On Roma Holocaust Memorial Day deportations of Roma from Germany continue

Tino Jacobson

August 2 is the official day of remembrance of the Roma Holocaust. It commemorates the bestial murder of some 4,300 Roma and Sinti during the liquidation of the so-called “Gypsy Camp” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in August 1944.

Away from the official events on this day, however, it becomes all too clear that even 77 years after this Nazi crime, the Roma cannot find a safe home in Germany. The callousness of the federal and state governments is expressed in Berlin, for example, where the Roma memorial in front of the Bundestag (parliament), which commemorates the 500,000 Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism (Nazism), is to fall victim to another new S-Bahn (urban transit) line less than ten years after its unveiling .

At the beginning of June, the Independent Commission on Antiziganism (Roma persecution), which was formed on behalf of the Bundestag and the government in 2019, issued recommendations against discrimination against Roma. The 843-page report calls for only a few concrete measures. The most important is certainly the demand for an immediate halt to all deportations of Roma from Germany.

The poster reads: "The memorial stays"--demonstration on 8 April 2021 in Berlin (Photo WSWS)

It reads: “The Independent Commission on Antiziganism recommends to the federal government ... to put an end to the lack of prospects of those who have to live with the insecure status of having their residence tolerated. Concerning the practical application of the provisions of the Residence Act, it must be made clear that the Roma living in Germany are to be recognised as a group particularly worthy of protection for historical and humanitarian reasons. State governments and Aliens Departments are called upon to immediately end the practice of deporting Roma.”

But this is precisely what Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Democratic Union, CSU) categorically rejects on behalf of the federal government. It is true that in the press conference on July 13 he advocated some cosmetic measures, such as the appointment of a commissioner against antiziganism or the creation of a permanent federal-state commission. But he then quietly dropped the demand for an end to deportations.

Meanwhile, the federal and state governments are continuing the brutal deportation policy of recent years against Roma.

In 2020, 10,800 people were officially deported, more than 25 percent to the Western Balkans. Of the 2,787 people deported there, 761 were minors. The Western Balkan states include Albania and the former Yugoslav states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia and Kosovo. In 2014 and 2015, the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) declared these six states to be so-called “safe countries of origin,” even though the Roma are massively discriminated against there. Almost all Roma there live in slums and have no access to health care and education.

This classification as “safe countries of origin” means almost all asylum applications from the Western Balkans are rejected. As a result, even people who have lived in Germany for decades, or since birth, face deportation. Whole families with children, single parents and severely disabled adults and children are affected.

On June 30, 2021, in the middle of the night, the city of Göttingen arrested the Islami married couple in their flat, who had been living in Germany for 30 years, placing them in hand and foot cuffs to deport them immediately to Serbia. The children and grandchildren who lived in the flat with the couple were completely shocked following this brutal police action.

Both the parents in Serbia and the children and grandchildren in Germany are now left to fend for themselves. One adult daughter is severely mentally handicapped and needs permanent care, which the parents were able to provide for her until 2020 when she was placed in an institution against her parents’ wishes. Mr. Islami has a physical and chronic mental illness. Ms. Islami is the sister of Gani Rama, who was deported to Kosovo two years ago and then murdered by a nationalist a short time later.

On July 22, about 50 people, including the Islami children, protested in front of the Göttingen Aliens Department against this brutal deportation. The children reported how their parents have been living in Belgrade since then and would be homeless without the support of the family in Germany. The father is also unable to buy his necessary medication in Serbia. The couple, who originally fled from Kosovo, also have language problems, as they both speak little Serbian.

In Celle, under the cover of darkness, the authorities deported a single mother with her severely disabled daughter to Serbia at the end of June. The six-year-old daughter is 90 percent disabled. She suffers from severe hearing loss with a resulting speech disorder, microcephaly, and hip dysplasia. The Celle Youth Welfare Office had appointed a supplementary carer to support the mother for years.

The mother had originally fled Serbia, where she was subjected to severe physical and psychological violence. About two weeks before the deportation, a supporter had filed a hardship application for the family. Despite the ongoing asylum court proceedings and the application for hardship support, the deportation was allowed to proceed, even though it presented “a serious threat to the child’s well-being,” as Sebastian Rose from the Refugee Council of Lower Saxony rightly put it in a nutshell.

In Bochum, the Destanov family of five is facing deportation to Northern Macedonia, from where they fled in 2015. The family has a five-year-old son who suffers from severe breathing problems as well as heart disease. The reason for their flight from Northern Macedonia was an arson attack on their home. The family was originally supposed to be deported on June 1, but protests prevented this, which at least made it possible for the five-year-old to have a heart examination at the end of July.

Stefani (14), from Hamburg, is facing deportation to Montenegro in August together with her siblings and mother. In March 2019, they had escaped the miserable conditions there. In Germany, however, their asylum application was rejected under the pretext that they had entered “illegally.” Despite very good grades at school, Stefani and her family face having bureaucratic obstacles to the prospect of staying placed in their way. According to German residence law, she would have had to attend school “regularly and successfully” for at least four years. But logically, this has only been possible for Stefani for two years. The corresponding committee of the Hamburg state parliament rejected the petition to forward her case to the hardship commission.

In Magdeburg, the Barjamovic family, who have lived there for ten years, are again being threatened with deportation to Serbia, after this was averted in 2015 and 2016 through loud protests. Discrimination and inhumane conditions were the reasons for their flight to Germany. A petition containing 52,000 signatures to support the family’s right to stay was submitted to Magdeburg City Hall on July 14, 2021.

