South Africa Is on a Knife Edge as Xenophobia Escalates

Richard Pithouse

South Africa

Xenophobia is a global crisis, but in South Africa, it takes a particularly violent form. The day-to-day accumulation of insult and harassment from within the state and society periodically mutates into open-street violence in which people are beaten, hacked and burned to death. If there is a useful point of global comparison, it may be with the communal riots that rip Indian cities apart from time to time.

The state has tended to stand down while a neighborhood is roiled with xenophobic violence. When it does move in, after the destruction, removal of people from their homes and killing have stopped, it usually arrives to arrest migrants rather than the perpetrators of the attacks. It is overwhelmingly impoverished and working-class African and Asian migrants who must face this pincer movement from the mob and the police.

The severity of the situation in South Africa first came to global attention in May 2008 when xenophobic violence, sometimes intersecting with ethnic sentiment, took 62 lives. At the time, the country was ruled by Thabo Mbeki, a man with deep and genuine Pan-African commitments. But by the end of 2007, Jacob Zuma’s path to the presidency was clear, and the ethnic chauvinism he had introduced into the public sphere was rampant. The limited social support offered by the state was increasingly understood to be tied to identities such as ethnicity, nationality and claims to be part of long-established communities.

By the time that Zuma took the presidency in May 2009, it was common for party officials in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal to tell impoverished people that they had not received houses, or other entitlements, because of an “influx” of “foreigners” or people “from other provinces”—a euphemism for ethnic identity. There were cases where people, seeking the approval of political authority, began to “clean” their communities themselves.

Now, almost 15 years since the 2008 attacks, the situation is much worse. Most South Africans have lived in a state of permanent crisis since the colonial capture of land, cattle, and autonomy. But for most young people, that permanent crisis no longer takes the form of the ruthless exploitation of labor under racial capitalism. Last year, youth unemployment hit 77.4 percent, the highest out of all G20 countries. As Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian philosopher who writes from Johannesburg, argued in 2011, the intersection of race and capitalism has rendered people as “waste.”

The pain of young lives lived in permanent suspension is often turned inward. There is a massive heroin epidemic, depression and anxiety are pervasive, and rates of violence, much of it gendered, are terrifying.

In this crisis of sustained social abandonment, there are attempts, sometimes extraordinarily courageous, to build forms of politics around the affirmation of human dignity. They have often met serious repression, including assassination. But unsurprisingly, there are also attempts to build forms of popular politics around xenophobia, some of them with fascistic elements. Young people, mostly men, are summoned to the authority of a demagogic leader, given a rudimentary uniform in the form of a T-shirt and the opportunity to exercise some power in the name of “cleaning” society. Perversity is dressed up as virtue.

At the same time, all the major political parties, including the ruling African National Congress (ANC), have moved sharply to the right and have become increasingly xenophobic. In government, the ANC has always run a highly exclusionary migration regime and is now moving to end the permits, established more than 10 years ago, that gave around 178,000 Zimbabweans the right to live, work and study in South Africa.

Its rhetoric has also moved sharply to the right. The party’s spokesperson, Pule Mabe, recently declared “open season on all illegal foreign nationals,” adding, “we can no longer guarantee their safety.” The party’s policy conference in early August proposed “a well-coordinated strategy for tracking down illegal foreigners.” That strategy explicitly included the recommendation that “ANC branches must take the lead in this regard.”

Many analysts take the view that the ANC, which has already lost control of many of South Africa’s major cities, will not be able to win the next national election in 2024. As the party faces the prospect of losing power for the first time since the end of apartheid, the temptation to scapegoat migrants for its failures is escalating. Alarmingly, the new parties taking the political space opened by the rapid decline in support for the ANC are more or less uniformly forms of authoritarian populism centrally organized around xenophobia.

Former business mogul turned politician Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA party, which is making rapid electoral advances, mixes hardcore neoliberalism with xenophobia. In 2018, Mashaba staged a “citizen’s arrest” of a migrant and then tweeted, “We are [not] going to sit back and allow people like you to bring us Ebolas in the name of small business. Health of our people first. Our health facilities are already stretched to the limit.” This conflation of a vulnerable minority with disease evokes the horrors of historical forms of fascist mobilization.

Public speech from the state, government and most political parties routinely conflates documented and undocumented migrants as “illegal foreigners,” “illegal foreigners” with criminals, and, in recent days, following a horrific gang rape on the outskirts of a decaying mining town, rapists. When the police come under pressure to respond to concern about criminality, they frequently arrest migrants, often including people with papers rather than perpetrators of actual crimes.

The mass-based organizations of the left, with political identities rooted, to a significant extent, in the factory, the mine or the land occupation have often opposed the turn to xenophobia, and it is common for migrants to hold positions of leadership in these kinds of organizations. But while they can provide nodes of refuge, they lack the power to effectively oppose the rapidly worsening situation at the national level.

With no national force with the vision and power to offer an emancipatory alternative to the poisonous politics, sometimes with fascist elements, that turns neighbors against each other, the country is on a knife edge.

The devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canada’s young people

Dylan Lubao

Never in the modern history of Canada have the country’s children and youth been sacrificed on such a scale as the past two and a half years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through seven waves and multiple variants of the virus, at least half of Canada’s roughly 13 million young people aged 29 and under have been afflicted with COVID-19.

Students walking out of Winnipeg's Kelvin High School on Monday, Jan. 17 to protest the lack of COVID-19 safety measures. (Striking Students/Reddit)

The pandemic’s deadly trajectory has been orchestrated by the capitalist ruling class, its government representatives at the federal, provincial and territorial levels, and the leadership of the trade unions. Declaring that the population had to learn to “live with the virus,” capitalist governments have forced public schools to remain open with virtually no protections in place for one simple reason: to ensure parents could go to work and generate profits for the country’s banks and corporations.

