The Fall of Rajapaksa: Why Democracies Fail Strongmen

D Suba Chandran

Last January in 2014, none would have predicted the fall of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. At that time, he was gathering momentum politically every passing day; political opposition within Sri Lanka – both inside and outside the Parliament was perhaps the weakest; and he had earlier vanquished the LTTE, the biggest threat to Sri Lankan polity until then.

There was no opposition to him; none of the leaders from the opposition party, including Ranil Wikramasinghe was confident of fighting against Rajapaksa at that time. There were no threats from any of the sub-regions in Sri Lanka – either from the east or the north politically or otherwise. There was no non-State actor that could even remotely pose a challenge to Rajapaksa. His family had by then taken absolute control over the entire State. From the Parliament to media, not many dared to question Rajapaksa and his family. In fact, he felt so strong, that he even preponed the election schedule.

And what an election it turned out to be, strengthening the very core of democratic ideals in South Asia! In retrospect, he is not the only leader in South Asia, who got elected to power democratically by the people, and further got elevated almost into a demi-god or a messiah, only to be dethroned subsequently by the same people who elected them. The list in India alone is long enough; it includes Sheikh Abdullah, Laloo Prasad Yadav, Mamta Banerjee, NT Ramarao, Jayalalitha and many others. While some like Jayalalitha have bounced back electorally, others like Laloo are still trying to float. What causes the rise and fall of these strong men and women? What makes the democracies to elect them strongly, and also make them fall?

Revenge of Minorities?For the fall of Rajapaksa, the simplest explanation provided so far is too simple to agree with. It talks about the revenge of minorities in Sri Lanka, meaning, the Sri Lankan Tamils and Muslims voted completely against Rajapaksa. Perhaps, the minorities did not vote for Rajapaksa; but the minorities in Sri Lanka put together do not constitute an electoral majority! This means, a substantial section of the Sinhala community have also voted against Rajapaksa.

Ethnically, the Sri Lankan Tamils (a section of them being Muslims) constitute less than 12 percent and the Sinhalese constitute close to 75 percent. In religious terms, the Buddhists constitute 70 percent, while the Hindus, Muslims and Christians form the rest. Revenge of minorities’ theory may not do justice to the larger aspirations and anger within Sri Lanka against Rajapaksa, his family and their naked pursuit and abuse of power.

Over Confidence and Arrogance of Rajapaksa Family?Second, perhaps Rajapaksa’s arrogance and over confidence brought his downfall. From the Airport to the rural areas, one could see huge banners of Rajapaksa, a problem afflicted with political leaders starting from South of India. The banner culture reflects a particular attitude of the political leadership, bordering megalomania. In Tamil Nadu for example, one of the previous losses that Jayalalitha suffered was attributed to this attitude.

Democratically elected leaders, in certain cases get themselves alienated from the very people who have voted them to power. When sycophants’ takeover and build a wall between the leader and people, and when the former get carried away and start listening to a self serving cabal, it is an invitation to disaster.

Added to the above problem is allowing one’s family to abuse the system. This has become a South Asian trait and a bane to democracy in the region. The “Rajapaksa brothers” have become a governance issue and even dynastic; the general perception in Sri Lanka about Rajapaksa, his brothers and wards has been highly negative – not only amongst the minority communities, but also the majority.

In fact the recent Sri Lankan Presidential election concluded was not about electing a new leader. It was all about dethroning Rajapaksa and his family members. The new President Maithripala Sirisena was an unknown name, even within Sri Lanka; by no stretch of imagination, even his own family members would vouch that his popularity carried the day for him. Not many Tamils and Muslims who had voted for him in the elections had actually heard his name before or seen his photograph. Nor the UNP, the main opposition in Sri Lanka was so strong, that it factored substantially in the electoral result. It was Rajapaksa’s unpopularity that elected Sirisena.

Rajapaksa’s decision to prepone the election presumably based on the advice of an astrologer – Sumanadasa Abeygunawardena and invite a Bollywood Star – Salman Khan to campaign for him defeats all political logic. What went wrong with a towering political leader, who was shrewd enough to defeat the LTTE? At the end, it is neither star power of one’s own, or imported from Bollywood that secures the win. It is people and democracy.

Development vs Devolution vs Decentralization: It’s the Combination Stupid

Third, the most important issue that the democrats in South Asia should understand is relating to good governance, efficient administration and decentralized power. What makes men and women as “strong leaders” is not their charisma, but their ability to make positive use of the same to deliver goods to people. True, Rajapaksa had vanquished an enemy and won the War. True, Rajapaksa restored the road and rail networks. But development has to go along with democratic governance and political decentralization. Rajapaksa’s fall should be a big lesson to all the strong men and women in South Asia.

Despite their individual popularity and even an emphasis on developmental projects, what people need is a clean government, good governance and corruption free administration. Rajapaksa may have restored the Yal Devi, the famous and historic train service linking Jaffna with Colombo; and reopened the A-9 Highway after the Civil War and necessary demining, linking the Northern Province with the rest of Sri Lanka. But, this has not cut much ice amongst the Tamils in northern Sri Lanka. In South, Rajapaksa may have built a huge international airport in Mattala and a deep sea port in Hambantota. And a super expressway connecting the Kattunayake international airport with Colombo city. But that has not resulted in Sinhalese voting for Rajapaksa. People in north and south, cutting across ethnic divides, were expecting not just developmental projects, but good governance, devolution of powers and corruption free administration.

Unlike the predominant perception outside Sri Lanka, not all Tamils in the island are pro-LTTE. In fact, the mainstream Tamil leadership was equally targeted by the LTTE during 1980s and 1990s. There were/are genuine political grievances, which Rajapaksa ignored completely; overwhelmed with the military victory over the LTTE, he ignored the mainstream. Perhaps his advisors questioned the need to devolve political powers, after the LTTE had been militarily defeated. The 13th amendment could have been a starting point, totally sidelined unfortunately.

A substantial lesson that the big leaders have to learn in South Asian context is the need for empowerment of the regions and providing adequate space for political voices from different spectrums. Beating one’s own chest about winning the war or vanquishing an enemy will yield fewer dividends in the long run. As a political turning point becomes history, people start living in their present. Democratically elected leaders will have to understand that the people want a better future and a comfortable present and hardly have time to bask in the glory of a past, how much ever glamorous it was.

The new President today has more challenges to address. But there is enough for him to start with. The fact that the election was violence-free and there was a smooth transition underlines the fact that the democratic institutions are still intact. Perhaps, one should also credit Rajapaksa for accepting the defeat and ensuring the smooth transfer of power. Well done and congratulations Rajapaksa. Whatever may have been your flaws while in power, you have accepted its loss with so much grace. You may have missed a huge opportunity to build the nation, after the military defeat of the LTTE; but by peacefully handing over power to the next President, you have earned some credit. Perhaps, the Begums of Bangladesh have something to learn from Sri Lanka on this issue. Perhaps, the other strong men and women who have been elected by the system, should also learn from Rajapaksa’s defeat. Democracies in South Asia may elect strong leaders, but will also not hesitate to throw them out, using the same ballots.

All the best Sri Lanka. 2015 should be a new beginning.

Governor's Rule and PDP's Dilemma

Shujaat Bukhari

Even after a high voter turnout that was witnessed for the first time in last 28 years, Jammu and Kashmir failed to get a government. Eighteen days after the results to tumultuous assembly elections were declared, political parties could not cobble up together to stake a claim. This resulted in state slipping into Governor’s rule and N N Vohra taking over the reins of the administration.

The Governor’s rule has disappointed people at large as they were expecting a government in place. Since Omar Abdullah, who headed the NC-Congress coalition for six years declined to continue as caretaker Chief Minister which he could have till January 18 when the term of the Assembly would end, there was no alternative but to fill the vacuum with a spell of Governor’s rule.

Not only the people had voted for a change, which was reflected in results and the look forward for better governance, but people particularly in Kashmir had pinned hopes for a speedy rehabilitation process for flood victims. Kashmir had seen severe floods in September affecting nearly a million people. A proper government is need of the hour to address their requirements.
However, the fractured mandate that these elections threw up has temporarily blocked the road to formation of a government. Not only were the seats divided among many parties but the clear division on the communal lines also played a significant role in this delay. As Jammu preferred BJP, this marked the beginning of the end of a fragile unity of a state that is diverse in nature. In contrast Kashmiris voted for all – from PDP to NC and Congress. Regional aspirations must have played a role in Kashmir but not the religion. Even as people were outraged on the hanging of parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during Congress led UPA, the Sopore constituency where from he hailed ironically returned a Congress candidate to the Assembly. Ladakh region, which has four seats, chose Congress, though by default. All the three out of four (one Independent won from Zanskar) were elected purely on their personality cult and not because of Congress, which has otherwise been routed in entire India.