The Hardship Commission, which has been sitting on the case since last December, postponed its decision in mid-July. Seven-year-old Alex had to undergo emergency surgery in mid-July and his father is severely disabled with epilepsy. The youngest son, Mario, suffers from a rare hereditary disease and kidney stones. Seventeen-year-old son Josef has been dancing successfully for eight years in the “Break Borders Crew” and has already received several prizes and even won the title of German champion with the group in 2017.

Especially in Magdeburg, the memory of the crimes committed against the Roma by the Nazis is omnipresent. This is commemorated by two Roma monuments, one at Magdeburg Cathedral and the other at the Flora-Park shopping centre. During the Third Reich, the Holzweg-Silberberg forced labour camp was built near today’s Flora Park, where Roma and Sinti were imprisoned from 1935. The memorial consists of a 1.80-metre-high marble stele with the names of 340 murdered people engraved on it. The dedication text at Flora Park reads: “These names are to commemorate the fate of the Sinti and Roma who were deported from the camp at Holzweg-Silberberg to Auschwitz and murdered on 01.03.1943.”

Chinese paleontologists discover fossilized remains of largest land mammal to ever inhabit the Earth

Ronan Coddington

In mid-June, a research team from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences lead by professor Deng Tao published their findings of a new species of Paraceratherium along the border of the Tibetan plateau.

A skull and mandible of Paraceratherium linxiaense which are preserved at the Hezheng Paleozoological Museum in Hezheng County, Gansu Province, China. Credit: Deng et. al., 2021

Today, the largest mammal to walk the Earth is the African bush elephant. While a sight to behold, this contemporary behemoth of the African plains pales in comparison to the Paraceratherium, the largest mammal to ever walk the Earth. While appearing to be some strange mix of a giraffe and an elephant, Paraceratherium was in fact a giant early rhinoceros. The ancient rhino’s skull alone was roughly the size of a human torso while the animal’s shoulders would have reached five meters above the ground. Paraceratherium linxiense is named after the Linxia Basin in central China where its fossils were discovered.

According to the University of Montpellier’s rhino paleontologist Pierre Olivier, in comments made to National Geographic, Paraceratherium would have been able “to eat flowers at the third or fourth floor of a building” today. The animal’s very own steps would have been felt through the earth, as estimates suggest it could have weighed a whopping 20 tonnes.

Deng’s team found that early species of Paraceratherium spread to central and south Asia around 43 million years ago. Millions of years later, it crossed what is now the Tibetan plateau seeking a humid environment. These findings suggest the Tibetan plateau was not elevated at the time, and its increased elevation is the cause of its modern aridity.

This giant mammal led an existence similar to a modern giraffe, feeding on huge amounts of plants throughout the Oligocene, a period lasting from 34 to 23 million years ago. It lived in a massive area encompassing what is now modern-day Eurasia. It had little to fear from nearby predators, with the exception of Astorgosuchus, a massive crocodile that would often exceed 10 meters in length. Evidence suggests it would prey upon even fully grown members of Paraceratherium.

The findings give paleontologists clues as to how this rhino genus spread across what is now Eurasia. Paraceratherium likely had social structures and reproductive cycles not dissimilar from the modern elephant, living in small social groups where females would guard younger members of the species. Males would live solitary lives, only approaching other members of its species to mate or compete for resources.

Ironically it was likely gomphotheres, an ancestor and relative of elephants, that likely drove Paraceratherium to extinction. Like elephants, gomphotheres were mixed browsers, feeding on both grasses and trees. This enabled them to become ecosystem engineers, as their feeding habits were extremely damaging to foliage, producing an ecosystem that had significantly fewer trees. For Paraceratherium, a large mammal that spent most of its waking hours browsing on trees, this change in plant composition proved devastating and it fell into extinction.

This change was not restricted to Paraceratherium’s range, as gomphothere descendants spread across the world. The engineering opened new ecological niches and in turn enabled animals more closely resembling modern rhinos to diversify and eventually become the horned beasts we know today.

These discoveries have provided numerous fascinating insights into the world of millions of years ago. However, modern military conflicts and wars for the control of resources in central Asia have greatly reduced science’s ability to understand these magnificent beasts. According to paleontologist Donald Prothero, efforts to explore the region continue despite being “extremely dangerous now because of warfare between the tribal chiefs and the Pakistani government, Taliban insurgents, Islamic extremists, and the spillover of the military conflict in Afghanistan.”

In 2006, the most remarkably preserved remains of these animals were annihilated. Excavated by a French team of paleontologists in the hills near the village of Dera Bugti, Pakistan, in 1999, the region was controlled by Akbar Bugti, the head of the Bugti tribe, a group consisting of an estimated 180,000 people. The elder Bugti was an invaluable source of information and protection for the scientists as they searched for bones, eventually recovering a nearly complete skeleton of Paraceratherium.

However, before they could be removed for further research, repeated bombings related to the Pakistani army’s suppression of the Baloch people in the region led to their destruction. The bombings that destroyed the fossils were part of a deliberate campaign to terrorize the local population.

Furthermore, efforts throughout the 20th century to construct a full skeleton of Paraceratherium suffered complications due to the remains being scattered across eastern, central and western Asia. Due to the rivalries between Soviet, Chinese and Western imperialist governments, little collaborative study was carried out.

