Britain’s special forces deployed in Ukraine and at least 19 countries

Jean Shaoul

Ever since the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, the UK has played a leading role in escalating the US-NATO led war against Russia.

It has trained and equipped the Ukrainian army, deployed troops in Eastern Europe on permanent missions or large-scale combat exercises and staged repeated anti-Russian provocations, including sending a British warship into waters claimed by Russia.

Ukrainian volunteer military recruits take part in an urban battle exercise whilst being trained by British Armed Forces at a military base in Southern England, August 15, 2022. Ministry of Defence and British Army as the UK Armed Forces continue to deliver international training of Ukrainian Armed Forces recruits in the United Kingdom [AP Photo/Frank Augstein]

The UK has secretly deployed special forces (UKSF) in Ukraine, even though it is not officially party to the war.

Although the House of Commons must vote for war, special forces, which include the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service, Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), the Special Forces Support Group, 18 Signal Regiment, Joint Special Aviation Wing and No. 47 Squadron, can be deployed without parliamentary approval and with the government refusing to even list their operations.

The Mirror reported in April 2021 that a “small team of UK special forces” had been deployed to Ukraine in an apparent intelligence-gathering mission on the border with Russia. Two months later, the British Embassy in Kiev released a statement reporting that the UK Minister for Defence Procurement and Deputy Defence Minister of Ukraine had “observed joint training activity of Ukrainian, UK and US special forces,” implying that UKSF were involved in a training operation in Ukraine.

In April 2022, Al Jazeera reported that Russia had announced it was “looking into a Russian media report alleging that the SAS had been sent to the Lviv region in Western Ukraine” to “assist the Ukrainian special services in organising sabotage on the territory of Ukraine.” Just months later, the Daily Star reported that a group of ex-SAS troopers were in Ukraine and had “killed up to 20 Russian generals and 15 of the feared Wagner mercenaries,” the British also having helped to train some Ukrainian troops in ambush methods.

Earlier this year, leaked US military documents revealed that the UK had deployed 50 special forces personnel, including the SAS, to Ukraine, more than half of all the Western special forces in the country from February to March 2023.

Operations in Ukraine are only some of the UKSF’s covert activities. According to research compiled by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a London-based NGO, based on leaked reports to the mainstream media, wire services and broadcasters or as the result of operations that have gone wrong, the UKSF has carried out operations in at least 19 countries between 2011 and 2021, including Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Kenya, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

It can be assumed that these deployments form only a fraction of Britain’s covert operations around the world. They, along with Britain’s arms deals, international defence partnerships and projections of force are part of the UK government’s broader preparations for war.

Not only are special forces activities kept secret, but then Prime Minister David Cameron even authorised their deployment in Syria after the House of Commons explicitly rejected sending troops to the country in August 2013. Three days before the vote, UKSF and Britain’s spy agency MI6 were on the ground there, with European and Jordanian sources stating in 2013 that UKSF had been training rebel forces for a year.  

In the case of Libya, special forces were only revealed as operating with rebel forces against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in March 2011 when farmers in a remote village captured a team of UKSF and MI6 operatives. Since then, the UK has sent in SF, supposedly to combat ISIL and train Libyan forces alongside US, French and Italian personnel. In 2019, a SAS unit had to be evacuated out of Tripoli and Tobruk after armed clashes broke out.

While Britain’s combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan officially ended in 2011 and 2014 respectively, the UKSF continued their operations.

In Iraq, while parliament approved airstrikes against ISIL in September 2014, the government gave an explicit commitment not to deploy ground troops that it evaded by deploying UKSF. Prime Minister David Cameron reportedly gave the UKSF “carte blanche” to launch raids against ISIL’s leaders in operations that continued for the rest of the decade. He had sent the first UKSF teams to northern Iraq weeks before the vote on an intelligence gathering mission. Since then, there has been a continuous stream of SAS and SBS operations, with the most recent in 2021. The Daily Mail reported a surge of 100 killings of ISIL leaders in the summer of 2020.

After 2014, UK special forces stayed behind in Afghanistan to fight Taliban and ISIL militants. Despite their mission only “to train, advise or assist” Afghan forces, there are numerous reports of their involvement in lethal night raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Last March, the government was forced to open a public inquiry after BBC Panorama reported allegations that the SAS were responsible for 54 summary killings in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, when men were separated from their families and shot dead after being said to have produced a weapon.

There have been multiple reports of UKSF operatives fighting on the Syrian frontline in al-Tanf where there is a US base, Raqqa and near the Turkey/Syria border. Parliament had approved airstrikes explicitly against ISIL commanders but not the deployment of combat troops on the ground. In 2018, there was a rare reporting of a SAS fatality, apparently killed alongside a US commando in a friendly fire incident that Washington originally blamed on a roadside bomb. It is likely that UKSF remain in Syria.

The UKSF have also carried out missions in Yemen over the last eight years in support of Saudi forces fighting Houthi insurgents that took control of the capital Sana’a in 2014. By seconding them to MI6, under the control of the Foreign Office, the government was able to circumvent the European Convention on Human Rights and deny it was supporting the US in its covert missions in Yemen, with UKSF personnel reportedly conducting assassinations near Sana’a.

In May 2019, the government sent two SBS teams to the Persian Gulf, after Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates reported explosive sabotage attacks on commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, to monitor Iranian naval activity around the island of Qeshm, close to the country’s naval bases, under the pretext of protecting UK registered oil tankers.

Britain’s main theatre of operations is the Middle East, but it has also fielded SF troops throughout Africa, including in Mali and Algeria. Skirmishes have been reported in Somalia, close to Britain’s military base in Kenya.

