China’s Surveillance State and its Meaning for Us

Mel Gurtov

The Tools of Surveillance

In a recent commentary, I discussed the visit to China of the UN’s chief human rights official on what proved to be a seriously misguided and rather naïve attempt to improve the conditions of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang province. An important element in that mass internment of innocent civilians is China’s ubiquitous surveillance system, which has facilitated the roundup of Chinese Muslims.

That system is not confined to the Uyghurs. It is a many-layered nationwide network designed to collect personal data for police and security units on every Chinese citizen whose behavior or personal characteristics might be troublesome to the authorities. In a word, no one is above suspicion.

Now, a New York Times investigative group has acquired over a “hundred thousand [Chinese] government bidding documents. They call for companies to bid on the contracts to provide surveillance technology, and include product requirements and budget size, and sometimes describe at length the strategic thinking behind the purchases.”

The documents make perfectly clear why China is often called the “surveillance state”: Its facial recognition technology, DNA analysis, and other tools that intrude into people’s identity go far beyond anything other countries use–or George Orwell imagined.

We already knew some dimensions of the Chinese surveillance system before the Times report. For instance, various sources told of Chinese hackers embedding malware in smartphones to track Uyghurs’ movements and conversations, even when they left China.

China’s ministry of public security announced plans to obtain the DNA via blood samples of tens of millions of male adults and children, with Xinjiang and Tibet the starting point for creating a data base to cover virtually the entire population.

Cameras with facial recognition capability are literally everywhere. Western publications on genetics abetted Chinese efforts to identify Uyghurs (as well as Tibetans) by carrying many articles that “had a co-author from the Chinese police, the military, the judiciary or some such government institution,” according to a Belgian geneticist.

The Times report based on contract bidding adds a good deal to this picture. Facial recognition cameras are now installed in private as well as public places. They are capable of collecting voice and iris prints, and race and gender information for inclusion in an ever-expanding data base. Phone tracking not only gives a person’s location but also usernames and certain activities, such as social connections and personal habits.

What do the Chinese authorities have to say about criticisms of the surveillance state?

On one hand, they defend it by insisting it’s necessary to protect against terrorism and crime. There are no abuses of human rights in Xinjiang, only “reeducation” to bring its ethnic majority into the modern age.

On the other hand, the authorities say the criticisms are based on “misinformation and disinformation,” leading to sanctions on Xinjiang products that seek to “contain China’s growth,” disrupt “the international trade order and destabilize global industrial and supply chains.”

As the UN’s recent mission found out, it is impossible to conduct an impartial on-the-spot investigation of either China’s defense or the inhumane punishments it is carrying out.

One action the international community can take is to name and shame the perpetrators of genocide in Xinjiang and Beijing.

Governments can also intercede with technological firms that enable the Chinese to collect and upgrade their surveillance.

Banning the import of products of forced labor, as the US has now done with all Xinjiang-based exports, is another step.

To date, these steps have had limited success, demonstrating anew the difficulties in defending human rights when the means of repression are a matter of global commerce.

It Can Happen Here

Think that the Chinese surveillance state is of no consequence for us?  Intrusive technologies imbedded in social media are already part of our daily lives, monitoring our movement, personal tastes, social views, and even future plans.

Closed-circuit cameras track ordinary citizens and criminals alike. Now, consider how the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision might deepen the surveillance state here.  If, for example, women must cross state lines, in violation of local law, to obtain an abortion or pills to induce abortion, will they be subject to official tracking for prosecution? Might every pregnant woman in a red state be forced to install a tracking device on her phone? Might anti-abortion states be able to access apps some women use to track their menstrual cycles, nabbing those women believed to be in the early stages of pregnancy?

Police already access email and text messages in cases where a woman is thought to have ended a pregnancy under questionable circumstances. The door will now be open in some states to bringing criminal charges based on cell phone data for an abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy.

I’m inclined to say that in states where abortion is outlawed—and, even worse, if the Supreme Court makes abortions illegal nationwide—the tools of a police state will be endorsed as necessary for full implementation of the law, just as in China.

The Chinese already use apps in cell phones to monitor and quarantine citizens who show signs of COVID. As Xi Jinping said, “Big data should be used as an engine to power the innovative development of public security work and a new growth point for nurturing combat capabilities.” You can bet that some American politicians believe the same, and have particular targets in mind—for starters, racial minorities, human rights protesters, and investigative journalists.

In China, ordinary people have no recourse if the surveillance system catches them. The days of private lawyers occasionally able to defend people in court are numbered. The police are all-powerful; few safeguards of privacy exist. Xi Jinping has provided a model of high-tech authoritarianism that can exist side by side with consistent economic growth.

We should beware.

Pandemic is driving poverty in Germany to new highs

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The poverty rate in Germany reached a new high of 16.6 percent of the population in 2021. According to the Poverty Report 2022 of the Paritätischer Gesamtverband charity association, entitled “Between Pandemic and Inflation,” 13.8 million people lived in poverty, 600,000 more than before the pandemic began.

Bottle deposit collector, a common sight in Germany (Bild: Sascha Kohlmann / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The poverty threshold was regarded as a monthly income of €1,148 for a single household, €1,492 for a single parent with one child, and €2,410 for a couple household with two small children. Since the report covers 2021 it does not consider the impact of the dramatic increase in inflation since the beginning of the year.

Since 2006, the trend in the annual poverty reports has been upward. Ulrich Schneider, Chief Executive of the Paritätischer Gesamtverband, said at the presentation of the report, “The current poverty record is the peak of a trend that has had Germany firmly in its grip for 15 years now. This trend began in 2006. Since then, the poverty rate has risen from 14 to 16.6 percent, despite all the economic successes of this country. The number of poor people increased by more than 2 million in those 15 years—from 11.5 to 13.8 million.”