Out of 87-member house, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) emerged as the single largest party with 28 followed by BJP with 25, National Conference 15, Congress 12 and others 7. Both NC and Congress extended support to PDP to form the government to keep BJP away and this could be possible with the support of few independents. Reports suggested that both BJP and NC had a “failed” round of negotiations in Delhi two days after the results were declared. But both parties denied the same.

For PDP, the situation turned piquant. On the one hand they maintained that they couldn’t trust NC and going with Congress, according to a PDP insider was “against the mandate of people”, but on other they had to walk on a razor’s edge to deal with BJP.

Both PDP and BJP are ideologically poles apart. BJP’s integrationist agenda for Kashmir is diametrically opposite to PDP’s Self-Rule. Still they had opened up backchannel communication and even exchanged papers for stitching up an alliance. PDP’s patron and old horse of Kashmir politics, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, weighed more on having BJP alliance and to give time to mature it was not his worry. By exploring this option he wants to carry along the Jammu region, which has overwhelmingly voted for BJP. “There would be a vacuum if we would go with NC or PDP as there would be zero participation in the government from Jammu as no elected member could join cabinet from the Hindu dominated belt” a senior PDP leader explained. So the motive was to seek more time to find a middle road.

But Omar Abdullah’s decision to call it a day halfway prompted the Governor to recommend his rule. The talks between PDP and BJP have not been called off and BJP has not refused to discuss three crucial points of Mufti’s agenda, viz resumption of dialogue with Pakistan and separatists, keeping Article 370 off the table, strengthening cross LoC CBM’s and withdrawal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) from certain areas. Sources say that structured dialogue could begin anytime. But the political grapevine is that BJP may further drag the process keeping in view the elections in Delhi scheduled to be held next month.

Not only are the non-BJP parties upping their ante against PDP but the separatists have also joined the chorus. Their standard response vis-à-vis elections have always been that it was a futile exercise. But with the changing situation in which BJP is poising to come into power in Jammu and Kashmir, even the hardest among hard-liners, Syed Ali Geelani, issued a literal warning to PDP. “If the state is handed over to the people having fascist ideologies, then a ‘do or die’ like situation will be created for our nation because our lives, property, faith and our culture will be in danger and with the help of armed forces, Kashmir would be made a testing lab for the projects like ‘home coming’ and ‘save daughter and bring daughter-in-law’.” he said adding that Muslim identity was at stake. This seems Mufti’s most testing time in his 50-year-long career.

Whatever unfolds in the coming weeks, the fact is that the state is in a chaotic situation where the administration has to be manned by a few bureaucrats. Successful elections, which always are a challenge in Jammu and Kashmir, had rekindled the hope for a stable government but it worsened those prospects and a commoner in Kashmir is fuming as why political parties could not put their inherent acrimony behind and move forward to give them a government they deserved. With Governor’s Rule in place, only worry now is that Delhi is not repeated in Jammu and Kashmir. No one wants a re-election in the state.

Ukraine premier’s pro-Nazi version of World War II: USSR invaded Ukraine, Germany

Lena Sokoll

In a recent broadcast of “Tagesthemen”, the main newscast of Germany’s ARD public television channel, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk grotesquely distorted the history of World War II, accusing the Soviet Union of having invaded Germany and Ukraine.

Remarkably, this brazen and thoroughly calculated falsehood, designed to promote the myth of a joint German-Ukrainian struggle against a Soviet-Russian aggressor, went unchallenged by the presenter. It has not been denounced by the broadcaster in retrospect.

The interview, conducted with Yatsenyuk during his visit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on January 7, consisted largely of anti-Russian ranting. Presenter Pinar Atalay’s innocuous and unfocused questions remained unanswered, and only amounted to brief interruptions to Yatsenyuk’s castigation of Putin, Russia and the Soviet Union.

Yatsenyuk said, “Russian aggression in Ukraine is an attack on world order and order in Europe. All of us still clearly remember the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. That has to be avoided. And nobody has the right to rewrite the results of the Second World War. And that is exactly what Russia’s President Putin is trying to do.”

Atalay made no comment on this scandalous historical lie, i.e. that the Soviet Union—not Nazi Germany—had invaded Ukraine. The television station responded to a complaint about the programme from the Public Committee for Public Service Media, remarking that the quality of the simultaneous Russian-German translation was too poor for the presenter to question the statement during the ongoing interview. In fact, however, the “Tagesthemen” news item was a recording of the interview, and there was no critical response to Yatsenyuk’s lie from the programme’s director or ARD.

Five days after the interview, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper attacked not Yatsenyuk and ARD, but the Russian foreign ministry, which vehemently rejected the Ukrainian prime minister’s account, citing the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials.

“As to the Second World War,” wrote Russia correspondent Kerstin Holm in the newspaper, “the thinking of the Russians is set in concrete ... But disabused countrymen remember that Russia, in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, was an aggressor in World War II and was responsible for the Katyn massacre”.

Holm also claims that “Liberation could at best be said to apply to the expulsion of the Nazis, but not to the Sovietisation of reconquered areas”.

The German government did not distance itself from Yatsenyuk’s remarks or comment on his statements. Foreign office spokesman Martin Schäfer said: “Like anyone here in Germany—politicians, citizens or sports celebrities—the Ukrainian prime minister has the right to tell the German media whatever he deems appropriate. That is part and parcel of our extremely important right to freedom of expression”.

Thus, the results of the Nuremberg Trials and the denial of German guilt in the Second World War are declared to be matters of opinion. In fact, the German Wehrmacht (army) and Waffen-SS waged a war of extermination in Ukraine, whose barbarism still stands out among the countless atrocities and crimes of the Nazi dictatorship and the world war that it wanted and started.

On June 22, 1941, German Wehrmacht troops stormed across the borders of the USSR without any declaration of war, aiming to engulf the enemy in a Blitzkrieg and push them far back into the interior of the country. While the northern and central sectors of the army had orders to capture Leningrad and Moscow, the southern army sector marched on Kiev. It was supported in this by two battalions of Ukrainian nationalists, code-named “Nachtigall” and “Roland”, marching in German uniforms and under German army command.

These Ukrainian battalions were recruited from the rabid anti-Semitic and anti-Communist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. After the invasion and with the approval of the German occupiers, they took over management of police stations and launched pogroms. In late June 1941, the German occupiers incited the first major pogrom, in the Galician city of Lviv, which was carried out with the active support of the OUN. The public hunting down of Jews claimed at least 4,000 lives.

Many massacres and pogroms followed. The largest single extermination took place shortly after the sacking of Kiev on September 29-30, 1941 in the ravine of Babi Yar. Approximately 33,000 Kiev Jews were killed, including elderly people, women and children who had not been able to flee from the advancing army. The massacre was one of the crimes prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials. Approximately 850,000 Jews were murdered in the German war of extermination in Ukraine.

Judaism and Bolshevism were synonymous in the propaganda of the Nazis and the OUN. The murder of Jews was seen and propagandised as equivalent to the anti-Soviet struggle. The brutal terror waged against the Jews and the determination to destroy particularly the Jewish people in occupied Ukraine flowed from the German Reich’s resolve to annihilate the Soviet Union and the impact of the world’s first socialist revolution.

The Wehrmacht’s conquest of Ukraine not only entailed a deep incursion into Soviet territory. It also cut off the rest of the USSR from Ukraine’s fertile agricultural land and large coal reserves. While the USSR was weakened by hunger, Nazi Germany exploited Ukraine’s resources, deporting over a million Ukrainians to work in German industry and agriculture as slave labour.

The German occupiers were therefore unwilling to tolerate any notion of an independent Ukraine. When the OUN proclaimed Ukraine’s independence in Lviv on June 30, 1941, Bandera was taken into “protective custody” in then Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This was not the end of collaboration between the German occupiers and Ukrainian fascists, however.

OUN supporters remained active in administration and as an auxiliary police force in the organisation of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Tens of thousands of them served as volunteers in SS divisions, directly aiding the Nazis in combat against the Red Army.

The current Ukrainian leadership, which was backed by Germany in the coup d’état that brought it to power last spring, stands unashamedly in this bloody tradition of Ukrainian nationalists and fascists. They extol Stepan Bandera as a national hero and rely on an alliance with Germany against Russia as the basis of their political power.

Members of Yatsenyuk’s government maintain close relations with fascist elements and place them in key positions.

