New powers for secret services in Bavaria

Marianne Arens

On Monday, August 1, a new Constitutional Protection Act came into force in the state of Bavaria. Protection of the constitution is the name given to Germany’s post-war domestic intelligence services and the new Bavarian legislation is part of a massive upgrade of the country’s security services. It is a role model for the construction of a comprehensive police state on a federal basis.

The law creates a super authority, which operates secretly but has far-reaching police powers. The separation of the police from the secret services, embodied in Germany’s post-war constitution based on drawing lessons from the crimes of Hitler’s Gestapo, has been effectively wiped out.

Bavaria is now the only German state that permits its intelligence services to access massive amounts of data formally reserved for police authorities. Telephone companies must store all of their data for two and a half months and then hand data over to the secret services on request. Such data details which person has spoken to whom, for how long and from what location.

The state secret services can now also conduct online searches of computers and install spyware on private computers—powers also formally restricted to the police. To this end the Bavarian parliament has approved a supplementary budget for 2016 to fund nearly 100 new secret service jobs.

The state secret services will have virtually unlimited powers. Existing rules for the protection of professional secrecy for journalists, lawyers and clergy have been undermined. Even small children now may be spied on, although they cannot be prosecuted under German law. “Radicalization is not a question of age,” declared Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (Christian Social Union, CSU). In reality the state government is seeking to force children to spy on their parents, as was practiced by both the Nazis and the East German Stalinist police.

For the first time a legal framework for the selection and the use of undercover agents has been created. Undercover agents may now officially be used against groups with no record of violent activity.

In order to infiltrate such nonviolent groups the secret services can use the services of virtually anyone. According to the new law, even criminals convicted for serious offences, such as manslaughter, can be recruited as undercover agents. Only murderers are excluded.

While the powers of the secret services have been greatly expanded, parliamentary oversight of their activities has been cut back. The appropriate parliamentary control committee for telephone surveillance must now meet only once a year, instead of meeting every six months, as formerly.

The new law is part of the general trend towards a police state. At the start of June the federal cabinet agreed an enormous expansion of the powers of the police and intelligence services, allowing telephone calls to be intercepted without a court order. On July 28, Chancellor Angela Merkel then announced a nine-point plan for internal security involving new drastic powers for state forces. The latest Bavarian law now goes even further.

Justifying the state build-up, Interior Minister Hermann stressed the dangers posed by “extremism and terrorism” at a press conference on Monday. According to Herrmann, the greatest threat were radical Islamists, both so-called “lone wolves” and “controlled and active terrorist cells,” which were seeking “to destroy our freedom.”

Herrmann referred to the “first Islamist suicide bombing” in Ansbach on July 24, and the attack carried out by a 17-year-old Afghan on July 18 on a commuter train near Würzburg. These attacks, both attributed to the Islamic State group, involved severe injuries but no mortalities.

Notably the Interior Minister made no mention of the terror rampage conducted by an 18-year-old in Munich on July 22, in which nine people were killed. The attack was the pretext for an unprecedented police state exercise in Munich.

The reason is very simple: the attacker in Munich was a German-Iranian who sympathized with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The youth praised Adolf Hitler and most of his victims were foreign-looking youth. The content of his computer made clear that his role model was the Swedish fascist Anders Breivik, who carried out terror attacks in Oslo and Utoya.

The number of victims in Ansbach and Würzburg, when compared to the casualties in Munich, makes clear that far-right terror is the main threat in Germany.

According to the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, 178 homicides have been carried out by far-right extremists in Germany since 1990, although official figures put the number at 75. Bavaria has witnessed a rapid increase in far-right terror. In the first half of 2016 politically motivated crimes against refugee shelters in the state more than tripled compared to the same period in 2015.

Herrmann remains silent on the far-right terrorist attacks because the secret services maintain close links to such neo-fascist circles. This was particularly evident in the case of the far-right terrorist group, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which murdered nine immigrant workers between 2000 and 2006.

In the course of the investigation into the murders it emerged that various intelligence agencies and police authorities had installed more than 20 undercover agents and employees into the circles in and around the NSU. Some of these agents played a leading role in building up neo-Nazi networks and were in direct contact with the three confirmed members of the terrorist group. There is evidence that employees of the secret service were even actively involved in the murders.

The Bavarian intelligence services also played a significant role. Five of the nine murders were carried out in the state. In the course of investigation it was revealed that the state secret services employed for a decade an agent who assisted in the creating the far right “Thule Power” and had close links to the groups from which the NSU emerged. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung the agent received up to 150,000 German deutschmarks from the state to build the network.

This same authority has now been freed from further parliamentary scrutiny and is receiving expanded powers. It is clear that the issue is not about the protection of the population, but rather the build-up of an apparatus with close ties to the far-right terrorist scene which can be used against future social opposition.

Herrmann made this very clear in his press conference on Monday. In addition to the new law, he announced tougher measures against refugees. Random police checks will monitor asylum centres and in future the Bavarian police will increasingly conduct mass operations, i.e., indiscriminate mass controls of all transport users to detect so-called “illegals.”

“We need to stop refugees without papers at the German borders, clarify their identity and when necessary reject them,” Herrmann said. “Foreign offenders most quickly lose their right of residence and be deported even more quickly—even back to crisis regions.”

In reality, these attacks on the democratic rights of refugees are aimed at all workers. Growing militarism and continuous social cuts are incompatible with democracy. This is the logic behind the new laws in Bavaria, which represent a further step towards a police state in Germany.

Amnesty report denounces Australia’s “cruel” refugee regime on Nauru

Mike Head

A report published this week by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch further exposes the deliberate violation of the human, democratic and legal rights of about 1,200 men, women, and children who have been detained on the remote Pacific island of Nauru for more than three years after seeking asylum in Australia.

As the report documents, the Australian government has set a brutal model for countries around the world to punish and bar entry to the millions of desperate refugees. There are now more than 60 million globally fleeing persecution, oppression and war, mostly as a result of the wars being waged by the US and its allies, including Australia, throughout the Middle East.

Anna Neistat, an Amnesty research director who conducted the investigation, said: “Australia’s policy of exiling asylum seekers who arrive by boat is cruel in the extreme. Few other countries go to such lengths to deliberately inflict suffering on people seeking safety and freedom.”

According to the report, the traumatised refugees suffer frequent abuses, inhumane treatment, primitive housing, unpunished assaults and denial of basic medical and psychological services. Despite 915 of the asylum seekers being officially classified as refugees needing protection under international law, all are being held indefinitely, unable to leave the island.

One woman told the researchers: “People here don’t have a real life. We are just surviving. We are dead souls in living bodies. We are just husks.”

