French-backed Libyan militia airstrike kills 42 civilians

Alex Lantier

On Monday, a month after military strongman Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) bombed a refugee detention camp near Tripoli, killing 44 people, LNA aircraft repeatedly bombed a government building in the southern Libyan city of Murzuq. In three strikes, they killed 42 people and left over 60 wounded, including 30 in critical condition. Victims of the bombing reportedly included guests from a wedding that had recently taken place at a nearby venue.

Murzuq municipal councilman Ibrahim Omar reported that 200 local dignitaries had assembled at the building “to settle social differences.” He added, “No armed or wanted people were among them. … Haftar bombed unarmed civilians.” Omar called for humanitarian aid, saying that the local hospital was overflowing and could not cope with the large number of casualties from the bombing.

The LNA released a statement declaring that it had targeted “Chadian opposition fighters,” which, according to Al Jazeera, is a phrase that in LNA briefings “usually refers to Tebu tribesmen opposing them in the area.” Haftar’s forces had occupied Murzuq, the center of an oil-rich region in the southwest of the country, in April. However, the LNA apparently lost control of it after sending many of its forces northwards to attack Tripoli.

The House of Representatives of the rival Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli issued a statement that the LNA’s bombings “have gone beyond war crimes to crimes against humanity.”

Responsibility for the atrocity in Murzuq lies above all with the NATO imperialist powers. After going to war with Libya in 2011, backing various Islamist and tribal militias to destroy Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime and plunging Libya into a decade of bloody civil war, they are now waging a bitter proxy war across the country.

After the LNA bombing of the Tajoura refugee camp near Tripoli last month, US officials vetoed a neutrally worded UN Security Council resolution drafted by the UK, calling for a cease-fire.

Monday’s attack in Murzuq came the day after French President Emmanuel Macron called Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah El Sisi, one of Haftar’s main backers, to discuss strategy in Libya. The Egyptian State Information Service reported that Sisi “reiterated that Egypt supports efforts exerted by the Libyan National Army (LNA) to fight terrorism and uproot terrorist organizations that pose threats to security of both Libya and the Mediterranean region.”

Tensions are rising with the Italian government, which funds the GNA to operate coastal patrols and build concentration camps to keep refugees from reaching Italy. Rome has repeatedly demanded a “unified” European position on Libya, trying to compel France to support the internationally recognized GNA.

While France has consistently backed Haftar against the Italian-backed GNA, which officially has UN recognition, Washington also appears to be swinging behind the LNA. In April, as the LNA attack on Tripoli began, Trump spoke personally with Haftar via telephone, effectively giving him the green light. Reversing earlier calls by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a cease-fire in Libya, the White House released a statement hailing “Field Marshal Haftar’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources.”

Britain to join US naval blockade of Iran

Jean Shaoul 

The UK is set to join the US “international maritime security mission” in the strategic Strait of Hormuz. It has already deployed a destroyer, the HMS Duncan, and a frigate, the HMS Montrose, to the Persian Gulf to escort UK-flagged vessels—some 47 to date—through the Strait.

The decision reverses Britain’s earlier proposal to launch a European-led operation supposedly to protect tankers in the Gulf. It signifies a further intensification of the drive to war against Iran, carried out behind the backs of the British people, who are deeply hostile to another war of imperialist plunder in the Middle East.

Announcing the decision, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the UK wanted to build “the broadest international support to uphold freedom of navigation in the region.” He continued: “The deployment of Royal Navy assets is a sign of our commitment to our UK-flagged vessels and we look forward to working alongside the US and others to find an international solution to the problems in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Britain’s “approach to Iran hasn’t changed. We remain committed to working with Iran and our international partners to de-escalate the situation and maintain the nuclear deal.”

Both statements are a pack of lies. They come amid a US-led war drive targeting Iran after Washington unilaterally suspended the 2015 Iranian nuclear accord, launched a major military buildup in the region and demanded that US allies support it.

The Trump administration’s provocative move, in the guise of “protecting shipping lanes” through the crowded 21-mile-wide sea lane through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies passes, establishes a patrol of warships aimed at blockading Iran.

General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, first announced the mission early last month when he called on US military allies worldwide to join a US-led battle fleet that would surround Iran. The Pentagon would provide “command and control” ships to direct operations, he stressed, while America’s allies would provide escort vessels to follow US orders.

The purpose of this US campaign of “maximum pressure” is to secure complete control not only over Iran’s economy, but also over the oil supply of Washington’s main imperialist rivals in Europe and East Asia, and of Asia’s two most populous countries, China and India. Far from seeking an international “solution” to the escalating conflict between the US and Iran, Washington is seeking Tehran’s total submission to its dictates.

Commander Rebecca Rebarich of the US Department of Defense welcomed the British decision, saying, “This is an international challenge and we look forward to the opportunity to work together with the Royal Navy and with additional partners and allies who share the common goal of ensuring the free flow of commerce.”

The decision of Britain’s newly appointed prime minister, Boris Johnson, to join the US war fleet flows from his close relations with the Trump administration and his advocacy of deepening ties with the US, based on securing a post-Brexit free trade deal with the anti-European Union president. It represents a shift in Britain’s position from initially seeking to de-escalate the Strait of Hormuz crisis and reflects its increasing isolation from its former European partners.

Just two weeks ago Britain balked at joining a US-led mission, calling instead for a “European-led maritime protection mission” in the region. Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s then-foreign secretary and challenger to Johnson for the premiership, said at the time that the European-led force would “not be part of the US maximum pressure policy on Iran, as we remain committed to preserving the Iran nuclear agreement.”

But London, which has long served as Washington’s bridgehead to Europe, was unable to convince Berlin and Paris, co-signatories along with the US, Britain, China and Russia to the nuclear deal, to sign up to Trump’s flotilla. This was not because France and Germany are any more pacifist than the US and Britain. Rather, they view Washington’s unilateral torpedoing of the nuclear deal, its re-imposition of sanctions against Iran, Trump’s statement that he had been 10 minutes away from bombing Iran, Britain’s illegal seizure of an Iranian tanker off Gibraltar on US orders, and Iran’s seizure of a UK-flagged tanker, the Stena Impero, as cutting across their own geostrategic and commercial interests in the energy-rich region.