Interior Minister Arsen Avakov appointed the fascist, Vadim Trojan, chief of police for the Kiev region in November 2014. Trojan was commander of the extreme right-wing Azov volunteer battalion, some of whose members wear helmets with swastikas and SS runes in the fighting against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Another commander of the Azov battalion, Andrij Bilezki, told the BritishTelegraph newspaper: “The historical mission of our nation in these crucial times is to lead the white races of the world in the final crusade for their survival”.

The installation of such violently reactionary forces in power in Kiev and the support given to them by the imperialist powers of NATO requires the rewriting and falsification of history. This is the significance of Yatsenyuk’s statements to ARD, and the silence of authorities in Germany on them.

The coming fight over wages in the US

Jerry White

Amidst general proclamations of “economic recovery” in the United States, there is a nervousness within the corporate and political elite over the consequences of the real state of social relations in the country—above all, extraordinary levels of social inequality. Several leading newspapers and think tanks have pointed to the long-term stagnation of wages and the lack of social mobility, especially among young workers, as the catalyst for a potential eruption of class conflict in 2015.

In a January 17 blog entry, “Driving the Obama Tax Plan: The Great Wage Slowdown,” New York Times columnist David Leonhardt writes: “Wages and incomes for most Americans have now been stagnant for 15 years. They rose at a mediocre pace for much of President Bush’s tenure in the 2000s, before falling sharply during the financial crisis that dominated the end of his presidency.” Leonhardt claims that Obama “helped break the back of the crisis.” However, he adds, “the recovery on his watch has been decidedly mediocre, too — especially in terms of paychecks.”

What is involved is a historic restructuring of class relations in the United States. Leonhardt notes: “There is little modern precedent for a period of income stagnation lasting as long as this one. Official records don’t exist before World War II. But the best estimate is that the Great Depression may be the only other modern time in which incomes for most households in the United States have grown so slowly—or not at all—for so long.”

Leonhardt cites a new report by the Democratic Party-aligned Center for American Progress, whose coauthors—Obama's former economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, and British Labour Party Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls—warn, “When democratic governments and market systems cannot deliver such prosperity to their citizens, the result is political alienation, a loss of social trust, and increasing conflict across the lines of race, class, and ethnicity…”

Leonhardt, following the line of Summers and Balls, presents the historic decline of wages in the United States as the outcome of cosmic economic forces—globalization, disparities in education, technological change and the like—divorced from any analysis of the policies of the ruling class and its political representatives. While counseling his readers that “no politician, of either party, can quickly alter the basic forces behind the great wage slowdown,” he hails a number of paltry proposals from the Obama administration as a significant step toward resolving the growth of social inequality.

In fact, the slashing of wages has been the deliberate policy of successive Democratic and Republican administrations over the last three-and-a-half decades, starting with the administrations of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican President Ronald Reagan. Responding to the globalization of production and the long-term decline of American capitalism, the ruling class went on the offensive: a systematic campaign that involved the destruction of tens of millions of industrial jobs, wage-cutting and union-busting on the one hand, and the promotion of the most reckless forms of financial parasitism on the other.

This process has vastly accelerated under Obama. Beginning with the forced bankruptcy and restructuring of the auto industry in 2009, which led to the halving of wages for tens of thousands of new-hires, the Obama administration and US big business utilized chronically high levels of unemployment to transform American workers into a highly exploited, low-wage work force, hired and fired at will, with virtually no job security or guaranteed level of hours, wages and benefits.

As a result, the proportion of labor’s share of the gross domestic product—in the form of wages, benefits and government outlays for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—is now at the lowest level since the Second World War.  At the same time, the share of GDP going to corporate profits is at the highest-ever postwar level.

With consummate cynicism, Obama, in his State of the Union address tomorrow, is expected to call on Congress to pass tax increases on capital gains and on the biggest financial firms to fund tax credits for childcare and college tuition. The effort is a political fraud, since the president knows that the Republican-controlled Congress will not pass any of these proposals.

What is most striking about the proposals to deal with wage stagnation is their paucity. Even if the Obama administration passed its meager tax proposals, they would do nothing to reverse the historic decline of working class living standards. Every other proposal, “profit-sharing” and “employee stock ownership,” is aimed at further tying the fate of the working class to American capitalism and its struggle for market share and profits.

In its efforts to forestall independent action by the working class over wages, the ruling class is seeking to mobilize the right-wing, pro-corporate trade unions. Earlier this month, the AFL-CIO—which has been instrumental in suppressing the class struggle and driving down wages —held a “National Summit on Raising Wages” in Washington, DC.

The keynote address, delivered by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, was filled with demagogy about social inequality and Wall Street greed, along with obsequious praise for the trade union functionaries she was addressing. The Massachusetts senator avoided any criticism of the Obama administration itself, which has funneled trillions of dollars to the banks as part of the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history.

The emergence of a movement by workers in the United States and throughout the world to fight for better living standards is inevitable. Young workers and students, in particular, confront a future of economic insecurity far worse than the conditions faced by their parents or even their grandparents.

To carry out this fight, the working class must be armed with a clear perspective and strategy. The Socialist Equality Party urges workers to establish independent and genuinely democratic rank-and-file committees, organized in opposition to the trade unions and their defense of the capitalist system and subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party.

The experiences of the working class over the last three-and-a-half decades have shown that such a fight involves a struggle against not just this or that greedy employer or political administration, but in opposition to the entire economic and political system.

This is a political struggle, which requires uniting the working class—black, white, immigrant and native-born, young and old, in the United States and internationally—on the basis of a common revolutionary perspective and program. The capitalist system has failed and must be replaced with socialism, the rational organization of the world economy on the basis of democratic control and production for human need, not private profit.

More than half of US public school students living in poverty

Andre Damon

For the first time in at least half a century, low-income children make up the majority of students enrolled in American public schools, according to a report by the Southern Education Foundation (SEF).

The percentage of public school students who are classified as low-income has risen steadily over the past quarter century, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. In 1989, under 32 percent of public school students were classified as low-income, according to statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) cited by the report. This rose to 38 percent by 2000, 48 percent in 2011, and 51 percent in 2013.

These figures are the result of decades of deindustrialization, stagnating wages and cuts to antipoverty programs. Since the 2008 financial crisis in particular, the US ruling class, with the Obama administration at its head, has waged an unrelenting assault on the social rights of working people, carrying out mass layoffs, driving down wages, and slashing social services during the recession and the “recovery.” The SEF report makes clear that it has been the most vulnerable sections of society, including children, who have been made to bear a disproportionate burden due to these policies.

The study defines low-income students as those qualifying for either free or reduced-price lunches. Students from families making less than 135 percent of the federal poverty threshold are eligible for free lunches, while those making under 185 percent of the federal poverty line are eligible for reduced-price lunches.

The report was published last week in the form of an update to a 2007 study, entitled “A New Majority,” which warned that low-income students had for the first time in decades become the majority in the historically impoverished American South, and were well on their way to becoming the majority in the US as a whole. In 2006, the year covered by the report, low-income students constituted 42 percent of students enrolled at public schools. Seven years later, the figure has risen by a shocking nine percentage points.

The 2007 report noted that in 1959, “Historical correlations suggest that close to a majority of the school-age children in the South were in households living below the recently defined American poverty line.” It added, “Somewhere between 1959 and 1967, it is likely that for the first time since public schools were established in the South, low income children no longer constituted a majority of students in the South’s public schools.”

“By 1967, the percentage of low income children in the South and the nation had declined to unmatched levels,” the report continued, but noted that the improvement “came to a halt in 1970 when the percentage of low income children leveled off and remained essentially constant over five years. In 1975 the trend lines for low income students in the South and across the nation began to creep upward. After 1980, the Reagan Administration convinced Congress to enact large federal cutbacks in anti-poverty programs, and the numbers of low income children in the South started to rise sharply.”

The vast historical retrogression exposed by the report is further emphasized in the breakdown by state. The report notes, “In 1989, Mississippi was the only state in the nation with a majority of low income students. It had 59 percent. Louisiana ranked second with 49 percent.”

Low-income students now comprise the majority in 21 states, and between 40 percent and 49 percent of students in 19 others. While all states had significant numbers of low-income students, the share of poor students in the South and West is “extraordinarily high.” It notes that “thirteen of the 21 states with a majority of low income students in 2013 were located in the South, and six of the other 21 states were in the West.”

Mississippi has the highest share of low-income students, at a shocking 71 percent, or nearly three out of four, in 2013. Second was New Mexico, where 68 percent of public school students are low-income. These are followed by Louisiana, with 65 percent; Arkansas, with 61 percent; Oklahoma, with 61 percent; and Texas, with 60 percent. California, the country’s most populous state, has 55 percent of its public school students in poverty.