This regime, while vehemently defended by Australia’s current Liberal-National Coalition government, was established in 2012 by the previous Labor government, under Prime Minister Julia Gillard, for the explicit purpose of punishing asylum seekers in order to deter others from trying to reach Australia.

The report states that the refugees “endure unnecessary delays and at times denial of medical care, even for life-threatening conditions. Many have dire mental health problems and suffer overwhelming despair—self-harm and suicide attempts are frequent. All face prolonged uncertainty about their future…

“Refugees and asylum seekers interviewed said they have developed severe anxiety, inability to sleep, mood swings, prolonged depression, and short-term memory loss on the island. Children have begun to wet their beds, suffered from nightmares, and engaged in disruptive and other troubling behavior.”

Neistat and other researchers interviewed 84 asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Kuwait and Afghanistan, including stateless Kurds. They also interviewed several Australian-funded service providers, who supplied information despite risking prosecution under Australian law for doing so.

The refugees initially spent a year or more living in cramped vinyl tents, with filthy toilets, with temperatures indoors regularly reaching 45 to 50 degrees Celsius, and torrential rains and flooding. Those people later classified as refugees were generally provided accommodation in prefabricated units, converted containers or other sub-standard housing.

About one-third of the 1,200 people remain in the tents inside the detention centre, still subject to curfews, banned from bringing smartphones into the camp and monitored by guards.

To visit Nauru, the researchers had to go undercover to break through a wall of secrecy erected by Australia and Nauru’s government, which is paid millions of dollars annually to host the detention facilities. Requests by journalists to visit are invariably rejected, doctors and other detention staff face criminal charges for disclosing abuses, Facebook has been banned and human rights observers have been denied access.

The report emphasises that Australian authorities are well aware of the abuses. The Australian Human Rights Commission, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a Senate committee and a government-appointed expert “have each highlighted many of these practices, and called on the government to change them.”

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch conclude that the Australian government is guilty of human rights abuses: “By forcibly transferring refugees and people seeking asylum to Nauru, detaining them for prolonged periods in inhuman conditions, denying them appropriate medical care, and in other ways structuring its operations so that many experience a serious degradation of their mental health, the Australian government has violated the rights to be free from torture and other ill-treatment, and from arbitrary detention, as well as other fundamental protections.”

As with every previous inquiry, the Australian mainstream media largely buried the report, and the government dismissed it out of hand. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection said it “strongly refutes many of the allegations” in the report, but refused to provide details on which parts of the report it was refuting.

The report says the self-immolation of 23-year-old Omid Massoumali, an Iranian refugee, in April had a devastating effect on other detainees, triggering rapid declines in mental health. Massoumali was the third refugee within eight months to die in an Australian detention facility after setting himself alight in protest at the inhuman conditions.

At that time, Australian Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton flatly defended the delay in evacuating Masoumali, who might have survived had he received prompt medical care. Dutton branded such protests as politically futile acts of “self-harm” and claimed that the refugees were happy to be “settled” in Nauru.

The reality is that Nauru, just 21 square kilometres (smaller than a major city airport), has been devastated by 40 years of Australian phosphate mining. As a result of Australian colonial rule, most of the island is uninhabitable and uncultivable. Employment opportunities are scarce and basic services, such as health and education, are inadequate.

That is precisely why successive Australian governments—dating back to the “Pacific solution” unveiled by the Howard Coalition government in 2001—have used Nauru, along with Papua New Guinea’s equally impoverished Manus Island, as a punitive location for people seeking refuge in Australia.

Labor’s immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann said his party was “deeply troubled” by the Amnesty report, and Immigration Minister Dutton needed to “immediately investigate these claims.” This is rank duplicity. Labor, which first introduced the mandatory detention of refugees in 1992, remains unequivocally committed to maintaining the “offshore” detention camps.

Last year, Labor joined hands with the government to push through legislation to retrospectively legalise the Nauru and Manus camps. That bill provided the basis for this February’s ruling by Australia’s High Court sanctioning the offshore regime, effectively setting a new global benchmark for the indefinite incarceration of people—“offshore” facilities outside the jurisdiction of the courts.

Likewise, the Greens’ immigration spokesperson, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull needed to take action on the situation in Nauru. It was the Greens who gave the previous Labor government the parliamentary numbers to remain in office as it reopened the Nauru and Manus camps. The Greens back the underlying “border protection” framework of stopping refugees reaching Australia, except for small numbers of carefully hand-picked people.

The truth is that Australian governments, Liberal-National and Greens-backed Labor alike, have made asylum seekers and immigrants scapegoats for the worsening social conditions being imposed on the working class. Some of the world’s most vulnerable people are being subjected to ever-more lawless imprisonment, setting precedents for wider use around the world.

Rio Olympics overshadowed by social crisis

Rafael Azul

The 2016 summer Olympic games will open today, Friday August 5, in Rio de Janeiro at 8:00pm (local time), when the Olympic flame will be lit in Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious Maracanã Stadium.

Some 11,500 athletes representing 28 sports and 207 nations, are expected to participate; 306 events have been scheduled.

The Rio event is the 29th since the Olympics were reinstituted in 1896. In ancient Greece, the games were meant to symbolize peace. It is said that even ongoing wars were suspended while the games took place. Whatever remains of that earlier symbol is merely superficial. The current games take place under conditions of seemingly unending war in North Africa and the Middle East, and the threat of war in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.

These games were meant to signal to the world Brazil’s entry into the club of wealthy industrialized nations. Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced his nation’s bid to host the games in 2009. “Our time has arrived,” declared Lula then, pointing out that Brazil was alone among the 10 largest economies in the world in never having hosted the Olympic games.

The games on Friday open in a completely different climate. This nation of nearly 200 million is in the midst of the worst social crisis since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1985. Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, has been suspended from office and is being impeached as a result of a political coup that installed the right-wing, and widely hated, President Michel Temer. The new president, a darling of Wall Street and the financial sector, has imposed “austerity” policies that attack the living standards and social benefits of Brazilian workers, most of whom will not be able to afford to attend either today’s opening ceremonies or any of the games.

This week’s Olympic games offer a telling contrast between wealth and poverty. The favelas, the impoverished hillside neighborhoods of the city, many of them under police occupation, have been under attack since the city was awarded the Olympic games. Walls were built to keep poor people from tourist destinations, homes were summarily demolished and people relocated to suit the construction plans, affecting some 30,000 people. An additional 6,000 homeless people have been moved away from Río’s downtown.