This trend accelerated in the two pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. The poverty rate climbed from 15.9 to 16.6 percent. “This is the steepest increase in two years ever measured by the micro census,” as Schneider explained. “Never before in recent times has poverty spread so rapidly in Germany as during the pandemic. The increase is unprecedented.”

In 2021, in particular, the economic effects of the pandemic fully impacted on poverty trends. In 2020, poverty had risen from 15.9 to 16.1 percent.

What is striking, is the sharp increase in poverty among the employed and especially among the self-employed. Among the latter, the poverty rate increased by 46 percent, rising from 9 to 13.1 percent. Numerous other reports also confirm that many self-employed people suffered financial losses during the pandemic.

But poverty among those with an employment contract—people who are poor despite working—also rose unusually sharply during the pandemic, from 7.9 to 8.4 percent. The key factors here were income losses due to short-time working and the fact that employees on low wages were hit hardest by pandemic-related income losses.

This was compounded by the rapid increase in part-time working. “It can be surmised that pandemic-related reductions in working hours, with corresponding wage losses, also played a role here,” the presentation says.

Poverty among pensioners and among children and youth also reached new highs in 2021, at 17.9 and 20.8 percent, respectively. More than one in five children and youth grew up in poverty in 2021.

“It is a record for old-age poverty and a new record for child poverty that is reflected in the statistics. Never before have higher values been measured in the micro census. Child poverty is reflected here—as in previous years—primarily in the poverty rate of single parents, at over 40 percent, and of those with many children, at over 30 percent,” the report reads.

The economically inactive and those with a low educational level are also disproportionately affected by poverty. The same is true for people with a migration background (28.1 percent) and without German citizenship (35.3 percent). The poverty rate among students is 30 percent.

The poverty trend also varies regionally. Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg have the lowest poverty rates at 12.6 and 13.9 percent, respectively, while North Rhine-Westphalia (18.7), Thuringia (18.9), Saxony-Anhalt (19.5) and Berlin (19.6) are well above average, with Bremen leading the way at 28 percent.

As in an earlier report, the Ruhr, which has seen massive deindustrialisation, is the top problem region in terms of poverty. In Germany’s largest conurbation with 5.8 million inhabitants, more than one in five (1.2 million) live in poverty. With a poverty rate of 21.1 percent, if the Ruhr were a state, it would rank second to last, ahead of Bremen.

The high poverty rate in the Ruhr is accompanied by a disproportionate number of Hartz IV (welfare) recipients. While the Hartz IV rate was 8.1 percent nationwide in 2021, it was 14.4 percent in the Ruhr, over 18 percent in its cities such as Duisburg, Essen, Herne, reaching 24.4 percent in Gelsenkirchen.

The figures for children and young people are even more dramatic: 22.9 percent of minors in the Ruhr were in families receiving Hartz IV benefits in 2021. The figure was as high as 30 percent in Essen and 39 percent in Gelsenkirchen.

The situation is similarly drastic in other major cities. Berlin, for example, has been known for many years as the capital of poverty.

The statement on the poverty report concludes, “Poverty has increased by leaps and bounds in the pandemic years. Never have we had more poverty since unification [in 1990], never has Germany been more divided.”

This hardly takes into account the rising cost of living since autumn 2021. With an inflation rate of 7.9 percent in May, a Hartz IV or basic old-age welfare payment rate of €449, compared to the previous year, had a purchasing power of just €414. “People who have to live on basic welfare payments—and that is around seven million people—do not know how they will make ends meet.”

About seven million people must live on basic welfare. In addition, there are at least as many again whose incomes are only scarcely above this level because of low wages and incomes. They, too, do not know what they are supposed to live on at the end of the month. And that was the case even before the costs of electricity, heating and food exploded. 1.6 million people are forced to regularly obtain parcels from food banks, which can barely cope with the onslaught of people seeking help.

As Schneider explained, “Our welfare payments quite objectively no longer protect people from poverty.” The extreme rise in the cost of living posed a “very great danger that Germany will simply break up at the lower end of the income scale.”

The Paritätische Gesamtverband criticizes the government’s relief package because it does not decisively fight the increasing poverty. Only 2 of its 29 billion euros flow exclusively to low-income households. This is completely inadequate and will be eaten up by inflation in a very short time. Basic income support recipients, for example, receive a one-time payment of €200, and children whose families must live on Hartz IV are awarded a paltry €20 a month. Even the heating allowances for housing benefit and student grant recipients are not enough.

The report points out that almost half the population has no significant resources in the form of assets and that one in five works in the low-wage sector.

The one-off payments from the government’s relief package are therefore less than a drop in the ocean. Exploding electricity and energy costs are beyond the means of most of the working class and even parts of the middle classes. Current calculations suggest that bills for heating, electricity and gas will double and triple by the end of the year.

In the event of a complete loss of gas supplies from Russia, which the EU and the German government are bringing about with their sanctions against Russia, Mona Neubaur (Greens), the new state Economics and Energy Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, expects prices for gas to increase sixfold, as she explained in the state parliament on June 30. Gas and energy would then become unaffordable for most people.

Poverty has increased sharply worldwide in the last two years. The culprit is not the pandemic alone, but its exploitation by capitalist governments to carry out an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. Except for China, no government has been willing to stop and eliminate the virus with extensive lockdowns and other protective measures while providing adequate compensation for affected workers. Globally, 20 million people have so far had to pay with their lives for the criminal profits-before-lives policies of the ruling class.

At the same time, the central banks cranked up the money presses. Hundreds of billions of euros and dollars have been thrown in the coffers of the corporations and banks, leading to an unprecedented increase in wealth at the top of society and the rise of inflation.

According to the latest Oxfam report, the ten richest individuals in Germany increased their “cumulative wealth from about $144 billion to about $256 billion since the pandemic began.” According to the French consultancy Capgemini, the number of millionaires in Germany grew by about 100,000 to 1.63 million during the pandemic. Many corporations reported record profits despite the pandemic.

