Bangladesh’s right-wing interim government moves to consolidate its power, end popular ferment

Keith Jones

Two-and-a-half  weeks after a popular uprising forced the flight of long time Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s military-installed interim government continues to consolidate its authority and press for the resumption of “normal life” in a country marked by grinding poverty, savage worker exploitation, and gaping social inequality.

It is doing so with the support of the Students Against Discrimination (SAD), the student movement whose agitation triggered the mass protests that led to the fall of Hasina’s 16-year-old Awami League regime. The ostensible left parties, many of which are grouped together in the Left Democratic Alliance, and the trade unions are also backing and pledging to work with the interim government, as are the principal opposition party, the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), and big business.

The interim government includes two SAD leaders among its 21 “special advisors” or ministers, and has otherwise tried to give itself “progressive” airs.

However, it is manifestly a right-wing capitalist government. It is back-stopped by the military, which oversaw its formation and remains very much the power behind the throne.

The government’s first orders of business are ensuring that capitalist “law and order” is re-established, Bangladesh’s garment industry resumes pumping out profits for global investors, and the IMF austerity measures Hasina agreed to in Jan. 2023 in exchange for a $4.7 billion emergency loan are implemented.

Muhammad Yunus speaks to the media in Dhaka, Bangladesh, March 3, 2024. [AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu]

The government’s right-wing, anti-working-class character is personified by the “chief special advisor,” Muhammad Yunus. The 84-year-old Yunus is a former banker and an internationally-celebrated advocate of micro-finance and petty-bourgeois entrepreneurship as the path to capitalist development. He has close connections to Washington, international capital, and various European imperialist powers.

In addition to taking the role of de facto prime minister, Yunus has given himself direct charge over numerous important ministries, including defence, energy, textiles and jute, education, and information and broadcasting.

With the support of the SAD, the BNP, and last but not least the military, Yunus is replacing various Awami League loyalists and appointees at the top of key state institutions. Their replacements are almost invariably persons associated with the BNP or technocrats with ties to domestic big business and/or international organizations like the IMF and World Bank.

In a move which is no doubt gaining it some popular support, the interim government has also taken action against certain crony capitalists who profited enormously from their corrupt ties with the previous government. The S. Alim Group, which is accused of siphoning off billions from the country’s largest private bank to support its global operations, has been stripped of its control over the Islami Bank.

Earlier this week, Yunus met with the newly-appointed head of Bangladesh’s central bank and former leading IMF official Ahsan H. Mansur. They agreed that the bank should move to curb rising inflation by adopting a “restrictive” monetary policy. That is, that it should tighten the money supply and raise interest rates, thereby reducing access to credit, slowing economic activity and driving up unemployment. Under capitalism the brunt of such a “war on inflation” inevitably falls on the working class and rural toilers.

The Yunus-led interim government has been warmly welcomed by the western powers, especially Washington. The latter clearly hopes that it can leverage its close ties with Yunus to prevail on Bangladesh to put greater distance between itself and Beijing.

While Hasina enjoyed very close ties to India—America’s principal South Asian/Indian Ocean region ally—Washington deemed her too ready to pursue a policy of “strategic non-alignment,” using the US-China rivalry to play one off against the other so as to extract maximum favours from both.

For this reason, Washington became increasingly critical of Hasina and vocal in its criticisms of her government’s use of state violence and politically-manipulated court cases to suppress its political opponents, including the BNP and its Islamist ally, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami.

At an August 20 press briefing, Pentagon Press Secretary Major-General Pat Ryder lauded the US-Bangladesh “defence relationship.” He went on to say that Washington looks “forward to working” with the Bangladesh military and interim government “to support our shared values and interests, such as a free and open Indo-Pacific”—code-words for upholding US dominance of the world’s most populous and rapidly growing economic region.

According to numerous reports, the Biden administration pressed the previous Hasina-led government to allow it to build a military base on Saint Martin Island, a coral reef situated close to shipping lanes in the Bay of Bengal.

To pave the way for the interim government’s formation, the military had the president, a largely ceremonial figure, dissolve the parliament the day after it hustled Hasina out of the country, having concluded her attempt to cling to power through mass violence had dangerously destabilized bourgeois rule.

Legally the interim government’s raison d’etre is to organize fresh elections to replace the previous Awami League-dominated parliament, which was chosen in a vote last January that most of the opposition boycotted on the grounds it was rigged.

However, as yet the interim government has said nothing about when new elections will be held; only that it will not be within the three-month period given for a “caretaker” government to do so in a constitutional clause that Hasina abrogated. Nor has Yunus announced when the interim government will outline its timetable for new elections.

He and other government representatives, along with much of the capitalist media, are claiming that key state institutions were so corrupted under Hasina’s “fascist rule” that time must be given to fundamentally reform them.

Everything suggests that Yunus and the military intend to use a prolonged period of rule by the unelected interim government to implement IMF-dictated austerity, privatization, and other “structural reforms” demanded by domestic and global capital.

In a dangerous development, 19 public post-secondary institutions, including 11 universities and six medical colleges, have imposed a blanket ban on student politics. Thirteen of these have also prohibited teachers and staff from engaging in political activity. SAD and many of the student groups affiliated with it are wrongheadedly supporting these bans on the grounds that the student wings of the traditional political parties have long bullied students and wielded inordinate control over campus life.

Bangladeshi garment workers block a road demanding their unpaid wages during a protest in which hundreds participated in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, April 16, 2020. (AP Photo/Al-emrun Garjon)

Last week, the UN said that, based on reports from the media and protesters, it concluded some 650 people were killed between July 16, when Hasina ordered police and Awami League thugs to initiate a campaign of mass violence against students protesting against a regressive, discriminatory government-job allocation system, and August 6.