While they recognize there is now little chance of rescuing the nuclear accord and their commercial relations with Iran, they are keenly aware that joining the US military coalition against Iran, given their own limited military resources vis a vis the US, would mean submitting to the Pentagon’s command and ceding the political initiative to Washington.

Speaking on television last week, Olaf Scholz, Germany’s vice chancellor and finance minister, said, “I’m very skeptical about that [US-led mission], and I think that’s a skepticism that many others share.” It was important to avoid a military escalation in the region, and “That’s why I think this is not a good idea.”

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas insisted that Germany would not join the US task force, saying, “Germany will not take part in the naval mission proposed and planned by the United States. We are in close coordination with our French partners. We consider the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy to be wrong.” He warned that while Berlin favoured a European mission, it was difficult to make progress on that. On Monday, he told reporters, “At the moment, the Britons would rather join an American mission. We won’t do that.”

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said that Paris was pursuing the possibility of a European “mission for monitoring and observing maritime security in the gulf” that was “the opposite of the American initiative, which is the choice of maximum pressure to make Iran go back on a certain number of its objectives.”

Far from easing tensions, such a “monitoring” operation in one of the world’s most incendiary flashpoints would serve to escalate the crisis. It is a bid by the European powers to grab a share of oil and gas resources in the strategic Persian Gulf region.

Deputy government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer left the door open for possible German participation in a US mission in the future. Nevertheless, the EU continues to distance itself from the US, saying it will continue working with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, despite the Trump administration’s decision to impose sanctions and freeze assets he holds in the US.

Britain’s decision has prompted a furious response from Iran. President Hassan Rouhani has warned that the Anglo-American task force risks “the mother of all wars.” He added, “A strait for a strait. It can’t be that the Strait of Hormuz is free for you and the Strait of Gibraltar is not free for us.”

This was a reference to Iran’s seizure of the Stena Impero near Hormuz in retaliation for the Royal Navy’s seizure of an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar, which it is still holding after more than a month. Rouhani insisted that the US lift all sanctions, which he called an act of “economic terrorism,” if it wants to have negotiations.

His remarks mark a recognition that the Strait of Hormuz crisis could lead to an open-ended war with catastrophic consequences. As the US and Britain move closer to war, all the major powers are seeking to expand their military forces.

Layoffs in global auto industry hit Mexico, India, China and the US

Jerry White

A rolling wave of layoffs in the global automotive industry is hitting workers on virtually every continent. A survey of recent headlines from auto industry and other news publications yields a grim picture of the relentless job-cutting.

“Tens of thousands losing jobs as India's auto crisis deepens,” writes Reuters, reporting on 350,000 auto assembly and parts workers who have been cut in recent months during India’s worst sales downturn in a decade. Maruti Suzuki has halved its production targets and is laying off six percent of its temporary workforce, with analysts predicting that up to a third of the three million workers employed in the industry nationwide will be dismissed.

“Shrinking Chinese car market sparks fears over foreign groups’ future,”reports the Financial Times, noting that Chinese plants owned by Ford and PSA are running at 11 percent and 1 percent capacity, respectively, and some 220,000 workers have lost their jobs in China’s first sales decline in three decades.

“Bosch sees stagnating sales, job losses as auto industry slows,”declares an Automotive News Europe article, citing an executive from the German-based auto parts conglomerate, who says, “Our plans foresee a stagnation in vehicle production in the coming years … the tailwind is gone.” Volkswagen has already announced 7,000 white-collar job cuts, and Daimler, Siemens and others are expected to follow suit.

“UK Auto Industry Facing a Slow Death,” CNN reports, nothing that the industry is facing its worst crisis since the 1970s, with production dropping by a fifth in the first half of the year and investment falling 70 percent.

A Reuters article headlined “Warning light flashing for Slovakia's auto industry” describes the fate of 3,000 workers laid off at Volkswagen’s plant in Bratislava, which “has sent shockwaves through Slovakia, the world’s biggest car producer per capita.”

One-day strike in 2017 by BMW workers in UK

In the US, GM shut down the 78-year-old Warren Transmission plant in suburban Detroit last week, following on the closure of the Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant and the Baltimore transmission plant. The Oshawa, Ontario plant is set to close at the end of the year, and the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant faces closure in January 2020.

In Mexico, at least 650 out of the 1,800 workers at the General Motors assembly plant in San Luis Potosí, 250 miles northwest of Mexico City, will lose their jobs on August 12 when the company reduces the number of shifts from three to two, according to information recently cited by the Unifor union in Canada.

Antonio, a worker at the GM plant in Silao, Mexico, told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter: “I’ve been investigating here in Silao, but there is no information about layoffs at SLP (San Luis Potosí). There is total silence from the union. The firings are yet another assault against workers—stock owners always looking after their capital. We need to fight together in order to have more strength.”

Another Silao worker, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that pressure from GM management and speed-up have increased recently. “The other detail is about how small our bonuses have been,” he added, explaining that this has led “several workers to resign.”

On August 1, Mexico’s National Chamber of Transformation Industries (Canacintra) reported that Volkswagen had laid off 2,000 workers over the previous 30 days as a result of the termination of production of a model. The Mexican Association of Auto Distributors announced on July 31 that Nissan Mexico was carrying out a “deep restructuring” in response to a fall in sales of 15 percent in the first semester of 2019. In January, the company carried out 1,000 layoffs at assembly plants in Aguascalientes and Morelos. The Mexican economy is in near-recession, with job creation during the first semester of 2019 at the lowest point in a decade.

The Chevrolet Equinox crossover produced at the San Luis Potosí factory is also built by Canadian workers at GM’s CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. The 2,800 workers there are also being hit by layoffs the week of September 30, and more are slated for the final quarter of 2019.

