located south of Trenton, New Jersey.

Biden’s Plan to Sell Off Seized Russian Assets Violates the Constitution and International Law

Paul B. Stephan

The Biden administration wants to sell off the yachts, homes and other luxury assets it has seized from Russian oligarchs and use those proceeds to support reparations for Ukraine.

As part of his proposal for the latest aid package to Ukraine, President Joe Biden is asking lawmakers for the authority to formally confiscate the assets of sanctioned oligarchs to pay to “remedy the harm Russia caused … and help build Ukraine.” The House has already passed a bill urging Biden to sell the assets, but it didn’t specifically give him the authority to do so.

Others have encouraged the administration to sell off the tens of billions of dollars in Russian central bank assets it has frozen. It’s not clear from the White House statement whether Biden plans to go after state-owned assets too.

That he has gone to Congress to get permission indicates that his lawyers believe, as do I, that current law permits only freezing, and not selling, foreign property in the course of an international crisis.

I’ve studied and practiced international law for several decades and advised the departments of State and Defense on issues like this one. The idea of forcing Russia to pay reparations for the harm to Ukraine has obvious appeal. But the U.S. needs to comply with constitutional and international law when it does so.

Freezing vs. confiscating

You might ask what the difference is between seizing or freezing property – forbidding anyone to dispose of or use an asset or take income from it – and confiscating it.

Freezing destroys the economic benefits of ownership. But the owner at least retains the hope that, when the conflict is over and the freeze order ends, the property – or its equivalent in money – will return. Confiscation means selling off the property and giving the proceeds, along with any cash seized, to a designated beneficiary – in this case, people acting on behalf of Ukraine.

The International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1977permits only freezing, and not selling, foreign property in the course of an international crisis. Congress adopted this law to replace the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, which gave the president much broader power to take action against U.S. adversaries in and out of war.

Since then, the U.S. has frequently used the power to seize assets belonging to foreign individuals or nations as an economic sanction to punish what it considers bad behavior. For example, after Iran stormed and seized the American embassy in Tehran, the U.S. government seized billions of dollars in Iranian assets in the U.S, including cash and property. The U.S. has also frozen assets of Venezuela and the Taliban over ties to terrorism and Russian individuals considered responsible for human rights violations, thanks to the Magnitsky Act.

In all these cases, the United States held on to the foreign property rather than sell it off. In some cases, it used the seized property as a bargaining chip toward a future settlement. In 2016, the Obama administration famously returned US$400 million to Iran that the U.S. had seized after the embassy siege in 1979 – delivering stacks of Swiss francs stuffed inside a Boeing 737. In other cases, the assets remain under government control, administered by an office of the U.S. Treasury, in hope that eventually some compromise can be reached.

The Patriot Act, adopted in the wake of 9/11, created a limited exception to the confiscation ban in instances in which the United States is at war. The U.S. never has used this authority. And despite the increasingly heated rhetoric, stepped-up sanctions and growing aid for Ukraine, the U.S. is not at war with Russia.

Redressing gross violations

A fundamental principle of justice says those who cause harm while breaking the law should pay.

In international law, we call this “reparations.” As the United Nations puts it, “Adequate, effective and prompt reparation is intended to promote justice by redressing gross violations of international human rights law or serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

In recent history, victors have often forced reparations on the losers of war – as was the case following both World War I and World War II – especially when they are deemed responsible for massive death and ruin.

Russia has wrought terrible destruction in Ukraine. Several cities, including Mariupol, are all but destroyed, and evidence of war crimes in places like Bucha is mounting.

So it makes sense that so many scholars, lawmakers and others would argue that the regime of Vladimir Putin and those who benefit from his rule should help pay for it.

Some, such as Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe, argue U.S. law already allows the president to use any seized or frozen asset as reparations. But, as other experts have pointed out, doing so has serious problems. The legal issues noted above are one major hurdle and open this up to being challenged in court.

Another is political. Confiscating assets takes away important bargaining chips in any future negotiations, as they have been with Iran and other countries.

Specialists in sanctions law – including me – agree with Biden that Congress needs to pass a new law.