Instead, scientists often led duplicate efforts and published findings that were inaccessible to outsiders. To this day, conflict embroils the region, as Chinese efforts to economically integrate the region and exploit fuel resources have provoked backlash from the local populations as well as US-backed efforts to sabotage Chinese pipelines.

These conflicts are not only an affront to the people of the region, but a blow to the scientific understanding of people around the world. The history of life on Earth belongs to all of humanity, regardless of region. The subordination of life to the capitalist profit system not only threatens human knowledge but the very existence of life on Earth.

Welcome to Western China!

Serge Halimi

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends states try to convince people of the — undeniable — benefits of Covid-19 vaccines rather than use coercion. Emmanuel Macron thinks otherwise. This president, a constant critic of ‘illiberalism’, sees public liberties as nothing more than a dial he can adjust, an insignificant variable subordinate to the emergencies of the moment — be they medical, security or military.

Forbidding millions of people from boarding a train, ordering a meal outdoors, or watching a film in a cinema without proving they are not infected by showing, as many as ten times a day, a document that business-owners will have to check, shifts us into another world.

That world already exists and it’s called China. Police officers there have augmented-reality glasses linked to thermal cameras on their helmets so they can pick out a person with a temperature in a crowd. Is this what we want?

We are, in any case, blithely endorsing the rampant invasion of digital technology and the tracking of our private and professional lives, our exchanges and our political views. Edward Snowden, asked how to stop our data being used against us once our mobile phones are hacked, said, ‘What can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons? There are certain industries, certain sectors, from which there is no protection, and that’s why we try to limit the proliferation of these technologies’ (1).

Macron is encouraging the exact opposite of this by accelerating the replacement of human interaction with a tangled web of government sites, robots, voicemail, QR codes and apps. Now, booking a ticket and shopping online require both a credit card and a mobile phone number, and sometimes even additional official documentation. There was a time, not so long ago, when you could take a train and remain anonymous, and travel across a city without being filmed, your sense of freedom enhanced by knowing you left behind no trace of having been there. Yet child abductions happened then, too, as did terrorist attacks, epidemics, even wars…

The precautionary principle will have no limit. Is it wise, for example, to sit in a restaurant with a person who may have visited the Middle East, had irrational thoughts, taken part in a banned demonstration or visited an anarchist bookshop? The risk of your meal being interrupted by a bomb, a Kalashnikov or a punch in the face may not be great, but nor is it zero. So will it soon be necessary for everyone to present a ‘civic pass’ guaranteeing they have police approval and no criminal record? They could then peacefully repair to a museum of public freedoms, the true ‘lost territories of the Republic’ (2)

Pegasus and the Threat of Cyberweapons in the Age of Smartphones

Prabir Purkayastha

Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, is haunting the Narendra Modi-led Indian government once again. Seventeen media organizations including the Wire, the Washington Post and the Guardian have spent months examining a possible list of 50,000 phone numbers belonging to individuals from around 50 countries. This list was provided by the French journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International. These investigations by the media organizations helped zero in on possible targets of these cyberattacks. The mobile phones of 67 of the people who were on the target list were then forensically examined. The results revealed that 37 of the analyzed phones showed signs of being hacked by the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware or signs of attempted penetration. Of the remaining 30, the results were inconclusive as either the owners had changed their phones or the phones were Androids, which do not log the kind of information that helps in detecting such penetration.

The possible targets not only include journalists and activists, but also government officials. This includes 14 heads of states and governments: three presidents (France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa), three sitting and seven former prime ministers, and a king (Morocco’s Mohammed VI). The three sitting prime ministers are Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouly and Morocco’s Saad-Eddine El Othmani. Among the seven former prime ministers are Lebanon’s Saad Hariri, France’s Édouard Philippe, Algeria’s Noureddine Bedoui and Belgium’s Charles Michel, according to the Washington Post.

Once the malware is installed on a target’s phone, the spyware not only provides full access to the device’s data but also controls the phone’s microphone and camera. Instead of a device for use by the owner, the phone becomes a device that can be used to spy on them, recording not only telephonic conversations but also in-person conversations, including images of the participants. The collected information and data are then transmitted back to those deploying Pegasus.

Successive information and technology ministers in India—Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ashwini Vaishnaw—have stated that “the government has not indulged in any ‘unauthorized interception’” in the country, according to the Wire. Both the ministers have chosen to duck the questions: Did the government buy NSO’s hacking software and authorize the targeting of Indian citizens? And can the use of Pegasus spyware to infect smartphones and alter its basic functions be considered as legal authorization under the Indian Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009 for “interception, monitoring or decryption of any information through any computer resource”?

I am going to leave the legal issues for those who are better equipped to handle them. Instead, I am going to examine the new dangers that weaponizing malware by nation-states pose to the world. Pegasus is not the only example of such software; Snowden surveillance revelations showed us what the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States and the Five Eyes governments do and shed light on their all-encompassing surveillance regime. These intelligence agencies and governments have hacked the digital infrastructure of other countries and snooped on their “secure” communications and even spied on their allies. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel was not spared from NSA surveillance.

The key difference between nation-states and cybercriminals developing malware is that the nation-states possess far greater resources when it comes to developing such malware. Take the example of a group called the Shadow Brokers, who dumped a gigabyte of weaponized software exploits of the NSA on the net in 2017. Speaking about this, Matthew Hickey, a well-known security expert, told Ars Technica in 2017, “It is very significant as it effectively puts cyberweapons in the hands of anyone who downloads it.” Ransomware hit big time soon after, with WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware creating havoc by using the exploits in NSA’s toolkit.