Last Saturday protesters in the coastal city of Angra dos Reis, 100 miles south of Rio de Janeiro, extinguished the Olympic flame as it was carried on its way to the Maracaná stadium, in protest over Temer’s austerity policies and the routing of funds away from the town to pay for the Olympics. Angra dos Reis is a coastal gateway to expensive resorts and beach mansions of the wealthy from Brazil and around the world. It is also the site of a Petrobras oil refinery and nuclear power plant. The majority of its residents are working class and poor, living in precarious housing on hillsides that have seen repeated disastrous mudslides.

The protest at Angra dos Reis was one of a series of protests in virtually every town along the torch route. On July 27, demonstrators in São Jose dos Campos, an important center of industry northeast of São Paulo, marched alongside the torch with paper torches that read “education,” “health” and “housing.” As the torch entered Rio de Janeiro—under heavy security— demonstrators pelted it with stones.

A universal complaint in these protests is that funds were siphoned to the Olympics while workers were not getting paid on time.

Three weeks earlier, the Rio police had broken up demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro, also opposing spending on the games. Demonstrators indicated that teachers and public employees were not being paid due to a financial emergency at the state level.

Rio itself has the appearance of a city under siege. Eighty-eight thousand police and soldiers are occupying the city, operating under the pretext of insuring the security of athletes and tourists. This includes 47,000 from the military and the military police. At their disposal are 60 ships, 70 armored vehicles and 34 helicopters. Another 1,200 security officers have been assigned to the Rio airport area.

In June, the government of Rio de Janeiro announced conditions of fiscal emergency and asked for state funds to prevent an economic collapse.

As the games open, and while tourists and well-off Brazilians take tourists “selfies” in front of images of the Olympic rings along Copacabana beach, what is revealed with ever more clarity is the existence of two Brazils. Some 100 million Brazilians live in poverty—with per capita incomes of less than $300 a month—making it one of the most socially unequal countries in the world. In 2012, economic statistics indicated that sections of the lower middle class, above the poverty line, have virtually no disposable income above their basic needs.

The worsening economic conditions have gone hand in hand with increasing unemployment and the growth of informal and temporary jobs, particularly for youth.

High rates of poverty are most prevalent in northeastern Brazil, breeding grounds for the mosquito-borne Zika virus, itself a disease of poverty.

Concern over security and the Zika virus may also account for the low estimates of tourist spending this August, $200 million, contrasted to the $900 million spent by visitors during the World Soccer Cup two years ago.

Class tensions are at the breaking point. The most that Brazilian authorities can hope for is a brief period of social peace while the Olympic games take place, a “truce” in the spirit of ancient Greece. Such a lull in the class struggle, if it occurs, is bound to be only temporary, as Brazil enters a period of class war.

Bank of England announces record rate cut in windfall for financial markets

Barry Grey

The Bank of England (BOE) announced a massive stimulus program on Thursday in response to the negative impact of the referendum vote to leave the European Union on the British economy. The central bank slashed its benchmark interest rate to 0.25 percent, the lowest level in the bank’s 322-year history.

The rate cut, together with two other measures announced by the bank Thursday—a multi-billion-pound revival of the bank’s money-printing “quantitative easing” program and a new plan to extend virtually free credit to the major banks—will pump some 170 billion more pounds ($223 billion) into the UK’s financial markets.

Justified as measures to encourage bank lending and expanded investment and job-creation, the new handouts to the banks and corporations will do nothing of the sort. As the multi-trillion-dollar state subsidies to the banks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash have already showed, the result is a further expansion of financial speculation and parasitism alongside a further growth of social inequality and poverty.

The central bank cut its forecast for UK economic growth in 2017 to 0.8 percent from its previous forecast of 2.3 percent, its biggest ever downgrade between quarterly projections. Officials made clear the slowdown would not be brief, saying they expected the British economy to be 2.5 percent smaller in three years than they had projected before the referendum.

“The outlook for growth in the short-to-medium terms has weakened markedly,” the central bank said. It forecast a fall in imports into the UK from the rest of the world in 2017 and 2018.

Unemployment and inflation will rise, the bank said, and real income growth will slow while house prices decline. Warning that economic growth will fall to close to zero over the last six months of this year, the bank’s quarterly Inflation Report declared, “Following the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, the exchange rate has fallen and the outlook for growth in the short- to medium-term has weakened markedly.”

In response to the BOE announcement, the pound fell 1.1 percent against the dollar and UK government bond yields hit new lows.

The British and European financial markets responded to this dismal news with a sharp rise in stock prices. Britain’s FTSE 100 index shot up 1.59 percent and the Euro Stoxx 50 index rose 0.73 percent, as bankers, hedge fund operators and corporate CEOs rubbed their hands in anticipation of a new upsurge in profits and bonuses on the basis of a flood of virtually free money from the BOE.

The grim projections of economic growth reported by BOE Governor Mark Carney are based not only on the impact of the Brexit vote. That unanticipated development only intensified processes of stagnation and mounting crisis already clearly evident in Britain and internationally. Just last week the US, the euro zone and Japan released economic data showing a further slowdown in growth from an already anemic level.

Second-quarter gross domestic product growth in the US, at 1.2 percent, was far below the expected increase of 2.5 percent and barely above the miserable figure of 0.8 percent in the first quarter. Most significant was the 9.7 percent decline in business investment, the third straight quarterly fall. The euro zone economy barely budged, and France saw no growth at all.

The decline in US business investment is indicative of the character of the so-called “recovery” in the American and world economy from the Great Recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. On the basis of central bank quantitative easing, record low interest rates and trillions in government bank bailouts, together with a brutal assault on wages, jobs and working class living standards, there has been a further explosion of the types of speculation and outright criminality that triggered the crash in the first place.

Meanwhile, the banks and corporations have largely refused to invest in production and infrastructure, using their government-provided windfalls instead for such parasitic activities as stock buybacks, dividend rises and mergers and acquisitions.

The new moves by the BOE will only accelerate these processes. The scope of the measures announced is extraordinary. In addition to buying 60 billion pounds of government bonds, the central bank will purchase 10 billion pounds of corporate debt.

To make sure that the banks’ profits are not damaged by the reduction in interest rates, the BOE will offer them four-year loans at rates close to the 0.25 benchmark in a so-called “term funding scheme” worth up to $100 billion.

Carney and the bank’s Monetary Policy Committee made clear, moreover, that these steps were just the beginning. They said they expected to cut the bank rate again later in the year to as low as 0.1 percent. Carney reassured reporters that the BOE would take “whatever measures are necessary” to bail out the financial system.