Poor students require far more resources than their affluent peers if they are to keep up. But rather than provide resources according to need, the Bush and Obama administrations, under the “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” programs, have channeled resources away from schools with a high share of students in poverty, which are declared to be “underperforming.”

The SEF report warns, “With huge, stubbornly unchanging gaps in learning, schools in the South and across the nation face the real danger of becoming entrenched, inadequately funded educational systems that enlarge the division in America between haves and have-nots.”

The study is the latest in a series of reports showing the increasingly desperate social conditions facing children in the United States.

In September, the US Department of Education released statistics showing that the number of homeless children increased by eight percent in the 2012-2013 school year, compared to the year before. There were 1.3 million homeless children enrolled in US schools, a figure that is up by 85 percent since the beginning of the recession.

In April, Feeding America reported that 16 million children, or 21.6 percent, live in food insecure households. The share of all people in the United States who are food insecure has increased from 13.4 percent in 2006 to 21.1 percent in 2013.

In April 2013, the United Nations Children’s Fund released a report showing that the US has the fourth-highest child poverty rate among 29 developed countries. Only Lithuania, Latvia and Romania have higher child poverty rates. The US fell behind even Greece, which has been devastated by years of austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund.

Arrests follow terror raids across Europe.

Chris Marsden

Terror raids have been mounted in Belgium, France and Germany in the aftermath of the January 7 assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo .
In Belgium, two suspects were shot dead by police and another seriously wounded in the town of Verviers, near the border with Germany. Thirteen arrests were made, with nine suspects held in raids in Molembeek, two in Brussels, one in Berchem, one in Verviers, and two in France. All three Verviers gunmen were Belgian nationals recently returned from Syria. The centre of Verviers and its train station were sealed
off Thursday by heavily armed police, who tried to enter a flat above a bakery. Witnesses said they heard a series of explosions at 5:45pm and sustained gunfire.
Special police units carried out at least a dozen raids elsewhere in four districts with predominantly immigrant neighbourhoods. A total of 10 search warrants were issued. Police reported that two more suspects had
been arrested after a car chase and gunfight in the city of Liege.
Authorities claim they had moved to dismantle an active terror cell spanning Belgium and France that was planning an “imminent” attack targeting police officers
and various buildings in Belgium. Eric van der Sijpt, a federal magistrate, said, “The suspects immediately and for several minutes opened fire with military weaponry and handguns on the special units of the federal police before they were neutralised.” Police sources said earlier that they had resolved to launch the pre emptive operation a fortnight ago, i.e., before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, after bugging the
homes and cars of the men recently returned from fighting in Syria. “I can confirm that we started this investigation before the attacks in Paris,” Van Der Sypt
said. No link had been established with the Paris attack, he insisted. The authorities and the media are deliberately downplaying or concealing the wealth of information on the perpetrators, including the gunmen who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack, known by European and US
intelligence and police officials in advance of the attacks and alleged plots.
Belgian police this week acknowledged that
Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher used in the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher supermarket attacks, as well as the Tokarev handgun used by Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman in the Kosher market attack, had been purchased from Belgian criminal gangs. The information is highly specific. Coulibaly is said to have bought the weapons near the Gare du Midi in Brussels. Neetin Farasula, from Charleroi, is in detention after he
handed himself over to police Tuesday. He admits being in contact with Coulibaly.
In another example of cross-border operations, French national Mehdi Nemmouche last May killed four people
at the Jewish museum in Brussels after having fought in Syria the previous year. He was caught by French police in Marseille.
A court case is underway in Antwerp involving 43 men and three women alleged to be members of Sharia4Belgium, which is linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
This week, Europol Director Rob Wainwright told British MPs that the names of 2,500 Islamist suspects had been collected from agencies across European Union member states.
In France, 12 people were arrested in anti-terrorism raids targeting people linked to Coulibaly. A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, said the arrests began overnight
Thursday and continued in three towns Friday morning. Those arrested included the man who supplied a car to Coulibaly, identified based on DNA found in the car.
The Gare de l’Est train station in Paris was evacuated for an hour Friday morning after an alleged bomb threat. This occurred on the day US Secretary of State John Kerry was in Paris, mending fences with President
François Hollande after President Barack Obama’s failure to attend the memorial rally for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Another incident Friday afternoon involved a gunman who took two people hostage in a post office in Colombes, a suburb of Paris. The man was arrested
after giving himself up to police and releasing the hostages unharmed. He was reportedly carrying a military weapon that he told police was a Kalashnikov. Friday saw prominent media reports that several French national media web sites, including L’Express , Le Parisien and France Inter , experienced technical problems traced to a common service provider, Oxalide.
About 19,000 French web sites have been hit by cyberattacks in the wake of the Paris shootings, according to Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyber-defence for the French military. Military authorities have reportedly launched round-the-clock surveillance to protect government sites.
On Friday morning, in Berlin, 250 police were involved in dawn raids on 11 premises, leading to the arrest of two
men suspected of helping to recruit for the Islamic State in Syria. One, Ismet D, a 41-year-old man, was suspected of “leading an Islamist extremist group made up of Turkish and Russian nationals from Chechnya and Dagestan,” the police said.
On Thursday, police in Wolfsburg, about 200 kilometres west of Berlin, took a 26-year-old German-Tunisian dual national, Ayub B, into custody on suspicion he had
fought in Syria for the Islamic State in 2014.
The ruling elite have lost no time in using the raids to whip up a climate of fear and justify demands for further repressive powers for the state.
Jewish schools in Brussels and Antwerp were closed and classes cancelled after officials said they were a “potential target” for attack. The Cheider school, the only Orthodox Jewish school in the Netherlands, was also closed. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel announced new legislation making traveling abroad for terrorist activists punishable by law, expanding the reasons for Belgian citizenship to be revoked for dual nationals deemed to be a terror risk, freezing assets of those suspected of aiding terror and, most importantly, authorizing the calling in of the army domestically.
In France, up to 100 people are now under investigation for making or posting comments supporting or justifying terrorism—with some sentences of years in prison already summarily handed out.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet approved a draft bill Wednesday to allow the authorities to withdraw the national identity cards of suspected
extremists to prevent them from traveling abroad.
British Prime Minister David Cameron is in the United States seeking the support of President Obama for his own raft of repressive measures. His visit was preceded
by former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking at a private strategy session of Republican senators. Introduced by Senator John McCain, he stressed that,
“a substantial and not a fringe minority” of Muslims supported fundamentalism, which must be opposed by “force.”

Behind whitewash of CIA spying: The trail leads to the White House.