The working class in Germany is now expected to pay for the pandemic bailout and war in Ukraine through brutal cutbacks, unemployment, and wage reductions, as well as for the €100 billion euros being spent on arming the Bundeswehr. The billions for pandemic profiteers, armaments and war are to be squeezed out of the working class by means of inflation and wage cuts.

Data cover-up deepens as at least 3 children die of COVID every day in the US

Emma Arceneaux

Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) announced that it would discontinue publishing child hospitalization and mortality figures in its weekly “Children and COVID-19” report. The notice states that as of June 16, 2022, “due to only a portion of states reporting hospitalizations and deaths, we are no longer providing updates on cumulative hospitalizations and mortality data.”

Child with COVID-19 in hospital bed (Medical University of South Carolina)

The news highlights the degree to which surveillance and public reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic has been systematically shut down under the Biden administration, beginning with the Department of Health and Human Services ending the requirement for hospitals to submit daily death reports in early February.

Since the spring of 2020, the AAP has reported state-level information about child infections, hospitalizations and deaths. While the data has always been limited due its reliance on inconsistent public data from the states, the report has nevertheless been an important tool in tracking the far-reaching impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable population in society. It has been particularly insightful in documenting the calamitous impact of the forced reopening of schools during the Delta and Omicron surges, during which the vast majority of infections, hospitalizations and deaths among children occurred.

The latest report notes, “Almost 13.8 million children are reported to have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic according to available state reports; nearly 315,000 of these cases have been added in the past 4 weeks. Approximately 5.9 million reported cases have been added in 2022.”

It adds as well that for the week ending June 30, nearly 76,000 children were infected with COVID-19, up from 68,000 last week. By contrast, this is a 528 percent increase from the number of child cases reported a year prior on July 1, 2021.

The rising cases are part of the latest wave of the pandemic ripping through the United States and internationally. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are now dominant across the country, accounting for 70 percent of cases last week. The subvariants are known to be highly resistant to immunity from vaccines and prior infections.

The AAP’s last update for child hospitalizations recorded a cumulative total of 43,316 since the start of the pandemic but with data from only 25 states and New York City. It also recorded 1,055 deaths with data from 46 states, New York City, Puerto Rico and Guam.

Though alarming in themselves, the figures from the AAP are known to be undercounts due to the limitations noted above. Over 86,000 children ages 0-17 have been hospitalized from COVID-19 according to CDC data and at least 1,624 have died. The CDC Data Tracker, which is the most real-time source to track deaths by age group, has added 63 pediatric deaths in the past seven days alone, an average of nine per day. Over the past month, 101 pediatric deaths have been added to the Data Tracker, an average of over three per day.

Even these horrific figures are also likely undercounts. In a still unexplained incident, on March 16, 2022, the CDC abruptly removed 72, 277 deaths from the Data Tracker, including 416 pediatric deaths, or 25 percent of the total. Despite repeated attempts by the WSWS to clarify this change to their data, the CDC never issued a clear explanation.

The only plausible explanation for this data manipulation can be gleaned from a report in the Guardian and a form publicized by anti-COVID activist Gregory Travis, which note that the CDC now differentiates between children dying “with COVID” and dying “from COVID.” Initially a far-right talking point at the start of the pandemic, this was adopted by the Biden administration and state Democrats during the Omicron surge last winter.

Though the discontinuation of hospitalization and death data in their weekly report is alarming, the AAP is correct in noting the scarcity of information being made public about the spread of COVID-19.

According to Johns Hopkins, at present half (25) of US states report case information only once a week. Only four states continue to report case numbers seven days per week: Texas, Arkansas, New York and New Jersey. Twenty-four states report COVID-19 deaths only once per week, while Nebraska and North Dakota report deaths “0 days” per week.

On March 18, North Dakota changed from daily reporting to once per week reporting, but the state’s new weekly dashboard does not include deaths. Instead, COVID-19 deaths are now included in a provisional data report released by the Vital Records division once a month. Similarly, Nebraska’s “Respiratory Illness Dashboard” does not publish COVID-19 deaths.

Other states that have reduced reporting since mid-March include Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Montana and Vermont.

The CDC has led the charge in perpetuating the lie that tracking infections is not necessary. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky laughed during a recent interview when she stated, “I know we’re not counting all the rapid [tests]... One of my favorite lines from somebody at the CDC was, ‘you don’t need to count the rain drops to know how hard it’s raining.’” In fact, identifying cases is a prerequisite to isolating infected individuals and stopping the chain of transmission.

Nearly every state, in seeking to justify the reduction in reporting, cited the CDC’s changes to its community risk guidelines in February, which sought to convince the public that risk was tied not to community transmission but to local hospital capacity.

Announcing the reduction in weekly reporting on April 4, a spokesperson for Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services stated, “The change in the way the state will report cases and deaths going forward adheres to a national surveillance strategy created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

On May 18, Vermont decommissioned its COVID-19 dashboard and changed to weekly surveillance reports, which its website states provide “the data and indicators most useful to help monitor and determine risk of COVID-19” but do not include mortality data. Death information, as well as more robust data sets with demographic information, is only available through the state’s Open Geodata portal, which is also updated only once per week.

On a COVID-19 Update podcast episode in April, the American Medical Association interviewed Marcus Plescia, MD, MPH, the chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). The ASTHO consists of the chief health officials from each US state, Washington D.C., US territories and Freely Associated States. In the interview, Plescia stated that the reduction in data reporting is consistent with reaching “a different stage with how we’re handling the pandemic.”

Plescia repeated the lie that infections in themselves don’t matter. “We don’t want people to get COVID but people are going to get COVID and if they’ve been vaccinated, they’re probably going to be okay,” he said.