Punishing Russia while preserving the rule of law

The question then becomes what that legislation should look like to avoid running afoul of international law and the U.S. Constitution. There still seem to be several limitations on what Congress can do.

For example, the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantees due process before the government can confiscate a private citizen’s property. But does this apply to property in the U.S. that belongs to a foreign citizen? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to two Supreme Court cases.

Selling off Russian state property such as central bank assets, creates other problems. International law provides a certain degree of immunity from confiscation to foreign nations and their assets overseas. Outside of wartime, confiscation of state property, including U.S. deposits of Russia’s central bank, runs up against these challenges.

A case currently before the International Court of Justice will decide whether the United States violated this rule when it used funds from frozen Iranian central bank deposits to compensate people who had won a default judgment from Iran for supporting terrorists.

So, yes, I believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is outrageous and demands a response. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. and other countries should ride roughshod over international law and the U.S. Constitution to do so. Congress should be able to craft a law that allows some assets to be confiscated without violating due process or international law.

I predict that disregarding these issues will likely produce embarrassing judicial setbacks that will make it harder to help Ukraine down the road.

North Korea’s Real Threat: Radical Isolation

John Feffer

A recent military parade in Pyongyang showcased the country’s intercontinental ballistic missile. Kim Jong Un used the opportunity of the spectacle to promise that he would push the country’s nuclear program forward at maximum speed. To top it off, North Korea has been improving its tactical nuclear weapons, which means that it may soon be able to threaten South Korea with a nuclear strike as well.

North Korea’s nuclear program has been the perennial threat that concerns South Korea, East Asia, and the United States. Some pundits are even suggesting that the nature of this threat has recently changed—that North Korea is no longer just interested in possessing nuclear weapons in order to deter attacks by other countries. Instead, as Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin argues, North Korea is now seriously considering using nuclear weapons for offensive purposes as part of an effort to take over the Korean peninsula.

This seems far-fetched. Pyongyang has difficulty even maintaining control of its own territory. Having seen Russia’s embarrassing failure to take over Ukraine, a considerably weaker country, the North Korean government can’t seriously believe that it could invade and control South Korea, a considerably stronger country.

True, Russia’s nuclear weapons have made the United States and NATO reluctant to confront Russian forces directly in Ukraine, but they haven’t provided the Kremlin with any practical advantage over Ukraine on the battlefield. Given the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and U.S. security guarantees to South Korea, Pyongyang wouldn’t be able to use nuclear blackmail to aid in some hare-brained effort to seize the entire peninsula.

After all, Pyongyang knows that any use of nuclear weapons, be they against its southern neighbor or the United States, will result in massive retaliation. The North Korean leadership would be committing suicide if it launched an ICBM or tactical nuke.

No, in fact, nuclear weapons are not the biggest threat that North Korea poses to the world. North Korea’s greatest liability is something that it currently views as an asset: its radical isolation.

To protect itself against COVID-19, North Korea has closed its borders. During the pandemic, it even shut down trade with its principal economic partner, China, only resuming trade in January. Virtually all diplomatic staff have left the country, and so have humanitarian aid workers.

Fine, you might say, isolation befits North Korea. It doesn’t produce anything that the world particularly wants, unlike Russia and its oil, gas, and military exports. If it doesn’t want to play with others, it should be left undisturbed in its own sandbox.

But such isolation is actually dangerous—and not just for North Koreans.

As part of its radical isolationism, North Korea has refused any COVID vaccines. It has so far turned down offers of three million doses of Sinovac and two million of the AstraZeneca-Oxford University vaccine.

The country’s population of 25 million unvaccinated people offers COVID an extraordinary opportunity not only to spread but also to mutate. A powerful new Pyongyang variant would not stay within the borders of North Korea. Even those who have little empathy for the plight of North Koreans have to understand that a new COVID variant could potentially kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people all over the world.

Providing North Korea with tens of millions of doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines— the more effective drugs that the North Korean government reportedly prefers—would neutralize the country’s inadvertent biological weapon.

But North Korea’s isolation is dangerous for other reasons.