The financial markets fully expect and are demanding even more extreme measures. The Wall Street Journal quoted ING economist James Knightley as saying of the BOE’s announcement, “We see it as a stop-gap solution to show authorities are doing something ahead of more substantial fiscal support [i.e., corporate tax cuts] later in the year.”

British government to escalate its Middle East intervention

Paul Mitchell

On Monday, a Ministry of Defence (MoD) press release on the UK’s intervention in the war in Iraq and Syria was taken up in several British media outlets including the BBC, Guardian and Daily Mail.

The headline-grabbing story told of an air-strike on a palace of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Mosul, the Iraqi “capital” of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh), by Reaper drones and Tornado fighters using the Royal Air Force’s 2,000-pound bunker busting Paveway bombs. ISIS has been in control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, since June 2014, when the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of an offensive by the Islamist force.

The press release also revealed that there have been RAF strikes over several days around Manbij in northern Syria, which lies on the main supply route from Turkey to Raqqa, Islamic State’s headquarters in Syria.

The British air force has conducted close to 950 airstrikes from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus since the UK restarted military action in Iraq in September 2014, as part of the US’s Operation Inherent Resolve to recapture territory held by ISIS. Some 1,150 military personnel are stationed in the region and more have been promised by Conservative Defence Minister Michael Fallon.

Speaking at the Royal United Service Institute’s annual airpower conference last month, Fallon declared, “The RAF has not operated at this sustained operational tempo in a single theatre of conflict for a quarter of a century.

“Our tempo and commitment to the operation—our precision targeting, our Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and our overall support to the coalition—shows no sign of abating.”

An indication of the severity of the conflict can be gleaned from the monthly reports published on the MoD website, which catalogue the almost daily bombing raids by the RAF.

Typical is the entry for July 28 which reads, “RAF aircraft continued to provide close air support to the Syrian democratic forces on Thursday 28 July, when a Reaper patrolled the Manbij area. The Reaper’s crew conducted 4 attacks with Hellfire missiles against several groups of Daesh fighters, and assisted in 4 further attacks by coalition fast jets. In Iraq, Brimstone armed Tornados destroyed a mortar near Qayyarah, while a pair of Typhoons used a Paveway IV to strike a Daesh bunker on the shores of Lake Qadisiyah.”

A demonstration of the terrible power of the missiles can be seen here.

The ramping up of UK military intervention is part of US plans to recapture Mosul from ISIS. According to some press reports, pressure is increasing to begin the offensive in October--before the US presidential election--and that it may be combined with one on Raqqa.

Speaking at a meeting of 30 defence and foreign ministers in Washington last month, Brett McGurk--Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition To Counter ISIL, Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL--declared, “The liberation of Mosul is now in sight and an achievable goal” and means the end of the “IS phony caliphate.”

In March, ISIS was ousted from the Syrian city of Palmyra and in June from the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The Pentagon claims ISIS has lost some 45 percent of the territory it held in Iraq and up to 20 percent in Syria.

In recent weeks, the Obama administration has given permission for US advisers to be deployed with Iraqi battalions i.e., in the firing line, and hundreds of advisers are pouring into the Qayyarah air base, about 40 miles south of Mosul, which was recaptured from ISIS last month.

Additionally, support for the Peshmerga militia of the Kurdistan Regional Government has rapidly escalated with an agreement signed last month to provide $415 million to buy ammunition and medical supplies.

The battle for Mosul will be waged by three main military forces: Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi Security Forces. So far, the fight against ISIS has provided the glue for an uneasy truce among these political factions—but US officials concede the informal alliance on the battlefield could be shattered by political disagreements. A powder-keg has been created, which will lead to another bloody sectarian conflict in the vacuum left should ISIS be defeated.

The Popular Mobilization Forces is an Iraqi state-sponsored umbrella organization composed of some 40, almost entirely Shia Muslim militia groups. It was created in 2014 as the Iraqi Army collapsed. Nominally headed by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, under the control of the Iraqi security services and paid by the Iraqi state, most militias operate with their own chain of command, and receive direct support from Iran. According to Amnesty International, Shiite militias have abducted, tortured and killed numerous Sunni civilians.

The US alliance with the Peshmerga, which it sees as the mainstay of the Mosul operation, has antagonised both the Iraqi central government and Turkey, which fears growing Kurdish influence with the US—especially since the failed coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Erdogan earlier in July. The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and its local offshoots now control a swathe of territory from northern Iraq into northern Syria.

A recently negotiated US-Kurdish understanding includes Peshmerga militia standing aside when the Iraqi Security Forces pass through their units during the initial assault on Mosul. The move is part of a US effort to make sure that the units involved in the Mosul operation do not end up killing each other.

The US has also dropped its opposition to arming Sunni militias in Iraq’s Anbar province and helped create a new Tribal Mobilization Force.

The announcement Wednesday by President Barack Obama that he has authorised a month-long bombing campaign against Islamic State in Libya, prompted Middle East Eye (MEE) to raise questions regarding UK military involvement on that front.

Noting evidence of ongoing covert UK operations in Libya, including the use of the elite Special Air Service regiment, MEE writes: “On Wednesday, sources at the Ministry of Defence in London refused to be drawn on ‘potential UK flights and Libya’ when asked to clarify the UK's position by MEE. This comes after Prime Minister Theresa May promised to work toward preventing Libya ‘becoming a base for Daesh.’ She made the comments alongside her Italian counterpart, Matteo Renzi in Rome last week.”

MEE also states that the British government has “refused to comment on whether RAF drones are currently operating over Libya.”

The UK’s role in the bloodbath being carried out across the Middle East and North Africa lies firmly with the Labour Party which allied itself with the Conservative government, voting for war in Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, in Iraq again in 2014 and in Syria in December 2015.

Current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn cleared the path for the bombing of Syria when he capitulated to his right wing and agreed to a “free vote” on military action, enabling 66 Labour MPs to vote with the Tories without fear of censure.

In a survey of the party membership, 75 percent registered their opposition to the bombing of Syria. Only the day before, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee voted four to three in favour of a motion that Cameron “had not adequately addressed concerns” about military action.

Corbyn continues to state his personal opposition to military action in Syria and Libya, but his new Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, Clive Lewis, pointedly refused to rule out support for military operations in Libya. “We will look at the detail of any request from the Libyan authorities, if and when such a request for military assistance is made,” Lewis reported.

Knife attack in London prompts massive police operation

Robert Stevens

The as yet unexplained killing on a central London street of a United States national Wednesday evening is being used to justify a massive build-up of armed police throughout the UK.

London’s Metropolitan Police named the victim as Darlene Horton, 64, who died at the scene. She was the wife of a university professor from Florida, who was within hours of flying home.