Thomas Gaist & Patrick Martin

Only a day after the final CIA whitewash of its unconstitutional spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, documents released by the agency reveal that the Obama White House knew in advance that CIA operatives had been ordered to investigate the legislative panel, which has legal responsibility for overseeing the agency.
An Accountability Board appointed by CIA Director John Brennan handed down its official finding Wednesday that the five CIA operatives who broke into Senate Intelligence Committee computers and read staff email were acting in good faith and that their spying was “reasonable.”
The five-member panel included former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh, former White House Counsel Bob Bauer and three unnamed CIA officials (so much for
accountability!). The panel rejected the findings of the agency’s own Inspector General, David Buckley, prepared last July, which condemned the spying on the Senate committee and referred it to the Justice
Department for possible prosecution.
Along with the Accountability Board report, however, the CIA was also compelled to release a redacted version of Buckley’s report, which it had been fighting to keep
secret, opposing Freedom of Information Act requests from several news organizations. One attachment to the Buckley report is a memorandum from one of the five CIA operatives, a lawyer for the
agency, which makes the remarkable admission about Brennan’s prior consultation with the White House before the intrusion into the Senate Intelligence
Committee’s computer system. This was a special computer system set up by the CIA
itself to handle some six million pages of documents on torture in CIA secret prisons between 2002 and 2007, which became the basis for the 6,300-page report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the
512-page summary released to the public—again in redacted form—last month. At some point during 2013, the CIA learned that the Senate committee staff had obtained a copy of an internal document dubbed the “Panetta report.” This was a summary of the evidence of CIA torture, prepared for then-director Leon Panetta in 2012 that undercut the CIA’s official pretense that it had never tortured prisoners at “black sites” in Europe and Asia.
CIA Director Brennan ordered an investigation into how the document came into the hands of the Senate committee staff, and then met with White House Chief
of Staff Denis McDonough to brief him on the plan. Following this meeting (whose contents remains top secret), Brennan called the CIA attorney who was part
of the group of five investigating the Senate committee, and told him to use “whatever means necessary” to find the source of the leak.
“The conversation with McDonough came after Brennan first issued the directive, but before he reiterated it to a CIA attorney leading the probe,” the internal CIA report
states. This is nothing short of a smoking gun, demonstrating direct involvement of the Obama White House in actions which Senate Democrats publicly condemned as
unconstitutional and illegal. Obama himself was more than likely consulted, given the sensitivity of the issue and his own close ties to Brennan, the head of counterterrorism at the White House before he was named CIA director. McDonough and Obama are known to have an extremely close relationship, particularly on national security matters, as demonstrated by reports at the time of Obama’s decision, in August 2013, to pull back on plans for air strikes on Syria. After initially approving the military action, Obama went for a walk with McDonough, during which the two discussed the order
to attack Syria and agreed it should be rescinded. No other White House or Pentagon officials were involved in the process. The memorandum from the CIA lawyer suggests that he was well aware that discussing the spying on the Senate with the White House could be a political bombshell if it was subsequently revealed. He wrote of
his conversation with Brennan: “I cautioned that discussing this matter with the WH, at this stage, was problematic, as it could later be viewed as WH interference in a potential criminal investigation.” The memorandum continues: “I repeatedly counseled the Director, as well as [redacted] and [the Director of the Office of
Congressional Affairs], that it was unwise to ask the WH for direction as to a possible criminal investigation… If the WH were to order the inquiry stopped, it could constitute an act in furtherance of obstruction of justice. At the least, it could be interpreted that way by Congressional critics and the press. Merely consulting
with the WH would place the director in a bad light, making it appear that he was politicizing a potential criminal matter.”
In the upside-down world of the CIA, the “criminal investigation” was being conducted by the agency, the “crime” was the Senate staff obtaining the Panetta review, and “obstruction of justice” would be any effort to prevent the CIA from spying on the Senate.
Nonetheless, the use of such language is extraordinary, and goes far to explain the frenzied efforts of both the CIA and the Obama White House to block the release of
the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture and all other associated documents.
It should be pointed out here that McDonough, who had advance warning from Brennan that the CIA was spying on the Senate committee, was later designated by Obama to “mediate” disputes between the agency and the committee over the declassification of the torture report. Throughout this process, McDonough sided with the CIA. Members of the Senate committee complained that the White House backed CIA demands for redaction
of even the pseudonyms given to CIA agents, including those who directly perpetrated acts of torture.
In response to the final whitewash of the CIA by the Accountability Board, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee during the
preparation of the torture report, issued a statement declaring, “I continue to believe CIA’s actions constituted a violation of the constitutional separation of powers.”
Feinstein said she was “disappointed that no one at the CIA will be held accountable,” but was conspicuously silent about the role played by the White House in both the cover-up of CIA torture and the intrusion into the Senate committee’s computers.
The Brennan-McDonough meeting sheds new light on the July 2014 declaration of the Obama Justice Department that it “had no prosecutorial interest” in the CIA spying on the Senate committee. Any such
prosecution would have had to follow a trail that led straight to the highest officials in the White House. Both the circumstances behind the obstruction of the Senate report on CIA torture, and the report itself, reveal
criminality at the highest levels of the state—under both the Bush and the Obama administrations. Yet no one has been held accountable, and the entire matter has been almost entirely dropped by the media.

US torture report exposes European powers’ involvement in CIA crimes.

Alex Lantier

The publication of the US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture has exposed the European powers'
complicity in ghastly crimes of US intelligence. Even though European states' complicity in CIA torture and rendition operations has been documented for nearly a decade, no European officials have been held accountable.
In 2005, the Council of Europe tasked former Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty with preparing a report on secret CIA prisons in Europe. He released two reports, in 2006
and 2007, documenting the complicity of dozens of European states in setting up facilities for illegal CIA rendition and torture. The states involved included Britain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Albania.
The existence of approximately 1,000 CIA flights and of secret prisons in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Bucharest (Romania), Antavilas (Lithuania), and Stare Kiejkuty
(Poland) has since been confirmed.
Nonetheless, after the US Senate recognized CIA use of the grisliest forms of torture—including murder, sexual assault, sleep deprivation and forcing inmates to stand on broken limbs—officials across Europe reacted by insisting that they should enjoy immunity. Top officials of the Polish government, which is appealing a July ruling against it over its role in CIA torture by the European Court on Human Rights,
denounced the report. “Certain secrets should stay that way,” said Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak.
Polish prosecutors have been investigating the case for six years, including a two-year investigation of former Polish intelligence chief Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, without
bringing any charges. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was waterboarded as soon as he arrived at Stare Kiejkuty.
One medical officer there noted: “We are basically doing a series of near-drownings.”
Other detainees at Stare Kiejkuty, which housed Saudi, Algerian and Yemeni detainees, were subjected to mock executions with a power drill while standing hooded and naked. Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski lamely
claimed that CIA officials did not explain how they planned to use their secret prisons in Poland. “It was a question as we saw it only of creating secret sites,” he said, adding that he closed down the facility in 2003 because “the Americans' secret activities began to worry” Polish authorities. Lithuanian officials confirmed that the black site named “detention center Violet” by the US Senate report appears
to be the Lithuanian detention center near the capital, Vilnius, identified in a 2009-2010 parliamentary investigation. Lawmaker Arvydas Anusauskas told
Reuters, “The US Senate report, to me, makes a convincing case that prisoners were indeed held at the Lithuanian site.”
Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi detainee now kept at Guantanamo Bay, has stated that he was kept and tortured at the site. Washington paid the Lithuanian government $1 million to “show appreciation” for operating the prison, according to the US Senate report,
though the funds were reportedly paid out through “complex mechanisms.”
Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius has asked Washington to confirm whether or not the CIA tortured prisoners at its secret prisons in Lithuania.
British Prime Minister David Cameron dismissed the issue of torture and Britain's role in rendition flights to countries including Libya, saying that it had been “dealt with from a British perspective.” He told the public to trust British intelligence to police itself, as official investigations had “produced a series of questions that the intelligence and security community will look at ... I'm satisfied that our system is dealing with all of these issues.”
In fact, the CIA torture report has revealed the advanced state of collapse of democratic forms of rule not only in the United States, but also in Europe. What has emerged across Europe since the September 11 attacks is the framework of a police state far more technically powerful than even the most ruthless dictatorships of twentieth-century Europe. The methods deployed as
part of the “war on terror” will also be used against opposition in the working class to unpopular policies of austerity and war.
European governments participate in the digital spying on telecommunications and Internet activities of the European population, carried out by the US National
Security Agency and its local counterparts, as revealed by Edward Snowden. They also are planning joint repression of social protests, based on talks between German federal police, France's Gendarmerie, and other security forces with the European Commission. “During my investigation, people called me a traitor and said I was making things up,” Marty told the Tribune de Genève. “The Europeans disappointed me. Germany, the United Kingdom, and many others blocked the establishment of the truth. In fact, most European countries actively participated in a system that
legitimated large-scale state crimes.” “I think we must recall, and it is very important, that this operation, this anti-terrorist policy, was decided and carried out under the aegis of NATO,” Marty told Swiss television channel RTS.
“The United States invoked Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which says that if one member of the alliance is attacked militarily [e.g., as Washington claimed, on
September 11], all NATO members are required to come to its aid,” Marty said. Once this was accepted, he added, “there were a whole series of secret accords
between the United States and European powers. And all the European countries pledged to grant total immunity to CIA agents, which is manifestly illegal.”
The European powers’ participation in the CIA torture program underscores the utter hypocrisy of the humanitarian pretensions used to justify operations ranging from NATO wars in Syria and Libya to this
February's NATO-backed, fascist-led putsch in Ukraine. The ferocious opposition of the European ruling elites to attempts to bring this criminality to light is the clearest
indication that the democratic rights of the population cannot be secured by appeals to any section of the state. The defense of the population's democratic and social rights is a question of the revolutionary mobilization of the working class in an international struggle against European capitalism.

Obama administration continues to block report on Saudi financing of 9/11 attacks.