With the pig-headed nationalism typical of the union bureaucracy, Mike Van Boekel, the Unifor president at the Ingersoll plant, boasted that GM Canada had told him the layoffs in Canada would be temporary, while the shift elimination in San Luis Potosí would be permanent. “Unfortunate for the Mexico plant, but it’s good news for us at least that we’re not losing the shift,” he told a local radio station.

In late 2017, workers at the CAMI plant fought a bitter month-long strike against GM’s demands for increased wage and benefit concessions. The day after GM threatened to shift Equinox production to Mexico, Unifor shut the strike down and signed a sellout contract. Opposed to a common struggle by autoworkers across North America, Unifor then responded to GM’s announcement that it would close the Oshawa assembly plant by launching a racist campaign calling for a boycott of “Mexican cars.”

There is no such thing as a “Mexican” car, any more than there is a “Canadian,” “American” or “Chinese” one. The global auto industry is an interconnected whole, involving the labor of tens of millions of production workers, engineers and technicians around the world, in addition to the workers who extract the raw materials, all of whom contribute to the building of what are, in fact, world products.

GM closed its Warren Transmission plant last week

It is impossible to fight the global onslaught of the transnational corporations on the basis of the narrow nationalist program of Unifor, the United Auto Workers, IG Metall in Germany, the CTM in Mexico or any other union. In opposition to the global strategy of the corporations, autoworkers must develop an internationally coordinated response to defend the jobs, working conditions and living standards of workers around the world.

Under the whip of the financial markets, the global automakers are embarking on yet another wave of mergers and acquisitions to bolster returns to their richest shareholders. Through increasing tie-ups, including Ford-VW and renewed talks of a Renault-Fiat Chrysler merger, the corporations hope to counteract falling sales by expanding into the markets of their former rivals and creating economies of scale to close “redundant” factories and share the immense costs involved in the brutal struggle to dominate new technologies, including electric and self-driving vehicles.

While electric vehicles (EVs) make up only a tiny portion of current world sales—around 1 percent in the US—analysts say this will rise to about 10 percent in the mid-2020s and over 50 percent by 2040. As of January 2019, global automakers had committed over $300 billion to electrification, according to a recent report by the United Auto Workers union.

Due to the much reduced mechanical complexity of EVs—the electric transmission of the Chevy Bolt, for example, has 80 percent fewer moving parts than a traditional internal combustion engine transmission—Ford is telling investors that EVs could lead to a 30 percent reduction in labor hours per unit. This could lead to the elimination of 35,000 powertrain workers in the US over the next several years, according to the UAW, and traditional automakers could outsource the production of lithium batteries, electric motors, automotive electronics, advanced braking systems and other new technologies to low-wage manufacturers within or outside the US.

The UAW has predictably responded to this threat by offering to work with the corporations and the US government to create a “new industrial policy” to beat back China, which, the union laments, “is expected to be home to 62 percent of global lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity by 2023.” This includes a trade war policy that treats advanced vehicle technology as a “strategic sector to be protected and built in the US.”

This policy, which is identical to that of Trump, divides the international working class, encouraging a fratricidal race to the bottom and dragooning workers behind their “own” capitalists as the rival nationally-based ruling elites prepare to drag mankind into another world war—this one producing a thermonuclear holocaust.

The past decade has seen an increasing wave of struggles by autoworkers. This includes Toyota and Honda workers in China (2010); Maruti Suzuki workers in India (2011-12); Hyundai and Kia workers in South Korea (2013); Renault workers in Turkey, Mercedes-Benz and other workers in Brazil and Fiat Chrysler, GM and Ford workers the US (2015); BMW workers in Britain and Ford workers in Romania (2017); VW and Daimler workers in Germany(2018); VW workers in Hungary and auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico (2019).

These growing struggles must be coordinated and guided by an international strategy aimed at uniting every battalion of the working class against the transnational corporations and replacing the capitalist system with a scientifically and democratically planned world socialist society.

As Mexican economy stagnates, ruling Morena party imposes state law to suppress social protests

Don Knowland

On August 1 the so-called Law of the Garrotte, which effectively criminalizes opposition demonstrations, marches and protests, went into effect in oil-rich Tabasco, the home state of Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). The majority of the state Congress made up of deputies from AMLO’s party, the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), rammed through the legislation.

The law imposes a six- to 13-year sentence for interfering with “the execution of public private works and works or roads or communication channels,” and for “the extortion, coercion, attempt to impose or impose fees or totally or partially prevent free movement of people and vehicles, machinery, specialized equipment or the like.” The sentence increases to 10 to 20 years if violence accompanies an attempt to impose fees, or minors are used in blockades.

Morena depicted the legislation as an attempt to end shakedowns related to public and private works. But it has unleashed a firestorm of opposition from Mexico’s other major parties, the former ruling party, the PRI (Institutional Revolution), as well as the Party of National Action (PAN) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

While the handwringing by these right-wing bourgeois parties, all of which are responsible for bloody acts of repression, amounts to a hypocritical political gesture, the charges they level are nonetheless true.

The PRI charged that the Morena deputies were “acting as accomplices of a regime that wants to replace politics and dialogue with brute force.” The Tabasco PRI deputy who had proposed the higher sentence for extortion claimed he had not intended to “criminalize social protests,” or impede the right to free expression.

Another Tabasco PRI deputy, Ingrid Pantoja, said that the law is a “betrayal of the people,” intended as a pretext “to inhibit the right of citizens to exercise any type of demonstration against the federal, state government, municipality or any other public entity, even if they are peaceful.” Pantoja gave as an example that any citizen could go to prison for protesting the privatization of water promoted by the Morena mayor of the Tabasco city of Villahermosa.

The national president of the right-wing PAN, Marko Cortés Mendoza, called the law an attempt by the Morena government “to build a totalitarian and controlling system, which has gradually limited the checks and balances of all Mexicans.” He said PAN did not oppose “regulating” marches, but ruled out “repressing and criminalizing those who exercise their constitutional right to march in protest.”