It is understood that Horton was attacked by a 19-year-old Norwegian national of Somali origin near the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square. The man stabbed two other women and three men in the incident. Those stabbed were taken to hospital. None had life threatening injuries and three were discharged Thursday. The injured are British, American, Australian and Israeli.

Shortly after the killing, the police arrested the man on suspicion of murder, after stunning him with a Taser. According to the police, the attack took place just after 10:30 p.m. After being called, the specialist firearms police officers who Tasered and apprehended the man were on the scene in six minutes.

Initially, the police stated that terrorism could have been factor in the attack. Assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said, “Early indications suggest mental health is a significant factor in this case and that is one major line of inquiry.” He added, “But of course at this stage we should keep an open mind regarding motive and consequently terrorism as a motivation remains but one line of inquiry for us to explore.”

“As a precautionary measure, Londoners will wake up this morning to notice an increased presence on the streets of officers, including armed officers today,” Rowley said. Later police said they would be on the streets “for as long as we need.”

Rowley’s statement was changed later Thursday morning to omit any mention of terrorism as a motive. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe did not reveal any further details about the arrested man or a possible motive, stating only, “As we have already made clear, mental health remains a substantial focus for our investigation.”

He too concluded his statement, “Across our capital today you will see more police officers, armed and unarmed, to reassure the public after recent events overseas.”

Around midday, after an initial investigation that included house searches, Rowley issued another statement saying, “I emphasise that so far we’ve found no evidence of radicalisation that would suggest the man in our custody is in any way motivated by terrorism.”

Despite this, armed police units continued to patrol many of the capital’s busiest locations and tourist spots, brandishing weapons including semi-automatic carbines, Glock pistols, Taser stun guns, CS spray and batons. The Guardian noted, “Around the British Museum in Bloomsbury, near the scene of Wednesday night’s attack, patrols could be seen on almost every street, as well as in the courtyard in front of the museum.”

The units have access to an array of other weapons, including shotguns.

The police blitzing of the capital came just one day after the Metropolitan Police announced Operation Hercules, under which 600 armed police officers, masked and clad in all black body armour resembling paramilitary squads, will flood London’s streets. This will bring the total number of armed police operating in the capital to 2,800.

The units have access to BMW F800GS motorbikes capable of speeds of 140 mph as well as vans. They will operate speedboats that will be deployed all over the Thames. Just hours before the attack Wednesday evening, some of the armed units were paraded before the media, with Sky News shadowing a high-speed boat full of masked police as it speeded down the Thames.

The mobilisation of this force is part of the Conservative government’s plans to increase by 1,500 the number of armed police officers throughout the UK.

Operation Hercules was launched by Hogan-Howe, who said Sunday that the UK’s “threat level” remained at “severe”—meaning an attack was “highly likely.” Citing terrorist attacks that have occurred recently in several European cities, the commissioner said, “You could say it is a case of when, not if ... as the police officer in charge of preventing such an attack, [I] know that you want me to reassure you. I am afraid I cannot do that entirely.”

The launching of Operation Hercules was carried out with the full backing of London’s Labour Party Mayor, Sadiq Khan. It was then endorsed Thursday by Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, the main ally of the party’s nominally “left” leader Jeremy Corbyn.

From the Met’s statements, there is every indication that the London attacker is mentally ill. Yet without any public discussion, vast numbers of armed police have been placed on the capital’s streets.

Due to the gutting of vital social services, many mentally ill people are being left to fend for themselves. The Guardian reported Thursday, “Mental illness is a significant part of what Metropolitan Police officers deal with every day and they get 600,000 calls about it a year. They are called to far more incidents involving mental health problems than robbery or sexual offences, a report by the mental health charity Turning Point found in 2013.”

Turning Point’s report cited a Metropolitan Police Service review that “estimated that 15 to 25 percent of incidents are linked to mental health. Using this estimate the daily contact rises to a minimum of 1,626 calls per day …”

As in London, incidents involving mentally disturbed people and actual terrorist attacks are both used to deploy armed police and the military in capital cities and towns across the continent.

In France, a state of emergency has been in place since terrorist attacks last November. Following subsequent attacks in Paris and the still unexplained killing of 84 people in Nice, more than 120,000 soldiers and armed police have been deployed nationwide.

Huge police mobilisations are ongoing in the Belgian capital, Brussels, and Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. This week armed police flooded Schiphol airport, just five miles from the centre of Amsterdam and the fifth busiest airport in Europe. This was in response to an undefined “threat.” As part of the operation, military police searched every car entering the airport.

In Germany, the coalition government led by Chancellor Angela Merkel has responded to recent events in France and Germany with plans to place soldiers on the streets of the capital, Berlin.

Defence Minister Ursela von der Leyen announced that regional police forces and the Germany army (Bundeswehr) would begin practising co-ordinated exercises on the pretext of training for terrorist attacks. This is in defiance of Germany’s constitution, which after the horrors of fascism, places restrictions on the use of troops on German soil. Since the Second World War, soldiers have only been deployed on German streets to deal with natural disasters such as flooding.

The routine deploying of masses of police armed to the teeth and of soldiers testifies to the extraordinary level of social and class tensions in Europe. No aspect of daily life is now exempt from intrusive policing by the state. In France, dozens of summer events have been banned in Paris, Nice, Marseilles and other towns and cities on the pretext that large crowds could serve as a magnet for terrorists. On Monday, France introduced sea patrols on passenger ferries to and from the UK. For the first of these operations, police officers were flown in by helicopter onto a ferry just as it entered French waters.

Justifying the resort to such repressive measures, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian stated, “We are in a situation of war. Sometimes it is necessary to ban events if the security requirements are not respected. Everyone must understand this situation leads to constraints.”

Accustoming the population to accept such “constraints” is a major, overarching concern for Europe’s ruling elites. Measures that will be used to target working class protests and strikes are being rolled out in the name of combating terrorism.

RAND Corporation lays out scenarios for US war with China

Peter Symonds

A new study by the RAND Corporation titled “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable” is just the latest think tank paper devoted to assessing a US war against China. The study, commissioned by the US Army, provides further evidence that a war with China is being planned and prepared in the upper echelons of the American military-intelligence apparatus.

That the paper emerges from the RAND Corporation has a particular and sinister significance. Throughout the Cold War, RAND was the premier think tank for “thinking the unthinkable”—a phrase made notorious by RAND’s chief strategist in the 1950s, Herman Kahn. Kahn devoted his macabre bookOn Thermonuclear War to elaborating a strategy for a “winnable” nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

According to the preface of the new study, released last week, “This research was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and conducted within the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. RAND Arroyo Center, part of the RAND Corporation, is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.”