On Tuesday, the non-governmental Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) released a report that said at least 819 people had been killed in political violence between July 16 and August 18, and a further 25,000 had been injured, mostly by police bullets, rubber bullets, tear gas and pellets.

According to the HRSS, the majority of the deaths came in the final days of the Hasina regime and the immediate aftermath of its fall, when dozens of police stations were attacked, and reactionary elements took advantage of the breakdown in authority to mount communal attacks on temples, homes and businesses of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. As across South Asia, the Bangladeshi ruling class has a long and vile record of using communalism and communal violence to divert social anger along reactionary lines.

The HRSS said that of the 293 dead whose professional identity it could establish, 144 were students, 57 labourers, 5 journalists, 35 of other professions, and 51 were police or other security personnel.

The Hasina regime, long lauded on the financial pages of the western media for supposedly presiding over rapid capitalist growth, fell victim to mass popular anger over joblessness, poverty, state repression and an ever-widening chasm between a small layer of Bangladeshi capitalists and their managerial enforcers and other hangers-on, and the vast majority of the population, comprised of workers and rural toilers.

What began as a student protest over the limited issue of government job quotas exploded into a popular uprising in response to the Awami League government’s brutal repression of the students.

However, the working class—and this remains the great danger—was effectively reduced to the role of a spectator and then part of the supporting cast in these events. Workers and their families joined in the mass protests. But the working class did not intervene as an independent force, under its own class banner, advancing its own democratic and social demands, and using the methods of class struggle, strikes, factory occupations and general strikes. For this, the various Stalinist and other left parties and the trade unions are responsible.

For decades, that have orbited around the two main capitalist parties, the Awami League and the BNP, arguing that workers can advance their interests by pressuring and even openly aligning in electoral blocs with these right-wing capitalist and pro-imperialist parties.

Today, under conditions of social upheaval and ferment in the streets, these organizations are redoubling their efforts to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie by boosting the legitimacy of the right-wing capitalist government hastily improvised by the military. The Stalinist parties and union leaders are also joining Yunus and the military in unduly flattering the student protesters.

That the students showed great courage is indisputable. Nor is their sincerity in question. But if the ruling class is today hailing them as “martyrs” and “heroes” and leaders of a “revolution,” it is with the aim of exploiting their petty-bourgeois naiveté, delusions and aspirations. 

Australian “Closing the Gap” report reveals worsening conditions for Aboriginal youth and workers

Sue Phillips

The latest annual government “Closing the Gap” report, produced by the pro-business Productivity Commission, shows a further deterioration in the economic and social conditions affecting indigenous workers and youth under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government.

Aboriginal children playing at an out-station settlement, north of Alice Springs in central Australia [Photo by WSWS/John Hulme]

This follows a scathing report by the Commission in February which warned that the Closing the Gap agreement, which is meant to improve these conditions, was on the verge of failure. It criticised the government for “weak” actions and “unfulfilled promises” in critical areas.

The most recent data evaluates 15 of the agreement’s 19 socio-economic targets, covering areas such as life expectancy, health and wellbeing, employment, education and training, land and sea rights, housing, incarceration, family safety and internet access. Of the 19 indices monitored, only five are on target, even by the limited and narrow goals set.

Regardless of successive governments’ token official apologies for injustices against Aboriginal people, and the Labor government’s posturing of concern during its failed indigenous Voice referendum campaign, four key areas are not only stagnating but worsening.

Adult indigenous incarceration rates continued to rise significantly in 2023, reaching 2,265.8 per 100,000, up by 114.7 per 100,000 from the previous year. This data alone indicates the real federal and state Labor governments’ response to the social crisis, which is to adopt more punitive law and order measures.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicide rates continue to rise, with the latest data showing a rate of 29.9 per 100,000 people. This is a substantial increase over the past two years under the Albanese government. Suicide was the leading cause of death for indigenous people aged 15–39 in 2022.

Those aged 35-44 years had the highest rate of suicide—52.3 per 100,000. That was almost five times the rate of 10.8 per 100,000 for non-indigenous people.

Despite the 2008 parliamentary apology by the Rudd Labor government to the “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal children removed from their families, the over representation of indigenous children in out-of-home care is increasing. In 2023, the rate was 57.2 per 1,000 children, up from the 2019 baseline of 54.2. The involvement of child protection agencies was reported as “worsening.”

Last year’s rate was 12.1 times higher than for non-indigenous children. In Victoria, the rate was even more extreme at 102.9 per 1,000, or 22.5 times the rate for non-Indigenous children.

Recently, a South Australian report revealed that Aboriginal newborns are increasingly taken from their mothers immediately after birth. These removals, planned by child protection agencies during the mothers’ pregnancies, have been carried out without the mothers’ prior knowledge. Last year, the state’s Department for Child Protection removed 105 babies under one month old, with about a third being Aboriginal and most removed before they were a week old. This inhumane practice is creating further inter-generational trauma for Aboriginal communities.

Overall, the life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people will not meet the target of zero by 2031. In 2020–2022, non-indigenous males were expected to live 8.8 years longer than indigenous males. Non-indigenous females had an 8.1-year advantage over indigenous females.

Life expectancy for indigenous males was just 71.9 years and 75.6 years for females. Over the past 15 years since the Closing the Gap program was launched, only small improvements have been made, with indigenous male life expectancy increasing by 4.4 years and female life expectancy by 2.5 years.

This is not just an issue of indigenous disadvantage. The dire situation for the Aboriginal population, the most marginalised and disadvantaged section of the working class, is occurring amid the Labor government’s austerity measures against all working people.