UKSF soldiers also went to the Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia in 2016 for “counter-terrorism” purposes. In 2018, SAS reservists were deployed to Estonia as part of the NATO mission in the Baltic states “to deter Russian encroachment,” monitoring Russian military movement over the border.

These revelations come as Britain’s arms exports soared to a record £8.5 billion in 2022, more than double the £4.1 billion recorded in 2021. The two largest buyers, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are among the world’s most repressive regimes.

Last month, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak travelled to Tokyo with a large trade delegation announcing a new defence partnership with Japan involving the doubling of joint military exercises, deploying the UK’s Carrier Strike Group in 2025, advancing the Global Combat Air Programme and extending Britain’s military reach deeper into the Indo-Pacific.

Last month, Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin went to India to strengthen military ties and to discuss “industrial collaboration in the aerospace sector.” In March, British and Swedish defence ministers agreed to deepen their collaboration and signed a defence procurement deal as Stockholm prepares to join NATO. Since last July, the Ministry of Defence has announced deals, assistance and missions to Finland, Germany, France, Estonia, Oman, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, Qatar, Poland, the USA, Ghana and the Republic of Korea.

UK COVID inquiry in crisis as Conservative government tries to conceal pandemic crimes

Robert Stevens

So vast are the crimes committed by Britain’s ruling elite during the COVID-19 pandemic that the Conservative government is all but refusing to co-operate with the official inquiry it authorised.

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry was announced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in May 2021. To date over 226,000 people have died due to COVID in Britain. Over a million are estimated to be suffering from the debilitating impact of Long Covid.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a COVID-19 Press Conference with Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, October 10, 2020 [Photo by Pippa Fowler/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY 2.0]

The first inquiry hearings, examining the UK's resilience and preparedness (Module 1), is set to take place June 13. The first oral hearings of Module 2, dealing with the main decision-making and political governance around the pandemic, are scheduled to start in the weeks to come. The oral hearings are expected to last at least three years, until the summer of 2026.

The inquiry is chaired by former High Court judge, Baroness Heather Hallett, who in 2009 acted as coroner in the inquest of the 52 people killed in London’s 7/7 terrorist bombings.

But before oral sessions are even underway, Hallett’s inquiry was plunged into crisis by the refusal of Johnson, and then the Cabinet Office, to hand over diaries, notebooks and WhatsApp messages from his period in office. The inquiry requested that Johnson hand over unredacted WhatsApp messages sent and received by Johnson from January 1, 2020, to February 24, 2022; unredacted diaries; copies of 24 unredacted notebooks; and unredacted WhatsApp messages sent and received by Johnson’s adviser Henry Cook.

All Johnson initially provided to the Cabinet Office was WhatsApp messages from May 2021, the month he announced the COVID Inquiry and a period well over a year after his initial response to the pandemic during which he advocated the mass infection of the population with COVID through a murderous “herd immunity” policy. This was at the time when Downing Street were working out scenarios that up to 800,000 people could die if such a policy was enacted.

Johnson’s successor, Rishi Sunak, following the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss, is also implicated in COVID crimes, which accounts for the extraordinary refusal of the Cabinet Office to cooperate with its own inquiry. The Cabinet Office gave the inquiry only redacted versions of the limited messages Johnson handed over, leading to Hallett being forced to request the unredacted material using a Section 21 notice under the 2005 Inquiries Act that “provides inquiries with statutory powers to compel evidence.”

In response Sunak’s Cabinet Office took the extraordinary decision June 1 to launch legal action against the Inquiry—via a judicial review—claiming that making the material available would compromise ministers' and other individuals' right to privacy. The legal case argues that Hallett should not have “the power to compel production of documents and messages” that the Cabinet Office claimed are “unambiguously irrelevant to the inquiry's work.”

Following the government’s taking legal action, Johnson—who was removed from office in a palace coup in which Sunak played a central role—moved into damage limitation mode. Last Friday, Johnson wrote to Hallett saying he was prepared to hand over his unredacted WhatsApp messages shared with the Cabinet Office and would also hand over “relevant” material, including correspondence from his old mobile phone, but only if he could obtain access to it. However, it is not clear what is even available any longer from that crucial period in the form of his phone messages.

According to the i news site, “The ex-prime minister kept his personal phone number that he had had for more than a decade when he entered No 10 and it was on this number and device that crucial messages were sent as the Covid pandemic unfolded in 2020.” It added, “Johnson was told by security officials to turn off the device and never turn it on again in case it could be hacked by hostile actors, i understands. This means historic messages from 2020 and early 2021 are no longer available to search and the phone is not active.”

Regarding his 25 notebooks, Johnson wrote Hallett that they had been removed by the Cabinet Office and “If the government chooses not to [hand them over to the Inquiry], I will ask for these to be returned to my office so that I can provide them to you directly”.

Johnson’s action prompted the government to threaten that he could lose legal funding for his participation in the Inquiry “if you knowingly seek to frustrate or undermine, either through your own actions or the actions of others, the government's position in relation to the inquiry unless there is a clear and irreconcilable conflict of interest on a particular point at issue”.