Cortés Mendoza said “it is paradoxical” to see how AMLO—who 26 years ago seized oil wells for more than 10 days, generating losses according to Pemex, the national oil company, of more than 40 million pesos—now seeks to stifle such actions. PAN Senator Kenia López Rabadán said López Obrador would have faced more than 50 years in jail under the new law, since he led seizures of oil wells on four occasions.

The Extraordinary National Directorate (DNE) of the PRD said the law was intended to “protect the interests and businesses of Morena, and not to protect Tabasco citizens ... they just want to defend juicy businesses that will give them a lot of money.”

The DNE emphasized that “it is obvious that said law seeks to avoid protests before the imminent construction of the [$8 billion] Dos Bocas refinery by Pemex, to begin in August … money is what moved them to make those constitutional changes, and now it turns out that blocking a street is more painful than a homicide, or someone accused of rape in the state of Tabasco.”

India’s Hindu supremacist government abrogates Kashmir’s autonomy

Keith Jones

India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government illegally stripped Jammu and Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority state, of its special constitutional status Monday, and split it into two Union Territories. One is comprised of the Jammu and Kashmir divisions of the now abolished state, and the other of the sparsely populated, but geostrategically significant, Ladakh region.

Through actions that are tantamount to a constitutional coup, the Indian state has not just abrogated the broad autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) enjoyed—at least on paper—under articles 370 and 35 (A) of the Indian constitution. The new governments of the bifurcated state have been given a status inferior to that of the Indian Union’s remaining 28 states, enabling New Delhi to exercise wide powers over the territories’ affairs in perpetuity.

Monday’s actions have explosive international and domestic ramifications. They will further inflame tensions with Pakistan, and constitute a further stage in the Indian ruling elite’s turn toward authoritarian forms of rule and the promotion of Hindu communal reaction.

Fearing mass popular opposition to its actions, the BJP government has poured tens of thousands of additional troops into Jammu and Kashmir, cut off internet, cell phone and landline access across much of the region, including in Srinagar, J&K’s summer capital, and arrested prominent opposition politicians. As of midnight yesterday, several districts, including Srinagar and Jammu, have been placed under Section 144 of the Criminal Code, meaning all gatherings of more than four people are prohibited.

Kashmir and the Indo-Pakistani military-strategic rivalry

Control over the territories that comprised the former British Indian princely state of Jammu and Kashmir has been at the center of the reactionary military-strategic rivalry between New Delhi and Islamabad since the 1947 communal partition of South Asia, into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India.

As a result of the 1947-48 Indo-Pakistani war, Jammu and Kashmir was itself partitioned, splitting South Asia’s Kashmiri-speaking population between Indian-administered J&K and Pakistani-held Azad (“Free”) Kashmir. Ever since, both countries have vowed to “reclaim” the part of Jammu and Kashmir held by the other.

The abrogation of J&K’s legal autonomy and its fuIl “integration” into the Indian Union are aimed at demonstrating New Delhi’s resolve to end the Indo-Pakistani conflict on its terms and to force a quick and bloody end to the anti-Indian insurgency that has convulsed the state for the past three decades. Successive Indian governments—whether headed by the Congress Party, the BJP, or a “Third Front” of casteist and regional parties—have responded to the insurgency with massive state violence, including disappearances and summary executions of alleged insurgents and widespread torture of civilians. With more than half a million Indian army troops and paramilitaries in a state with a population of just 14 million, the mobilization of the repressive forces of the Indian state in Kashmir has been justly compared to that of Israeli security forces on the West Bank.

Pakistan, for its part, has sought to manipulate the mass alienation from New Delhi among the Muslims of the Kashmir Valley to further its own reactionary agenda. This has included sidelining secular Kashmiri nationalists, while providing arms and other logistical support to Islamist anti-Indian Kashmiri insurgents.

In 2016, two years after Narendra Modi and his BJP came to power in New Delhi, a new wave of mass protests erupted in J&K. The BJP government’s response was twofold: to order a vicious crackdown, which left over a hundred dead and thousands of protesters, the overwhelming majority of them young people, blinded; and to ratchet up tensions with Pakistan. First in September 2016 and again this February, the Modi government ordered military strikes inside Pakistan in what it claimed was retaliation for Pakistan-supported terrorist attacks. The latter “surgical strike” resulted in a Pakistani counterattack and a dogfight over disputed Kashmir that brought South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals the closest they have been to all-out war since 1971.

Islamabad has condemned India’s tightened control over J&K, saying no “unilateral” step by New Delhi can alter its “disputed status, as enshrined in United Nations Security Council resolutions,” and is vowing to push back. As “party to this international dispute,” declared a tersely worded Foreign Ministry statement, Pakistan “will exercise all possible options to counter [India’s] illegal steps.”

Subsequently, Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary summoned the Indian High Commissioner (ambassador) and handed him what Islamabad characterized as a strong démarche, that “conveyed Pakistan’s unequivocal rejection of these illegal actions as they are in breach of international law and several UN Security Council resolutions."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, urged all parties to “exercise restraint,” according to his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric. Dujarric added that a UN Military Observer Group “has observed and reported an increase in military activity” along the Line of Control that separates Indian and Pakistani-held Kashmir.

Rewriting the constitution by executive fiat

The domestic implications of the BJP government’s actions are no less incendiary.

J&K was stripped of its special status, dismembered and transformed into two Union territories through a presidential order, that illegally excised some sections of the constitution and rewrote others, and through two motions rammed through parliament Monday in a matter of hours.

Bangladesh primary school teachers demand government nationalise schools

Wimal Perera

Hundreds of teachers and workers at non-government primary schools in Bangladesh are continuing their agitation to demand that the Awami League-led government nationalise their schools.

The protestors, who represent tens of thousands of non-government primary teachers at over 4,000 schools, are also calling for permanent jobs and enlistment in the official Monthly Pay Order (MPO) scheme. The MPO is a pay system for teachers in state-controlled public schools and government-approved institutions.