This government is presiding over the steepest decline in living standards for the working class in decades, advancing a corporate agenda, further cutting real wages and social services, while lowering taxes for the wealthy and spending billions on war preparations.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) research has found a significant correlation between poverty and suicide across the population as a whole. From 2001 to 2022, suicide rates were notably higher in the most disadvantaged areas. In the poorest areas, the suicide rate was more than double that of wealthier areas.

The Closing the Gap report understates the impact of this broader inequality. The devastating issue of Aboriginal children taking their own lives goes unreported in the data. Earlier this year, a coronial inquest investigated the suicides of 13 Aboriginal youth, aged 10 to 23. Tragically, this included a 10-year-old girl, her 13-year-old sister, a 12-year-old, a 16-year-old boy and a 17-year-old. These deaths occurred over a four-year span in the remote Kimberley region of northern Western Australia (WA), which has one of the highest suicide rates globally. In April, the media reported the suicide of another 10-year-old WA Aboriginal boy, who was in foster care.

Alongside the worsening rates of incarceration for adults, the target to reduce the rate of Aboriginal young people in detention by at least 30 percent by 2031 is not on track.

According to a AIHW report, on an average day in the Northern Territory (NT), 1.75 percent of indigenous children aged 10–17 are in youth detention or under “community-based supervision.” This is 44 times the rate at which non-indigenous children are incarcerated.

This year the NT Labor government, with the full support of the Albanese government, initiated two police-state style curfews in the town of Alice Springs after a handful of violent incidents fuelled by the acute social crisis. This underlines Labor’s attitude to Aboriginal youth in particular who are subjected to aggressive over-policing. The NT has almost three times as many police per capita as the country as a whole.

Human Rights Commission reports this year raised “grave concern” at the treatment of children in adult watch houses. One recent media report showed footage of an intellectually disabled, 13-year-old indigenous female handcuffed, naked, covered in her own urine in an isolation cell in a Queensland adult watch house. Such brutalising and criminalising of indigenous children is commonplace. Some children have been held in isolation for up to 30 days.

Social indicators from the latest Closing the Gap report show that the most significant disadvantages are in remote Aboriginal communities. These areas, isolated from major regional centres, often hundreds of kilometres away, suffer from a lack of employment, inadequate education and healthcare services, overcrowded housing, and deprivation of even the most basic necessities, like proper sanitation and clean drinking water.

For years, governments and right-wing think tanks, such as the Centre for Independent Studies, have argued that unless these communities are “economically viable”—meaning profitable—they should be shut down. As a result, these communities have been deprived of resources and infrastructure, effectively pushing them toward closure.

Across the country, nearly 500 remote communities lack clean drinking water, a basic human right. This is despite repeated reports, with governments largely ignoring the issue. Some communities suffer from contaminated water with harmful substances like microbes, bacteria, nitrates, arsenic and uranium.

This has led to poor health outcomes, low life expectancy and the highest rate of suicides. In 2020–22, life expectancy of Aboriginal people in remote areas was five years shorter than in major cities and regional centres.

By contrast, significant advances made were in indigenous land and sea acquisition. Data showed a 7.8 percent increase in the area of land subject to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ legal rights. The target of 15 percent increase by 2030 on the sea covered by indigenous rights had been met six years ahead of time, involving 113,461 square kilometres as of June 2023.

Land and sea rights acquisitions have been promoted by the Labor government as part of programs to “empower” indigenous business and drive an “entrepreneurial spirit,” as Albanese touted in his speech at the annual Garma Festival in the NT this month.

The Indigenous Procurement Policy, first introduced by the Liberal-National Coalition government in 2015, established annual targets for all government departments to award contracts to indigenous enterprises as “preferred service providers.”

This has led to state and territory governments fast-tracking Native Title acquisitions. In 2022, according to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, about 84 percent of the NT’s coastline has been recognised as owned by Aboriginal communities through Native Title.

As throughout capitalist society, there is a vast gulf between the Aboriginal financial elite, which includes CEOs of land and sea councils, academics, politicians and business operators, and the vast majority of the Aboriginal population, who are among the most impoverished sections of the working class.

The government’s agenda of prioritising indigenous capitalist enterprises was behind Labor’s attempt to insert an indigenous Voice advisory body in the Constitution. The Voice would have been a means of integrating even further the indigenous elite into the state apparatus to further the pro-business program of the Albanese government, as well as its war plans.

Already the 2022 Closing the Gap report disclosed a growing relationship between Aboriginal businesses and the military, with the Department of Defence underlined as one of the largest procurers of indigenous goods and services.

The claim that the Closing the Gap program, launched in 2008 by the Rudd Labor government, would address the injustices of the “Stolen Generations” and overcome the atrocious conditions of most Aboriginal people has proven to be an utter fraud.

Gold price reaches record high

Nick Beams

The price of gold hit a new record high this week, rising from $2,300 per ounce in June to $2,531 on Tuesday, in another sign of the growing instability in the global financial and monetary system.

Gold bars [AP Photo/Seth Wenig]

Among the immediate reasons put forward for the latest rise is the prospect of an interest rate cut by the US Federal Reserve at its next meeting in September followed by further cuts before the end of the year, tending to push down the value of the dollar and making gold a more attractive asset.

Such explanations, however, do not explain the fundamental trend which began in 2022, and which has accelerated this year, resulting in a rise on the gold price by one fifth so far, with predictions that it could go to $3,000.

While attributing the latest surge to US and European buyers positioning themselves for interest rate cuts, the Financial Times (FT) noted: “Gold has been on a blistering run since the end of 2022, underpinned by emerging market central banks seeking to diversify their reserves away from the dollar, as well as huge demand from Chinese investors.”