Hallett, the COVID Inquiry chair, was obliged to ask a series of extraordinary questions of Johnson. These include:

• “Please confirm whether in March 2020 (or around that period), you suggested to senior civil servants and advisors that you be injected with Covid-19 on television to demonstrate to the public that it did not pose a threat?”
• “Did you inform the then Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, during a phone call on or around 13 March 2020 that you ‘wanted herd immunity’, or words to that effect?”
• “Did the then Cabinet Secretary, Lord Sedwill, on 12 March 2020 (or around that period), advise you to inform the public to hold ‘chickenpox parties’ in order to spread infections of Covid-19? What was your response to any such advice?”
• “In or around Autumn 2020, did you state that you would rather ‘let the bodies pile high’ than order another lockdown, or words to that effect?

As Johnson’s chancellor, Sunak was just as opposed to lockdowns. In his campaign for the leadership of the Tory party in 2022, Sunak stated, “My view is we did go too far, particularly on keeping schools closed… and I would not have a lockdown again. I was very clear in cabinet, I was one of the key voices in favour of opening up [schools].”

Sunak even launched at the height of the pandemic in August 2020, the Eat Out to Help Out scheme at a cost of £850 million to the taxpayer. Denouncing the scheme, which led to COVID infections shooting up by between 8 and 17 percent as people mingled in restaurants, Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a member of the SAGE committee of government advisors, told the Observer, “it was a spectacularly stupid idea and an obscene way to spend public money.”

The crisis escalated Monday when Elkan Abrahamson, a lawyer who represents one of the inquiry’s key “core participants”, the Bereaved Families for Justice group, said that if Hallett did not receive the evidence she is demanding, “the only logical response of the chair is to resign because she can’t properly do her job”.

The ruling class will do everything it can to ensure that no-one of any significance in political and corporate circles is ever brought to account for the social murder of over 200,000 people and the debilitating, possibly lifelong suffering inflected on those with Long COVID.

Step forward the nominally liberal Guardian, and its sister Observer title, to promote the bona fides of that essential tool of the British ruling elite, the “independent” Public Inquiry.

An op-ed published Sunday by the Observer's chief political commentator Andrew Rawnsley, declared, “This inquiry cannot bring anyone back to life. The service it can perform for victims has been illustrated by earlier inquiries such as those into the Hillsborough disaster, the Bloody Sunday killings and the contaminated blood scandal. One of the vital functions of this public inquiry is to give a voice to the bereaved and supply a form of justice by forcing decision-makers to give account and take responsibility for what they did.”

The fact that the Tories are seeking to neuter an inquiry they established and set extremely limited terms of reference for should blind no-one to the fact that it will do nothing to establish justice, even if it proceeds. After more than three decades no-one was held accountable for the Hillsborough deaths. 51 years have elapsed since the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre without any justice.

To these cover-ups must be added the inquiry into the June 2017 Grenfell Tower fire deaths which is still underway with the sixth anniversary of the fire later this month. No-one responsible has ever been charged, or even arrested for the 72 deaths at Grenfell, with that inquiry conducted, as is the COVID inquiry, under the 2005 Inquiries Act, which “has no power to determine, any person’s civil or criminal liability.”

Over 150,000 teachers on strike in Romania

Andrei Tudora

More than 150,000 Romanian teachers are engaged in a national strike that started on May 22. The strike is part of a growing upsurge of the class struggle across Europe. Romanian teachers join workers in the UK, Spain, Portugal, France and Germany, who are engaged in mass protests and strikes against austerity. Health care and railway workers in Romania are also engaged in protests against low wages and dangerous working conditions.

These struggles pose sharply the questions of political organization and perspective. Teachers are confronted not only by a Grand Coalition PSD-PNL (Social Democratic Party-National Liberal Party) government but also by the corporatist union apparatus, with the strike developing increasingly against the trade union federations.

A section of the protest march in Bucharest [Photo: WSWS]

Thousands of teachers have gathered in towns and cities across Romania to protest. On the 30th of May, a large rally took place in Bucharest, with over 20,000 teachers as well as many workers and pensioners from the city who joined in support. The rally started in Victory square, the seat of the government, and ended in front of the presidential palace.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke to workers at the rally, who expressed their anger at the situation facing educators and their determination to continue the strike.

Georgeta and Mihaela (left) [Photo: WSWS]

Georgeta and Mihaela work in a special needs school. They were protesting the low wages and the desperate situation of special-needs education, which is starved of funds and threatened with closure.

Ghergina [Photo: WSWS]

Gherghina, a retired teacher, lamented teachers’ declining living conditions over the past decades and said of government politicians that “austerity should begin with them.”

Bogdan from Bucharest [Photo: WSWS]

Bogdan, a teacher from Bucharest, explained that the government is not paying teachers their bonuses or correctly applying the salary law. He said that the strike should continue and that “it is not the union leaders that get to decide when the strike ends. The teachers will decide.”

Suzana and Bogdan from lasi [Photo: WSWS]

Bogdan and Suzana came more than 170 miles from Iasi. They are tired, they said, of the way teachers are treated and of extremely low wages. They were among the teachers that remained in the square into the evening hours.

Union executives went inside to discuss with the president and came up with a scheme of “political guarantees” that they attempted to present as a victory for the workers. Workers shouted down the union bosses and refused to return home at the agreed hour. A few hundred protesters remained in the square for several more hours, in defiance of the unions and the police.

Romanian workers confront a government that is deeply involved in the imperialist war drive against Russia and is determined to impose the costs of the crisis onto the working class.

The grand coalition government, formed officially at the end of 2021, has already presided over the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the ongoing COVID pandemic, and has turned the country into an open-air barracks for the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. It has built up fascistic forces in the form of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) party and elevated them to the status of main political opposition. Romania has made plans for a massive increase of its military, including the purchase of F-35 fighter aircraft, Abrams tanks, submarines, drones and helicopters, at the cost of billions of dollars.