With schools set to return from summer break in the coming weeks, the political establishment is once again preparing to subject children and their families to a policy of mass infection and death. Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government announced earlier this week that there will not even be a mask mandate in the province’s schools, let alone any more substantial measures to curb COVID’s spread.

These mass infection policies were opposed by young people and workers over the past year, both in Canada and around the world. It is high time for workers and young people to draw the political lessons of these struggles in order to launch a political fight to put an end to wave after wave of infection by eliminating COVID-19 globally.

Lisa Diaz, a parent in the United Kingdom, organized a school strike on October 1, 2021, urging parents to keep their children home from school to protest governments’ forced infection of children around the world. Many parents in Canada took up her call and the hashtag #SchoolStrike2021 became one of the highest-trending on Twitter.

In Ontario, biostatistician and educator Ryan Imgrund called for a protest on October 14, 2021 against the education unions’ refusal to permit education workers to wear N95 respirators in COVID-infested schools. Illustrating the union leadership’s hostility to the rank-and-file membership, Imgrund was publicly censured by his union, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association. Other unions, like the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, warned their members that participating in the protest would be grounds for dismissal. 

The emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant in November and its rapid spread throughout the world prompted governments, including in Canada, to declare it “mild.” No additional measures were taken to protect the population and families were encouraged to gather over the holiday break. Except for brief delays, schools were reopened after the holidays in the midst of record infection rates.

Across the world, both students and education workers fought back. Throughout Europe, thousands of students marched at the beginning of January in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Greece, demanding that schools remain remote and that governments do more to protect the population from the disease. Teachers in France went on a nationwide strike to protest the mass infection policies of the widely-reviled government of President Emmanuel Macron.

Thousands of students and education workers protested across the United States. High school students in Chicago demanded that the Democratic Party-led city administration step down for its role in spreading the virus. Chicago teachers went on strike to resist the reopening of schools. Here too, the pro-capitalist orientation of the Chicago Teachers Union bureaucracy revealed itself, as it colluded with Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot to reopen schools in defiance of the wishes of rank-and-file teachers and students.

Chicago Public Schools students protest outside of CPS headquarters [Credit: WSWS Media]

Hundreds of students across Canada protested as well. At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, dozens of students walked out in January, backed by over 4,600 who signed a petition urging the university administration to reverse its reopening plan. At McGill University in Montreal, hundreds of students went on strike to demand that the administration provide remote learning options, which the administration relented to after a public backlash. Hundreds of high school students from 90 schools in Manitoba also walked out of class to demand safer classrooms.

Despite the militancy and courage of the students and education workers, government pandemic policy only worsened. The dismissal and sabotage of these protests by the union bureaucracies politically disarmed young people and the broader working class, enabling provincial governments to dismantle mass testing capacity in January.

At its height, the fifth wave put almost 11,000 Canadians in hospital simultaneously, which is still the highest number on record. Between mid-December, when the fifth wave began, and its end in mid-March, over 7,600 people were killed, making it the third-deadliest wave even though the majority of the population had received at least two doses of the vaccine.

The far-right Freedom Convoy, incited and built up by the official Conservative Party opposition, occupied Ottawa’s Parliament Hill in February and demanded the end of all COVID-19 public health measures. Provincial governments of all political stripes promptly complied, while the federal liberal government green-lighted the elimination of virtually all remaining public health measures.

A sixth wave of the pandemic, driven by the BA.2 Omicron subvariant, subsequently ripped its way through completely defenceless schools. The sixth wave established a startling new baseline for infections and hospitalizations even during the warmer spring and summer months. At the low point of the sixth wave in mid-June of this year, over 3,000 Canadians were hospitalized with COVID-19, triple the number during the same periods in 2021 and 2020. Deaths, peaking at a seven-day rolling average of 82 on May 21, eclipsed the third and fourth waves.

The BC Centres for Disease Control found in March that 60 percent of children had tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies. Quebec’s Coalition Avenir Quebec government nonchalantly announced that at least one-third of the province’s 1.5 million children contracted COVID-19 during last winter’s fifth wave. Children’s hospitals have been pushed to the breaking point as COVID-19 and other infectious diseases have come roaring back, courtesy of governments dismantling of public health measures that previously kept them at bay.

Perhaps the most accurate and damning figures come from researcher Dr. Tara Moriarty at the University of Toronto, because she has regularly exposed vast government undercounts of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Dr. Moriarty estimates that 57 percent of the Canadian population had been infected with the Omicron variant by April 5, 2022. Because schools are major drivers of viral transmission, it can be reasonably inferred that at least half of all children have been infected with Omicron, in addition to those infected with earlier variants.

According to official figures, 52 youth under the age of 20 have died of COVID-19 and 133 young adults between 20 and 29 have succumbed to the disease. Millions have been infected and an unknown number have been hospitalized with mild to severe symptoms. Tens of thousands of young people have lost parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts and friends—many of whom would be alive today had they not been forced to “live with COVID-19.”

Demonstrating the immense toll the pandemic has taken on the mental health of young people, a University of Calgary study of 80,000 youth across the globe discovered that rates of anxiety and depression among young people have doubled since the pandemic began in 2020.

A growing body of evidence shows that potentially hundreds of thousands of young people across Canada are suffering from the effects of Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome, also known as Long Covid. Given that an estimated 10 to 30 percent of all those infected go on to develop this life-altering chronic illness, an entire generation of young people has been deprived of their childhood and health.

Australian COVID-19 death toll passes 12,500 as monkeypox concerns grow

Clare Bruderlin

As COVID-19 infections and hospitalisations continue to mount, the official death toll has now surpassed 12,500. Hundreds more people are dying every single week.