Every new detail that scientists learn about Long COVID, or Post-Acute Coronavirus Syndrome, underscores that this statement could not be further from the truth. At least 10 to 30 percent of people who contract COVID-19 will develop Long COVID and an estimated 20 million adults in the US currently suffer from persistent symptoms, which can affect nearly every organ system in the body.

As for children, very little is known about the long-term impact that an infection will have on their health and development. The recent release of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for ages 6 months-5 years is an important but limited step toward protecting children from the most severe acute outcomes. Vaccines have been shown to reduce the incidence of Long COVID by only 15 percent in adults.

Many children ages 5-17 remain unvaccinated altogether. As of June 29, 2022, only 36 percent of children ages 5-11 had received at least one dose and only 29 percent had two doses. Among ages 12-17, 69 percent had received at least one dose and 59 percent had two doses.

With the intentional shutting down of surveillance and public reporting of COVID-19 data, it is increasingly difficult for people to track the disease and understand their own risk. This has ominous implications for the coming fall and winter when millions of children will be forced back into dangerous classrooms and during which time the White House has projected 100 million Americans could contract the disease.

Turkish security forces fire on migrants, killing a child and wounding 12

Hasan Yıldırım

Turkish Gendarmerie forces opened fire on a vehicle carrying migrants in the eastern city of Van on the Iranian border, killing a child and wounding 12 other immigrants. The entire political and media establishment has been relentlessly waging an anti-refugee campaign and bears political responsibility for this incident. It occurred shortly after the massacre of at least 37 migrants by security forces on the Spanish-Moroccan border.

The father of his a child killed by Turkish Gendarmerie gunfire sitting next to the child’s remains, July 3, 2022. [Photo: Twitter]

On July 3, gendarmerie teams carrying out a road check in Van’s Saray district on the Iranian border opened fire at a van that allegedly disobeyed a “stop” warning. The driver of the van fled the scene, but Gazete Duvar reported that four of the 12 wounded are in serious condition and one of the deceased was a child, aged four. According to the Van Governorate’s statement, all of the wounded were lightly wounded.

In its statement, the Van Governorate said: “In order to stop the vehicle whose driver did not obey the ‘stop’ warning and drove towards the Gendarmerie personnel, shots were fired at the tires of the vehicle.” However, photographs taken after the incident show numerous bullet marks on the rear of the vehicle.

The governorate also claimed that the death and injuries were caused by “ricocheting” bullets, alleging: “It was determined that the vehicle was used in migrant smuggling and there were 40 irregular migrants inside. Unfortunately, one migrant unfortunately lost his/her life and 12 irregular migrants were slightly injured due to ricocheting bullets.”

Before that, on July 1, 35 refugees escaped from a refugee camp in the Cevdetiye district of Osmaniye, a southern city. A fascistic mob rapidly formed alongside the deployment of large numbers of gendarmerie personnel to catch them. This underscores that the anti-refugee propaganda which has long been carried out by bourgeois politicians and the media establishment has reached an extremely dangerous level.

Many recent similar incidents make clear that refugee camps in Turkey are no different from prisons. Recently, in a camp for 30,000 refugees in the southern city of Adana’s Sarıçam district, a group of refugees marched to protest poor food. On June 15, hundreds of refugees protested in a refugee camp in the Kapuçam district of Kahramanmaraş. The demonstrators were dispersed by police.

These events were almost completely ignored by the bourgeois political establishment and media. For decades, the Turkish ruling class and its media have supported US-led imperialist wars and regime-change operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond. Entire societies have been devastated by these criminal wars, with tens of millions of people displaced.

While millions of people from Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa try to reach Europe in the hope of finding refuge, the European Union’s (EU) “Fortress Europe” policy has turned the Mediterranean into a refugee graveyard. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, together with Greece, has taken on the task of protecting Europe’s borders from refugees.

Ankara’s dirty deal with the EU to keep refugees out of Europe has turned Turkey into a massive refugee prison. According to President Erdoğan’s statement in December 2021, there were around 5 million refugees in Turkey. According to a report by the Refugees Association, as of June 23, the number of Syrians in Turkey is 3,684,488.

The Erdoğan government and the entire ruling class face a deepening economic, social and political crisis amid the COVID-19 pandemic and NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine. While official annual inflation in Turkey has reached 78 percent, according to the independent Inflation Research Group (ENAG), real annual inflation has reached 175 percent. With 90 percent of the population estimated to be living below the poverty line, social inequality is wider than ever as the government pursues policies in favour of the bourgeoisie in the pandemic.

This year, as a wave of wildcat strikes by workers spreads across many industries, the political and media establishment are responding to growing social anger and working class militancy with a chauvinist anti-refugee campaign. This campaign, which aims to divide and confuse workers, turns defenceless refugees into scapegoats, while all the establishment parties commit to preventing asylum seekers from coming to Turkey and to returning refugees to their countries of origin.

Boasting that they had repatriated half a million Syrians since 2016, Erdoğan announced in May that they would send 1 million more Syrian refugees back. He said, “We are preparing a new project that will ensure the voluntary return of 1 million Syrian brothers and sisters we host in our country. We will implement this project with the support of our country and international non-governmental organizations.”

The bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and its allies, including the far-right Good Party, backed by the pseudo-left parties, have criticized the government’s actions from the right. They attack the government’s efforts to block the refugees as “insufficient.” CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu said of Erdoğan’s plan to send back one million Syrian refugees: “Come off it! There are still flows of fugitives coming from the border. We will send the rest back in two years, and we are all fed up with your fake projects.”

The most prominent party in the anti-refugee campaign, however, has been the Victory Party (Zafer Partisi). Founded by Ümit Özdağ, a former Good Party member, this middle class party brands refugees as Turkey’s main problem and hysterically campaigns for their deportation.