According to Ziarul Financiar, the number of millionaires in Romania has increased sharply since 2016. The country has over 1,800 “super-rich” individuals, the most in the region.

The vast majority of the country’s population, however, has been economically devastated by the cost-of-living crisis that is hitting workers across the world. Romania’s official inflation rate was 16.7 percent last year and 15.5 percent this January, with the highest utilities price increase in the EU, according to Eurostat. According to EU figures, basic food prices rose up to 40 percent from 2021 to 2022.

A starting teacher’s salary in Romania is around €500 and can go up to €850 for senior teachers. Rents in major cities in the country average around €400 for a one-bedroom apartment, with utility prices easily going over €150.

The government has recently passed an austerity law freezing wages, new hiring and spending in the public sector.

The coalition government also passed a new set of education laws, which introduce further standardized testing and impose the implementation of various police measures in schools.

While educators are determined to face off against the government, the greatest obstacle for their struggle remains the trade union bureaucracy.

Union executives like Marius Nistor or Simion Hancescu make thousands of euros a month. Their unions, the FSLI (The Federation of Free Education Unions) and the FSE “Spiru Haret,” have for decades acted as an industrial police arm of the state. The union bureaucracies have refused to organize strikes for 18 years, including in 2011 when teachers were victims of a police campaign during national exams, and in 2021, when school reopening during the COVID pandemic led to a deluge of infections in schools. Hancescu cynically commented at the time for Şcoala9 that the system “lost a lot of value” along with the teachers that died of COVID.

Since the first days, union leaders have scrambled to sabotage the strike. They attempted to end the strike for a one-time bonus of €500, but were contemptuously rejected by teachers, who widely shared calls on social media for a mass exit from the unions.

The government maintained an obstinate and defiant attitude throughout. It has repeated the mantra that there is “no money” and has made a “final offer”—an insulting increase of between €50 and €200 pre-tax, with any further increases to be set over following years. It proceeded to sign the increase into an emergency law on Thursday and announced an end to negotiations.

On June 1, President Iohannis, speaking from Mimi castle in Moldova, where EU leaders had gathered to advance their war aims against Russia, threatened the teachers, implying the government will use strike breakers against them: “How dare they threaten national exams ... After the government gave them everything they asked for, what basis could they have to continue the strike? ... I believe that a lot of educators, who already considered that it [the strike] was too much will go back to school and they are doing a very good thing.”

At the same time, union leaders increased the pressure and announced in the media that their mandate has been “successfully carried out.” They have bitterly denounced teachers and blamed the influence of the fascist AUR party and “political agitators” infiltrating social media for the teachers’ determination to continue the strike.

The trade union federations in health and rail are also working out plans to delay strikes and isolate the teachers. The rail unions have set a date for the strike as no closer than the first of July, while Sanitas, the largest nurses’ union, is in constant talks with the government and aims to squash the strike completely.

Germany: Long prison sentences for attacking Nazis—a political judgement

Peter Schwarz

The Dresden Higher Regional Court has sentenced 28-year-old Lina E. to five years and three months and three other defendants to around three years each in prison. The court determined that the four had formed a criminal organization that targeted, attacked and injured neo-Nazis. Investigations of another 15 suspects are ongoing.

The court suspended Lina E.’s arrest warrant, albeit with strict reporting requirements, because she had already spent two and a half years in pre-trial detention. However, she will have to serve at least one more year in prison if the verdict becomes final.

"Free Lina" graffiti in Leipzig [Photo by Frupa / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The trial against Lina E. and the draconian sentences are politically motivated and serve, in more ways than one, political purposes.

The verdict itself is based on questionable circumstantial evidence, conjecture and the testimony of a dubious key witness. Despite 98 days of hearings, the court failed to produce clear evidence of the acts that led to the defendants’ convictions. In only one case—the attack on neo-Nazi Leon R. in the city of Eisenach in December 2019—was it able to prove an indirect link between Lina E., who was arrested shortly thereafter, and a specific act.

The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is responsible for crimes against state security (prosecutions are otherwise the responsibility of the federal states), immediately seized upon the case and deliberately inflated it. It had Lina E. flown to the arresting judge in a helicopter like a terrorist, ensured that she remained in pre-trial detention for two and a half years, labeled her a ringleader and demanded a prison sentence of eight years.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office “knew only one direction,” as a commentary in the taz newspaper put it: “Whenever a woman was at the scene of the crime, it was supposedly Lina E. Whenever there was circumstantial evidence, it was interpreted against the defendants. Authorities even kept for themselves an alibi of one of the defendants, which was lying dormant in the files of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, either accidentally or deliberately. In any case, it was the defense that had to dig it out.”

The special police commission Soko Linx, which was founded in November 2019 by the Saxon State Criminal Police Office to combat “left-wing extremism,” was, as we reported in an earlier article, “a sort of joint venture between Saxon police and the far-right scene.” Details from the investigation files, including the unredacted names of suspected anti-fascists, were repeatedly leaked to the public via the far-right Compact magazine and Focus Online.

“The investigations and research,” we wrote, “increasingly paint the picture of a police force that is not only close to right-wing extremist elements, but rather itself operates as part of a right-wing extremist network. It appears to be systematically leaking information to right-wing extremists and closely collaborating with them.”

The long prison sentences for Lina E. and her co-defendants stand in stark contrast to the judiciary’s leniency toward violent far-right extremists.