Economic isolation has pushed Pyongyang to pursue black market strategies to make money in global markets. It has been involved in the production of narcotics, particularly crystal meth. It has long been rumored to have produced counterfeit $100 bills. And it has unleashed its world-class hackers to extort money through various cyber-blackmail schemes and cryptocurrency manipulations.

The cultural isolation of the population has made it easier for the government to maintain its control over society. True, North Koreans manage to get some information from the outside, including South Korean TV dramas. But isolation increases the atomization of the population, making it all the more difficult to develop a civil society apart from the government sphere.

And the geopolitical isolation of the country—North Korea doesn’t belong to any regional organizations and, aside from the United Nations, few international organizations—makes it difficult to embed the country into the system of global laws and norms.

The North Korean government is certainly ambivalent about its isolation. On the one hand, Pyongyang doesn’t want to expose itself to what it considers to be various political and economic viruses—democracy, an unregulated free market—circulating in the outside world. On the other hand, the North Korean leadership recognizes that it cannot achieve its goal of a “strong and prosperous nation” behind high, impregnable walls. It has, for instance, consistently relied on China to sustain its economy. But the North Korean leadership views its current dependency on Chinese trade to be unacceptable, both because of the perceived inferior quality of Chinese goods and because of the risk of China using its advantage to put pressure on Pyongyang.

The bottom line is that North Korea wants to engage the outside world on its own terms.

Generally, the outside world has not been willing to meet North Korea halfway. Sanctions impede any serious economic engagement with the country. Hostile rhetoric prevents most political engagement. Even cultural engagement has been largely off the table, particularly during the pandemic.

These efforts to reinforce North Korea’s isolation are counter-productive. They only push the country into engaging in more of the behaviors that the outside world finds so noxious. And, in the case of COVID vaccines and humanitarian assistance, the outside world may well be creating the conditions for a catastrophe of massive proportions that will inevitably have negative consequences far beyond North Korea’s borders.

The World Health Organization says the COVID pandemic has killed nearly 15 million across the globe

Benjamin Mateus

The World Health Organization (WHO) released Thursday its much-awaited and anticipated report on global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 for the period from January 2020 to December 2021.

The bodies of COVID-19 victims placed on hospital stretchers in Sri Lanka (Source: Facebook)

By the end of last December, officially reported global deaths had reached 5.42 million. However, the WHO study found that almost 15 million more people perished in the same period than usual, 2.75 times higher than the official total of COVID-19 deaths. The estimate of excess deaths gives a range from 13.3 million to 16.6 million.

The WHO defined excess death/mortality as “the difference between the total number of deaths and the number of deaths that would have been expected in the absence of the [COVID-19] pandemic.”

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, remarked, “These sobering data not only point to the impact of the pandemic but also to the need for all countries to invest in more resilient health systems that can sustain essential health services during crises, including stronger health information systems.”

A regional comparison of excess deaths to official COVID-19 deaths underscores the seriousness of these warnings. But more than recognizing the disparities, without understanding why these exist, little can be expected to bring about the changes advocated by the WHO. The disparities are ultimately a byproduct of global capitalism and its criminal policies that allowed the virus free rein to infect the most vulnerable and the disenfranchised.

In this sense, the New York Times attempts to cover the criminal policies perfected in 2021, precisely the vaccine-only strategy that forced the piecemeal and systematic return to normalcy. They wrote yesterday, “Much of the loss of life from the pandemic was concentrated in 2021 when new and more contagious variants drove surges of the virus even in countries that had fended off earlier outbreaks.”

Rather than making a straight year-to-year comparison, the Times only notes that roughly 18 percent, an extra 10 million people, died in 2021 than “would have been without the pandemic.” It is worth noting that when the 2020 excess death report was published, there were 3 million excess deaths and 1.8 million official COVID-19 deaths. The Economist’s estimate placed those figures at 5.6 million excess deaths and 1.8 million COVID-19 deaths.

In other words, the number of excess deaths for 2021 is far more than twice the number that perished in 2020, despite having confirmed the efficacy of several COVID-19 vaccines and the recognition of the airborne nature of the virus, and the importance of respirators and high-efficiency ventilation to stem the tides of infection. It also became clear that the virus could mutate to forms with more virulent and contagious characteristics.