The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, is also a major buyer with its gold reserves increasing every month. Last year it bought more gold than any other central bank in the world. At the same time, it has been reducing its holdings of the dollar, which have dipped to below $800 billion, down from around $1.1 trillion in 2021.

In the first half the year, purchases by central banks hit a record 483 tonnes and have been a key factor in lifting the price of gold by a third since 2022.

Major buyers include the Czech National Bank and the National Bank of Poland as well as the Qatar Central Bank and the Central Bank of Turkey which increased its gold holdings by 30 tons in the first quarter, bringing them to 570 tons.

The beginning of the surge is clearly connected to the rising geo-political and geo-economy and financial tensions following the onset of the US-NATO provoked war in Ukraine.

One of the first actions of the US and its allies was to impose a freeze on the $300 billion worth of dollar assets of the Russian central bank, largely held in the European banking system, together with other financial sanctions.

The freezing of the Russian assets and the prospect they will never be returned—the US wants them to be used to finance the war—sent a shock wave around the world as countries realised they could be subject to the same action if they crossed the US path.

As the New York Times reported back in May: “Many central banks, including China started acquiring gold after the US Treasury Department took the rare step of freezing Russia’s dollar holdings under sanctions imposed on Moscow.”

Guan Tao, global chief economist at the logistics firm BOC International, told the Times, the sanctions had shaken the “foundation of trust for the current international monetary system” which forced central banks to diversify their holdings.

Commenting on the latest rise to the Guardian, a senior analyst at the trading platform XS, voiced widely held views. The rise in the gold price, he said, reflected a “rise in uncertainty and investors’ flight to safe havens” and that with economic, geopolitical, and monetary factors driving this surge” gold was solidifying its position.

There are also indications that wealthy investors, often in so-called family companies, have been increasing their gold holdings because of fears about the stability of the dollar as the international reserve currency, due to the ever-increasing rise in US debt.

The World Gold Council (WGC) reported in July that private purchases of gold had surged to 329 tonnes in the three months to June. This was almost five times higher than in the previous quarter and lifted the demand for gold in the June quarter to the highest for that period since records began to be collected in 2000.

The chief market strategist at the WGC, John Reade, told the FT that anecdotal evidence suggested that wealthy family offices were among the main buyers because of concerns over the fiscal position of the US government.

“I couldn’t explain why gold was so high,” he said. “I was looking for the missing buyer, who might be people buying because of renewed or accelerating fears over US debt.”

Those fears are not misplaced. The independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said that US government debt is on an “unprecedented” trajectory. The Treasury has warned that the present rate of increase is “unsustainable” as has the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

The warnings about US debt levels are written in facts and figures. The present debt level is more than $35 trillion and it has been calculated that it increases by $1 trillion every 100 days.

Increased spending on US wars is a major factor. Another is the increased interest bill on existing debt. Over the past decade US debt interest payments have more than doubled and the CBO has reported that debt servicing costs, now heading to $1 trillion, surpassed military spending this year as well as outlays on Medicaid. On average the US is spending more than $2 billion a day on interest payments.

A situation has now arisen where the US must borrow money just to pay the interest bill on the money it has already borrowed.

This raises the existential question of the role of the dollar as the global currency, a status which has conferred enormous privileges on US imperialism, allowing it to finance its military and domestic spending through the accumulation of debt to an extent not possible for any other country.

But there are objective limits to this process. Since August 1971, when Nixon withdrew the gold backing from the US dollar, it has operated internationally as a fiat currency, that is, one which is not backed by a store of real value in the form of gold, but which is dependent on the continued financial power of the US state.

That power rests, in the final analysis, on the economy. The US economy, however, is shot through with debt and severely eroded by financial parasitism, in which profit is increasingly accumulated, not through the expansion of industrial capacity as it was in days gone by, but by complex and riskier deals on financial markets.

Ukrainian parliament passes law banning Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Jason Melanovski

Ukraine’s parliament moved forward on Tuesday with long-standing plans to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). A lopsided 265 votes to 29 were cast in favor of a bill that will shut down religious groups supposedly linked to Moscow. 

President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to quickly sign the bill into law. In language commonly used by the fascist right, he praised the vote as a means to  strengthen the “spiritual independence” of the country.

Under the law, each individual Orthodox parish accused of ties to Moscow will be given nine months to leave the UOC and join another Orthodox church such as the government-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) or risk being banned in Ukrainian courts.

As Ukrainian-Canadian political science Professor Ivan Katchanovski noted on X, despite government persecution, the UOC still owns the largest number of parishes with 9,107 compared to 5,194 among other Orthodox churches. A complete ban on the UOC would entail a potentially huge transfer of buildings and property to the government-favored OCU.

The move comes as Ukraine continues its NATO-backed adventurist invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, while Ukrainian troops keep losing territory in the Donbass to Russia. The situation for Ukrainian forces in the region has been described as “catastrophic” by military analyst Julian Repke in the German tabloid Bild.

On Monday, Ukrainian authorities ordered the evacuation of the eastern city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk, which was previously home to over 65,000 residents. About 53,000 people, including approximately 4,000 children, now remain in the city with Ukrainian authorities warning that Russia will likely take both Pokrovsk and its surrounding villages within the next two weeks. 

According to Strana.ua, three companies of a battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, including their commanders, refused to execute the orders of the military high command because of a “huge personnel shortage.” Ukrainian troops are outnumbered by Russian troops by a ratio of one to three. Ukrainian soldiers are reportedly also deserting in large numbers, in what are growing indications of the unfolding disintegration of the Ukrainian armed forces.