For example, André Eminger was sentenced to only two and a half years in the National Socialist Underground (NSU) trial in Munich, even though he had supported and accompanied Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos and Beate Zschäpe, who committed at least ten racist murders, for 14 years. He left the courtroom a free man.

Two neo-Nazis who in 2018 attacked and seriously injured two photojournalists in Fretterode in the state of Thuringia, got off with a suspended sentence and some community service hours. Judge Andrea Kortus of the Mühlhausen Regional Court justified the lenient sentence by saying that the defendants had mistaken the photojournalists for Antifa (anti-fascist) activists. “In the court’s opinion, it is apparently legitimate to act against left-wing activists and to attack them in the most brutal way,” we commented on the verdict. The converse, as the Dresden court’s verdict against Lina E. shows, is not the case.

From the start the trial against Lina E. and her co-defendants, the state pursued the goal of denouncing and criminalizing any opposition to the far right as “left-wing extremism.”

The fact that the far right is promoted and covered up by the state and, when exposed, handled with kid gloves, has been well known at latest since the exposure of the NSU and the Hannibal Network in the security forces. The extent of far-right violence in Germany is enormous. The Antonio Amadeu Foundation has counted 219 deaths at the hands of far-right perpetrators since 1990. The Federal Criminal Police Office reported 1170 violent right-wing crimes last year, 12 percent more than the previous year. Nearly 600 right-wing extremists with outstanding arrest warrants are reportedly untraceable.

The state of Saxony has long been a stronghold of the far right who enjoy close ties to the highest levels of state and government. There are entire regions terrorized by the far right. In Chemnitz, Saxony, the NSU was able to prepare its murderous attacks undisturbed for years, surrounded by a supportive scene teeming with state informants. The National Democratic Party (NPD) held seats in Saxony’s state parliament for ten years, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the second strongest party there. In 2018, Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (Christian Democrats, CDU) defended a far-right march in Chemnitz—as did the president of the secret service (Verfassungschutz) Hans-Georg Maassen; but while Maassen was forced out, Kretschmer remained in office.

The trial of Lina E. was intended to distract from this far-right conspiracy and criminalize opposition to it. The claim that he honored anti-fascist commitment, that it was merely a matter of prosecuting serious crimes, with which Judge Hans Schlüter-Staats opened his nearly nine-hour justification of the verdict, is simply false.

The state prosecutes not only organizations that use violence as “left-wing extremist,” but also those that fight with political means, such as the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP, the Socialist Equality Party in Germany). In a brief from the Interior Ministry justifying the surveillance of the SGP by the Verfassungsschutz, the SGP is accused of being “left-wing extremist“ because it fights “for a democratic, egalitarian, socialist society,” agitates “against alleged ‘imperialism’ and ‘militarism’” and thinks “in class categories.”

As soon as the verdict against Lina E. was pronounced, a chorus of voices called for tougher action against “left-wing extremists.”

“We are experiencing a growing radicalization and acceptance of the most brutal violence among left-wing extremists,” claimed the state of Thuringia’s Verfassungschutz president, Stephan Kramer. The violence, according to him, is directed at “political opponents as well as representatives of the state.” Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democrats, SPD) claimed that authorities were cracking down on the dangers of right-wing extremism, and that in the coming days they would also keep a close eye on the far-left scene.

Verfassungsschutz President Thomas Haldenwang warned that the moment was approaching “when one must also speak of left-wing terrorism.” Saxony’s Interior Minister Armin Schuster (CDU) announced investigations into the left-wing extremist scene: “We will continue to investigate, further uncover the network and are confident that we will be able to bring more criminals to justice.” The security policy spokesman for the AfD in the Saxon state parliament, Carsten Hütter, said the sentence against Lina E. was too lenient and that the judiciary in this case had failed.

Demonstrations against the draconian verdict were banned on the grounds that they could turn violent. In Leipzig, where a large demonstration was planned for Saturday, the Federal Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court, upheld the ban. Three thousand riot police were mobilized to suppress any protest. When more than 1,000 people then demonstrated—legally—against the ban, the police surrounded them and held them until early Sunday morning.

French National Assembly to examine €413 billion defense spending bill

Kumaran Ira

President Emmanuel Macron’s government has begun examining the Military Programming Law (LPM) for 2024–2030 in the National Assembly. The bill would raise military spending to €413 billion over these years, or 40 percent more than the last LPM for 2019–2025. Debates on the LPM are to finish with a formal vote on the bill tomorrow.

French President Emmanuel Macron, after proposing a substantial boost in defense spending, visits the Mont-de-Marsan Air Base in southwestern France on Friday, January 20, 2023. [AP Photo/Bob Edme]

The LPM is an illegitimate law, imposed by the political establishment against the will of the people, as the LPM is financed by the pension cut Macron has imposed on the French people without a vote and against overwhelming popular opposition. The LPM exposes the argument that the pension cuts, which eliminate €13 billion in yearly pension spending, are necessary to “save” the financing of pensions. In fact, there is plenty of money for pensions. The ruling just wants to spend it on war, not on retirees.

Macron is impoverishing the French people and trampling democracy underfoot in order to slash social spending and direct funds towards building the “European war economy” he has called for amid the NATO war with Russia. Indeed, the €17.7 billion increase in yearly defense spending is largely financed by the €13 billion per year now being cut from pensions.

French militarism depends on the tacit but very real support of the union bureaucracies and their pseudo-left political allies, who since the last mass protests against Macron’s cuts on May Day have postponed action for a month, until tomorrow. The choice of this date also helped Macron avoid a debate on the budgetary priorities and the policy of military escalation that he is imposing on the French people.