In 2013, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League-led government took over about 26,000 schools in the face of mass action by Bangladesh teachers. Four thousand private schools, however, were not included in the program.

There are many categories of educational institutes under non-MPO educational institutes. These include primary and secondary schools, colleges, technical and vocational institutions and Islamic-based madrasas. Teachers and employees at these schools depend on student tuition fees. An estimated 16,000 non-government school teachers do not receive regular salaries.

The non-government primary teachers began a sit-down demonstration outside the National Press Club in Dhaka on June 16. On July 3 they started a hunger strike. About 230 fell sick during the protest, including six from dengue fever, one of whom—a teacher from Faridpur—died on July 12. The teachers have told the media that they are determined to win their demands.

The government does not care “about our ordeals,” Rabindranath Barman, a primary teacher from Panchbibi, Jaipurhat, told the New Dawn newspaper. “We’re defying the rain, sun, dust, mosquitoes, and constant noise of vehicles… We can’t sleep properly and even we don’t have any bathrooms here,” he said.

Shipra Rani Dey from the Alamin Bazar primary school on Hatiya Island, about 160 kilometres from Dhaka, told New Dawn that she had been involved in the protest for 27 days with her toddler son. The Alamin Bazar school was established on the remote island in 2006 and has over 200 students.

Shipra explained that her husband was bedridden and that she was the only person working in her six-member family. She had worked for the last 13 years but not received a regular salary. “I won’t go home unless I get a positive message from the government,” she said.

Bangladesh non-government school teachers are organised in a range of different unions—the Non-government Primary School Teachers’ Association; the Non-MPO Educational Institutions Teachers’ and Employees’ Federation; and the Bangladesh Besarkari Prathamik Sikkhak Samity—to name just a few.

Russian authorities continue crackdown on opposition protests

Clara Weiss

At a new protest by the bourgeois liberal opposition in Moscow on Saturday, the Russian authorities continued their violent crackdown, arresting at least 600 people. Led by pro-US opponents of President Vladimir Putin, the protesters are demanding that opposition candidates who have been barred from participating in the Moscow City Council elections on September 8 be placed on the ballot.

Russian news outlets suggested that the turnout at the protest on Saturday was similar to that of the previous week, when between 3,000 and 5,000 people marched through the city center. The protest was met with a military-style presence of the Russian national guard and its subdivision, the OMON paramilitary forces, resulting in the arrest of over 1,300 people.

Like the previous protest, the one on Saturday had not been authorized. Organizers officially called it a “stroll.” Many of the protesters carried Russian flags. The presence of police and paramilitary forces was similar to the previous week, with at least as many OMON and police forces as there were protesters. Planes belonging either to the Russian national guard or the police flew over the city center.

OMON and the police used teargas at Pushkin Square, shut down several central subway stations, and beat protesters with cudgels. There were multiple reports of passersby being violently arrested. Among them was Alexander Svidersky, a deputy of the ruling United Russia party and member of the district electoral commission, who was arrested while walking his dog in the city center. According to eyewitnesses, OMON even stormed a local McDonalds restaurant to arrest several protesters who were trying to hide there.

The Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported that many of the arrested had their fingerprints and mug shots taken. The newspaper said that in the lead-up to the protests, there were threats from the authorities that young men participating would run the danger of being drafted into the military. The official number of arrested is 600, but Russian newspapers suggest that approximately the same number were detained as at the previous week’s demonstration, that is, well over 1,000.

Most leading figures of the liberal opposition, including the right-winger Alexei Navalny, and most election candidates who were barred from the ballot, among them Ilya Yashin and Lyubov Sobol, are now in prison, serving sentences of up to 30 days (in the case of Navalny). Sobol was dragged out of a cab on Saturday and arrested while on her way to the rally. One of her aides was arrested on Friday and charged with instigating “mass unrest,” a charge that carries up to 15 years in jail.

The continuation of the violent crackdown on opposition protests is a sign of deep political and social crisis in Russia. Predictably, the pro-imperialist media in the West has hailed the protests as a welcome challenge to the authoritarian presidency of Putin. The EU condemned the crackdown on the protests, and the US embassy in Moscow declared that Saturday’s response by the Russian authorities “undermines the rights of citizens to participate fully in the democratic process.”

Such statements are thoroughly hypocritical. The governments in both the EU and the US are responsible for violent crackdowns on protests in their own countries, including against supporters of Catalonian separatism in Spain and the yellow vest protests in France. They have set up concentration camps for immigrants and refugees. US President Donald Trump has been inciting fascist violence through his tweets and rallies, resulting in a series of mass shootings just over the past two weeks that have claimed the lives of dozens of people.

The imperialist powers support the opposition protests not out of any concern for democratic rights, but because, of all the fractions of the Russian oligarchy, the liberal opposition’s program aligns most closely with the interests of Western imperialism.

Study calls for closure of over half all health clinics in Germany

Tino Jacobson & Markus Salzmann

A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, which promotes “reform processes” and “the principles of entrepreneurial activity” to build a “future-oriented society,” proposes closing more than half of all clinics in Germany. Less than 600 of the current 1,400 hospitals would be maintained under the plan, according to the report, published on July 15, commissioned by the Berlin Institute for Health and Social Research.

With the grotesque argument that only the closure of clinics could achieve more staffing, better equipment and higher quality, the report also calls for further reductions in hospital stays and an even greater focus on generating profits.

According to the authors, around 5 million people a year in Germany stay unnecessarily in hospital. They could just as well be treated as outpatients, reducing the number of hospital stays to 14 million a year.

The reduction in the number of clinics is justified by the fact that “many hospitals are too small and lack the necessary equipment and experience to handle life-threatening emergencies.” By reducing the number of clinics, the report’s authors claim, a variety of complications and deaths could be prevented. In the future, the focus would primarily be on the quality of hospitals with accessibility no longer a top priority.