Patient in an intensive care unit (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Australian hospitals remain under enormous strain, with over 4,350 COVID-19 hospitalisations across the country and thousands of healthcare workers furloughed. This includes up to 2,000 hospital staff furloughed each day in Victoria, close to 1,000 WA health staff and more than 2,600 health workers in NSW. In addition, there are over 2,000 active COVID-19 cases among staff in residential aged care facilities.

The spread of the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, nearly as contagious as measles and extremely immune-evasive, and the continued infection and reinfection of the population, is the direct result of official policies. Governments, state and federal, Labor and Liberal-National alike, have allowed the virus to circulate endlessly since the removal of public health measures from December last year.

The rolling 7-day average for new infections continues to be above 30,000, under conditions where testing and contact tracing has been dismantled. More than 9.6 million total infections have been recorded, including tens of thousands of reinfections. Recent analysis of reinfection data from NSW Health showed that more than 20,000 people in NSW who had COVID-19 in January were reinfected within five months.

Despite claims by the media and some government health officials that the Omicron winter wave is approaching its “peak,” in reality, every week since January 8 this year the death toll has been above the highest “peaks” seen throughout 2020 and 2021.

A recent analysis by the Actuaries Institute has found that COVID-19 was the third-leading cause of death in Australia based on deaths from January to July, killing more than cardiovascular disease or lung cancer.

Since January 1 this year, the number of patients hospitalised each day with COVID-19 has been above 1,600. Even the lowest number of hospitalisations this year, recorded in March, was still above the highest number of hospitalisations recorded over the past two years of the pandemic.

The virus is being allowed to spread throughout the country at a time in which vaccination rates are falling, as a result of the persistent campaign by governments and the media to downplay the severity of COVID-19. The immunity gained from previous vaccinations is also fading.

Just 71.4 percent of the population aged over 16 has received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 37.1 percent of the eligible population aged 30 and over have had a fourth booster shot. Until July, the fourth booster was limited to those over 65 years of age and those with underlying health conditions.

The pandemic has hit hardest among the most disadvantaged sections of the working class. A recent Australian Bureau of Statistics report on the demographics of those who have died of COVID show the people living in the least disadvantaged areas (quintile 5) had the lowest numbers of deaths due to COVID-19. The number of people who died due to COVID was around 3 times higher among those in the most disadvantaged quintile than those in the least disadvantaged.

Immigrants to Australia have died from COVID-19 at more than two times the rate of people born in the country (15.6 deaths per 100,000 people versus 7.6 deaths). Those born in the Middle East had the highest age-standardised death rate at 46.9 deaths per 100,000 people.

The same report found that at least 60 deaths in Australia were due to Long COVID, raising the long-term consequences of COVID-19 infections. It is estimated that some 10-30 percent of COVID-19 infections will develop Long COVID, which can affect nearly every organ in the body.

These figures are a reflection of the conscious and bipartisan policy, enforced by both Labor and Liberal-National governments, to impose the burden of the pandemic on the working class for the benefit of the financial elite. Workers have been forced back into unsafe workplaces, including schools, to be exposed to COVID without adequate PPE or other measures to prevent the transmission of the virus.

In Victoria, state Labor Premier Daniel Andrews announced Tuesday that 3.5 million N95 and KN95 masks would be handed out at railway stations, and that boxes of 10 masks would be handed out over the next four to six weeks to anyone visiting a state-run COVID-19 testing site.

Whilst N95 masks or better are necessary to deal with COVID, an airborne pathogen, the number of masks is barely enough for one mask each for half the state’s population and N95s, like surgical masks, are not normally meant to be reused.

Moreover, the government has refused to reinstate mask mandates in indoor settings, despite health advice to do so. Instead it has adopted the demands of business, which oppose such mandates because of their impact on profit-making activity, including retail shopping. The mask distribution is thus a cosmetic attempt to cover-up the refusal of the government to take the scientifically-grounded measures required to end transmission.

While the use of well-fitted N95 or better masks or elastomeric respirators is among the most important tools to fight the pandemic, official government websites still recommend the use of surgical masks and even cloth masks as PPE, despite the fact that they are not appropriate for preventing airborne transmission.

At the same time, the few remaining measures against COVID continue to be wound back. In Western Australia, the state Labor government announced Tuesday that hospitals will scale back their COVID-19 screening protocols.

Testing requirements are being removed for patients presenting at emergency departments who are asymptomatic and for most asymptomatic visitors. Healthcare workers, who had been required to wear N95-style masks across all clinical areas, now only need to do so when “caring for vulnerable patients or working in high-risk areas.” Inadequate surgical masks are instead going to be required, exposing health workers to infection.

The rollback of these basic infection control measures is being accompanied by a barrage of propaganda, claiming that the winter surge has reached a “peak.” Given the dismantling of the testing system, these assertions are based on no evidence whatsoever.

The abandonment of all efforts to stop the COVID-19 pandemic and the demand that society must “live with the virus,” has set the stage for the disastrous response to all infectious diseases. Amid the deepening COVID-19 crisis, cases of monkeypox are surging around the globe, and there are now 58 confirmed cases in Australia, including more than 30 cases in NSW, with some of these occurring through community spread.

Despite global outbreaks of monkeypox detected as early as May and the now more than 26,000 cases recorded around the world, it was only last week that federal Labor Health Minister Mark Butler announced the arrival of just 22,000 doses of a third-generation monkeypox vaccine.

Initial doses are being rolled out to high-risk groups, in particular men who have sex with men, however, this has been accompanied by the portrayal of monkeypox by the corporate media and government as affecting only this demographic, implying that it is a sexually transmitted infection (STI).