On June 27, Özdağ announced that he would visit Reyhanlı, a town in Hatay bordering Syria, to plant a land mine on the border, and pledged to plant more mines after coming to power. While Özdağ was prevented from entering the city by the Hatay Governorate, no one thought to ask where and how this fascistic politician had found a land mine.

As a result of this reactionary campaign by the entire political and media establishment, fascistic attacks against refugees in Turkey are on the rise. Three Syrian refugees were burned to death in Izmir last November, and a far-right mob raided a Syrian neighbourhood in Ankara in August. After a quarrel between Syrian refugees and Turkish citizens broke out in Adana last May, attacks were reportedly carried out on Syrians’ homes; four people were injured.

These and many other attacks are a serious warning to the working class as a whole. The fascistic mobs that today, with the encouragement of the ruling class, target defenceless refugees will in the coming period target workers who go on strike or organize protests for decent wages, better social conditions, and democratic rights.

Turkish health workers on two-day nationwide strike after murder of Dr Ekrem Karakaya

Ulaş Ateşçi

Yesterday, Ekrem Karakaya, a cardiologist at Konya City Hospital, was killed while on duty in an armed attack by Hacı Mehmet Akçay, a relative of a patient. The assailant committed suicide after the murder.

Healthcare workers march during a strike on December 6 in İzmir, with a banner saying ‘Health care is teamwork. We want wages to live decently, above the poverty line!’ [Credit: @sesgenelmerkezi on Twitter]

After the murder, hospital staff stopped work. Physicians and health workers organizations such as the Turkish Medical Association (TTB), Hekimsen and SES unions are stopping work today and tomorrow in protest. They blame the government, which they correctly hold responsible for increasing attacks on health care workers and are demanding that necessary measures be taken.

The World Socialist Web Site condemns this attack and calls for the preparation of a mass political movement in the working class in defence of health workers. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, and governments across Europe and the Middle East, have contempt for the needs of health care workers and the working class as a whole. Amid a new upsurge of COVID-19, it is essential for all workers and youth to mobilize in solidarity with health workers in this critical fight.

Hekimsen, which has approximately 20,000 members, said in a statement: “Our union has decided to take action for 2 days (July 7 - July 8, 2022) all over Turkey. We will discuss with our stakeholders about what to do after the Eid al-Adha.”

The TTB, which has around 110,000 members, held a press conference, announcing its support for the two-day strike. In a statement titled “We are sorry, we are furious! We will hold those responsible to account,” TTB officials stated: “As the Turkish Medical Association, we have repeatedly warned the government against the widening spiral of violence. We have repeatedly explained that violence in health care sector is not an isolated issue, but a social and political problem.”

Stressing that they had demanded action be taken and the law be amended to address increased armed or physical attacks on health care institutions, the TTB accused the government of ignoring its warnings. It said: “The source of violence was detached from its social context, and the problem was reduced to individuals.”

It continued: “The entire responsibility of the health system, which is collapsing in every sense, is placed on the shoulders of physicians and health care workers. This situation causes us to become targets, and the policies carried out in the field of health come back to us in the form of violence, death, helplessness and hopelessness.”

The TTB emphasized the responsibility of President Erdoğan himself, who has increasingly targeted physicians and health care workers recently: “We call out to those who told us to let them go, today a colleague of ours has died. You are also responsible!”

The brutal murder of Dr. Karakaya outraged hundreds of thousands of health care workers and broader layers of working people. After the murder became known, the social media topics were almost entirely devoted to this issue. Both health care workers and many of their supporters criticized the decision of health care unions and TTB to strike for only two days and called for an “indefinite strike.”

The government’s initial reactions to the murder only deepened public anger. Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, who is thoroughly discredited for his policy of mass infection and death in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, was widely criticized for his vague statement on Twitter. Demands are mounting for his resignation.

Koca wrote: “A security guard from Konya Yunak District State Hospital shot a fellow physician at Konya City Hospital and took his life. He also died in the incident. Judicial authorities are continuing their investigations into this horrifying criminal act.”

Concerned that the political and social causes of the murder are being discussed by millions, the government imposed a gag order on reporting on the murder in a Konya court. Thousands of people nevertheless discussed the issue on social media.

Since December last year, physicians and health workers have gone on strike across Turkey almost every month to demand better wages and benefits, making them one of the most combative sections of the working class. One of their main demands was the adoption of deterrent legal measures against dozens of daily incidents of violence in health institutions.

Recent press reports reveal how the government’s targeting and impunity for physical attacks encourage new attacks on health care workers. On Monday, Prof. Koray Başar, a former President of the Psychiatric Association of Turkey, was physically attacked by an organized group.

Yesterday, before the murder, the SES union in Bursa issued a press release on another act of violence, stating: “Unfortunately, our physician friend working at Duaçınarı Oral and Dental Hospital has been subjected to constant threats and verbal violence by a patient and has no security of life.”

On April 15, which was declared “Day of Struggle against Violence in Health Care Sector” by the TTB, Süleyman Kaynak, an official of the Izmir Medical Chamber, shared the latest data on the situation. “Dr. Ersin Arslan and 10 other colleagues killed in the last 20 years were taken from us not only by angry patients and relatives, but also by the severe problems of the current health care system,” he said.

According to Kaynak, the number of acts of violence against health care workers “increased from 11,942 in 2020 to 29,826 in 2021. According to a survey conducted by the TTB, 84 percent of physicians have been subjected to physical or verbal violence at least once in their professional lives.” This means an average of 81 violent incidents per day.

The statement continued: “The government’s policies in the field of health care service have returned to physicians in the form of violence, death, despair and hopelessness, and working conditions have become unbearable” and that physicians have resigned, retired or left the country in response.