Tom Carter

Even after more than thirteen years, a cloud of secrecy hangs over the events of September 11, 2001. At every opportunity, the American political establishment cites the terrorist attacks that took place on that date as justification for military aggression
abroad and the buildup of a police state at home. Immediately after the attacks, a “war on terror” was declared that continues to this day. Official remembrances of the attacks have taken on the character of state rituals. However, the US government continues to obstruct the release to the public of factual information about the events of 9/11.
On January 7, current and former members of Congress as well as families of victims held a press conference to demand the publication of 28 pages that remain classified from a December 2002 congressional report entitled “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Activities Before and After the Terrorists Attacks of September 2001.”
These pages were classified by the Bush administration at the time the report was released. The January 7 press conference called attention to the fact that the Bush and Obama administrations have obstructed the release of these redacted pages ever since.
“The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11 and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” former Democratic Senator Bob
Graham noted at the press conference. Graham was the co-chair of the inquiry and he co-authored the report in question, so he speaks from first-hand knowledge of the
report’s contents. “While the 28 pages are maybe the most important and the most prominent, they are by no means the only
example of where information that is important to understanding the full extent of 9/11 has also been withheld from the American people,” Graham added. “This is not a narrow issue of withholding information at one place, in one time,” he continued. “This is a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11, by all of the agencies of the federal government, which have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.” Graham presented the issue as solely one of “incompetence” and the Obama administration’s desire
to avoid the exposure of incompetence.
An organization of family members of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks called “9/11 Families United for Justice” is campaigning to have the 28 pages released. Terry Strada, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, is a co-chair of the organization. “When former President George W. Bush classified the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry,” she said at the press conference, “he effectively protected the people who gave financial and logistical aid to at least some of the 19 hijackers while they were here in this country.”
Even without the full declassification of the 28 pages, there is ample evidence that Saudi Arabia was principally involved in financing the September 11 attacks, though this evidence is covered up by the media and the US political establishment. Previous reports and leaks have indicated that the
classified 28 pages detail the case of two of the hijackers in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hazami and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The pair flew to the US under their own names after attending an Islamist training camp in Malaysia that was monitored by the CIA. They were met in Los Angeles by Omar al- Bayoumi, an individual with ties to Saudi intelligence and, according to unclassified sections of the report, “seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia.” Bayoumi met al-Hazami and al-Mihdhar at the Saudi consulate and took them to San Diego, where they moved in with an FBI informant in the months preceding the September 11 attacks. An associate of Bayoumi, Asama Bassnan, received checks from the then-Saudi
ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, and his wife—money that was used to assist the hijackers. While in San Diego, the pair had meetings with Anwar al-Awlaki, the cleric and US citizen who was
assassinated by the Obama administration in September 2011. Al-Awlaki had his own strange ties with the US state, having attended a meeting with military officials
at the Pentagon only months after the September 11 attacks, as part of a supposed “outreach” effort. In October of last year, Zacarias Moussaoui—the so- called “20th hijacker” who is currently serving a life
sentence in maximum security prison—released a letter to the Oklahoma Western District Court alleging that he was personally assisted by Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud. Moussaoui took flight lessons in Norman, Oklahoma along with Mohamed Atta and Marwan al- Shehhi, two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.
According to Moussaoui, the Saudi prince financed his flight lessons “and was doing so knowingly for Osama bin Laden.”
Since coming to office, the Obama administration has worked to prevent a full public accounting of the ties between Saudi Arabia and the September 11 hijackers.
In 2009, the administration intervened on behalf of the Saudi monarchy to block the release of documents gathered by the families of September 11 victims. While the January 7 press conference has been almost
entirely ignored by the mass media, the fact that the Obama administration is continuing to cover up a report proving that the September 11 attacks were financed by
Washington’s ally is no ordinary matter. It calls into question the entire official “war on terror” narrative. The Saudi connection to the September 11 attacks is only one of many unanswered questions regarding the
involvement of sections of the US state in the terrorist attacks.
US intelligence agencies cultivated ties with Islamic fundamentalist groups such as Al Qaeda for decades before the September 11, 2001 attacks, including during the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-1989). During that
war, President Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed that the jihadist militias in Afghanistan were “freedom fighters.”

Racist provocation and the “war on terror”

Patrick Martin

Early Wednesday morning, the new edition of Charlie Hebdo went on sale across France, with the press run ramped up from the usual 60,000 to 5 million. The new issue, with a degrading cartoon of the prophet
Muhammad on its cover, is not a monument to “press freedom,” as portrayed in media accounts, but rather a state-supported provocation. Through this publication and its echoes throughout the
media, millions of French citizens are being bombarded by an anti-Muslim campaign that was, until recently, the province of the neo-fascist National Front. These sentiments are being deliberately whipped up to provide a base of support for renewed military operations by French imperialism.
The conduct of the “war on terror” is acquiring ever more openly a racist character. That the campaign is being very carefully coordinated is evident in the fact that the French government paid for the enormously expanded press run, while leading journals of the French bourgeoisie made it possible: Le Monde supplied computers, Libération opened its offices
to the surviving Charlie Hebdo staff. Prime Minister Manuel Valls dropped by to show his support.
The French government has wasted no time in utilizing the January 7 attacks to promote its war drive in the Middle East. Following Tuesday’s 488 to 1 vote in France’s National Assembly to extend air strikes in Iraq,
French President François Hollande, until recently the most unpopular official in France, appeared on the deck of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to address its crew as they set sail for the Middle East. He cited the events of the previous week, which left 20 dead in Paris, saying the situation “justifies the presence of our aircraft carrier.” The carrier is to join the US military in the Persian Gulf, where American forces are raining bombs down on western Iraq and eastern Syria as part of the war targeting, for the present, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad next in line.
The US-led coalition of imperialist powers and Gulf sheikdoms carried out 18 air strikes on Monday alone. There is little doubt that these bombing attacks slaughter more innocent people every day than the
number of people who died in Paris last week, albeit with far less attention from the Western press. On its way to the Persian Gulf, the Charles de Gaulle will pass along the coast of Yemen, giving the Hollande
government the capability to launch air strikes on targets in that country. US and French officials have suggested that Said Kaouchi received military training and instructions in Yemen from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There have been unconfirmed suggestions in the media that a massive attack on Yemen, either by French warplanes or US drone missiles, or both, is imminent.
The Charlie Hebdo attack is also being used to rapidly escalate the other component of the “war on terror”—the assault on democratic rights at home. Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, describing the
mobilization of 10,000 French troops to stand guard at public transport centers, schools and other supposed targets of terrorist attack, said Tuesday, “This is a
military operation like the military operations we conduct abroad,” directed at “the same enemy.” He added that “today, the new and serious element is that there is no dividing line between the external threat and the internal threat.” While claiming to defend “freedom of speech” at Charlie Hebdo, the French authorities have arrested at least 54 people for “defending terrorism”—that is, for speech, including posts on social media. Four of those arrested are minors, and some have already been convicted and sentenced under legislation that provides for expedited
trials. Alongside the crackdown on public expressions of sympathy with Islamic fundamentalism is the buildup of sweeping police state powers that will be directed not
merely at Islamic radicals, but at any opposition to the French bourgeoisie, above all that from the working class. Valls promised that within three months his government will have drafted new laws on expanded phone-tapping and Internet surveillance, as well as measures to
restructure the French educational system and change the country’s housing policy (aimed at breaking up Muslim communities in impoverished suburbs around major cities).
Given that France is home to some five million Muslims —the largest Muslim population in Western Europe— these measures are not only anti-democratic and
provocative, they are also extremely reckless. Supporters of the propaganda offensive of the French bourgeoisie proclaim that all criticism of the vile
provocations of Charlie Hebdo is an attack on “free speech,” and that somehow the mobilization of the resources of the French state to promote the magazine is a defense of democratic rights. It is one thing to defend the legal right to publish a vicious, racist, right-wing magazine. Marxists oppose the banning even of outright fascist publications by the bourgeois state, because any laws used against the extreme right will be used far more violently against the
working class and the left. It is a far different matter to cover up for, and even
glorify, the repulsive political messages of such publications. There is no difference in principle between cartoons distorting and degrading the prophet Muhammad and the anti-black caricatures of the Ku Klux Klan or, for that matter, the anti-Semitic
caricatures long popular in the neo-fascist and neo-Nazi
camp. This is demonstrated by the logic of French politics, as President Hollande combines solidarity with the anti-Muslim caricatures of Charlie Hebdo with an
invitation to Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascist National Front, to a meeting at the Elysée Palace. The relentless pollution of public opinion and the distortion and misdirection of the natural anger and
shock over the Paris massacre reveal the ideological bankruptcy of the French bourgeoisie and of imperialism as a whole. American imperialism justified its wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq by waving the bloody shirt of 9/11, a pretext that is now completely exhausted. As they plot new military adventures, assuming the
dimensions of a veritable new Crusade, the ruling classes in France and internationally are playing the race card. Inexorably, however, the fundamental class
contradictions in all the major capitalist countries will make themselves felt. The working class must shake off the stultifying effects of the media propaganda barrage and take up the struggle for its independent class interests—the defense of jobs, living standards and democratic rights, and the
fight against imperialist war.