NSW Health director of health protection, Jeremy McAnulty, said on the roll-out of the vaccines that, “Most people are not at risk from monkeypox,” and that “to be infected you typically need close skin-to-skin contact.”

McAnulty’s false claims, which amount to medical misinformation, were refuted by Royal Australian College of General Practitioners rural chair Michael Clements. In comments to the media, he stated: “Please remember that anyone can contract monkeypox and it is not a sexually transmitted disease. This is just a virus, and we need to deal with monkeypox without stigma or unhelpful commentary.”

As Clements indicated, monkeypox is an infectious disease which threatens all of society. The virus can spread through aerosols, droplets and fomites, with the dominant mode of transmission believed to be skin-to-skin contact and respiratory droplets. The infection period can last over a month, including before the onset of lesions, and requires isolation throughout this time period after confirmed exposure.

Whilst most cases remain among men who have sex with men, there are a growing number of infections among women around the world, as well as children and young people. At least 8 infections among children have been recorded in the US. Moreover, so far testing has predominantly been among men sexually active with other men within nearly every non-endemic country, and there has not been a program of contact tracing and testing to determine the extent of the spread of the virus.

It is clear that the approach by the federal Labor government to the threat posed by monkeypox and the vaccine roll-out will be no different to the slow, inadequate roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine under the Liberal-National government.

“People can hardly afford to eat”: US inflation continues to hammer workers

Marcus Day

A shopper looks over meat products at a grocery store in Dallas, April 29, 2020. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

Annual price increases for US consumer goods remain at their highest level in nearly 40 years, according to the latest inflation data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Prices for items in the Consumer Price Index rose 8.5 percent in the 12 months ending in July, down slightly from the 9.1 percent rate reported in June, but still the second-largest yearly increase since December 1981.

Food prices in particular have surged in recent months. The BLS’ overall food index rose 10.9 percent year-over-year in July, while the cost of food at home increased 13.1 percent, the biggest increases since May 1979.

Amid a heat wave which has blanketed much of the US this summer and broken records in a number of regions, electricity costs rose 15.2 percent compared to last year, increasing by 1.9 percent over the last month alone.

The cost of shelter also pushed higher, with rent rising 6.3 percent nationally since 2021, with increases far greater in many major metropolitan areas, forcing large numbers of young people to live with their parents, and threatening others with eviction and homelessness. In California, 1.5 million households are behind on their rent, according to Census Bureau data released in late July.

Although the cost of gasoline, which is more volatile, fell somewhat from June, down 7.7 percent, it remained 44 percent higher than a year ago. The national average price for a gallon of gas is hovering near $4, compared to $3.18 in 2021.

The Biden administration and sections of the corporate media nevertheless seized on the latest data to claim that inflation is easing and that a corner being turned, with Biden misleadingly asserting that the BLS report showed “zero percent inflation in the month of July—zero percent.”

In a two-minute appearance, Biden painted a fantastical picture of a booming economy, but the reality facing masses of workers is one of increasing desperate struggle for daily existence. According to a separate BLS release Wednesday, real average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory employees fell 2.7 percent year-over-year in July.

Incumbent PM declares victory in turbulent Papua New Guinea election

John Braddock

On Tuesday, the James Marape-led Pangu Pati was invited by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Governor-General Sir Bob Dadae to form the country’s next government. Marape was unanimously re-elected unopposed as Prime Minister by MPs present in the first sitting of the new parliament.

Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea James Marape addresses the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly, on Sept. 24, 2021, at the UN headquarters. [AP Photo/Peter Foley/Pool]

The announcement came in the wake of an election plagued by violence, fraud allegations and large numbers of voters missing from the electoral roll. As parliament met there were still 14 seats to be declared in the 118-seat house. Voting began on July 4 and ended on July 22, but counting was extended until August 5 by Dadae because of writs still outstanding. The deadline was extended again for a third time until August 12.

Former Prime Minister and Peoples National Congress (PNC) leader Peter O’Neill unsuccessfully applied to the Supreme Court to delay parliament’s return until all electorates had finished counting.

Marape claimed victory last week, saying the Pangu Pati had the numbers to form a coalition giving it an “overwhelming mandate.” The Pangu Pati, along with a string of coalition parties and independents, controls a total of about 80 seats.

The Pangu Pati has the most seats with 36, the main opposition PNC 14, United Resources Party (URP) 10, People First Party (PFP) 2, People’s Progress Party (PPP) 1, United Labour Party (ULP) 3, Peoples Party 4, National Alliance Party 5. There are also several single-member parties and eight independents.

Marape told the National that the Pangu Pati had entered the election with “clear coalition partners” such as the URP and PPP and had not contested certain seats against them. “Hence, it is very easy for us now to stitch a coalition,” he declared. Belden Namah, leader of the opposition Papua New Guinea Party and a former deputy prime minister, was one prominent recruit.

Solicitor General Tauvasa Tanuvasa initially stated that the Electoral Commissioner had no power to extend the receipt of writs beyond August 5 and any not handed in by then would be declared as “failed.” However, his comments have been ignored in the haste to install the new government. A series of court battles is expected. 

The election will be widely viewed by the population as illegitimate. In a desperate bid to stem popular distrust, Marape was forced at one point to issue a statement that the Pangu Pati was “not rigging” the process. He said if Pangu was doing that it would have made a “clean sweep” of all 118 seats, including those lost by prominent party leaders such as John Simon in East Sepik.

His chief rival, O’Neill, told the media that “the rights of at least 3.8 million citizens and hundreds of candidates have been denied by the willful actions of a few power-hungry men.” Electoral roll problems meant “millions of our people have not voted,” he said.