This year alone, around 1,000 Turkish physicians have gone abroad. According to the Hekimsen union, “approximately 9,000 doctors have resigned from the public service in the last 20 months; nearly 2,000 of them have gone abroad or are about to leave.”

Kaynak concluded his statement, stating: “Without acknowledging the root causes of violence in health care system, that is, without improving the living conditions of citizens, the working conditions of physicians, without changing the health care system that does not prioritize public health, a mere violence law cannot permanently solve violence in health.”

The murder of Dr. Karakaya and the increasing attacks on health care workers in Turkey can only be understood in the context of the deepening crisis of the capitalist system as a whole.

For nearly two decades, the Erdoğan government and capitalist governments internationally have subordinated health care to the profit interests of corporations, gutting public health while also massively impoverishing the working class amid deepening social inequality. Militarism is relentlessly glorified, police violence against social protests commonplace, and basic democratic rights completely disregarded.

US extends economic war on Russia to China

Peter Symonds

An article published in the New York Times on Tuesday, entitled “US aims to expand export bans on China over security and human rights,” explicitly linked Washington’s escalating economic war on China with the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine.

Citing administration officials, the article declared that “the Biden administration is applying lessons learned from controls on Russia during the Ukraine war to try to limit China’s military and technological advances.” It noted that the White House has declared China to be the “greatest long-term rival” of the US.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk to each other during their meeting in Beijing, China, Friday, Feb. 4, 2022. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

US Commerce Department official Alan Estevez told an event organised by the Center for a New American Security: “We need to ensure that the US retains technological overmatch. In other words, China cannot build capabilities that they will then use against us, or against their neighbours for that matter, in any kind of conflict.”

Estevez is head of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export controls. Significantly he is also a former Pentagon official, underlining the direct link between economic and military warfare. Estevez told a Commerce Department policy conference last week: “My goal is to stop China from being able to use that technology to advance their military, modernize their military.”

The fact that the Biden administration is targeting China with the measures being used in its war against Russia is highly significant. Increasingly openly, the US is treating the military war against Russia and the mounting confrontation with China as part of a far broader conflict to weaken and subjugate potential rivals.

Just as the US goaded Russia into invading Ukraine by refusing to rule out NATO membership, so it is strengthening ties with Taiwan and boosting arms sales to the island. Washington knows full well that any move by Taipei to declare independence could provoke Chinese military intervention. As with Russia in the Ukraine war, the US would use conflict over Taiwan to undermine and destabilise China.

All of these war plans are hypocritically dressed up as the defence of democracy and human rights. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told the same departmental conference that export controls were “at the red-hot centre of how we best protect our democracies.” She boasted that global export controls on Russia had led to a 90 percent slump in its semiconductor imports and could soon decimate its fleet of commercial aircraft.

China is also in the crosshairs. The Biden administration announced another round of bans last week against five Chinese companies claiming that they were continuing to support Russia’s military-industrial complex and that their activities were “contrary to US national security and foreign policy interests.” The Commerce Department provided no evidence for its allegations.

The companies added to the export blacklist—Connec Electronic, King Pai Technology, Sinno Electronics, Winninc Electronic and World Jetta Logistics—are all in the hi-tech sector. The bans, the first on China for allegedly aiding Russia, were implemented even though American officials acknowledge that the Chinese government and most Chinese companies have complied with US-led sanctions.

These are just one element of the battery of bans and tariffs imposed on China under Trump and now extended under Biden in an effort to weaken its economy. Whatever the pretexts, which range from connections to the Chinese military to allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the measures are particularly aimed at crippling China’s efforts to compete in hi-tech fields.

Not only do the bans apply to US companies and investors, but the Biden administration is seeking to extend them to foreign companies using the threat of economic penalties. The US has blocked foreign companies from exporting certain items if they are made with American technology to listed entities including the Chinese hi-tech telecommunications giant, Huawei. Bans are also in place over the export of goods containing specific amounts of American-made content.

Washington has marshalled its allies in Europe and Asia in the proxy war against Russia to join in the economic bans on Russia. However, its efforts to do the same against China have met with some resistance in American and global business circles fearful of the economic impact of such measures and of Chinese retaliation.

Myron Brilliant, executive vice president at the US Chamber of Commerce, told the New York Times that while businesses supported sanctions against Russia, views on China were “more complex and nuanced.” The business community, he said, had deep concerns about China’s policies, “yet we must also recognize that the two largest economies are very integrated… So the impact of broad decoupling or extensive sanctioning of China would be much more destabilising.”

Nevertheless, the Biden administration is proceeding with its efforts to tighten the economic noose around the Chinese economy. Bloomberg reported this week that the White House “is expanding its campaign to curb the country’s rise” by seeking to block the Dutch corporation ASML Holding NV from selling chip-making technology to China.

The Trump administration had already bludgeoned the Dutch government into barring the export of the most sophisticated chip-making technology to Chinese firms. ASML is the world’s top maker of lithography systems, machines that perform the crucial step of etching the microscopic circuitry essential to the manufacture of semi-conductors.

Now US officials are in talks with their Dutch counterparts to prevent ASML from selling older mainstream technology, known as deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV), required to produce the less advanced chips used in a broad range of devices from cars to computers, phones and robots.

As Bloomberg explained, such a ban would significantly broaden the range and class of chip-making gear now forbidden from heading to China, potentially dealing a serious blow to Chinese chip-makers from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp to Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd.

Just as the Trump administration set out to destroy the Chinese tech giant Huawei by cutting off its global access to advanced computer chips and technology, so the Biden administration is seeking to block China from developing its indigenous chip-making capacity that is vital across a broad range of commercial and military applications. According to Bloomberg, American officials are also pressuring Japan to ban the export of chip-making technology to China.

Along with US propaganda over Chinese “human rights” abuses, unsubstantiated allegations of threats to invade Taiwan, the strengthening of US military alliances in Asia and the boosting of the American military in the region, the escalating economic war is another warning of US imperialism’s advanced plans for conflict with China.