Indeed, no nationwide protest against Macron was held until the Assembly had debated the bill and moved to vote on it.

The LPM vindicates the call of the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) to bring down Macron via a general strike. According to polls, two-thirds of the French people want to block the economy via a strike in order to stop Macron’s cuts—and, thus, the financing of the LPM. The struggle to bring down Macron is thus also a struggle against the military escalation that has already produced a NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and threatens to explode across all of Europe.

The LPM sets in place a highly aggressive rearmament policy for the French military. It includes massive spending on cyberwarfare, updating military equipment and modernizing France’s nuclear arsenal.

As parliamentary debate on the LPM began, Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the law “is a sign of the return to harder competition between the great powers, against a backdrop of nuclear proliferation.”

General Jérôme Pellistrandi, the editor of the Revue Défense Nationale, commented on the bill: “It is a significant budgetary effort. It will be useful. It comes amid a double context. There is an extremely fragile geopolitical situation, France’s need to pursue and in fact restart an effort on defense, but also a domestic political situation where the French are being asked to make major efforts to finance their own defense. There is a feeling that these 413 billion euros must be very well spent.”

The military budget, which was already at €43.9 billion in 2023, will rapidly rise to reach 2 percent of France’s GDP. Military spending will rise €3 billion per year until 2027, then €4 billion per year starting in 2028. It would reach €69 billion in 2030, compared to only €32 billion in 2017.

The LPM would give the navy a new generation of nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines, whose construction is to begin in 2035, and a new aircraft carrier to replace the Charles de Gaulle. Its construction will begin in Saint Nazaire and demand €5 billion. The air force will obtain a new generation of fighter jets, either the Franco-German Future Combat Air System (FCAS) or the Rafale 4.

The law also sets aside €5 billion for drones, €13 billion for overseas interventions, €10 billion for space and cyber warfare and €5 billion for intelligence operations. It also mandates €49 billion for equipment stocks and €16 billion to increase France’s supply of ammunition.

The single largest item of defense spending, with 13 percent of the total budget, is the strengthening of France’s nuclear arsenal. It foresees both the modernization of France’s nuclear missile submarines with M51 missiles and also the modernization of nuclear missiles fired from French Rafale jets.

For over a half century, the French bourgeoisie has claimed that it was defending France via a policy of deterring attacks by holding nuclear weapons. It argued that no one would dare attack France, which has a nuclear arsenal large enough to destroy most of even the largest countries. Launched by President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, this deterrence strategy was aimed to guarantee France’s national independence.

All these calculations are collapsing as Washington and NATO wage war on Russia in Ukraine, as a Third World War has in practice already begun. Indeed, this war shows that the simple possession of nuclear arms does not suffice to prevent direct attacks on a country’s territory, or on what its government considers to be its fundamental national security interests.

NATO supported a coup in Ukraine in 2014 to install a pro-NATO, anti-Russian regime in Kiev, provoking a civil war and the secession of several Russian-speaking regions of the country. NATO then began arming its puppet regime in Kiev, which built up vast armed forces, heavily armed by NATO, near its borders with Russia. NATO implemented this policy even though Moscow, which has a massive nuclear arsenal, stressed that it saw this policy as an intolerable threat to Russia.

Finally, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Washington and its European allies not only armed Ukraine but applauded invasions of Russian territory by their neo-Nazi Ukrainian proxies. Thus the possession of nuclear arms by Russia has in no way deterred NATO from aggressively waging war on it.

To claim that today one can guarantee French workers’ security by holding nuclear weapons is to deceive oneself or to try to deceive others. The greatest danger, indeed, is that the mounting NATO-Russia war in Ukraine threatens to lead the warring governments to utilise the vast stocks of nuclear weapons that they hold.

The urgent need in this situation is to build an international, anti-war movement in the working class to stop the war escalation and prevent the use of nuclear weapons. Defending the security and the living standards of the workers requires an international political mobilization of the working class. Indeed, no faction of the political establishment is opposing Macron’s policies of austerity and militarism.

The union bureaucracies and their political allies like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France party all remained silent on the LPM or refused to campaign against it. These forces have no perspective to offer to the struggle against Macron’s pension cuts. Indeed, they do not oppose the militaristic policy that Macron needs the pension cuts in order to pursue.

Train horror in India: Another crime of decaying capitalism

Arun Kumar & Patrick Martin

The deadliest train crash in India in more than a quarter of a century has killed nearly 300 passengers and injured more than 1,000. It is a tragedy that has horrified the world and exposed the criminal neglect of basic infrastructure by the ultra-right regime of Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi and the capitalist governments that preceded it.

Rescuers attempt to remove body of a victim of from passenger train that derailed in Balasore district, in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, Saturday, June 3, 2023. [AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool]

Three trains collided in Balasore district of the eastern Indian state of Odisha last Friday night, two of them high speed passenger trains moving in opposite directions, the third a freight train heavily laden with iron ore. The Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore is a four-line station, with two main lines in the middle and two loop lines on either side. The Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express from Chennai in southern India to Howrah in eastern India was travelling at 128 kmph in one main line and Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express was coming from Howrah at 126 kmph along other main line.

According one railway official, the northbound Coromandel Express diverted from the main line into the side loop, where it “crashed into a goods train full of iron ore stationed there” that “absorbed all the shock of crash as it was very heavy.” Another official said that 12 of the 22 cars in the passenger train were derailed by the collision, and some were thrown in the path of the southbound Superfast Express, which smashed into them and itself derailed.