The three-week polling period saw widespread illegal ballots, accusations of bribery, weapons brandished to intimidate voters and even killings. The media have reported at least 50 election-related deaths, down from 204 documented in the 2017 election, but including several days of violence in the capital Port Moresby during which troops were deployed onto the streets.

In one area alone, Madang, 211 men were charged for fighting and disrupting the count. Police Commissioner David Manning described “ongoing investigations into some candidates who are believed to have been inciting their supporters to fight with opponents, and arrests will be made.” He added there was potential for more confrontation as parliament sits and the court hears disputes over the vote.

International election observers reported problems ranging from interference in counting by scrutineers and double voting, to incomplete electoral rolls, which had not been renewed since 2017. In some cases, up to half of the names of eligible voters were not on electoral rolls, a Commonwealth Observer Group said.

The Melanesian Spearhead Group, in another observer report, said the election’s “many challenges” included unexplained delays of up to three days before counting started in some electorates, scrutineer interference and failure to check voter identity documents.

The new government is likely to be highly unstable. In 2019 Marape, who was then finance minister, took over the prime ministership after O’Neill resigned amid corruption charges. Marape has presided over an economic and social disaster, including the ongoing closure of the Porgera goldmine and alleged misuse of international funds for PNG’s COVID response. Budget shortfalls resulted in government debt rising to 52 percent of GDP.

Marape’s coalition almost collapsed in late 2020 when dozens of MPs, including cabinet ministers, defected to the opposition. Marape passed his 2021 budget in an emergency parliamentary session with the opposition absent—a move the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. He then adjourned parliament for four months to avoid a vote of no confidence, ensuring that he could not, under the rules, be removed before the current election.

O’Neill, Marape’s main opponent, declined in the end to challenge for the prime ministership. “I encourage leaders who have been elected properly and who are genuinely interested in rescuing PNG from the economic and social chaos Marape has plunged the country into over the past three years, to consider putting their hand up for the top job,” O’Neill declared.

The Guardian asked in one commentary whether “PNG’s institutions have been so eroded that people feel they have no option but to take matters into their own hands.” In fact, trust in the entire ruling elite has disintegrated following decades of social deprivation and growing inequality, buttressed by authoritarian military-police measures.

The crisis has been exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Tens of thousands of workers, as high as 25 percent of the workforce, lost their jobs. PNG remains one of the least vaccinated countries in the world, with just 3.4 percent of the eligible population partially vaccinated. Authorities have ceased vaccination operations in the capital Port Moresby due to lack of funding. The fragile health system is facing collapse, its inadequate conditions and low pay leading to repeated protests and strikes by nurses.

The political and business elite in Australia, PNG’s colonial ruler until 1975, is increasingly concerned about the unstable situation in its northern neighbour. The Lowy Institute’s Interpreter commented on August 4 that while Canberra had helped with planning, transport and ballots for the PNG election, its electoral support “was clearly inadequate to the task.”

Canberra’s primary concern is not the plight of the impoverished PNG peoples, but its own geo-strategic and business interests.

Pointing to the Solomon Islands’ recent security pact with Beijing, the Interpreter declared that “PNG should be the centre-piece of Australia’s renewed Pacific foreign policy.” It highlighted “strategic infrastructure investments” such as the government-backed purchase of telecommunications company Digicel by Telstra, a ports upgrade program and the Coral Sea Cable as projects that will “enhance connectivity with PNG and contribute to regional security.”

Amid the United States-led drive to war, Australia’s chief aim is to maintain its hegemony over the country, and to push back against China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence in the Pacific. This will undoubtedly be at the centre of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit in September.

COVID-19 now leading cause of death in New Zealand

Tom Peters

COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death in New Zealand, equal with heart disease. The New Zealand Herald reported on August 7 that in the week ending 17 July, 120 deaths were directly attributed to COVID-19, nearly 15 percent of all deaths. The figure rises to one in five if one includes all deaths within 28 days of a COVID infection being reported. 

Epidemiologist Michael Baker told the Guardian that 15 percent was likely an undercount, as some people would have died from the virus without being tested. He expressed concern that “at the point where we’re seeing peak mortality, we’ve seen, seemingly, public interest and concern dropping to quite a low level.” 

Baker pointed out to the New Zealand Herald that “there will be people dying from conditions which are not attributed to Covid-19, but are actually caused by it.” In more than one in 10 cases, coronavirus infection leads to long-COVID, a condition which can severely affect the lungs, heart, brain and other organs.

Medical staff test shoppers who volunteered at a pop-up community COVID-19 testing station at a supermarket carpark in Christchurch, New Zealand. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

As of August 9, a total of 2,475 people had died within 28 days of being reported as COVID-positive. While the Ministry of Health previously described all such deaths as COVID-related, its reporting guidelines changed on July 19, wiping hundreds of deaths off the tally. According to the Ministry, there are now 1,688 “confirmed” COVID-related deaths, which certainly underestimates the real toll.

Baker has previously noted that if COVID kills 3,500 people by the end of the year, this would add 10 percent to New Zealand’s overall mortality rate, and would have a measurable impact on life expectancy.

According to the New York Times’ COVID tracker, New Zealand’s death rate is the sixth-highest in the world, at 0.36 deaths per 100,000 people. Close to 20 COVID deaths and 6,000 cases are being reported each day, and over 600 people are in hospital with the virus. This is down slightly from a peak of more than 10,000 cases and more than 800 hospitalisations last month.

In total, almost 1.7 million COVID cases have been reported, and there are estimates that more than half of New Zealand’s 5 million inhabitants have been infected. Over 26,000 reinfections are recorded, and this figure will increase as people’s immunity from vaccination wanes.

The Labour Party-led government and the media, however, are promoting the maximum level of complacency and encouraging the illusion that cases will soon fall to a “manageable” level.