Why am I recounting NSA’s malware tools while discussing Pegasus? Because Pegasus belongs to NSO, an Israeli company with very close ties to Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA. NSO, like many other Israeli commercial cyber-intelligence companies, is founded and run by ex-intelligence officers from Unit 8200. It is this element—introducing skills and knowledge of nation-states—into the civilian sphere that makes such spyware so dangerous.

NSO also appears to have played a role in improving Israel’s relations with two Gulf petro-monarchies, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Israel, therefore, sees the sale of spyware to these countries as an extension of its foreign policy. Pegasus has been used extensively by the UAE and Saudi Arabia to target various domestic dissidents and even foreign critics. The most well-known example, of course, is Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and the Washington Post’s columnist, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

NSO’s market capitalization is reported to be in the range of $2 billion, making it perhaps one of the most expensive civilian cyber-intelligence companies. And its tools are frightening, as there does not seem to be any protection against them. Most of these tools are classified as cyberweapons and require the Israeli government’s approval for export, again showing the link between the Israeli state and NSO.

The other reason why Pegasus spyware is so dangerous is that it does not need any action on the part of the owner of a phone for the device to be hacked by the spyware. Most infections of devices take place when people click on a link sent to them through email/SMS, or when they go to a site and click on something there. Pegasus exploited a security problem with WhatsApp and was able to hack into a phone through just a missed call. Just a ring was enough for the Pegasus spyware to be installed on the phone. This has now been extended to using other vulnerabilities that exist within iMessage, WhatsApp, FaceTime, WeChat, Telegram, and various other apps that receive data from unknown sources. That means Pegasus can compromise a phone without the user having to click on a single link. These are called zero-click exploits in the cyber community.

Once installed, Pegasus can read the user’s messages, emails, and call logs; it can capture screenshots, log pressed keys, and collect browser history and contacts. It exfiltrates—meaning sends files—back to its server. Basically, it can spy on every aspect of a target’s life. Encrypting emails or using encryption services such as Signal won’t deter Pegasus, which can read what an infected phone’s user reads or capture what they type.

Many people use iPhones in the belief that they are safer. The sad truth is that the iPhone is as vulnerable to Pegasus attacks as Android phones, though in different ways. It is easier to find out if an iPhone is infected, as it logs what the phone is doing. As the Android systems do not maintain such logs, Pegasus can hide its traces better.

In an interview with the Guardian published on July 19, “after the first revelations from the Pegasus Project,” Snowden described for-profit malware developers as “an industry that should not exist… If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.” He called for an immediate global ban on the international spyware trade.

Snowden’s answer of banning the sale of such spyware is not enough. We need instead to look at deweaponizing all of cyberspace, including spyware. The spate of recent cyberattacks—estimated to be tens of thousands a day—is a risk to the cyberinfrastructure of all countries on which all their institutions depend. After the leak of NSA and CIA cyberweapons, and now with NSO’s indiscriminate use of Pegasus, we should be asking whether nation-states can really be trusted to develop such weapons.

In 2017, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft and no peacenik or leftist, wrote, “Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage.” It is this concern that certain leading companies within the industry—Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom and others—had raised in 2017, calling for a new digital Geneva Convention banning cyberweapons. Russia and China have also made similar demands in the past. It was rejected by the United States, who believed that it had a military advantage in cyberspace, which is something it should not squander.

Pegasus is one more reminder of the danger of nation-states developing cyberweapons. Though here, it is not a leak but deliberate use of a dangerous technology for private profit that poses a risk to journalists, activists, opposition parties and finally to democracy. It is a matter of time before the smartphones that we carry become attack vectors for attacks on the very cyberinfrastructure on which we all depend.

24 Muslim Brotherhood members sentenced to death in Egypt

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

An Egyptian kangaroo court on Thursday sentenced 24 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death in two separate cases, the daily Sabah reported.

The state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper said the Damanhour Criminal Court ordered the death penalty for 16 defendants affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, including Mohamed Sweidan, a regional leader of the organization, for their involvement in the bombing of a police bus in Rashid (Rosetta) city in the Beheira governorate in 2015.

Six of the defendants were tried in absentia. The report added that the blast killed three police officers and wounded 39 others. The same court also handed down the death penalty to eight Muslim Brotherhood members, including two in absentia, who were accused of killing a police officer in December 2014 in Ad Dilinjat city in Beheira.

There are no exact figures for death penalties issued in Egypt this year except for 10 handed down in April and those upheld against 12 Muslim Brotherhood leaders over the Rabaa sit-in dispersal case in 2013.

Founded in 1928 in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood became the main opposition movement in Egypt despite decades of crackdown, and has inspired side movements and political parties throughout the Muslim world. But it is still banned in several countries, including Egypt, for its alleged links to terrorism.

Earlier in 2021, Amnesty International denounced Egypt’s “significant spike” in recorded executions. The human rights organization estimated a more than threefold rise to 107 last year, from 32 in 2019.

American Muslim groups urge suspension of US aid to Egypt until el-Sisi Regime cancels politically-motivated executions

The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest coalition of major national, regional, and local Muslim organizations, on June 28 sent a letter to Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken calling on the Biden administration and Congress to demand that “the Egyptian government halt its plans to conduct a mass execution of democracy activists, faith leaders, and other political prisoners in the coming days.”