Far from being an isolated episode in Eastern Europe, the US proxy war in Ukraine is rapidly morphing into a global conflagration between nuclear armed powers.

Citing Europe’s “cohesion” against Russia, Norway’s government bans oil workers strike so imperialist powers can continue to wage war

Jordan Shilton

Norway’s Labour Party government stepped in on the first day of a strike by oil and gas workers Tuesday to criminalise their job action. The move demonstrates how governments in every country are illegalising working class opposition to the spiraling cost of living so that the imperialist powers can continue waging war with Russia.

The strike involves 74 mainly senior oil and gas workers on the North Sea platforms of Gudrun, Oseberg Sør and Oseberg Øst and was set to have expanded to include a further 117 workers on the Heidrun, Aasta Hansteen and Kristin fields on Wednesday. Under conditions of inflation of over 5 percent and bumper profits for the oil and gas giants due to high energy prices, workers are demanding wage increases.

Despite the relatively small number of workers involved, their strategic position in Norway’s oil and gas production would have seen total gas output drop by 25 percent and oil by 15 percent by the weekend. This prospect was intolerable for the Norwegian government and the major European imperialist powers in Berlin, Paris and London, which are increasingly reliant on Norwegian natural gas to replace supplies from Russia. The government therefore announced just hours after the strike that the job action had been banned and all outstanding issues would be submitted to a compulsory wage board, a government-appointed body that will make a final determination on the pay dispute.

“When the conflict can have such great social consequences for the whole of Europe, I have no choice but to intervene in the conflict,” declared Labour Minister Marte Mjøs Persen in a statement. “It is unjustifiable to let gas production stop to such an extent.”

Underlining the explicitly political character of the decision, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs released its own statement, which demanded that Norway “must do everything in its power to help maintain European energy security and European cohesion against Russia’s war.”

The logical conclusion to be drawn from the government’s action and this chilling statement is that any job action or protest by workers that threatens the imperialist powers’ war will be declared illegal and prohibited by using the full force of the state apparatus. A regime that resorts to “everything in its power” to crush popular opposition and “maintain … cohesion” ought to by rights be called a dictatorship.

The oil workers’ union rushed to give its stamp of approval to the government’s draconian action. Audun Ingvartsen, leader of the Lederne union, vowed that workers would return to their jobs as soon as possible. Asked if the strike was over, he told Reuters, “Yes.”

Norway’s trade unions are among the most important backers of the Labour Party. They preside over a heavily regulated and centralised collective bargaining system designed to suppress workers’ struggles. Norway’s trade union confederation LO (Landesorganisasjonen), counts approximately 1 million members out of a total population of just over 5 million and a working population of around 3.5 million people.

Far from being exceptional, Tuesday’s events in Norway are increasingly the norm across Europe and North America, as deeply unpopular governments sitting atop unprecedented levels of social inequality, trample basic democratic and social rights under foot at home and wage war abroad. Late last month, the Biden administration intervened to ensure that a threatened strike by over 20,000 dockers at the port of Los Angeles was called off before it had even begun. The workers were determined to fight for wage increases and an end to a brutal regime of casual labour that has left many workers sleeping rough in their cars in a desperate effort to secure a shift. But for the American ruling class, any disruption to the key trade route is unthinkable because it would disrupt its war aimed at reducing Russia to the status of a semi-colony.

Spain’s Social Democratic-led government intervened last week to criminalise a strike by Ryanair pilots and cabin crew for improvements to wages and conditions.

In Germany, the Social Democrat-led government met Monday for the first session of a corporatist dialogue with trade union and business leaders to determine how to suppress workers’ wage demands to fund the war effort. The “Concerted Action” called by Chancellor Olaf Scholz aims to impose the full burden of Germany’s massive €100 billion rearmament programme on the backs of working people.

Norway is a major gas supplier to Britain and Europe, and its role has increased still further following the US-NATO-instigated Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, Norway accounted for a quarter of gas supplies to Britain and Europe. In March, Equinor, the state-owned oil and gas firm, confirmed that it received permits from the Norwegian government to increase gas production at the Oseberg and Heidrun fields by 1 billion cubic metres and 0.4 billion cubic meters respectively by September 2021. It was no mere coincidence that this announcement came as German Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck visited Oslo to sign an agreement with the Norwegian government for increased gas supplies to Germany, which already depends on Norway for 30 percent of its natural gas needs.

German news magazine Der Spiegel reported at the time that the German government would supply Norway with specially equipped ships capable of converting liquified natural gas into gas off the German coast in order to facilitate Norway’s export of an additional 1.4 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Europe this summer. Habeck also announced during his visit the creation of a bilateral working group to consider the building of a gas pipeline between Germany and Norway.

In addition to supplying energy for the imperialist powers war effort, the Norwegian government is more than a willing partner in the massive military build-up against Russia. Sharing a short Arctic border with Russia, Norway has played host on several occasions over recent years to major NATO exercises. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who has overseen a vast expansion of the aggressive military alliance’s presence in Eastern Europe and has initiated the creation of a 300,000-strong rapid reaction force, served twice as Norway’s prime minister between the late 1990s and 2013. During Stoltenberg’s second term in office, Norway’s current Prime Minister and Labour Party leader, Jonas Gar Støre, served as his foreign minister.

The banning of the Norwegian oil workers’ strike by a government claiming to be “left-wing” underscores how workers in Norway and internationally entering into struggle against the intolerable increase in the cost of living and dangerous working conditions, including the threat from the pandemic, confront a political fight against imperialist war. Behind the backs of the population, the major powers have decided that everything, including workers’ democratic and social rights, must be sacrificed to a war aimed at carving up Russia and seizing control of its rich natural resources.