Brigitte Mohn, a board member of the foundation, funded privately by the Bertelsman Group, one of the world’s largest mass media companies which is also active in the service sector and education, summed up the goal of “future hospital care” with undisguised cynicism, “The reorganisation of the hospital landscape is a question of patient safety and, above all, has to pursue the goal of improving the quality of care.”

On patient care, Mohn added, “If a stroke patient reaches the nearest clinic after 30 minutes but does not find a suitably qualified doctor and the medically necessary specialist department, it would be better to drive for a few minutes longer to a well-equipped clinic.”

Mohn is a member of the family that owns Bertelsmann. Her mother, the company matriarch Liz Mohn, is one of the richest women in the world, with a fortune of around three billion euros. Brigitte also sits on the supervisory board of Rhön-Klinikum AG, an operator of private clinics that would benefit from the closure of municipal hospitals. Among others, Rhön-Klinikum AG operates the University Hospital of Marburg and Giessen, where hundreds of workers protested against low wages and poor working conditions earlier this year.

The consequences of decreasing the accessibility of clinics is obvious. More complications and deaths will occur because patients cannot be treated quickly enough. In addition, ambulances, emergency physicians and paramedics will face a significant additional burden.

The argumentation of the study is extremely mendacious. The Cologne / Leverkusen region was selected as a model, which is one of the most densely populated areas in Germany. According to the Bertelsmann study, 24 out of a total of 38 hospitals should be closed in this region by 2030.

Even here, the study estimates that about ten percent of residents would require more than 30 minutes to reach the nearest hospital after the proposed shutdowns. According to the study, this could be reduced to about three percent if a different “speed model” were used. In plain language, this means that ambulances would face completely unrealistic higher speed assumptions in order to increase accessibility.

US to ring China with missiles in nuclear arms race

Andre Damon

Within hours of the official withdrawal by the United States on Friday from the world’s most important nuclear treaty, the Pentagon made clear that it intends to ring China with missiles amid a rapidly accelerating nuclear arms race.

A Titan II nuclear missile [credit: US Department of Defense]

Speaking to reporters during a trip to Australia, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Pentagon would deploy missiles prohibited under the treaty “sooner rather than later.”

“I would prefer months,” Esper said.

The deployment of medium-range missiles in the Pacific would turn the Chinese coast and the Pacific islands surrounding it into a nuclear battlefront, putting the lives of billions of people in China, the Koreas, Japan, Taiwan and the broader region at risk.

The INF treaty, which was signed between then President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, banned the US and Russia from developing missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,000 kilometers, meaning that most of Europe and much of the Pacific were off limits to the stationing of nuclear missiles.

President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in the East Room of the White House, Dec. 8, 1987 [credit: White House]

However, as technological trends shifted military balances and the United States escalated its conflict with China, Washington increasingly came to view the Cold War-era treaty as conflicting with its aims of militarily encircling Beijing, which was not a signatory.

With the potential deployment of US nuclear missiles just minutes in flight-time from the Chinese mainland, tensions will be on a hair trigger, with the huge population of the region living under the specter of nuclear annihilation.

Responding to the US withdrawal from the INF treaty, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “the world will lose an invaluable brake on nuclear war.”

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said that Trump is “pursuing a strategy that will create the conditions for a dangerous arms race.” The Financial Times warned, along the same lines, of Trump’s “rekindling of the nuclear arms race.”

In defending his decision to station missiles in a densely populated area thousands of miles away from America, Esper accused China of “weaponizing the global commons using predatory economics.”

In other words, China, by carrying out peaceful economic activities, is threatening the United States, and that should therefore be countered with the threat of military annihilation.

“We firmly believe no one nation can or should dominate the Indo-Pacific,” said Esper, a man who represents a country that once “scorched and boiled and baked to death” (in the words of Air Force General Curtis Lemay) hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in its war to conquer the Pacific.

2019 Shangri-La Dialogue: The Shadow of China

Vijay Shankar

The Shangri-La Dialogue, an Asian security summit held annually in Singapore, took place between 31 May-2 June this year. And, in a grand affirmation of design, its director general declared, “It is a unique meeting where ministers debate the region’s many pressing security challenges, engage in bilaterals and come up with fresh solutions together”. Yet the central and perhaps the only theme that loomed was the strategic road taken by China over the years: from ideology and foment to growth, revision, and regional domination. China’s participation was remarkable not just for the level of its delegate, the defence minister General Wei Shenghe, but also for the resolve to hold sway in the region that he so candidly declared. Unfortunately, it was not debate that defined deliberations but the impending pay-back for a “hundred years (since the opium wars) of humiliation” and the probability of a breakdown of the status-quo without an alternative.

That China’s stunning growth had shifted the strategic centre of gravity of the world is a reality; however, what startled was China’s unabashed announcement that the world will now have to “adapt to its success” and it can no longer be subjected to the “iniquities” of the past. A clear statement of disaffection with the current order and a burial of Deng’s strategy to “hide-power-and-bide-time.”

What is emerging is that an international order on China’s terms would amount to little else but a 'monocracy' since China has taken no step to convince through actions that its objectives are directed towards a more even-handed order, and that its methods are neither authoritarian nor mercantilist. Their dealings in Sri Lanka, Kenya, Guinea, or for that matter, engagement with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) since 2001 are stark reminders of just the opposite.

 It may be recalled that in 2001, China’s trade accounted for 4 per cent of world trade. At the time, the western world was faced with high cost labour, an aging population, and low-productive democracy, which made economic sense to turn to China. Today, while those conditions remain, the situation in China has changed: labour is no longer cheap. Today, China’s share of world trade has almost tripled to 11.8 per cent. Concessions negotiated when it joined the WTO are no longer politically tenable; neither for those that bestowed this largesse nor for others in competition. A regime more consistent with present-day China’s state of development would appear the order of the day. Indeed, it may be argued that the fall-out of the petrodollar system that boosted the US Dollar as the globally accepted reserve currency creates an immediate and persistent artificial demand for it. This, quite unfairly, benefits only the US and the oil cartel, making it a distressing paradox that calls for reforms to the WTO.