The USCMO letter in part said:

Indeed, Egypt is ruled by a brutal military dictatorship with no regard for human rights, democracy, or justice. Under the military’s reign, Egypt has become the world’s third-largest executioner. In October and November 2020 alone, the junta executed 57 men and women. A 2020 Amnesty International report found that of those 57 people, over a quarter were “sentenced to death in cases relating to political violence following grossly unfair trials marred by forced ‘confessions’ and other serious human rights violations including torture and enforced disappearances.”

So far in 2021, 51 men and women have been put to death, including a Christian monk. In 2014, Impartial UN experts described the Egyptian government’s mass executions of political prisoners as a “continuing and unacceptable mockery of justice that casts a big shadow over the Egyptian legal system.”

The mass detention of political prisoners has been ongoing since 2013, when the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected government and massacred over a thousand anti–coup demonstrators at Rabaa Square, an atrocity Human Rights Watch called “the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”

Egypt the third-most prolific executioner in the world after China and Iran

Since the rise to power of Field Marshad Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt following the overthrow of his predecessor Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the country has seen a wave of repression against political dissidents, sparking outrage from human rights organizations.

The widespread use of the death penalty has become a major focus for concern, as hundreds of people have been sentenced to death since 2013. So far, at least 51 men and women have been executed in 2021 alone, according to the Middle East Eye.

In 2020, the number of executions in Egypt tripled from the year before, making the country the third-most prolific executioner after China and Iran, according to Amnesty International.

Many of those executed have been described by rights groups as “prisoners of conscience” detained due to their political opposition to the el-Sisi government.

According to the Geneva-based Committee for Justice rights group, at least 92 opponents of el-Sisi have been executed since 2013, and final death sentences have been issued for 64 others who may be executed at any moment.

No End to Escalating Repression

Egyptian authorities intensified their repression of peaceful government critics and ordinary people during 2020, virtually obliterating any space for peaceful assembly, association or expression, Human Rights Watch said in its World Report 2021.

The parliament approved President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s extension of a nationwide state of emergency for the fourth year in a row. The authorities used the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext to silence critics including health workers, journalists and bloggers, and to keep hundreds, if not thousands, of detainees in pre-trial detention without judicial review.  In May, President al-Sisi approved amendments to the Emergency Law that expanded the executive branch’s power. The Covid-19 outbreak exacerbated abysmal detention conditions, with a ban on prison visits from March to August without alternative means of communication. Dozens of prisoners died in custody, including at least 14 apparently due to Covid-19.

“Ten years after Egyptians ousted Hosni Mubarak, they now live under the harsher, suffocating security grip of President al-Sisi’s government,” said Amr Magdi, Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The Interior Ministry’s National Security Agency (NSA) and other security forces forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily arrested, and tortured detainees, including children. Many arrests were made on baseless charges of “joining a terrorist group” and “spreading false news.” Families of dissidents abroad were also subjected to collective punishment, including home raids and arrests. In September and October, the authorities arrested over 1,000 protesters, dissidents, and bystanders in response to small but widespread protests across the country.

A new age of surveillance and control in India

Javed Iqbal Wani

With the recent Pegasus scandal, the relationship between state surveillance and democratic practices are in sharp contention. It seems that control has become the sacrament of state in India based on a conception of sovereignty that operates by strictly regulating and punishing those considered as the foes of the regime. In India the key challenge it seems remains the decolonisation of administrative authority and power. There is a strong element of suspicion towards citizens who disagree with the ideology of the regime. Since coming to power in 2014, the current government has actively tried to underwrite most relations of power and authority. Such an approach is set in a paradigm of security, where political paranoia and anxiety has gained primacy over justice. Given the emphasis on market driven development and self-sufficiency approach propagated by the government, one would expect the state to make itself less visible in the everyday life of the citizens. However, there is an increasing presence of the state felt in the quotidian lives of its citizens against, what the Union government has time and again argued, a condition of desolation and anarchy leading to ‘anti-national’ activities. As a result, what is proposed is that state sovereignty requires protection of institutions of security.

The problem with such a security paradigm is that it pursues an imposed mode of political life and become more an issue of power and obligation than of participative and deliberative democracy. The urge of the Union government is to continue disciplining citizens and to slow down any opposition to its policies and ideology. Thus, control emerges as a substantive issue here. The Union government is trying to surreptitiously comport itself in its imagined crises. By unleashing institutions like the National Security Agency and Enforcement Directorate, and laws such as UAPA etc., the government has repeatedly tried to embody a new form of state power yet keeps insisting on the autonomy of these institutions. More recently the allegations of snooping on various ‘persons of interest’ by utilising a shady organisation like NSO, has raised new questions about its approach. If the allegations are true, it can be deduced that the state is sourcing and deploying new technologies to conduct its dirty work. This secret condition of governance in India makes the political utterly vulnerable and scuttles established ‘rule of law’ practices.

In the name of ‘national interest’ the Union government has in a way proposed that citizens must come to terms with a life in which accepted surveillance, security and discipline are the precondition of the ‘new’ citizenship. It is arguing for divesting the citizens of democratic deliberation and dissent. Recently, with various intellectuals and activists arrested under the draconian UAPA points out that the space to critique the political rationality of the government is shrinking at a great pace. In the current scenario it seems that one’s ideology, if it differs from the government, is weaponised against oneself. The ambitions of the government are increasingly becoming opaque to the citizens.