The paper is a war-gaming exercise in the Kahn tradition: weighing the possible outcomes of a war between two nuclear powers with utter indifference to the catastrophic consequences for people in the United States, China and the rest of the world.

The study is based on a series of highly questionable assumptions: that a war between the United States and China would not involve other powers; that it would remain confined to the East Asian region; and that nuclear weapons would not be used. In reality, a war on China would from the outset involve US allies and would thus, in all likelihood, rapidly escalate out of control, spread beyond East Asia, and heighten the danger that nuclear weapons would be used.

As part of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” the US has been strengthening alliances throughout the region, establishing new basing arrangements and consolidating military “interoperability.” The US military could not wage war against China without the intelligence and military and basing resources of, at the very least, Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

The RAND Corporation study considers four simplistic scenarios for a conflict defined by two variables: intensity (either mild or severe) and duration (from a few days to a year or more). It also notes that given the pace of advances in military technology—in what is already an undeclared arms race—the outcomes change over time. Thus, it studies the losses and costs for both sides of a war fought in 2015 and one in 2025.

The summary of findings pays far more attention to the outcomes of severe conflicts than for mild ones. In both cases—a brief, severe war and a long, severe war—the study estimates that the economic and military impact on China would be far greater than on the United States. At the same time, it concludes that the US would suffer greater losses and costs in 2025 than in 2015.

The paper states: “As its military advantage declines, the United States will be less confident that a war with China will conform to its plans. China’s improved military capabilities, particularly for anti-access and area denial (A2AD), mean that the United States cannot count on gaining operational control, destroying China’s defences, and achieving decisive victory if a war occurred.”

The unstated conclusion, which underpins all of the Pentagon’s planning and preparations, is that a war with China must be fought sooner rather than later. The US military build-up envisages 60 percent of all air and naval assets in the Indo-Pacific region by 2020—now just over three years away. Moreover, Washington’s deliberate inflaming of dangerous flash points in Asia, especially in the South China Sea, is aimed at portraying Beijing as “aggressive” and “expansionist” and concocting the necessary casus belli.

The very premises of the study, however, underscore the aggressive, neo-colonial character of a war confined to a region thousands of kilometres from the United States. Washington’s aim is nothing less than the complete subjugation of China to the strategic and economic interests of US imperialism.

In advising the Pentagon and the White House, the RAND Corporation paper calls for “prudent preparations to be able to wage a long and intense war with China.” It continues: “Of no less importance is the ability of the United States to limit the scope, intensity, and duration of a war with China through its planning, its system of civilian control and its ability to communicate with China.”

The reference to the necessity of a “system of civilian control” in the United States is particularly sinister. Behind the backs of the American population, plans are being drawn up by think tanks like the RAND Corporation, by the military/police forces and by the broader state apparatus for police state measures to suppress anti-war opposition that go well beyond those employed in World War II.

The RAND Corporation paper is a chilling confirmation of the warnings made by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) in its statement of February 18, 2016 titled “Socialism and the Fight Against War.” The statement notes that at a certain point, military fatalism becomes a significant contributing factor to the outbreak of war. It cites an international relations specialist who wrote: “Once war is assumed to be unavoidable, the calculations of leaders and militaries change. The question is no longer whether there will or should be a war, but when the war can be fought most advantageously.”

The new study indicates that such a shift in thinking is underway in Washington. And while the RAND Corporation study dismisses the possibility of nuclear war, other imperialist strategists are planning for such an eventuality.

Just two weeks ago, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which has played a central role in the planning of the “pivot to Asia,” issued a report assessing the Chinese nuclear arsenal. The paper was titled “China’s nuclear forces and weapons of mass destruction.”

The CSIS also downplayed the likelihood of nuclear war, but did not reject it out of hand. “History is a grim warning,” it stated, “that deterrence sometimes fails, and escalation occurs in ways that are never properly planned or controlled.

Driven by the worsening economic and political breakdown of capitalism, another catastrophic war on a global scale is not only possible, but inevitable without the intervention of the international working class. However, the same capitalist crisis that is driving towards the insanity of world war is also creating the impulse for social revolution. This underscores the urgent necessity of the political fight being waged by the ICFI to build an international anti-war movement of the working class to put an end to capitalism and its outmoded nation-state system and reconstruct society on socialist foundations.

New Zealand ‘Rich List’ dominated by property speculators

John Braddock

According to the National Business Review (NBR) ‘Rich List’ for 2016, released last week, the fortunes of New Zealand’s wealthy elite are increasingly derived, not from productive activity, but various forms of financial parasitism, in particular property speculation.

The NBR, a mouthpiece of the corporate establishment, boasts that outside the dairy sector “it has been another great year for the country’s rich.” Big investors have seen “huge gains” to their share portfolios, while the rampant property boom has “seeded fortunes for astute and opportune investors,” especially in the country’s largest city, Auckland.

To qualify for the NBR’s list, individuals and families need to own at least $NZ50 million ($US36 million) in private assets. The country’s 190 richest people are worth a combined $59.6 billion, an increase in $4.6 billion over 2015. It includes 13 newcomers bringing in a total of $1.6 billion. Adding another four NZ-based international billionaires takes the total to $73.1 billion, a new record.

The NBR crows that most “rich listers” are “self-made people,” while a smaller number remain listed on the strength of family inheritances. “It is very hard to get on the rich list,” NBR editor Duncan Bridgeman declared. “It takes more than winning Lotto.”

The richest individual is Graeme Hart, worth $7 billion despite putting his UCI International, a US auto-parts maker, into bankruptcy. Hart runs a global packaging empire but his investment career began with the 1984–90 Labour government’s public sector privatisation program. Hart purchased the Government Printing Office for less than its capital value in 1990, followed by the Whitcoulls Group bookshops, then on-sold both at considerable profit.

The list of billionaires includes Singapore-based Richard Chandler ($4.2 billion), described as a “value investor” in energy, financial services and health care, the Todd family ($3.3 billion, energy investment), Michael Friedlander ($1.5 billion, property investment), the Goodman family (1.35 billion, property investment and development) and Stephen Jennings ($1 billion, property and urban development in Africa).

Notable longstanding “rich listers,” at equal ninth with an estimated worth of $900 million each, are Switzerland-based NZ merchant bankers Michael Fay and David Richwhite. Like Hart, they are beneficiaries of three decades of plundering New Zealand’s public assets, including buying and on-selling interests in Tranz Rail, Telecom and the Bank of NZ, transactions from which they gained over half a billion dollars.