A New Zealand Herald editorial on August 4 noted that public health restrictions are “barely visible in many situations” and there is an “almost complete laissez-faire environment whether to mask, boost vaccinations, test, report, or even isolate.” While observing that the pandemic “is not over,” the editorial welcomed the change, saying that “we should be capable of thinking for ourselves.”

On August 9, New Zealand’s minister for COVID-19 response Ayesha Verrall announced that the government will maintain the current, grossly inadequate, public health settings—once again rejecting calls from experts for mask mandates and other mitigation measures in schools.

Verrall declared that New Zealand was “heading in the right direction, with case numbers coming down,” despite “considerable pressure on the health system.” 

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the media that masks should still be worn in many indoor settings, and positive cases should still be isolated. However, she hinted that the government may remove even these measures if hospitalisations continue falling, saying: “we of course hope that we’ll continue to… see a decline in the impact on our health system, which is a major factor for us in the consideration of the settings.”

New Zealand’s COVID death toll is the outcome of deliberate and criminal policy decisions. For most of the pandemic, the government had an elimination policy: it used temporary shutdowns of schools and businesses, as well as border quarantine and other measures, to keep the country almost entirely free from the virus.

On October 4, 2021, however, Ardern suddenly declared that COVID could no longer be contained and the elimination policy would be abandoned. Ardern also stated, falsely, that an elimination strategy was no longer required because of the availability of vaccines—which do not prevent all deaths and severe illnesses and have hardly any impact on transmission. At that time, New Zealand had only recorded about 30 deaths for the entire pandemic. 

Bowing to pressure from big business, the government adopted the same policy of mass infection that has been imposed internationally, except for China, leading to more than 20 million deaths. Schools and workplaces have been kept open this year as the country was hit by the far more infectious Omicron variant. The unions, acting as the agents of big business and the state, played an indispensable role in enforcing the reopening of schools and workplaces.

Hospitals, already understaffed and rundown before the pandemic, are now experiencing an unprecedented crisis, with emergency departments swamped and staff continually getting infected with COVID. The Herald reported on August 3: “A woman was left lying in a hospital bed soaked in her own urine for 14 hours, while another patient was forced to wait for eight hours in the emergency department of an Auckland hospital.”

Thousands of operations are being repeatedly postponed, often leaving patients waiting in chronic pain, including some with cancer and heart conditions. Stuff reported on July 30 that “more than 8000 Auckland women [are] currently waiting for gynaecologist appointments, with some waiting nearly two years for care.”

People with COVID may also be missing out on essential medical care. Radio NZ reported that since March, 87 people have died from COVID-19 in their homes, an average of four per week. The Ministry of Health has not said how many of these people received any hospital care or whether they had been given antiviral treatments. Maori and Pacific Islanders, who are largely among the more oppressed sections of the working class, made up 37 percent of these deaths. 

Meanwhile, New Zealand is completely unprepared for monkeypox, which is rapidly developing into a new global pandemic. So far, three cases have been identified. Officials have asserted that there is no community transmission. Very few people are being tested, however, and the country has no vaccines.

The Burnett Foundation (formerly the AIDS Foundation), the Sexual Health Society and Auckland University expert Peter Saxton wrote to Ardern on August 3 calling for an immediate response, including a vaccination plan. They said “we cannot afford to wait for a widespread outbreak to justify a plan to address monkeypox” because it would “further overwhelm our already strained health system.” According to the World Health Organisation, 10 percent of cases require hospital treatment.

There have been more than 31,000 monkeypox cases reported in the outbreak globally. While it is currently spreading largely among gay and bisexual men, the virus is not a sexually transmitted disease and can be transmitted through physical contact, surfaces, clothing, and via airborne transmission—a fact that is being covered up by governments and public health authorities internationally, including in New Zealand, as they seek to downplay the risks.

Sri Lankan trade union leaders line up with President Wickremesinghe

Saman Gunadasa

Sri Lankan working people face unbearable living conditions with rampant inflation and scarcities of essentials, including food, fuel and medicines. Last month the inflation rate rose to 60 percent and food inflation to 90 percent. In spite of seething anger among workers and the poor over the continuing attacks on their democratic and social rights, the trade unions are suppressing their struggles.

Far from in any way defending the working class, the unions are pledging their support for President Ranil Wickremesinghe and his government, even as it prepares to unleash the savage austerity program demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The health and plantation unions are prominent among those directly backing Wickremesinghe.

Saman Rathnapriya assuming duty and speaking to media (Photo: Facebook/Government Nursing Officers’ Association)

In an extraordinary move, Government Nursing Officers’ Association (GNOA) leader Saman Rathnapriya has been directly integrated into the state apparatus. On August 2, Wickremesinghe appointed him to the newly-created post of Director General of Trade Unions. He is also a leader of the Federation of Health Professionals (FHP), a grouping of unions in the health sector.

Rathnapriya’s close collaborator—FHP president Ravi Kumudesh—met with Wickremesinghe on Saturday morning and promised to block the struggles of health workers.

“Even the groups which are totally opposed to you believe that amidst this kind of crisis you have the ability to play a role,” Kumudesh declared, adding: “We can’t afford to struggle frequently. This is a time [when] we all should get together and sacrifice and build the country. Only you can make that change happen. We are not your enemies or adversaries.”

After grovelling to Wickremesinghe, Kumudesh went the same day to a rally organised by the Trade Union Coordinating Committee (TUCC), the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) and anti-government protesters in Nugegoda, on the outskirts of Colombo. He is a co-convener of the TUCC.

Kumudesh demagogically told the rally: “Up to now none of the expectations of the ‘struggle’ [anti-government protests] has been fulfilled.” He then thundered: “This struggle is not going to end unless the victory is achieved.”