Europe’s terror attacks: The blowback from Western intervention

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of January 7 in Paris, police across Europe have launched a wave of arrests, rounding up dozens of alleged Islamist militants, many of whom have reportedly traveled to and from Syria, where the US and its allies have fomented a bloody civil war.
Amid press reports of imminent plots being disrupted, it is evident that European security officials were well aware of who the alleged plotters were and had been
closely following their movements and activities. The media, throwing itself into the state-backed campaign to terrorize the public, fails to ask the most obvious questions. How is it, for example, that these
individuals were able to freely travel to a foreign war zone, fight there, and then return, no questions asked?
The most obvious answer is that they enjoyed the acquiescence, if not direct support, of elements within the state itself. They were left alone until now because they were deemed to be useful. For nearly four years, Washington and its Western European allies—France first among them—have politically orchestrated and helped finance and arm a war for regime-change in Syria in which Islamist fighters, like the men who carried out the mass killing at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo , have served as the principal ground troops. Weapons, foreign fighters and money have been sent into Syria largely through Turkey, where the CIA set up a secret station to coordinate these operations. Much of the arms and aid flowing to the imperialist-backed “rebels” have come from Washington’s key Arab allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Two organizations have emerged as the preeminent armed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: the Al Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a split-off that has been condemned by Al Qaeda itself for its excessive brutality.
German reporter Jürgen Todenhöfer, the first Western journalist to travel through ISIS-held areas in Syria since the outset of the latest US-led war in the region, reported last month that fully 70 percent of those
fighting to overthrow Syria’s Assad regime are foreign fighters, funneled into the country from throughout the Middle East, Chechnya, Western Europe, North America
and elsewhere. According to a recent US government estimate, as many as 1,000 foreign fighters are joining these militias each month. The death toll in Syria approaches 200,000. Terrorist attacks, mass executions and other crimes have for years been carried out there by the same elements that committed the killings in Paris, without a word of protest from the official circles now promoting the “Je suis Charlie” campaign. They were doing the West’s dirty work.
With the entry of ISIS into Iraq last summer, however, today’s imperialist crimes collided with those of yesterday, creating a serious crisis. The debacle suffered by the Iraqi army at the hands of ISIS was the product of nearly nine years of US war and occupation that ravaged the country, claimed the lives of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis, turned millions into refugees, and provoked an intense Shia-Sunni sectarian conflict. Washington and its allies moved quickly to exploit this crisis, organizing a bombing campaign in both Iraq and Syria and sending thousands of US troops back into Iraq. Yesterday’s proxy forces in the war for regime- change in Syria were transformed into today’s enemies in the revived “war on terror.” This is the political context for the attack in Paris and the warnings of threatened attacks elsewhere. This is hardly a new story. US imperialism has for over half a century given its support to Islamist forces, with the aim of combating secular nationalist movements and regimes bent on asserting control over the region’s oil wealth or cementing close ties with the Soviet Union. The most famous example is Afghanistan, where the CIA, working in close collaboration with Pakistani
intelligence, sponsored a war by Islamist fundamentalist forces to overthrow a Soviet-backed government in Kabul. The forces that would later emerge as Al Qaeda
played a key role in this operation.
Since then, virtually all those designated as prominent targets and suspects in the “war on terror” are individuals well known to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
There are the 9/11 attacks themselves, in which the principal hijackers enjoyed close ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, Washington’s key ally in the Arab world. More than 13 years after the event, the US
government has refused to declassify 28 pages from a report produced by a congressional investigation into the September 11 events that deal with Saudi financing for the attacks. Key organizers of the attack were under direct surveillance by the CIA, but were allowed to enter, leave and re-enter the US freely, without even
possessing proper visas. Once in the US, they were allowed to train as commercial jet aircraft pilots. Then there is the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Muslim cleric who was assassinated in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Now blamed for a host of alleged plots, including providing direction to the Paris gunmen, al-Awlaki had intimate ties with the American state. He became the first imam to conduct a prayer service for Muslim congressional staff members at the US Capitol in 2002. Months after the 9/11 attacks, he was brought to the Pentagon to speak on easing tensions between Muslims and the US military.
More recently, in the case of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the key suspect in the attack, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was not only under surveillance by the FBI, but was targeted for recruitment as an informant
against the Muslim community. Tsarnaev, who was killed four days after the bombing, was allowed to travel freely to and from southern Russia, meeting with Islamists fighting the Moscow government. Moscow
itself warned US authorities about his activities not once, but twice. As for the gunmen killed last week in Paris, it is
acknowledged that they had been under surveillance by not only French, but also US and British intelligence.
How is it that those under surveillance by and in direct contact with police and intelligence agencies are the authors of one terrorist attack after another? The possibility of deliberate provocation can by no means be excluded. It is impossible to say for certain in each of these events whether some form of CIA skullduggery
was involved, with events allowed to transpire, carried out by individuals known to the state, either through acts of omission or commission by the authorities. The media’s attempt to present those involved in these acts of terrorism as mysterious and unknown individuals is fraudulent. On Friday, they reported in succession the
mass arrests in Paris and the rollout of new US plans to fund and train Syrian “rebels.” There was no examination of the connection between these developments.
After the first decade of the “global war on terrorism,” in which Al Qaeda was portrayed as an existential threat, these same forces were employed as proxies in
Western-backed wars for regime-change against secular Arab governments, first in Libya and then Syria. Now, their actions are once again being exploited to promote war abroad and repression at home.
Ultimately, attacks like the one carried out on Charlie Hebdo are the product of decades of imperialist intervention in the Middle East. The wars that have devastated one country after another have unleashed a
wave of violence that cannot but spill beyond the region. Meanwhile, Washington and its allies promote and work with the very forces involved in these attacks.

The Af-Pak Entity: Seduction to Armageddon?