While dairy, the country’s major export industry, had a horrific year with thousands of farmers facing crushing debt burdens from collapsing milk prices, the wine industry posted a record $1.57 billion worth of exports, up nearly 10 percent. The increase, driven by demand in the US, “has lined the pockets of the wine rich, most of whom posted increases in personal worth,” according to the NBR. This included Jim and Rosemari Delegat whose worth increased by $100 million to $450 million and Peter Yealand with $125 million.

In a commentary headlined “The road to riches is lined with property,” the Dominion Post noted on August 2 that most figures featuring in this year’s list got their start in the “property game,” while others have turned to property after making money through their other businesses.

Robert Jones, who owns commercial buildings in Wellington, Auckland and Sydney, along with a newly-opened office in Glasgow, saw his wealth jump by $30 to $650 million last year. John and Michael Chow doubled their wealth after buying troubled Stonewood Homes and completing a reverse takeover of NZX-listed shell company RIS Group. The brothers, who have made a fortune estimated at $75 million from brothels, hotels and property deals, have a property portfolio valued at over $200m. The Chows anticipate owning a $1 billion property empire by 2020.

The Todd family, the country’s third wealthiest, has moved into property, which includes Auckland’s Long Bay residential complex and the North Canterbury township Pegasus Bay. The Manson family added $100 million to their estimated $550 million wealth with several new central Auckland office buildings. Others on the 2016 list include Auckland real estate dealers, Barfoots, and a number of other property developers.

Prime Minister John Key increased his wealth by $5 million to $60 million, placing him at 175th on the list. Key made his fortune as a currency trader before entering politics. While he is the only politician on the NBR list, Key heads a parliament in which the 121 MPs from across all parties have registered interests in 295 properties between them. Two-thirds own more than one home and three have stakes in seven properties.

The NBR is this year celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Rich List. It first appeared in 1986, during the pro-market restructuring begun by Labour, with 56 individuals and 12 families for a total net worth of $5.3 billion. By 1987, at the height of the 1980s stock market boom, the list grew to 76 individuals and 25 families and a total of $8 billion. Throughout the 1987 and 2000 market crashes, the NBR reported, “the list of survivors was larger than the list of casualties.” Following each crash, share prices “bounced back” to above pre-crisis levels.

Following the 2008 global breakdown, rampant speculation in property and shares has been driven by the injection of billions in cheap credit into the financial system by all the major capitalist governments. The vast accumulation of money through property is built on the declining incomes and social conditions of the majority of the population.

While workers suffer under devastating mortgage and rent burdens, landlords and investors are raking in millions. The country’s housing affordability crisis, fuelled by out-of-control property speculation, is worsening. The New Zealand Herald reported on August 1 that the prospect of buying a home in Auckland for under $500,000 is becoming a “distant dream.” Only 12.6 percent of house sales now come in under that figure, while the average house value has risen to $992,207 and is forecast to hit $1m next month. The median weekly rent in Auckland for a three-bedroom house is a record $520, roughly equivalent to the income of a full-time worker on the minimum wage after tax.

Underlining the deepening social divide, a new study has revealed a large proportion of teenagers are living in poverty. The University of Auckland study, published last month in the International Journal for Equity in Health, found almost 20 percent live in poor households, including half of all young Pacific Island people and one-third of Maori youth.

The study used data from the Youth 2012 study of 8,500 secondary school students. Researchers grouped students based on nine indicators of deprivation and respondents had to identify on at least two of the indicators to be declared to be experiencing poverty. The most common indicator of household deprivation was “no family holiday in the last 12 months,” followed by “living room or garage used as bedroom”—that is, inadequate accommodation.

Sri Lankan opposition intensifies anti-government campaign

W.A Sunil

A group of parliamentarians headed by former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse held a rally in Colombo on August 1 after a five-day march to challenge the ruling alliance of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

The march was an attempt to re-install Rajapakse by mounting a right-wing and chauvinist campaign to try to exploit the widespread hostility toward the government’s attacks on living conditions and the democratic rights of working people.

Rajapakse was ousted from office at the January 2015 presidential election by Sirisena in a regime-change operation orchestrated by the US. Sirisena, a former senior minister in Rajapakse’s government and general secretary of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), defected to contest the presidential election as the common opposition candidate.

Former President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Wickremesinghe, who both have close connections with Washington, assisted in this operation. Washington had long turned a blind eye to Rajapakse’s anti-democratic methods of rule, but wanted to end his close relations with Beijing and realign Sri Lanka, along with other countries across the region, behind its military build-up against China.

After taking office, Sirisena assumed the leadership of the SLFP and the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) which is led by SLFP. He then led this coalition into a national unity government with Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP). However, around three dozen MPs defied Sirisena and regrouped around Rajapakse, forming a “joint opposition” to campaign against the government.

To give a populist coloration to the campaign, Rajapakse’s front branded the 100-kilometre march from near Kandy to Colombo the “People’s fight.” It boasted that one million people would rally in the capital but the demonstration failed to reach anywhere near that number. The police said the crowd numbered around 10,000, although that estimate could be deliberately low. Rajapakse’s government was thoroughly discredited when in power for its relentless attacks on living conditions and its repressive measures.

Opposition groups raised slogans and carried placards against increased taxes, subsidy cutbacks and the postponement of local government elections, in order to feign concern about democratic rights and living conditions. At the same time, to stir up Sinhala communalism, they opposed any power-sharing with the Tamil elite, with slogans such as: “Do not to divide the country,” “Don’t betray Sri Lanka” and “Don’t suppress war heroes.”

Addressing a public meeting in Colombo, Rajapakse appealed to the military, claiming that the government was “putting war heroes (soldiers) in jail.” His accusation is that the government wants to punish the military forces that crushed the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In fact, the government is whitewashing the war crimes, for which successive governments were responsible, starting from when the war began in 1983.

Rajapakse also accused the government of sending Buddhist monks to prison. He is keen to rally the monks behind his campaign. Ending his speech, Rajapakse declared, threateningly: “This march is only a dress rehearsal. Next time we will come to go the whole hog.”

Rajapakse put on a show of sympathy for workers, farmers and youth hit by the government’s cuts to fertiliser subsidies and increased value added tax (VAT). In fact, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government is simply deepening Rajapakse’s attacks. His government imposed wage freezes, slashed social subsidies and mobilised the police and military to suppress the struggles of workers and the poor.

While seeking to make a political comeback, Rajapakse’s campaign represents a definite response to the growing social unrest. It is seeking to fashion a right-wing, Sinhala chauvinist movement to divide and take on the working class.