This is not the first time that the Ukrainian government has escalated its attack on democratic rights and efforts to whip up ethnic tensions amid a severe military crisis. In March of last year, Zelensky announced the impending eviction of UOC monks from the 980-year-old Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, a well known historical and religious site in Kiev, just as the Ukrainian government made public plans to continue pouring its troops into the “meat grinder” of Bakhmut where Russian and Ukrainian soldiers died in the tens of thousands.

At the time, Zelensky indicated that the eviction was just the start of a broader campaign to whip up religious and ethnic xenophobia stating, “We will continue this movement. We will not allow the terrorist state any opportunity to manipulate the spiritual life of our people, to destroy Ukrainian shrines—our Lavras—or to steal any valuables from them.”

While the UOC has had a long-standing affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church, it declared its independence from Moscow in May 2022, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church still includes UOC-affiliated clergy in its work, however. 

In 1991, only 39 percent of Ukrainians identified as Orthodox Christian. As a result of the disorientation caused by decades of Stalinism and the devastating socio-economic consequences of capitalist restoration, in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, religious sentiments and obscurantism grew. Various rival branches of the Orthodox Church emerged, each with their own geopolitical orientation and political allegiances. By 2015, a Pew Research Center study found that approximately 78 percent of Ukraine’s adult population identified as Orthodox Christian.

Following the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev, the right-wing nationalist government of Petro Poroshenko intervened strongly in the creation and promotion of a single Kiev-aligned Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in opposition to the Moscow-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Both antecedent separate Orthodox churches of the OCU had supported the 2014 Maidan coup and would become a central part of the NATO-aligned Poroshenko  government’s push to promote nationalism, militarism and anti-Russian sentiment.

The government-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine was formed in 2018, out of these two smaller rival pro-Maidan Orthodox churches. In 2019, the OCU was granted independence or “autocephaly” from the Moscow-based Patriarchate under Patriarch Kirill, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Since the 2019 split from Moscow, the two separate churches have been engaged in an embittered rivalry over property, parishioners and religious sites. In this conflict, the Kiev-aligned OCU has received the full backing of the right-wing Ukrainian government, of which it has become an integral part. The invasion by Russia in February 2022, marked a new stage in the religious and political war between the two churches with Kiev moving quickly to denounce the UOC as “collaborators."

In October of 2022, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), which maintains close ties to the far-right, began to regularly carry out raids in search of “anti-Ukrainian” materials at UOC churches, impose sanctions on its bishops and supporters, and open criminal cases against dozens of its clergymen.

For centuries, the Orthodox Church in both Russia and Ukraine has promoted obscurantism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. Its clergy members have been guilty of participating in some of the worst anti-Jewish pogroms of the past, and continue to maintain close relations with the far-right in both countries.

However, there is clearly nothing progressive in Zelensky’s crackdown on one religious organization while supporting its equally reactionary rival. It is part of the systematic efforts to place far-right Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Russian chauvinism at the center of the ideology and politics of the Ukrainian state. 

The Ukrainian far-right has endorsed the government’s escalating attacks on the Church, while edging Zelensky on to take even more drastic measures. 

The Chief of Staff of the neo-Nazi Azov brigade Bohdan Krotevuxh wrote on X, “According to the UOC, this is not yet a ban, it is only the first step. So continue to fight the Russian FSB agent network—the UOC.”

Meanwhile social media accounts of the neo-fascist Right Sector organization complained that “It took almost a year for the Verkhovna Rada to pass a law in the second reading prohibiting the activities of religious organizations associated with the Russian Federation. But here, too, the law is not without tolerance. According to the law, the UOC is given nine months to sever ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. As if ten years of war were not enough.”

These same fascist forces have also praised Zelensky’s high-risk invasion of Russia’s Kursk region which they have labeled “historically Ukrainian.” The Ukrainian far-right has long laid claims to the Kursk region and several other Russian regions which it seeks to integrate into a “Greater Ukraine”.

Study finds 64 percent higher risk of dementia among elderly hospitalized COVID-19 patients

Bill Shaw

A new study has found that COVID-19 is associated with new-onset cognitive impairment that persists beyond the infection, as well as a higher risk of dementia among elderly hospitalized patients. The study was a review and meta-analysis of 18 previously published studies. There were significant differences in methodology and measures reported among the studies, but the researchers nevertheless were able to pool results to generate several new findings.

[Photo by Rayne Zaayman-Gallant / CC BY 4.0]

The researchers found that people 65 years old and older with COVID-19 acquired new diagnoses of dementia at 1.64 times the rate of uninfected controls for the 12 months following infection. These results were based on data from over 800,000 patients, half of whom were controls who did not have COVID-19. The risk of dementia was highest for females, African Americans, and people over the age of 85.

The researchers pooled the results of seven studies that used the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to measure cognitive function. In these studies, 98 percent of patients were hospitalized for COVID-19 and over 99 percent had no dementia diagnosis prior to their COVID-19 diagnosis.

The researchers found a mean MoCA score of 23.34 (95 percent confidence interval 22.24 – 24.43) across seven studies included in their meta-analysis, where a score of 26 to 30 indicates normal cognitive performance. Excluding one study that reported median vs. mean MoCA score did not change the results, nor did excluding two studies that included patients with neurological symptoms during the COVID-19 infection (the others specifically excluded such patients). This means that the result was not biased by certain studies that differed in significant ways from the others.