In the era of the ongoing pandemic and the many challenges it has created, a government is expected to practice an ethic of care and not animosity. It is expected to listen and constructively respond to the queries and anxieties of its people. Care and not control should take precedence in establishing confidence amongst the citizens. Relentless urge to control has put limits to governments’ own civility and has created a wedge between democracy and authority. Authority without responsibility is an imminent danger facing India right now.

Russia conducts military drills in Central Asia and China as US completes troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

Clara Weiss

Against the backdrop of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is set to be completed by the end of August, and the rapid take-over of large parts of the country by the Taliban, Russia began military drills with Turkmenistan on Friday, July 30, that are set to run until August 10.

Russia also began 10-day-long military drills on August 1, together with the Tajik armed forces and the armed forces of Uzbekistan. The drills will take place at the Harbmaidon training ground on the Afghan-Tajik border. Tajikistan and Afghanistan share a 800-mile-long (1,303 kilometers) frontier, which has been effectively taken over by the Taliban.

The deeply impoverished country hosts a Russian military base. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu expressed alarm this week about a strengthening of ISIS in Afghanistan amid the US troop withdrawal. He said that Russia was strengthening the military capabilities of its base in Tajikistan and ramping up the training of Tajik forces.

Tajik National Army troops (Image credit: Russian Ministry of Defense CC BY 4.0)

On July 22, Tajikistan held its largest military readiness drills since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, involving around 100,000 servicemen, 130,000 reserve troops and 1,000 armored vehicles. According to Eurasianet, Tajik military recruitment officers have been touring the country, drawing up lists of young people who could be called up as wartime reservists.

From August 9-14, Russia will also conduct its first joint military drills with China since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a joint statement published by Moscow and Beijing on Thursday, “The exercise is aimed to consolidate and develop the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in the new era, deepen the practical cooperation and traditional friendship between the two militaries, and further demonstrate the two sides’ resolve and capability to fight against terrorist forces and jointly safeguard regional peace and security.”

The drills in the northern Chinese Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region will involve some 10,000 troops along with aircraft, artillery and armored equipment. Both militaries are set to establish a joint command center to oversee the drills. The statement said, “The two sides’ participating troops will be mixed into teams to make plans jointly and conduct training together, in a bid to verify and improve both troops’ capabilities of joint reconnaissance, search and early warning, electronic information attack, and joint attack and elimination.”

The military drills come as the US has resumed bombing Afghanistan in support of government troops that have been rapidly losing territory to the Taliban amid the US troop withdrawal. The Kremlin has also been concerned about news reports suggesting that the US is seeking to establish a military base in one of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

As talks between the Taliban and the official Afghan government have stalled and preparations for the military drills were underway, both Moscow and Beijing welcomed Taliban delegations in July.

On Wednesday, Beijing welcomed a delegation led by the Taliban’s deputy head, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, for a two-day visit. It was the highest profile visit so far by the Taliban to China. Beijing declared that the Taliban would play “an important role in the process of peaceful reconciliation and reconstruction” of the country. China is particularly concerned about the potential bolstering of Uyghur separatist organizations, which have long-standing ties to the Taliban, going back to the CIA-orchestrated war against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul in the 1980s. At the time, China supported the US involvement in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. However, the Afghan war also turned out to be central for the training and arming of Uyghur separatist and terrorist organizations, which to this day maintain close ties with US imperialism .

By now, the Taliban have seized much of the Afghan province that directly borders China’s Xinjiang province, which is home to the majority of the Muslim Uyghur population in China and is claimed by Uyghur separatists as “East Turkestan.” The Taliban has earlier published statements, welcoming Chinese investments and assuring Beijing that it would not intervene in China’s domestic affairs. A spokesman for the Taliban’s political office, Mohammad Naeem, stated on Wednesday that it had again “assured China that Afghan territory will not be used against the security of any country.”

Earlier in July, Taliban delegations visited Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat, as well as Moscow. The visit by a Taliban delegation to Moscow on July 7-8 was, in fact, the third such visit this year. Although the Taliban has been banned in Russia as a terrorist organization since 2003, the Russian government has for many years been in relatively open contact with the Taliban.

According to Russian press reports, at the July meeting the Taliban promised that it would not allow Afghanistan to become a staging ground for attacks on Russia since it had “very good relations” with Moscow. The Taliban also assured Moscow that it would not violate the Afghan-Tajik border or any other border with Central Asian countries.

Speaking to Gazeta.Ru, Vladimir Dzhabarov, a member of Russia’s Federal Council and the ruling United Russia party, emphasized, “We will cooperate with any lawfully established [Afghan] government. If the Taliban become the lawful government, of course, we will establish relations with them, but under the condition that they will not be hostile toward our country.” He added that Russia “hasn’t had the kind of openly negative relationship with them [the Taliban] as the Americans did.”

A political expert, Stanislav Pritchin, cautioned that the Taliban was a very heterogeneous organization and that its central leadership could make no credible promise about the actions of its forces in Afghanistan’s north since they were recruited from various groups, some of which have their own political agenda. Andrei Kazantsev from the Moscow Higher School of Economics also speaking to Gazeta.Ru, stressed that Russia’s main concern was to prevent ISIS from consolidating its position in Afghanistan.