Ravi Kumudesh (Credit: WSWS)

The actions of Rathnapriya and Kumudesh are a graphic exposure of the role of the trade unions. While making empty declarations that they will “fight to the end,” they pledge to Wickremesinghe to sabotage that fight. They keep workers straitjacketed to the capitalist class and its political servants.

Health workers have been in the forefront of protests and strikes since late 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic struck, unions were compelled to call industrial action because of a groundswell of anger among health employees over the lack of safety measures and medicines, inadequate facilities for patients, increased workload, and stagnating salaries and allowances.

Unions shut down all action after discussions with health authorities and government ministers without achieving any of the workers’ demands. Both Rathnapriya and Kumudesh later publicly declared that the unions only called the strikes and protests to “manage” workers’ anger.  

Now, amid an unprecedented crisis of capitalist rule, the unions are being drawn even more closely into the government’s plans to suppress the opposition of working people to the austerity agenda that it has to impose.

Wickremesinghe, a long-time IMF enforcer, is acutely conscious that former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse was forced to flee the country in the wake of general strikes in April and May involving millions, followed by mass anti-government protests in June.

After assuming his duties as Director General of Trade Unions, Rathnapriya spoke to the Aruna newspaper of his plans to ensure the government would not be toppled by the working class and rural masses.

Glorifying his new political boss, Rathnapriya said that when Wickremesinghe was first appointed as prime minister in May, prior to becoming president, many people, including himself, believed Wickremesinghe was the person to “reconstruct the fallen economy of the country.”

Rathnapriya explained how he had sought to rein in the working class. “At that time, I told the trade unions not to put forward inappropriate slogans. Now he [Wickremesinghe] is the president. We must give him support believing he can do this job.

“When there’s a grave economic crisis in the country, without solving the problems, changing the government month after month is not practical.” Rathnapriya insisted working people must “give time” to Wickremesinghe.

Kumudesh and Rathnapriya were both co-conveners of the TUCC which, together with other unions and organisations, called one-day general strikes on April 28 and May 6. Millions of workers participated. Rural and urban poor people also rallied around these strikes.   

However, the unions deliberately limited these strikes to one-day actions and subordinated them politically to the demand of the bourgeois opposition parties—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna—for an interim government, in other words, another capitalist government.

The unions, like the rest of the Colombo political establishment, were terrified by the mass upsurge of working people and the threat it posed to capitalist rule.

After being installed as president, Wickremesinghe immediately set out to suppress anti-government opposition. He imposed the emergency rule, extended the Essential Public Services Act ban to all industrial action in key sectors and unleased a police-military crackdown against anti-government protesters occupying Galle Face Green in central Colombo. Dozens of protest leaders have been arrested.

The suppression of working-class opposition by the unions opened the door for this police-state repression. Significantly, health was one of the sectors subjected to bans under the Essential Public Services Act. Health workers face fines and jail terms for failing to turn up to work. Rathnapriya, Kumudesh and the health unions have taken no action to oppose this draconian measure.

Wickremesinghe is now seeking to rally the whole Colombo political establishment to implement the austerity program of the IMF. This will include sweeping privatisations of the state-owned enterprises, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, an end to state subsidies for education and health, and increased taxes on those least able to afford them.

Wickremesinghe is seeking the support of the unions and, in the case of Rathnapriya and Kumudesh, they are already on board. In an earlier interview, Kumudesh told the WSWS that he “personally” supported going to the IMF for emergency funds even though he knew the harsh conditions that would be attached. Rathnapriya is a former MP of Wickremesinghe’s right-wing United National Party, which has always backed and implemented the IMF’s demands.

The unions in the plantation sector, including the Ceylon Workers Congress, National Union of Workers and Democratic Workers Front and Up-Country Peoples Front, have all agreed to be part of Wickremesinghe’s all-party government. All of them support IMF austerity.

The plantation unions, which also function as political parties, have a long and sordid history of backing one or other capitalist government in Colombo and being given comfortable and lucrative ministerial posts. While their leaders serve in government, the unions function as industrial police for plantation companies in sabotaging workers’ struggles for higher wages and decent working and social conditions.

Fire in Berlin’s Grunewald forest demonstrates the political recklessness of the municipal authorities

Markus Salzmann

The largest forest fire in Berlin, Germany, since the Second World War has once again demonstrated the irresponsibility of the capital’s municipal government, a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Left Party and the Greens.

Smoke over the Grunewald forest behind the former radar tower of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Berlin (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

Teacher shortages, dilapidated schools, a dysfunctional administration in which the simplest trip to the authorities becomes a marathon, as well as a decaying infrastructure have long been permanent issues in Germany’s capital. Now there is also the irresponsible storage of tons of old munitions and confiscated fireworks in the middle of a recreation area, and a fire brigade that has been cut to the bone and was unable to bring the foreseeable catastrophe under control for days.

For reasons that have not yet been explained, numerous explosions occurred early on Thursday morning at a police explosives testing and destruction facility in the middle of Berlin’s Grunewald forest. There are 30 tonnes of ammunition and explosive ordnance on the site, as well as several hundred kilograms of fireworks.

World War II bombs, which are still being discovered in Berlin and the surrounding area, are brought to the site on a weekly basis. Confiscated pyrotechnics are also stored there. Controlled detonations then take place at intervals of several months, most recently in April.

After the fire broke out, a column of smoke developed that could be seen for kilometres over the forest, and more explosions were heard. On the hottest day so far this summer, the fire spread throughout the dry forest area as the day progressed. About 42 hectares were affected

Despite support from the police, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and the THW federal civil protection agency, the fire brigade has not yet been able to completely extinguish the fire. On Sunday, emergency forces were still fighting the enormous heat that had developed. The fire brigade explained that the flames were currently under control, but that it was always possible they could flare up again. Some spots on the ground were as hot as 700 degrees Celsius.