The researchers also analyzed MoCA scores according to time since COVID-19 diagnosis. The mean MoCA score less than 3 months after COVID-19 diagnosis was 22.32 (95 percent confidence interval 20.60 – 24.04), whereas the mean MoCA score 3 months or more after COVID-19 was 24.19 (95 percent confidence interval 23.58 – 24.80). In both cases, there was cognitive impairment because the upper end of the 95 percent confidence interval was below the normal score of 26 or higher.

Across 8 studies that reported the proportion of post-COVID patients who developed cognitive impairment, the overall proportion was 65 percent (95 percent confidence interval 44 percent - 81 percent). This result means that of all patients aged 65 and older, and who did not have a dementia diagnosis prior to hospitalization with COVID-19, 65 percent developed cognitive impairment associated with their COVID-19. A similar sensitivity analysis either did not change this result or actually increased the proportion with cognitive impairment.

The proportion of post-COVID patients with cognitive impairment measured within 3 months vs. after 3 months of the COVID-19 diagnosis was 85 percent (95 percent confidence interval 67 percent to 94 percent) vs. 49 percent (95 percent confidence interval 31 percent - 68 percent), respectively. Two studies measured MoCA scores in patients without COVID-19 with an average score of 26. 

Two studies measured longitudinal change in patients’ MoCA scores, showing that cognitive function significantly improved between the first (T1) and second (T2) measurement. The average T1 score was 19.1; the average T2 score was 23.4. Notably the T2 score remained below the threshold 26.

Most of these studies reported results on adults aged 65 years old and older, and thus the findings apply primarily to the elderly. The MoCA score results were from hospitalized patients, suggesting more severe COVID-19 disease. Also, many of the studies included results from prior to availability of the vaccine, and no studies reported or broke down their results by vaccination studies. 

All these factors limit the generalizability of the results. It is therefore hard to extrapolate the results to the general population.

Nevertheless, some conclusions may be drawn. First, the age group most likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and that accounts for approximately 60 percent of all hospitalizations with COVID-19 in the United States is 65 years and older. Second, the overwhelming majority of hospitalized individuals have not been vaccinated. One study found that between January and August 2023, of all individuals over the age of 65 who were hospitalized with COVID-19, only 23.5 percent had received the recommended vaccine schedule.

The net effect is that although hospitalizations for COVID-19 have been declining, they still overwhelmingly occur in unvaccinated individuals over the age of 65. Thus, the results presented in this new study are still highly concerning.

Also, given that the burden of cognitive disability or dementia in the elderly was already high prior to the pandemic, the implications of the study are staggering. In the United States in 2019, cognitive disability was the second most common type of disability. Worldwide in 2019, the World Health Organization reported that dementia is one of the top ten causes of disability in people aged 60 and older.

The same World Health Organization report cited a global cost of dementia of $1.3 trillion with a projected rise to $2.8 trillion in 2030. That projection of course was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and based on global trends in dementia onset and increases in the cost of healthcare that existed at that time. 

The ruling class through its criminal “let it rip” policy has added hundreds of thousands and likely millions of cases of dementia to this global toll during the course of the pandemic with their associated societal costs.

UK Labour government mounts anti-immigration offensive targeting over 14,500 people

Robert Stevens

This week the Home Office of Labour government Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a “major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity, to make sure that immigration and asylum rules are respected and enforced”.

This includes “new plans for the next 6 months to achieve the highest rate of removals of those with no right to be here, including failed asylum seekers, for 5 years.”

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper at the National Police Chiefs' Council gathering, July 11, 2024 [Photo by Andy Taylor - Home Office/Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

With Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour pledged to be a government of war, anti-immigration, and austerity in the service of big business, Cooper announced within two days of taking office the creation of a Gestapo-like Border Security Command. Central to it was setting up a Returns and Enforcement Unit to swiftly deport anyone deemed a “failed” asylum seeker. 

On Wednesday, the Home Office issued its “progress” report as it announced a raft of further anti-immigration measures befitting the most right-wing government in British history.

In the next six months the government plans to deport around 14,500 people deemed to be illegal migrants, topping the two previous six-month highs set during Conservative government rule of 13,410 in 2018 and 14,389 last year. The Home Office said meeting this target was required in “reversing the damaging drop in enforcement over recent years.”

It stated, “This enforcement surge, overseen by Bas Javid, the Home Office’s Director General for Immigration Enforcement, is part of the government’s plans to transform the asylum system and secure UK borders.”

Bas Javid is the brother of Sajid Javid, the former Tory home secretary who played a major role in revoking the British citizenship of a 15 year old girl, Shamima Begum.

Cooper is already overseeing a “summer blitz of illegal immigration raids” involving over 1,000 “Immigrant Enforcement” officials. The mass round-up, said the Home Office, necessitates, “increasing detention spaces to support the higher pace of removals including reopening and adding 290 beds across Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) at Campsfield and Haslar. This increase will ensure there is additional capacity to facilitate higher levels of enforcement and returns so that rules are properly respected.”

The Immigration Removal Centre detention camps have been widely condemned by human rights groups as inhumane, with detainees brutalised by a sadistic regime. When the Hampshire located Haslar IRC closed in 2015, this was partially due to a 2015 parliamentary review of IRCs which Rob McNeil, Deputy Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said had noted “that immigration detention had been expensive and damaging to detainees”.

Campsfield House in Oxfordshire, closed in 2018 after years of atrocious conditions under successive Labour and Conservative governments that resulted in multiple complaints, protests including sit-ins, hunger strikes, and stand-offs in which detainees were confronted by specialised riot squads.

The Socialist Equality Party, in opposing support for Labour in the general election insisted that Starmer’s party had no fundamental differences with the Tories. In reopening Campsfield and Haslar, Labour is implementing plans to bring them back into operation previously advanced by the Johnson/Truss Tory governments in 2022.