In recent months, Russian foreign policy think tanks have increasingly focused on analyzing the impact of the US troop withdrawal on Central Asia and discussing Russia’s own foreign policy strategy. Fyodor Lukyanov, who is Russia’s leading foreign policy pundit and maintains close ties to the Putin regime, recently wrote in the think tank journal Russia in Global Affairs, that the withdrawal marked the “end of an epoch in American and world politics.” He noted, “To some extent, Washington doesn’t care about what will happen now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Biden speaks a lot about democracy and freedom, but he understands that America’s possibilities are limited and that priorities have to be set. His choice is clear: the opposition to China by means of uniting the ‘free world’ against it. To keep the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan without any hope of achieving any real success will not further this goal.”

Also writing for Russia in Global Affairs, Timofei Bordachev stressed that the Kremlin should approach the troop withdrawal from the standpoint of its implications not just for regional but for world politics. While stressing that in terms of immediate security threats that Russia should work closely with the Central Asian states to bolster defense capacities, he wrote, “If the Taliban were to come to power or plunge the country into a new civil war, it would not damage major Russian projects.” He continued, “[t]he new reality in Kabul is not a threat, but an opportunity to adjust the existing formats of relations with partners—regional and not only.

“Much more important” for Moscow than the immediate regional implications, he emphasized, was “how the new situation in Afghanistan will affect Russia’s position in relations with China, India, Turkey, Iran, even with the United States and Europe.” Particular attention should be paid, Bordachev continued, to a possible involvement by Turkey in Afghanistan; the impact of the situation on China’s position in Pakistan and South Asia in general and its implications for India’s foreign policy strategy.

Severe smoke continues to blanket North American west

Adria French

The wildfire season in the United States and Canada has continued to spread smoke across the North American west. In the US, Oregon’s Bootleg Fire has grown to more than 413,000 acres (645 square miles)—over half the size of Rhode Island. Fires also burned on both sides of California’s Sierra Nevada and in Washington state and other areas of the West.

The National Interagency Fire Center reports that 87 large fires have burned more than 1.7 million acres so far in the US, and a total of more than 3 million acres have been scorched since January. Large fires are also active in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, as well as across Canada.

A firefighter walks a path as the Glass Fire burns along Highway 29 in Calistoga, Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

The scale of the fires has cast smoke and in some cases ash across the entire continent. Air quality alerts were issued along the East Coast last week and will continue until at least Tuesday in cities such as Minnesota, where the air quality has been classified as either “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy.” Strong winds also blew smoke from California, Oregon, Montana and Washington as far east as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

The dangerous levels of smoke in the atmosphere, quantified as the air quality index, are particularly dangerous for millions of agricultural workers, who are forced to work in increasingly inhospitable conditions. Over half of all farmworkers are undocumented, and the median income for all farmworkers is just $7,500 per year, making them particularly vulnerable to the health and safety issues posed by the smoke. Moreover, child labor is legal in agriculture, with 12 year olds forced to work days comparable to their adult counterparts.

At a flower farm in Willamette Valley, Oregon, one worker who spends nine hours a day, six days a week planting, growing and packaging flowers for retail sales reported experiencing painful physical conditions. “The smoke doesn’t let you breathe well. My throat hurt. There was a lot of black dust I was breathing in, and dirt coming from my nose,” the worker, who asked to remain anonymous, reported to the Salem Statesman-Journal .

Her employer did not offer to pay workers if they chose to go home, so she continued working. Nothing has changed in her working conditions since last September, when smoke from the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires started building up in the valley.

Thousands of agricultural workers in the area worked in smoky conditions during last year’s Labor Day fires. Farmworker advocates reported hearing from countless people describing headaches, nausea, loss of appetite and other smoke-related symptoms, as well as pressure to continue working in dangerous conditions.

“The acute effects cause irritability, nausea, shortness of breath,” said Sam Joseph, a pulmonary and critical care physician and professor at the Washington State University Elson S. Floyd School of Medicine to Northwest Public Broadcasting.

Breathing the air is dangerous on a day-to-day basis, and doctors say chronic exposure to smoke, year after year can lead to long-term health problems, especially for people with underlying heart and lung problems, children and senior citizens. Farmworkers are especially at risk.

Joseph said long-term exposure to wildfire smoke can lead to chronic cardiovascular diseases, like heart attacks (both fatal and nonfatal), irregular heartbeats and increased severity of asthma. These health problems are most troublesome for people who already experience heart and lung issues.

“In all smoke exposure, you’re exposed to lots of particles and chemicals,” Joseph said. “Some of the chemicals include carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and particulate matter, which we call soot.”

Earlier studies have shown pollution from wildfire smoke is worse than scientists previously thought. In a report from 2017, researchers found smoke plumes had three times as much pollution as predicted in earlier estimates.

Wildfire smoke may also greatly increase susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which has to date killed more than 630,000 people in the US and 4.2 million internationally, as noted by official figures. According to new research from the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Desert Research Institute, Washoe County Health District, and Renown Health in Reno, Nevada, coronavirus cases increased nearly 18 percent after wildfire smoke covered Reno between August and October in 2020.

The authors compared the smoke levels in northern Nevada, which experienced 43 days of elevated levels of smoke to those elsewhere in the United States such as San Francisco, which experienced 26 days of elevated levels of smoke. They found that the health impacts caused by smoke can make individuals more susceptible to COVID-19, a largely respiratory disease.