Instead, the de facto capitalist policy of vaccine nationalism and a vaccine-only strategy was used to begin the lifting of mask mandates and loosening of social restrictions and returning to “economic” normalcy that has cost the lives of millions more when every means to eliminate COVID-19 was available. That the scale of death doubled or tripled in 2021 only confirms that all remaining inhibitions for the social murder of the population had evaporated.

Twenty countries accounting for half of the global population saw more than 80 percent (11.9 million) of the estimated global excess mortality—Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, the Russian Federation, South Africa, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States of America.

Ten countries accounted for 68 percent (10.1 million) of excess deaths—Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States.

When these are sorted according to the World Bank income groups, lower-middle-income regions had the highest estimate of excess deaths with 7.87 million (52 percent) and the highest excess deaths per capita at 236 per 100,000 people. These regions also account for approximately 3.3 billion people and have a per capita GDP of only $2,217.

By comparison, upper-middle income regions saw 4.24 million excess deaths and high-income areas 2.16 million. But when compared on a per capita basis, they had similar excess death rates at 168 and 177 per 100,000, respectively. Low-income regions had only 0.64 million excess deaths, but the uncertainty bounds of the estimates are the largest because of poor registration systems for vital statistics.

Dr. Samira Asma, assistant director-general for data, analytics, and delivery at WHO, noted, “measurement of excess mortality is an essential component to understand the impact of the pandemic. Shifts in mortality trends provide decision-makers with information to guide policies to reduce mortality and effectively prevent future crises. Because of limited investments in data systems in many countries, the true extent of excess mortality often remains hidden.”

WHO experts told the New York Times, “About half of countries globally do not regularly report the number of deaths from all causes. Others supply only partial data. In the WHO African region, for example, the experts said that they had data from only six of 47 countries.”

By the WHO region categories, the population of Southeast Asia, which includes the Indian subcontinent, suffered the most significant number of excess deaths, with close to 6 million. With 4.7 million excess deaths, India accounted for nearly one-third of global excess deaths. The figure is almost 10 times higher than official COVID-19 deaths reported by Indian health officials. Most of these occurred during the explosive Delta wave that produced horrific scenes of burning piles of corpses across the country.

The delay in bringing out the report when it was completed in January was in large part due to objections raised by India on the methodology for estimating the excess deaths. According to several media reports, the complaints appear to be politically motivated to stall the release of the damning results until after elections in key Indian states were concluded in early March.

It also placed the WHO leadership in a precarious position. Many of the independent scientists working as technical advisors for the WHO and contributing extensively to the findings criticized the international agency for acquiescing to India’s delaying tactics. Though the report results are significant and now finally published, the delay underscores the politically explosive nature of the inconvenient truth.

The other country in Southeast Asia with a significant undercounting of COVID-19 deaths was Indonesia. More than 1 million people perished during the pandemic though official COVID-19 deaths stand at 156,000, a six-fold undercounting.

The case in Peru exemplifies that a robust vital registration system is not a substitute for investment in health systems and public health infrastructure. With a population of nearly 33 million, the excess deaths of 290,000 were only 1.4 times above the reported COVID-19 deaths. But on a per capita basis of 437 excess deaths for every 100,000 people, Peru is among the highest globally.

Dr. Elmer Huerta, an oncologist and public health expert in Peru, said, “When a health care system isn’t prepared to receive patients who are seriously ill with pneumonia when it can’t provide the oxygen they need to live, or even provide beds for them to lay in so they can have some peace, you get what you’ve gotten.”

In conjunction with the release of the WHO report on excess deaths, the mainstream press is acknowledging that the United States has reached the harrowing mark of 1 million COVID deaths. Though on an excess death per capita basis, the US stands in 40th place with 140 deaths per 100,000, the grim milestone is both substantively and symbolically a stain on the criminal policies that have been shaped initially by Trump and further carried out in the most criminal form by Biden.

Yesterday, new COVID-19 cases in the United States exceeded 100,000 again. Deaths sharply increased, with 1,929 deaths reported on May 4, 2022. Hospitalizations have also turned up sharply. And no preparations are underway to stem the seventh wave of infections.