What is different from the Tories is the speed at which Labour is enforcing its pledge to remove “illegal” migrants and “secure the borders”. Labour has ditched the Tories policy of attempting to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda—which it denounced as an ineffective expensive “gimmick”—and has switched the resources earmarked for the Rwanda scheme to ensure swift deportations to other countries.

The Home Office statement announced that “Staff are being redeployed to increase removal of failed asylum seekers, which had dropped by 40% since 2010. Three hundred caseworkers have already been reassigned to progress thousands of failed asylum and returns cases, including enforced and voluntary returns.”

Flights that had been primed for Rwanda deportations have been repurposed to deport immigrants to a host of countries. The Home Office boasted that the further deportations would be “Building on 9 successful returns flights in the last six weeks, including the largest-ever chartered return flight, the government is redeploying personnel and resources to support further activity.” The “largest-ever chartered return flight” was the deportation of more than 200 people to Brazil earlier this month.

The Telegraph had the Home Office plans as their second main front page story in Wednesday’s edition, under the inflammatory headline, “I’ll lock up and deport more migrants, vows Cooper”. It referred approvingly to “New returns agreements… signed with Vietnam, which has accounted for the biggest rise in Channel migrants, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Serbia and Georgia following the fast-track removal deal with Albania.”

Much of Labour’s anti-immigrant policy is being formulated in discussion with key European leaders as part of their overall “Fortress Europe” policy, including the fascist Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni who Starmer has developed a close relationship with.

The Home Office statement noted, “This work builds on the Prime Minister’s meeting at the European Political Community last month, where he held discussions with the migration working group alongside Italy, Albania, Germany, Malta, Denmark, Hungary, The Netherlands, and Slovakia. The European leaders discussed border security, their joint efforts to tackle people-smuggling, and the ambition to work collectively with other countries to deliver solutions.”

Labour is enforcing mass deportations under the guise of “smashing the criminal smuggling gangs” organising the perilous cross Channel sailing to the UK. The Home Office announced “up to 100 new specialist intelligence and investigations officers deployed to the National Crime Agency (NCA)” to tackle the gangs.

Far more personnel, including the 300 reassigned caseworkers, and resources are going towards removals and persecutions of asylum seekers and immigrants, beyond anything carried out by previous Conservative governments, including that of Theresa May which implanted a “hostile environment” for asylum seekers and refugees.

Cooper announced a “new intelligence-driven illegal working programme will be rolled out to target, investigate and take down unscrupulous employers who illegally employ those with no right to work here… Those caught working illegally and eligible for removal will be detained, pending their swift removal.”

The acceleration of Labour’s anti-immigration drive comes just days after a week of riots by fascists demanding further clampdowns against asylum seekers. While being forced to arrest and sentence many of those involved to bring the situation under control, the far-right were only able to organise in any number because of the frenzied anti-immigration atmosphere whipped up by Labour and the Tories as they competed over who was best placed to “Stop the Boats”.

The SEP noted the response of the Sun newspaper in the aftermath of the riots, which after demanding Starmer, in terms of arrests and prosecutions, “throw the book” at “far-right thugs”, insisted that the new government had to deal with “the twin problems of violent crime and illegal migration.”

We warned that the Sun’s editorial “can be read as the Labour government’s playbook in the coming weeks.”

These developments are a political indictment of all those such as Stand Up To Racism and groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, who insisted that stopping the fascists grouped around Tommy Robinson and within Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could be isolated from a political struggle against the Starmer government so that alliances could be formed with various trade union bureaucrats and Labour “lefts”.

Labour is already proving to be a greater danger to asylum seekers than the fascist mobs which its use of vile xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric to legitimise war and austerity encouraged. And it will use the strengthened powers for the police, including setting up of a national riot force targeting “extremism,” against the working class.

Ruto’s new Kenyan coalition government to reinstate rejected tax measures

Kipchumba Ochieng

After two months of youth-led protests that were brutally suppressed by police and state-sponsored goons opposing the austerity-driven Finance Bill 2024, the newly formed “broad-based” government of William Ruto is now reinstating tax increases.

On Saturday, Ruto, now leading a national unity government with the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) led by millionaire Raila Odinga, hinted at new tax measures to plug a $2.7 billion revenue shortfall following the forced withdrawal of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) designed Finance Bill on June 25.

Kenyan President William Ruto gives an address at the State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, June 26, 2024

The Finance Bill was meant to raise the same equivalent through hikes in regressive taxes, including the sales tax (VAT), unloading the full burden of the economic crisis on the backs of the working class and rural poor.

Ruto said, “We had a good plans with the additional Sh300 billion in the Finance Bill, 2024, but it was rejected. I have told [Malava constituency MP] Malulu Injendi and other MPs here that we go and plan again for new [tax] measures”.

ODM, which postured as sympathetic to the youth-led protests, will play a leading role. The new Treasury Cabinet Secretary is John Mbadi, one of the four opposition leaders from ODM selected by Odinga and approved by Ruto for the government of national unity.

The youth, workers and rural masses are at a political crossroads.

The hated Kenyan ruling class is proceeding to unload the full economic crisis and debt onto the shoulders of the Kenyan masses, already suffering mass unemployment, soaring costs of living, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and NATO’s war on Russia in the Ukraine. They will continue to conspire and use every weapon and dirty trick at their disposal to divide the youth and workers and crush their resistance.

This will mean continued police state violence, with Ruto’s bloody repression leaving at least 60 dead, 601 injured and 1,376 arrests over the past two months. Another 66 people have been abducted or have gone missing, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

But it will also involve attempts to co-opt the leaders of the Youth protest movement which declared itself “leaderless and tribeless” into well paid positions within the state machine. Last week, more than 400 young people converged at the United Nations offices in Nairobi for the Africa Youth Forum 2024 to discuss how African states can engage in “dialogue” with the youth.