“We believe that our study greatly strengthens the evidence that wildfire smoke can enhance the spread of SARS-CoV-2,” said Gai Elhanan, one of the lead authors of the study.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visits the US as a lackey of the banks

Santiago Guillen

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s recent three-day trip to the United States has yet again made very clear the class interests defended by the Spanish government formed by Sánchez's Socialist Party (PSOE) and his pseudo-left ally, Podemos.

Significantly, Sánchez did not visit the capital, Washington D.C., nor did he publicly meet with Joe Biden or any other official representative of the US government. Instead, he met with investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other major corporate heads. Sánchez was traveling not as a representative of the Spanish people, as is usually presented in the capitalist media but as a lackey in the service of Spain’s banks and corporations.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks during a news conference. (AP Photo/Paul White)

The explicit aim of the trip was to attract investments from large vulture funds and other possible US investors. Using the 140 billion euros Spain expects to receive in European Union (EU) bailout funds in exchange for massive attacks on the working class—pension and labour reforms and austerity—the PSOE-Podemos governments hopes to obtain an additional €500 billion in private investment.

During his visit, Sánchez met with a long list of banks and fund managers: Ares Management Corporation, Bank of America, Blackstone Group, Bank of New York Mellon, Brookfield Asset Management, Roko Capital Management, J.P. Morgan, Catterton Partners, Lone Star Funds, Morgan Stanley, Providence Equity Partners, Soros Fund Management, Wellington Management Group and also the US Chamber of Commerce in Spain.

Sánchez offered all of them guarantees that he will continue his attacks on the working class. In Spain, Podemos promotes the lie that a new labour reform is part of “social measures” to improve working conditions, but in the United States, Sánchez made clear that he intends to escalate attacks on workers.

As El País explained, “The Prime Minister explained to them that the labor reform, agreed with Podemos and also negotiated with Brussels, will mean that Spain is moving towards the German model of labor relations, where there is social peace but also flexibility for employers to adapt to circumstances through the use of furlough schemes, without redundancies.”

By German model of labor relations, Sánchez really was talking about the notorious Hartz laws, which created conditions for the emergence of a huge low-wage sector. This in turn served as a lever to smash wages and working conditions, wiping out many thousands of well-paid industrial jobs. The result of the “model” hailed by Sánchez has been an explosion of social inequality. In Germany, there are 136 billionaires and 542,000 millionaires. On the other hand, 13 million people live in poverty, the highest number since German reunification in 1991.

Sánchez boasted to investors that pro-Podemos unions will suppress the class struggle, El País added: “Sánchez explained to them that Spain is a country with few strikes, with social peace and constant negotiation between employers and unions.” In other words, the trade unions play a fundamental role in suppressing the class struggle and working with big business to impose wage cuts, plant closures and pension reforms.”

He also told them not to worry about his government’s new housing law. This was of special interest to these hedge funds: Blackstone is Spain’s largest landlord, with more than 40,000 homes out of the nearly 240,000 managed by hedge funds in Spain, while Lone Star owns around 15,000. Pedro Sánchez made clear that he had no intention of limiting their profits by regulating rents.

This issue affects millions of workers and youth. According the Platform for those Affected by Mortgages (PAH), since 2008 there have been more than one million evictions in Spain.

In addition to the real estate sector, other groups such as J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Providence or Wellington have strong investments in various sectors such as mobile telephony, energy, banking, food and other sectors in Spain. But it is global investment fund BlackRock that has the largest slice of Spain’s economy, with €17 billion worth of shares in 18 of the 35 companies of the IBEX-35, Spain’s principal stock market index.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management corporation, with $9 trillion in assets under management as of June 2021. It holds stakes in almost all major multinational companies, including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Monsanto and Apple among others. To understand its size and influence, it is enough to say that if it were a country, it would be the world’s third largest economy by size. Its president and CEO, Larry Fink, is known as “the fixer,” for being the person who “fixes things in the financial market.” Sánchez reportedly held a private, one-on-one meeting with Fink.

Podemos has covered for Sánchez’s visit. Podemos leader and Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz declared, “I suppose they have talked about taxes,” adding that this is “the only interesting thing about a visit to a large investment fund.” She concluded, “The president has done his job,” then cynically explained, “Investment funds are in the world to make money and governments, especially progressive ones, are there to improve people’s lives.”

Díaz’s cynicism has no end. She and her government have done nothing but work tirelessly, with the collaboration of the trade unions, to benefit these investment funds. The examples are many.

Spanish banks laid off 15,000 workers in the first six months of this year, all rubber-stamped by the trade unions and endorsed by Díaz herself. This has allowed the banks to announce last week €4 billion in profits, which will keep BlackRock and the IBEX-35 happy.

The monthly rise in electricity bills that is ruining millions of workers, green lighted by the PSOE-Podemos government, is benefiting large Spanish corporations like Iberdrola. The latest pension reform, signed by the government and trade unions with the employers, opens the way towards the privatization of pensions through company pension plans—in line with the aggressive promotion of these schemes by the hedge funds in Spain and throughout Europe.

These hedge funds have also profited from the herd immunity policy pursued by Madrid and the European Union, prioritising corporate profits over workers’ lives. While these firms made billions in profits, the cost in human lives of this policy has been over 100,000 deaths in Spain and over 1.1 million across Europe. Europe is now confronting a new wave under the virulent Delta variant, as capitalist governments across the continent continue to aggressively reopen the economy.