It is not yet known why the northbound train changed direction, but the crash is being attributed either to an incorrect signal or a malfunction of the signaling device. Before any investigation, the Modi government seized on the initial reports to pin responsibility on the railroad workforce at the local level to divert attention from how its own policies contributed to the disaster.

Shedding crocodile tears over the huge loss of life, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rushed to express his “distress” over the accident. “Whoever made the mistake, strong action will be taken,” he declared, making clear that scapegoats would be found and punished to cover up decades of neglect by successive governments.

In reality, the Indian ruling class, and Modi as their current representative, care nothing for the passengers smashed and dismembered in the collision. Most were migrant workers from across the states of West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand who are working in Chennai and nearby areas. Others were patients coming back from treatment in southern India’s private hospitals.

As media reports showed, the crash created a hellish scene filled with dismembered bodies. Rescuers could be seen climbing atop the wrecked trains to break open doors and windows using cutting torches, while local residents were trying to free the hundreds of people trapped in the rail cars.

A survivor from Coromandel Express, Ramesh, told ABP Nadu: “When the accident took place, the whole train wobbled and all of us fell down. We could not process anything. When we came out of the coach, we were shocked to witness multiple coaches derailed and one of the coaches crashed into another coach.”

Recollecting the horrific scene, Ramesh said that many of the people were stuck in the mangled remains of the train. Villagers immediately rushed for help and started rescuing the people. Eventually, the police and medical professionals reached the spot.

Modi’s Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Sunday that the reason for the accident was “a change in electronic interlocking” used to avoid collisions and that an investigation would show “who was responsible for that mistake.” But the statistics of deaths on the Indian rail network show that there is no “mistake” or “accident,” but the responsibility lies with successive governments.

Despite the horrific toll, Friday’s crash was exceeded by three other train disasters in India, including a 1995 crash when some 358 people were killed in a collision between the Purushottam Express and the Kalindi Express near Firozabad in Uttar Pradesh in northern India.

Even worse is the daily death toll from passengers thrown off trains—most riding on rooftops of overcrowded passenger cars—and people killed on the tracks, run over by speeding trains. According to the most recent figures, 16,000 people died in 19,000 accidents in 2021 on the Indian rail system. This averages out to 49 accidents per day, killing 45 people.

In an attempt to appease mounting anger over official negligence, Modi announced an ex-gratia payment of 200,000 rupees ($US2,427) for the next of kin of the deceased, and 50,000 rupees for the injured from the PM’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF). This is a drop in the bucket for a government that currently spends 6.33 trillion rupees ($76.8 billion) on the military—the third largest war budget in the world, trailing only the US and China.

While the Modi government and state authorities now are desperately trying to cover up their own responsibility, it is clear that decades of neglect and cost-cutting have resulted in a serious erosion of rail infrastructure and necessary safety measures.

A report published in the Hindu on May 31, just two days before Friday’s accident, which was headlined, “Increase in train accidents worries Indian Railways”, stated:

“The Railway Board recently took up the issue of loco pilots [locomotive engineers] being deployed over and above their prescribed working hours resulting in a threat to the safety of train operations. Going by the rules, duty hours of the crew could not exceed 12 hours under any circumstances, said the official, who did not want to be quoted... Worried over the increase in train accidents across the rail network, the Railway Board has called for urgent steps to fill vacancies and reduce the long working hours of locomotive pilots.”

Advanced technologies are available to prevent “human errors” and “signal failures” but have not been widely implemented. Railway officials have admitted that the train anti-collision system “Kavach” was not available on the route where the Friday accident took place.

In any case, the experience of rail workers in many countries is that even when the most modern technology is introduced, it is not used to make railroad operation safer, but to increase the profits of the rail bosses and their financial backers. This has been the purpose of Precision Rail Scheduling (PSR), introduced in recent years in both the United States and Canada, which has been used to reduce railroad crews to the status of industrial serfs, on call 24/7 for work.

The Modi government’s attitude to the carnage on the country’s rail system reflects the same cynical indifference towards the lives of the poor working people evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of people were allowed to die because of the criminal policy of the pro-business regime in failing to implement necessary health measures.

All over the world, the frenzied drive towards imperialist war and profit-gouging by the ruling elite has led to a colossal neglect in infrastructure building and maintenance. This is reflected in disasters such as the rail crash in Tempi, Greece, in which 57 people were killed, mostly students returning from their holidays, and the derailing of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio, which poisoned the small town—air, water and soil—with chemicals carried in the train’s tank cars.

In India, where the railroads are owned by the state, the same process is at work. The Modi government ignores public services, which are crucial for millions of workers and rural poor—a staggering 8.4 billion people use the railroad passenger system each year. Meanwhile, the government has been lavishly spending for military armaments, including highly sophisticated drones, warplanes, tanks, missiles and nuclear weapons, as it has rallied behind the US imperialism in its war drive against China.

All the main bourgeois parties in India share responsibility for this program of militarism and war against the working class at home. The Congress Party, now in opposition, has ruled the country for more than half of the time since independence in 1947, and has likewise ignored basic safety in India’s railway network.

The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, made a mild criticism of the neglect of rail safety, but it has propped up Congress Party governments and non-BJP coalitions for three decades, thus sharing their responsibility for the disaster. They are just as enthusiastic proponents of Indian capitalism as Congress and the BJP.

Brazil’s Congress launches January 8 coup inquiry as Lula covers for the military

Tomas Castanheira

More than four months after the fascist storming of the seats of political power in Brasilia by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Congress has begun a Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPMI) into the Acts of January 8, 2023. The presentation of the agenda for the six-month investigation, which was scheduled for Thursday, has been postponed until next week.

Pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators invade Brazilian government buildings. [Photo: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil]

The events that this Commission of Inquiry are to investigate represent the biggest shock to Brazil’s civilian regime since it was established in1985-88, after 21 years of military dictatorship. The attempted coup of January 8, which was unquestionably prepared at the highest echelons of the state and the armed forces, revealed that sections of the Brazilian ruling class are determined to dispense with any democratic facade and reestablish dictatorship as their means of exercising political power.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in January, the attack in Brasilia “represented both the culmination of the offensive by Bolsonaro and his civilian and military allies to promote a coup to overturn the election, and the first episode in a new political stage of the developing fascist movement in Brazil.”

The response of the Brazilian establishment in the following months, particularly that of the Workers Party (PT) government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has demonstrated that there exists no faction of the bourgeoisie that is capable or willing to respond to the growing fascist threat. The conditions in which the parliamentary investigation into the coup attempt is being held only confirm this elementary truth. 

The long delay in convening the Commission of Inquiry is the result of the PT government’s determination to prevent a public investigation into the conspiracy that, in the words of the president himself, came close to toppling him from power “so that some general could take over the government.”

After working to dissuade congressmen from the PT itself from convening an inquiry, the Lula government entered into frantic negotiations with its far-right allied parties, such as União Brasil, to block the CPMI. In February, the government leader in Congress, Randolfe Rodrigues, declared that they were “working to disarm this CPMI,” which he said was “led by the opposition” in order to “obstruct the ongoing investigations [into the] responsibility of those who committed the terrorist acts of January 8, 2023.”

The government was forced to invest heavily—with an ample distribution of public offices and funds, according to media reports—to get its allied parties to withdraw support for a proposal that it effectively characterized as sabotage of ongoing investigations into the coup attempt. This very fact reveals the fragile foundations upon which the PT’s power rests.

While the PT fought to limit investigations exclusively to the secret operations of the Federal Police and the Supreme Court (STF), the fascistic opposition led by Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) doggedly sought the opening of the public inquiry into the coup that it itself had planned. The PL and its allies aim to use the CPMI to create a platform to wave the political banners of the January 8 coup, while spreading the lie that the PT was the real architect of the invasion of government buildings, having purposefully undermined security and infiltrated agents responsible for “acts of vandalism.”

This false narrative by Bolsonaro’s supporters gained momentum after the leak in mid-April of security camera footage showing Lula’s Institutional Security Cabinet minister, Gen. Gonçalves Dias, walking among the protesters occupying the Planalto presidential palace. In response, the government fired Gonçalves Dias and agreed to set up the Commission of Inquiry to reaffirm, according to Randolfe, that “we were not the executioners of January 8, we are the victims.”

Even after having agreed to the inquiry, the Lula government is openly seeking to derail the work of the investigation. On the eve of its installation, Randolfe and the leader of the PT caucus, Zeca Dirceu, had dinner with the president of the commission, Arthur Maia, of União Brasil. According to Veja magazine, they demanded from Maia “‘responsibility’ in dealing with the military.” A participant interviewed by the magazine summarized the contents of the discussion: “The government recognizes that the relationship with the Armed Forces is not good and that it is not possible to stretch the rope, put the military against the wall, and throw the CPMI over them.”

The discussion reported by Veja is entirely consistent with the attitude and objectives openly pursued by the PT. On the opening day of the CPMI, May 25, Zeca Dirceu declared to CNN that this investigation “actually should not even exist.” According to the PT leader, “the political class should be dealing with hunger, job creation, education, health care,” and most importantly, “approving a new sustainable fiscal regime.”

In other words, as it seeks the unity of the Brazilian bourgeoisie to confront a working class increasingly impatient with the decline in its social conditions, the PT cannot allow the public agenda to be lost in exposing and fighting a fascist conspiracy within the state.

In particular, the PT wishes to prevent at any cost the exposure of the military high command’s engagement in systematic attacks on the legitimacy of the electoral process; its official support for a “popular mobilization” to overthrow the elected government; and its conspiratorial discussions, reported by various sources, of a possible uprising to consolidate a coup.

As it refuses to disarm the civilian and military forces acting to overthrow democracy, the PT seeks to buy their favors. In a revealing interview, Navy Commander Marcos Olsen, sworn in last month, declared: “I find it absolutely justifiable, in light of all that has occurred, that the president [Lula] has his reservations about the military in an ideological political context.... But, since the first conversation I had with him, he has always been concerned about assuring investments for the Force.”

Despite Lula’s attempts to cover up the tensions between his government and the military by showering it with increasing state resources, his government cannot buy its way out of these contradictions. American imperialism, which conspired alongside the Brazilian military to overthrow the elected government of João Goulart in 1964, remains a key player in this process. 

Seeking to secure its strategic interests in Latin America, permeated by its growing war campaign against Russia and China, Washington is again establishing independent and extra-constitutional relations with the Brazilian military. This alarming fact was made explicit by the leaked Pentagon documents, which revealed that Brazilian Navy officials maintained contacts with the US government, seeking to shift the Lula administration’s foreign policy towards a closer alignment with Washington. 

Recently, the daily Estado de São Paulo reported that the Brazilian Army organized a major international seminar with the US and NATO countries, from which it deliberately excluded Russia and China without consulting the government. According to the newspaper, along with a recent episode in which the Ukrainian government requested the purchase of Brazilian armored vehicles directly from the Ministry of Defense, the seminar was seen among Lula’s officials “as an example of how military diplomacy clashed with that of the government.”