In the context of military power, China’s defence expenditure is the second largest in the world; its policies carry weight, often provoke, arouse suspicion, and are invariably acted upon from a security perspective. China’s “right to build infrastructure and deploy defensive capabilities on the islands and reefs in the South China Sea,” is emphasised in the latest iteration of its Defence White Paper. So, its strategies of Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD), developing the 'Assassin’s Mace', creation of confounding Air Defence Identification Zones (ADIZs), and activities in the South China Sea (SCS) to create a 'maritime great wall' are symptomatic not just of safeguarding interests, but to dominate the region with no legitimacy. Friction is mounting in these waters and China is not inclined to resolve these disputes with the other stakeholders.

Neither international law nor the United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Sea (UNCLOS) seem to evoke any reverence, whether it be their 'Nine-Dash Line', military bases on the Mischief Reef (Philippines' EEZ), artificial islands along the way, or the dispute over the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Nevertheless, China insists that the situation in the SCS is stable, citing, intriguingly, the “100,000 ships” that sail through every year as evidence that there is no threat to trade while denouncing “countries outside the region that have come to the SCS to flex muscles in the name of freedom of navigation.” Such power declarations hardly lend itself to the idea of a China that can be relied and respected to support a durable regional environment. China, however, remains ostensibly oblivious to the fact that the strategic pivot of the world has long shifted to the Indo-Pacific, making stakeholders in these waters from far beyond the region..

Meanwhile, global stresses have built-up over multiple issues relating to cyber espionage, human rights, and 5G technologies. China would appear to have regressed in terms of political openness, military bullying, creation of a Sino-centric economic bloc, and a disdainful approach to international law. This strategic orientation will probably augur well for China’s aspirations but hardly so for global prospects.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is ambitious and comes with its share of controversies. It has also rapidly increased China's overall risk profile. Added to China's internal debt, excess capacity, increasing labour costs, and high ratio of investment to growth, the prospects of increased recurrence of a Hambantota are portentous. The Centre for Global Development (CGD) has concluded that Beijing, encourages dependency using opaque contracts, rapacious loan practices, and corrupt deals that mire countries in debt to undercut their sovereignty. Their infrastructural dealings with Djibouti, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, the Maldives, Mongolia, Montenegro, Pakistan, and Tajikistan are stark reminders of how predatory economic policies work. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir had in 2018 announced the shelving of two major projects, part of China’s signature BRI, to avert falling into an obsequious debt trap. As recently as 15 July, Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper, reported on China's reminder to Pakistan of the grave consequences of reneging on the earlier signed China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) contract.

Now, what could all this mean?

Tensions in the Persian Gulf: Contextualising Iran’s Bolder Resistance to US Pressure

Vijay Sakhuja


A spate of seizures of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere has fueled ongoing tensions between Iran, and US and the UK. The latest incident, the third in a row, involves arrest of a vessel in the Persian Gulf by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the grounds that it was “smuggling fuel for some Arab countries.” In July too, the IRGC  intercepted Panamanian-flagged Riah, suspected of smuggling oil, but it was the commandeering  of a British flagged vessel, Stena Impero, to Iranian waters that forced the British Royal Navy to shadow UK flagged merchant ships. The latter incident was ostensibly in response to the seizure by the British Royal Marines of the Iranian tanker, Grace-1, off Gibraltar, in the waters of British Mediterranean territory. It was alleged that the ship was carrying Iranian crude oil to the Baniyas Refinery in Syria, which has been under EU sanctions since 2014.

There is never a dull moment in the Persian Gulf. It has always attracted geopolitical, geostrategic and geoeconomic contestation between regional and external powers as well as among regional countries over freedom of navigation, safety and security of shipping, boundary disputes, and regional military developments. In most cases Iran has been the centre piece and has on many occasions threatened to block the Straits of Hormuz (SoH), a strategic choke point.

The ongoing tensions in the Persian Gulf have been simmering for some weeks now and have added to existing volatility in the prices of oil and gas in the international market that the US-China trade war caused. The marine underwriters have raised insurance rates, some shipping companies have decided not to send their vessels into the Gulf region, and others have issued advisories to their flagged vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf waters to take protective measures and not to sail close to the Iranian coast.

Meanwhile, some navies have begun escorting their national flagged vessels and others are hoping the US and its partners will underwrite safety of international shipping. The US and the UK are attempting to build a naval coalition and have approached alliance partners, allies and friends—South Korea, Japan, EU and others—to join forces to ensure uninterrupted flow of shipping in the Gulf waters. There have been mixed reactions to the proposal and few appear to be convinced.

The EU is apparently not on board; the proposal has invited ‘silence or rejection’ from many of the EU member states and Germany has been particularly blunt to announce that it would not join “sea mission presented and planned by the United States.” There is ’distrust and resentment’ against the US and visible evidence of conflicting approaches adopted by both sides towards Iran. The EU has invested enormous political and diplomatic capital to salvage the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the US’s decision to walk out of the deal has dented their trust in US President Donald Trump’s strategy of ‘maximum pressure’ against Iran instead of a diplomatic solution.

Unlike the EU, at least one Asian country appears to be mulling over the issue. South Korea may redeploy its warship—which is currently engaged in counter piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden—to Persian Gulf. Unlike South Korea, Japan has cautioned against an ‘accidental conflict’ but it faces at least three dilemmas. First is the broader Japanese foreign policy objectives wherein it wants to engage Iran. The second is Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe’s, role as a mediator between the US and Iran. The third is that Japan is still unsure about the kind of role it will be required to play in the Persian Gulf tensions. It is useful to mention that the Japanese Navy is already deployed in the Indian Ocean for a number of international and national commitments concerning maritime security. It may not be inclined to take more security responsibilities given that its neighborhood is already witnessing aggressive posturing by North Korea.