Vijay Shankar

Armageddon is the mythical site of gathering of armies for battle that will end all. Its geographical location is shrouded in biblical lore and considerable controversy
exists of its mercatorial coordinates, but its implications of the eventual catastrophic destiny of mankind (as revealed) are becoming less indistinct. Our study is far
removed from eschatology; it is however keenly concerned with the settings and geography of an impending geopolitical upheaval caused by the withdrawal of American forces from the Af-Pak region.
Inconclusive American abdication leaves in its wake a weak, nuclearised and failing Pakistan unable to reconcile a will to modernity with Jihadi aspirations; an
Afghanistan whose writ does not prevail beyond the edgings of Kabul; a resurgent Iran that seeks domination over west and northern Afghanistan; Central Asian Republics whose civilisational, ethnic and cultural roots in northern Afghanistan exert fissiparous pressures; and an incensed and isolated Russia that sees in the region an opportunity to impel its own influence as a limiting factor to that of the US and the
Saudis. Such competing external dynamics and interferences will work against central control from Kabul rather than in support of it, leaving bare a ‘gathering of armies’ driven by motivators in persistent friction with each other.
Warring Worlds
When states involve themselves for years on end in irregular, decentralised warfare such as the Afghan- Pakistan situation which has been in a state of violent chaos since 1979, the idea of central control is
anaemic. The breakdown of the region into several ‘Tolkienesque’ warring worlds for causes that can only be termed antediluvian has opened the geography of the expanse to historical fractures that the politics of the last century failed to reconcile. Today, a simmering Baluchistan finds little mutuality in a Punjab-dominated
Pakistan; Pakthunwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) ferociously cling to religio-ethnic links with eastern Afghanistan that refute the modern
idea of statehood within Pakistan; inside the rest of Pakistan is a smouldering Jihadist sentiment against India and the West; and finally, Afghan resistance to US
occupation in the post-al Qaeda defeat has left an insurgency engorged with modern weapons and enabling technologies.
Iran’s Intriguing Inclination
In understanding Iran’s contemporary posture towards Afghanistan, it is long forgotten that it was an early supporter of the 2001 invasion, played a key role in the
‘Bonn’ process that gave a constitution to the latter and has been historically wary of the radical militant ways of the Taliban and the manner in which it has been sponsored, fuelled and given sanctuary by Pakistan. While the seemingly endless supply of
narcotics across the porous Baluchistan border and through the Nimruz and Herat sectors, along with linked violence, remains an abiding source of societal distress,
illegal finances and arms trade, all of which has generated a strong impulse in Iran to control and affect stability in the Western region of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan and Iran have long been tied by culture and geography over centuries. Approximately one-fifth of Afghanistan’s population is Shia - a focal point for strife
- for Iran views itself as the guardian of Shiites. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Khomeini dispensation created a sphere of influence by organising
and materially supporting the Shia community there. Soviet inabilities permitted Iran to form a network of
Afghan Shia organisations in the Hazarajat region. When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, the country became a battleground for a proxy war between Iran,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Saudi’s sought the spread of their brand of Islam throughout Central Asia and Pakistan connived to install a Sunni-dominated
government and gain “strategic depth” against India.
Iran, having ended its eight-year war with Iraq, sought to establish a friendly government in Kabul, encouraging
non-Sunni groups to form a united front. These contrary interests spurred a civil war, frustrating Iran’s policies in the region. This time of confusion that saw
the rise of the Sunni Taliban. In 1996, the Taliban seized Kabul and overthrew President Rabbani, arousing the creation of a military front comprising Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns, called the Northern
Alliance, that sought to counter the Taliban. Iran, India, Russia, Tajikistan, and the US supported the Northern Alliance with material, training and sanctuaries. It was only after 9/11 that support for the Northern Alliance extended to military intervention by the US to defeat the Taliban (and al Qaeda) and establish a new Afghan government. Iran’s interests in Afghanistan are in conflict with Pakistan’s single-track preference of an Islamist regime in Kabul (the purpose being to foster its misshapen policy of “Strategic depth” both geographically and ideologically to confront a rising India.) Pakistan also believes a weak and fundamental Islamist government in Kabul may be the best way to keep ethnic, irredentist claims at bay, while at the same time expanding its own influence. Such a policy only paves the way for increased military involvement by all parties including Iran.
Russia’s Part in the ‘Novaya Great Game’
There is a veiled attempt by Russia to fill the current void in Afghanistan despite the probability that destabilisation of the region may be the outcome. Greater competition between neighbouring powers, in Russian perceptions, may set the stage for a new “great game” for the so-called heart of Asia. Russia has need to enter this contest and vie for influence in Afghanistan against other, more motivated external players, not only
to reawaken and accentuate its great power status (as it has done in Ukraine and in Syria) but also, understanding the positions these countries hold and taking their conflicting postures into consideration, the
unfolding situation in Afghanistan will affect Russia’s security indirectly by way of Moscow’s allies in Central Asia. Central Asian nations fear the possible consequences of destabilisation in Afghanistan, which may include an influx of refugees or an upsurge in Islamic extremism, drug trafficking, and tran-border crime, and they may well turn to Moscow for help. It is also difficult to portray a Russia of the immediate future, blind to the emerging Chinese influence in the region by way of their grand scheme of the ‘Continental Silk Route’ and their efforts to corner strategic mineral resources (1400 mineral fields including rare earth elements and over three trillion USD in untapped deposits) that Afghanistan abounds in. The probability of competing politico-socio-economic interests morphing into security concerns is real.
The Central Asian Republics
The Central Asian Republics (CARs) worry about how instability in Afghanistan affects the survival of their own political regimes. These concerns are also symptomatic of their existential weaknesses. But reality
would suggest that Central Asia’s economic prospects depend more on China, Russia and India rather than on Western military presence in Afghanistan, if only internal
stability could be assured. And here lies the rub: CARs have historically depended upon centrally administered authoritarian rule such that even today they are unable to view a globalised world through any prism other than that provided by a distant Moscow, advancing a possible return of a Russian Domain 2.0. Recent moves by Putin to build greater security cooperation among the CARs particularly with Kazakhstan (key regional player) and consolidating military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan would underscore the prospects of revisiting
privileged partnerships and the return of the Super (Capitalist) Commissar. More worryingly, the stage will be set for enhanced friction in the region.
The Thing about Gathering Armies
The thing about ‘gathering armies’ is that it puts in stark relief the dangers that a policy drift can inflict upon a designated region. India cannot treat the post-2014 situation in Afghanistan as a potential Armageddon for its security in South Asia. An Islamist
takeover of Afghanistan and the country’s subsequent turn into a hotbed of international terrorism is not a certainty. India will have to take more responsibility for regional security. This heightened responsibility must first close out the possibility of armed intervention and
put in place a dispensation that promotes cooperative engagement in economic development and institution- building. Under all conditions the use of geography to
further strategic security interests by any of the stakeholders must be abhorred. This approach is consistent with idea of placing strategic stability above strategic competition.

2015: An Opportune Time for South Asian Regional Integration

Amita Batra

In May 2014, when India made the unprecedented gesture of inviting the heads of all SAARC member- countries for the oath taking ceremony of its new Prime
Minister, hopes were raised that a new beginning for regional cooperation in South Asia was now in the offing. A few months later, both days of the 18th SAARC Summit were spent speculating about the possibility of a breakthrough in the cold vibes shared by the heads of India and Pakistan. While the Summit was rescued with a last-minute agreement on energy cooperation, two
other agreements, on road and rail connectivity were left languishing.
The much-expected revival of SAARC did not happen; but there was a hint among SAARC members of moving ahead with interested partners. The first month of 2015
has seen interesting developments with the West Bengal Chief Minister accepting Bangladesh’s invitation for a visit and a surprise outcome of presidential elections in Sri Lanka. What do these three developments mean for South Asia?
First, it is time to reformulate the idea of regional cooperation in South Asia as open and differentiated regionalism. Member-countries should come together in smaller sub-regional groups with a focussed agenda
comprising both common challenges and aspirations that are cross-border in nature. Once they are successful in attaining the limited agenda, the aims and objectives can expand and so can the membership as
non-members would begin incurring the costs of non- accession. In due course, sub-regionalism would serve as a preparatory ground for merging into larger groupings as it would be indicative of the members’
willingness to act in a cooperative framework with their neighbours and a readiness to join larger groupings in the region that go beyond these members.
Within South Asia, sub-regional groups already exist. Membership in some of these sub-regional groupings extends beyond South Asia to Southeast Asian/ East Asian countries. These include the BBIN with
Bangladesh Bhutan, India and Nepal as members; the BCIM with Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar; and the BIMSTEC with Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand, as member economies.
Instead of the existing overlapping and all-
encompassing objectives of these sub-groupings, it would be better to delineate a workable agenda based on an area of comparative advantage for each and adopt a focussed approach towards its achievement. Issues of hydropower, movements of peoples, transit rights etc. could be primary areas for the BBIN;
connectivity and economic corridors for the BCIM; and supply chains in textiles and clothing and gas pipelines could constitute the working agenda for the BIMSTEC.
The resource and expertise-constrained South Asian economies may then be able to contribute to and benefit from these groupings in accordance with their potential. A necessary prior requirement in this context would be the establishment of an institutional mechanism that includes a secretariat, working groups with requisite expertise, regular meetings, coordination
and periodic exchange of information and reports. Over time, a merger or expansion of the sub-regional groupings could shape into regional formulation.
Second, apart from the Teesta water sharing arrangement and the land boundary agreement – two significant issues that might see a resolution during the
West Bengal chief minister’s February 2015 visit to Bangladesh – the two countries may also like to consider the issue of full transit to India’s northeast via Bangladesh. Preliminary action on this front was evident in 2014 when Bangladesh, under a special transit arrangement, allowed transport of food grains to Tripura through its territory. The certainty of a full transit
agreement will facilitate connectivity of the North-East Indian states with the rest of India and as a consequence, allow them to take advantage of the Indian economic dynamism.
Third, the political change that Sri Lanka recently saw augurs well for the India- Sri Lanka Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) negotiations
for which, beginning 2005, led to a framework agreement scheduled to be signed in 2008. Reservations regarding the services sector liberalisation, particularly
mode 4 related movement of professionals, investment and non- tariff barriers (NTBs) coupled with lack of political will have prevented the CEPA from being signed
and operationalised. In order for this to happen, the CEPA must uphold the same principles of non- reciprocity and differential treatment as was the case in
the India-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement (FTA).
The India-Sri Lanka FTA is an example of a south-south trade agreement that has taken into account the asymmetry of the two economies in its provisions and yet been successful in generating a positive outcome of increased trade for both economies. Deeper integration via the CEPA may be particularly opportune when India is attempting to revive its manufacturing sector; and fears with regard to NTBs and services liberalisation may be better combated with more rational assessments of alternative liberalisation scenarios.
Strengthening developing country linkages is an imperative in the post-global financial crisis period when several traditional Western markets are unable to generate sufficient growth and hence demand for
exports of these economies. Regionalism is being actively pursued by the rest of the world. South Asia must therefore make best of the available opportunities in this direction in 2015.