The Guardian spoke to Faith Norah Lukosi, who wrote a piece in the Kenya’s main Daily Nation under the title, “Kenya is ripe for revolution led by youth”. Lukosi says that she is “happy my sentiments have been vindicated in 2024… I believe we are on the right trajectory.” But Lukosi’s version of a “revolution” is indicated by her representing a national fund meant to assist young Kenyans set up commercial enterprises.

The notorious Nairobi Governor Sakaja Johnson, one of the most corrupt politicians in the country who is allegedly behind sending paid-goons to terrorise and break up protests, outlined the co-option strategy. Speaking at the Forum, Sakaja said, “The young people of Kenya, the Millennials and Gen Zs, are not begging to be heard. If they are not on the table, there is no table… We must listen, we must have discussions with our young people.”

The third strategic pillar of the bourgeoisie’s offensive against the workers and oppressed masses is the trade union bureaucracy, led by the Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU-K), comprising 36 trade unions representing over 1.5 million workers. COTU has refused to mobilise its members against austerity and state repression. Amid mounting anger and calls to strike action among teachers, university staff, healthcare workers, civil servants, coffee workers, among others over wages, precariousness and subsidy cuts, COTU is promising to suppress the class struggle.

On Tuesday, COTU Secretary-General Francis Atwoli met with Labour Cabinet Secretary (CS) Alfred Mutua to offer his labour police services. Atwoli said, “I called upon the new CS to ensure that he strictly observes social dialogue to strengthen industrial relations in the country and ensure industrial peace”.

COTU’s affiliated, the Kenya Aviation Workers Union has already acted on this perspective. It called its members on strike last Monday against privatisation plans involving the sale of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), only to postpone it for two weeks pending “dialogue” with Ruto.

The only way to oppose this political conspiracy is by the working class and youth building an independent movement for socialism across Africa and internationally to fight against IMF austerity, the escalation of war and police state rule that are rooted in the capitalist system.

The Gen Z protests, fueled by deep social inequality, widespread unemployment, and unbearable living costs, reveal the necessity for a political struggle against the entire Kenyan political establishment, the capitalist state, and the forces behind it—the IMF and the major imperialist powers of the US and Europe.

Ruto’s decision to withdraw the Finance Bill 2024 was a tactical pullback to stem mass opposition sparked after the events of Bloody Tuesday (June 25), when police gunned down dozens of austerity protestors on the streets of Nairobi and across the country. It was part of a conspiracy hatched among the ruling class, involving ODM, COTU and influential Christian and Muslim clergy, closely assisted by the US and European Union, to buy time.

This fraud was promoted by pseudo-left tendencies like the Revolutionary Socialist League, a section of the International Socialist League (ISL), which claimed, “The people of Kenya have achieved a very significant victory,” and the Stalinist Communist Party of Kenya (CPK), which declared that “the Kenyan masses” had “forced their hand.” Both focus on the demand that Ruto personally resign, failing to address what sort of regime should replace Ruto. Even now the CPK presents a battery of reforms with no explanation of who is to implement them.

The pseudo-left insist that protests must be “leaderless”, “not politics” and “no banners”. Ezra Otieno, a leader of the RSL, told the Australian pseudo-left group Socialist Alternative:

“I think this is a good tactic not to have leaders emerging for now, because the government is actively looking for leaders. […] As the RSL, we go there with a purpose, because we must be in solidarity with the masses—we fully agree with what they say. So we go to the streets, we try to organise our people. When joining in, we do not carry banners as people just go without anything, to move around.”

The CPK, while claiming to that “Our immediate task is to build the highest level of organisation with the best leaders to govern a post-Ruto Kenya. We must counter the narrative that the people in the streets are leaderless, tribeless, and anarchists”, offers as an alternative an ambiguous “pro-poor people organisation”.

It states, “Our campaign must clarify that the masses demand genuine, people-centric leadership. We must lay the groundwork for a formidable pro-poor-people organisation with selfless leaders.”

The sole purpose of such a leadership would be to control popular discontent, arguing that this would “deflate government propaganda that misrepresents our movement and its aims.”

If anyone wants an example of how such supposedly “leaderless” protests led to the creation of capitalist “pro-people” parties, one should look at Spain. There, the indignados protests broke out in 2011, after working class uprisings toppled dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. The revolutionary offensive of the working class in North Africa won the political sympathies of workers and youth in Spain and internationally. Imitating the occupation of Tahrir Square, thousands of youth occupied squares in Madrid, Barcelona, and cities across Spain protesting draconian European Union-imposed austerity and mass unemployment after the 2008 capitalist crash.

Political forces akin to Kenya’s CPK and RSL, Spain’s Anticapitalistas, intervened to advance demands for “no-politics,” “no leadership” and a “horizontal” structure. Without an orientation to the working class, these gatherings ended in empty discussions dominated by Anticapitalistas, which ensured the radicalised youth were fenced off from workers’ struggles.

What emerged out of this movement was the “Left Populist” Podemos, a party created by Stalinist forces and Anticapitalistas that went on to rule with Spain’s main capitalist party, the Socialist Party (PSOE), from 2019 to 2023. Under Podemos, the government handed out billions of euros in EU bailout funds to the banks at the expense of impoverished workers as inflation surged across the world economy. It imposed austerity, smashed strikes, increased military budgets and armed both the Ukrainian and the Israeli regimes for war with Russia and with the Palestinian people.