India appears confident of an uninterrupted crude supply into the country and an oil ministry official said that India has “robust crude sourcing plans in place” and could obtain supplies from across the globe at competitive prices including the US. The Indian Navy responded to the SoH tensions and has deployed its warships on escort duties to ensure safe transit of Indian flagged vessels. China has advised a diplomatic route to lower tensions, and has urged the US to refrain from applying ‘maximum pressure’ against Iran. Meanwhile Iran has cautioned foreign powers to leave the Persian Gulf and has announced that Iran and the neighbouring countries can ensure safety of shipping in the region.

The US has launched Operation Sentinel to uphold ‘maritime stability, ensure safe passage, and deescalate tensions’ in the Persian Gulf and north Arabian Sea, and the Pentagon has announced deployment of additional troops in Saudi Arabia. However, the international community does not appear to be in any mood to get involved in any confrontation between the US and Iran; even if at all any of the states decides to, other than the UK, it could at best be limited to redeployment of the existing naval forces in the region.

Amending Myanmar’s Military-Drafted Constitution: The Prime Agendas and Actors

Angshuman Choudhury


On 30 July, the union parliament of Myanmar formally initiated a debate on amending the military-drafted 2008 constitution, two weeks after a Charter Amendment Committee (CAC) submitted 3765 recommendations. Formed through a parliamentary vote in February 2019, the CAC comprises 45 members, including representatives from 14 political parties that have lawmakers in the parliament, and the Tatmadaw (military).

Amending the 2008 constitution, from which the Tatmadaw derives its political authority, was one of the key promises of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) when it came to power in 2015. With the next general election fast approaching, the NLD now appears eager to push it through the parliament.

But, the process is complicated and has the potential to unsettle the brittle civil-military equation in Myanmar, which could in turn trigger massive political instability. That said, it is a pivotal step in the ongoing process of democratic transition that could contribute towards consolidating the nascent multi-party system in Myanmar.

Political DifferencesThere is a general consensus across the civilian political spectrum in Myanmar that the 2008 constitution needs to be amended and that the Tatmadaw’s role in political affairs, reduced. However, there are critical differences between various factions on the overall pace and scope of this process.

Despite initiating the amendment process and having the highest number of representatives in the CAC (19), the NLD proposed only 109 amendments—a mere 2.9 per cent of the total. The Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD)—one of the oldest critics of the Tatmadaw (and an NLD ally)—proposed the most number (1112; 29.5 per cent) despite having merely two representatives in the CAC. The SNLD was trailed by the Arakan National Party (ANP) and Mon National Party (MNP) who proposed 858 (22.8 per cent) and 640 (17 per cent) recommendations, respectively.

A majority of the recommendations (1196) sought to amend the executive arm of the union, followed by the legislative (859) and judiciary (632). The NLD is particularly eager to change Article 59(f) that bars individuals with foreign-born family (read Aung San Suu Kyi) from becoming the president, and Article 436, which stipulates a special majority vote (over 75 per cent) to amend important articles of the constitution.

The above data shows that the NLD is more cautious about the amendment process than some of the main ethnic parties. Its delicate relationship with the military as the federal ruling party compels it to project a calculated middle-ground position and propose just enough recommendations that allow it to demonstrate political will and test the waters but not unsettle the Tatmadaw leadership. The ethnic parties, on the other hand, are willing to push the line farther and change a bulk of the charter. As representatives of minority populations who have faced the full brunt of the military’s majoritarian and authoritarian policies, they are eager to see the generals stripped off their political power without delay. In fact, many of them want to wholly revoke the military’s 25 per cent reserved parliamentary seat share immediately. The NLD, on the other hand, seeks a progressive retrenchment—15 per cent for the 2020 election and then a reduction of 5 per cent before every subsequent election.

The emerging political divide is further sharpened by the ascendant aspirations of smaller ethnic parties to broaden their voter bases and reclaim lost ground from the NLD in their own regions. This was reflected in the recent statement passed by the ‘ethnic-based’ SNLD to reframe itself as a ‘state-based’ party.

In all, the amendment process is a double-edged sword—it could disturb old alliances and create new ones, resulting in political uncertainty and policy paralysis in the short term. But, in the medium-to-long term, it can bring nuance to the multi-party system by driving regional parties to assert their own agendas with much more specificity. Ultimately, this will only offer voters a much more diverse set of political choices and give greater political agency to marginalised demographies.

The Civil-military EquationUnsurprisingly, the military did not submit a single recommendation despite having eight representatives in the CAC and has withdrawn from the parliamentary debates. Needless to say, it does not want to relinquish political power by lending unconditional support to the process. In this, they have a decisive advantage in the form of an effective veto in the parliament—passing amendments requires over 75 per cent votes, and the military occupies 25 per cent of the seats.

But, the military too is treading a middle ground, not unlike the NLD. There is considerable popular and political support for the amendment process, including amongst the majority Bamar segments, which puts the Tatmadaw in an uncomfortable position. Consequently, the Tatmadaw has not rejected the process explicitly, but has criticised its structure. In February, it stated that the formation of the CAC was a “breach of constitutional rules,” but also noted that it is not against the amendment process. A month later, the deputy commander-in-chief said that any changes to the charter should be based on strict legal principles, and not just majority sentiments.

The Tatmadaw will do everything to stall the process in the pre-voting stage, lest the parliamentary debates become a nationwide movement. This includes encouraging its political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), to mobilise popular opposition—something that the military itself cannot do openly. The recent USDP rally in Mandalay—where the amendment process was portrayed as a threat to the “three main national causes” (“strong Union, national solidarity, and sovereignty”)—was case-in-point. The military could also use the ongoing armed conflicts in the country, especially in Rakhine State, to strengthen its position.

Despite the scant likelihood of the amendments passing the parliamentary vote due to the military’s veto, the sensitivity of the entire process, combined with the Tatmadaw’s staunch agenda of self-preservation, forebodes volatile times ahead. The threat of physical violence against pro-amendment factions, too, remains. Much would depend on the finer negotiations between the two main camps—civilian and military—and between the various political parties.