The fire brigade is still unable to reach the explosives facility because of the continuing danger of detonations. Two Second World War bombs were torn from their moorings and must first be cooled down.

Nearby regional and suburban railway lines in the direction of Potsdam remained closed until Saturday, and the Avus city motorway remained closed to traffic until Monday. A one-kilometre exclusion zone has been set up in the local recreation area, which no one may enter except the emergency services.

The fire has once again thrown a spotlight on the decrepit state of the fire brigade in Berlin. While the demands from fires occurring are becoming ever greater as a result of climate change, savage cuts in equipment and personnel have been made for years. “The overload has been clear for a long time,” Tagesspiegel quoted a spokesperson for the German Fire Brigades Union (DFeuG) in Berlin-Brandenburg. A report by the state audit office shows an additional need for 1,000 jobs—and that under normal conditions.

The workload is therefore enormous, as the number of states of emergency that have been called shows. A state of emergency is declared when ambulances are working at 80 percent capacity and the specified arrival time of ten minutes for patients can hardly be met. In 2020, a state of emergency was declared 64 times; in 2021, the number tripled to 178. Now, it also looks as if this record will be broken halfway through the year. It is clear that the delayed arrival of rescue services and the fire brigade, and their exhausted personnel, acutely endanger the lives of those affected.

Due to the extreme situation of the professional fire brigade, many members of the volunteer fire brigade were also put on duty on Thursday to staff services in the city. According to official reports, there were also more volunteer fire brigade officers than professional fire fighters in Grunewald on Friday night. The spokesperson for the firefighters’ union reported complaints from the ranks of the volunteer fire brigade because they are being so frequently and regularly called upon for duty.

In addition, more than 50 THW staff were deployed at the major fire in Grunewald. They set up several 30,000-litre pools to service the fire engines, laying a network of hoses from surrounding lakes to fill them.

The Bundeswehr deployed a “Dachs” bulldozer tank, which created five-kilometre-long breaks in the forest to contain the fire. In addition, a “Teodor” demolition robot was deployed, which had also been used in the Afghanistan war. The Bundeswehr cynically announced that the fire breaks should remain in place; they could “be used by the Berlin population after this crisis as beautiful cycling and hiking paths due to their extension,” a spokesperson said.

The police provided water cannons—one of the few technical devices with which Berlin is well equipped, being more regularly used against squatters and left-wing demonstrators.

Not available, on the other hand, were fire-fighting helicopters and aircraft that could have extinguished the forest fire from the air. German fire brigades do not have their own fire-fighting helicopters. The Bundeswehr’s fire-fighting helicopters are currently deployed in Saxony, where large forest fires have been raging for weeks. Despite the increasing number of forest fires, there are no fire-fighting aircraft in Germany.

It is pure luck that the fire broke out in the night hours and did not claim any victims. The impact on the forest will only be seriously assessed after the fire-fighting operations are over.

After the incident, the authorities emphasized the supposedly high safety precautions at the explosives facility, saying there was a fire break around the site and a fire alarm system. The ammunition depots were continuously sprayed with water in summer so that the phosphorus they contain does not ignite at high temperatures, it was said.

The Berlin police even went so far as to say that the explosives facility in the middle of a forest area was an advantageous location. Berlin police president Barbara Slowik said, “Currently, this facility is the only one that can be approved on Berlin land, with 80,000 square metres, far away from residential areas, which has also greatly benefited the fire brigade.”

It has been known for decades that the facility in a recreational area that attracts thousands of people every day is literally a ticking bomb. A facility for the destruction of weapons has existed here since 1950. The police are responsible for this and have had to admit that for a long time there had been repeated discussions about relocating it for safety reasons.

With German reunification 32 years ago, when West Berlin lost its insular location in the middle of the former East Germany (GDR), it would have been possible to relocate the explosives and storage site to less dangerous locations in sparsely populated Brandenburg. But plans to do so always came to nothing. In 2004, an application was made to relocate the site, but the SPD and Left Party Senate (Berlin state executive) at the time rejected it. Speaking at the site of the fire, Berlin’s mayor, Franziska Giffey (SPD) tersely declared that this would have to be reconsidered.

The same indifference with which the establishment parties treat the safety and lives of the population and have allowed the coronavirus to run wild in the pandemic, can also be seen in their reaction to climate change and its devastating consequences, which are increasingly apparent in the Berlin-Brandenburg region.

The summer months are getting hotter every year and less rain falls, which results in drier soil and underbrush Brandenburg is considered one of the driest regions in Germany with the fire brigade called out dozens of times during the summer months because of forest fires.

It is foreseeable that the SPD-Left Party-Green Senate will not draw any conclusions from the major fire in Grunewald. Representatives of the governing parties merely declared after the fire that they “wanted to talk about it.”

Environment Senator (state minister) Bettina Jarasch (Greens) said, “Of course, this has to do with climate change—not this fire, mind you, but the overall increase.” She added that one must be prepared for it. Her only conclusion from this was to build up more mixed forest areas instead of coniferous forest.

The SPD, Greens and the Left Party are continuing and intensifying their austerity policies in all areas of public and social infrastructure in the current legislative period. Niklas Schrader, responsible for domestic issues in the Left Party’s state parliamentary group, explained that Berlin had taken the right path in recent years in dealing with the fire brigade.

Instead of increasing the urgently needed material and personnel, there should be a “more efficient approach.” The Senate’s domestic affairs administration also expressed this view: “The fire brigade is basically well positioned for all foreseeable emergency situations in the city,” said a spokeswoman.