Greece forces refugees to participate in brutal “pushbacks” on Turkish border

John Vassilopoulos

Greek border authorities are enslaving asylum seekers and coercing them to participate in illegal police “pushback” operations forcing desperate refugees back across the border into Turkey.

Those involved are promised transit through Greece into Europe.

Six asylum seekers who participated in pushback operations along the Evros river, running across the land border with Turkey in north-eastern Greece, gave testimony to a joint investigation by the Guardian, Lighthouse Reports, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and ARD Report München. The journalists also interviewed Greek police sources, and residents in surrounding towns and villages.

The media outlets published their month-long investigation simultaneously on June 28, and in the Greek language Reporters United. The revelations confirm numerous accounts of “proxies” being used in pushback operations, most recently in a report published in April by NGO Human Rights Watch.

Pushbacks have increased since 2020, with the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR recording almost 540 incidents since then across Greece’s land and sea borders. This represents a fraction of the pushbacks that have taken place. The NGO Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the Greek government’s pushback operations across the Greek-Turkish sea border, recorded 81 such incidents in the last month alone.

Greek police and army guard as migrants gather at a border fence on the Turkish side, during clashes at the Greek-Turkish border in Kastanies, Evros region, on Saturday, March 7, 2020. [AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos]

Bassel, a man in his late 20s, was arrested in late 2020, according to Reporters United, as part of a group of Syrians “after they crossed the river in an inflatable dinghy. They were beaten and stripped to their underwear before being taken to the police station [in the border town of Tychero] in a vehicle without number plates. There they took their belongings and locked them in a cell with 150 other detainees.”    

At the police station, Bassel was “confronted with an appalling choice” according to Lighthouse Reports. Threatened with smuggling charges because he spoke English: “His only way out, they told him, was to do the Greeks’ dirty work for them. He would be kept locked up during the day and released at night to push back his own compatriots and other desperate asylum seekers. In return he would be given a travel permit that would enable him to escape Greece for Western Europe.”

Bassel was told the “work” would be unpaid but that “he could take his pick of the migrants’ belongings” according to the Guardian. Similar accounts were given by other asylum seekers interviewed, who stated they were beaten by police if anything went wrong.

Based on the testimonies received, Reporters United described in chilling detail what goes on during a pushback operation:

At night police transported the ‘slaves’ and the migrants to be ‘pushed back’ separately. The ‘slaves’ prepared the boats under the supervision of the policemen who were armed. During the pushbacks the border guards’ collaborators would often force migrants to take off all their clothes and if they found that they still had money hidden on them they would take it and beat them. This practice was corroborated by a police source. After that was the difficult part of getting across the river. Bassel recounted how he had to tie the rope onto a tree on the Turkish side of the river in order to pull the boat. The ‘slaves’ would then lead the migrants onto the boats. Usually 20 per trip (18 asylum seekers and two ‘slaves’ one at the front and one at the back of the boat) until all the migrants had been pushed back across. Bassel has said that he saw people drowning in the river.  

Some of the asylum seekers captured and forced to participate in “pushbacks” had been lured for this purpose by people smugglers, who handed them over to Greek border guards. This was the fate of three of the asylum seekers interviewed, who were held at the Neo Cheimonio police station. According to Reporters United, “they each paid €5,000 to a middleman in Istanbul who brought them into contact with a people smuggler who took them across the border from the Turkish side into the Greek side. There another Syrian known as ‘Mike’ was waiting to pick them up accompanied by police. Their collaboration with Greek police had just begun. Two of the three said that they weren’t aware before they came to Greece of what would be required of them. The third one said he knew.”

“Mike” reportedly works directly for the Greek police as recruiter and co-ordinator of migrants used in pushbacks. He lives in a container on the grounds of the police station in the border village of Neo Cheimonio. According to Reporters United, “Mike and his brother, who is also involved in trafficking, face multiple charges in Syria for fuel and people smuggling.”

The extent of the operation is such that it is widely known in the surrounding towns and villages. According to Reporters United, locals who were interviewed openly talked of “migrants who are collaborating with the police”, saying they could be found “working near the river” or “in the local area where they are often seen masked and accompanied by police officers as they buy supplies such as cigarettes, potato chips and croissants before going for the pushback operations at night-time so that they are not detected by the Turks.”

The policy of coercing migrants to participate in pushbacks was approved by the government. According to Reporters United one of the investigation’s police sources revealed “the idea was proposed to politicians as a means of protecting officers from direct involvement in pushbacks, given that they are afraid of being exposed to danger from skirmishes with Turkish forces or with smugglers.”

Europe’s response to the revelations that a European Union member is engaged in state sponsored criminality on a massive scale was a perfunctory statement by European Commissioner spokeswoman on migration affairs Anitta Hipper asking Greece to investigate. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock responded with a tweet stating that events in Evros and Melilla are “unacceptable”.

In practice, the pushback operations are conducted not against the EU’s wishes but with its direct approval and participation. A recent investigation by Lighthouse Reports found that European Border Agency Frontex was involved in at least 22 confirmed pushback operations in the Aegean between March 2020 and September 2021 while the real number could be ten times higher than that. 

The Greek government has avoided commenting on the revelations, assisted by Greece’s mainstream media which has barely reported the story. Its silence has been enabled by the pseudo-left Syriza, the country’s biggest opposition party, whose mention of the investigation was confined to comments by Kostas Arvanitis, a Syriza European Parliament member. He said, “these chilling revelations demand here and now concrete, responsible and convincing answers,” while claiming that “the EU has repeatedly expressed concern”. 

In power between 2015 and 2019, Syriza set up camps to intern refugees fleeing hardship and persecution, at the behest of the EU. The most notorious was on Moria, on the island of Lesbos, dubbed by the BBC as the worst refugee camp on Earth before it burned down in September 2020.