Sirisena and the government are desperately trying to contain the intensifying political crisis. On the evening before the march, Sirisena called an emergency meeting of the Rajapakse faction of the SLFP and warned that no one would be permitted to “form new movements, forces or parties while remaining in the SLFP.” But the march went ahead.

To keep Rajapakse’s group at bay, the government has intensified police and judicial investigations into corruption during his government. This is rank hypocrisy because every section of the ruling elite has engaged in corrupt and shady deals. However, the investigations have widened the rift between the government and opposition factions.

Speaking at a public meeting a day before the Rajapakse rally, Sirisena declared: “No walk or talk can stop our mission. We will rule the country for five years. No one can topple the government.” Sirisena and Wickremesinghe earlier decided to extend their national unity government alliance until 2020, in an attempt to strengthen its hand against the working class, not just the opposition.

Facing deepening global recessionary tendencies, falling exports and rising debt, the government has agreed to implement pro-investment policies and austerity measures as dictated by the International Monetary Fund, in return for bailout funds.

Those attacks have already triggered growing opposition among working people, the rural poor and students. In recent days, thousands of government workers, including university non-academic staff, health workers and teachers, as well as farmers, university students and unemployed youth have protested against the government’s policies and attacks on democratic rights.

There is fear among sections of the ruling elite that the opposition campaign could destabilise the government and make it impossible to impose the IMF’s loan conditions. Expressing this nervousness, the Sunday Times political columnist wrote: “What cannot be stomached is that their actions threaten the stability of this nation upon which rests its economic prosperity. Let the JO (joint opposition) wander where they will on the road to nowhere, but let them not take the nation as their travelling companion.”

The Rajapakse group’s right-wing campaign and the government’s deepening austerity assault pose great dangers to the working class. To answer the destruction of living conditions and democratic rights, workers need to rally youth and the poor and fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government as part of struggle for international socialism.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of Fourth International, invites all class conscious workers and youth to attend SEP’s public meeting on August 9 in Colombo to discuss this program.

India ships food after mass protests by starving Indian workers in Saudi Arabia

Kanda Gabriel

The Indian government has sent 16,000 kilograms of food to Saudi Arabia, which was distributed in front of India’s consulate in the port city of Jeddah, in an attempt to defuse mass protests by Indian migrant workers who had been laid off and left to starve.

More than 10,000 Indian migrant workers in that country are battling hunger after employers refused to pay their wages. They cannot leave Saudi Arabia because their employers often hold their passports in order to control them; nor can they afford a return trip home.

One Saudi construction company, Saudi Oger, has refused to pay its workers’ wages for seven months. It employs a total of 50,000 employees, including 4,000 Indian migrant workers. Last week, hundreds of Saudi Oger’s employees, who said they had not been paid in seven months, led protests in Jeddah demanding their back wages. The protest caused traffic disruptions in northern Jeddah and shut down a gas station.

The Saudi government subsequently sent police to disperse the protest. It then stationed police outside the workers’ camps to keep them from protesting while they starve.

After interviewing workers at one of the camps, CNN Money reported: “Trash collection has stopped, and there’s no electricity. The workers get water from the mosque across the street. Police are stationed outside after protests erupted in recent weeks.”

These events expose the ruthless class relations that exist in Saudi Arabia, the NATO powers’ most reliable ally in the Middle East and the leading source of funding for the various US-backed Islamist insurgencies in Libya, Syria and Iraq. The parasitic multi-billionaires of the Saudi royal family deprive inhabitants of Saudi Arabia—in particular, millions of super-exploited foreign migrant workers—of basic social and democratic rights.

There are roughly 3 million Indian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, which depends on migrant workers to fill jobs in its construction, services and manufacturing. In blue collar jobs like construction, many face severe hardship, working outdoors in extreme temperatures, and abuse by their employers. They work for a pittance, mainly in construction, transport and other low-paying sectors, and face miserable living conditions: meager meals and a lack of running water and functioning toilets in their camps.

Human Rights Watch has criticised Saudi Arabia for rampant employer abuses of migrant workers, including forcing them to work “against their will or on exploitative terms.” A visa system that ties workers’ residency to employment “grants employers excessive power over workers and facilitates abuse,” the group said.

The Indian state has never tried to defend the Indian migrant workers in the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms. According to the latest figures of December 2015, around 7,500 Indians have filed complaints, including exploitation and torture, against their employers in Persian Gulf countries.

The highest number of complaints was from Kuwait (3,236), followed by Saudi Arabia (2,472) and Bahrain (806). Indian missions in Oman, Qatar and UAE received 413, 378, and 126 complaints respectively. At the same time, about 5,900 Indian workers lost their lives in the Gulf countries last year, with most deaths reported from Saudi Arabia (2,691) and the United Arab Emirates (1,540).

The abuse and exploitation of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia has intensified enormously amid the financial crisis triggered by the ongoing global collapse in oil prices.

The Saudi monarchy has reacted by slashing government spending. With 70 percent of its revenue dependent on oil, it has cut public spending for 2016 by 25 percent, cutting subsidies on fuel, power and water, with gas prices set to increase by 80 percent. Mass layoffs continue to mount in oil companies and state-owned firms across the region, and since most other jobs are also connected to the petroleum industry, few workers are secure.

Local construction firms, which mostly rely on Indian migrant workers, are under pressure as a result. One of the largest companies, construction giant Saudi Bin Laden Group (SBG), which has built most of the country’s public buildings, was unable to pay its work force.

According to a survey by GulfTalent, an online recruitment agency, 14 percent of private companies plan to cut jobs in Saudi Arabia in 2016. In Oman, UAE and Qatar, the figure is 10 percent, 9 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

The recent announcement that Saudi Arabia will implement the second phase of the Nitaqat law, which allows the government to reserve jobs for native Saudis, will create more difficulties for Indian job seekers. Migrants are already worried that Gulf countries could levy tax on their personal income.

Nonetheless, head hunters in India looking for cheap labour are confident that acute poverty and social desperation that characterise Indian capitalism will continue to drive workers to seek work in the Persian Gulf sheikdoms. Wakeel Ansari, the president of Delhi’s association of recruiting agents, says Indian workers’ complaints have barely impacted their businesses, though they are suffering from the economic slowdown due to the crash in oil prices.

“The number of complaints is not even 1 per cent of the 7.3 million Indians residing in the Gulf,” Ansari said, dismissing the mass abuse of migrants in the Persian Gulf countries. “There may be some genuine cases of harassment or exploitation, but this can happen in any country,” he said.

The recruiting agents added that Gulf employers prefer Bangladeshi and Nepalese workers, as their wage levels are even lower than those of Indian workers.