Warsaw and Brussels intensify attacks on refugees at Polish-Belarusian border

Martin Kreikenbaum

The Polish government, with the support of the European Union and NATO, is waging a veritable war against refugees. After several hundred refugees near the Polish border town of Kuznica tried to break through the frontier and enter Polish territory, 2,000 additional Polish soldiers were sent to the border and the crossing was sealed off. Moreover, the Polish Territorial Defense Force was put on alert and NATO was called for consultation.

According to the Polish research service Okopress and the Belarusian Twitter channel Nexta, the refugees, mostly from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, in desperation and to send a signal, set out together on foot from the Belarusian capital Minsk to the border with Poland. They have been met by a massive display of force from Poland and the EU.

Polish soldiers and refugees at the Polish-Belarusian border

For weeks, the borders to Poland and Lithuania have been closed to refugees, and those who are apprehended while crossing are forcibly shipped back to Belarus by border guards in illegal pushback operations. Thus, refugees attempted to use the official border crossing at Kuznica-Bruzgi. However, just shy of the border, they were allegedly run off the road by Belarusian border guards and driven into the woods.

As videos of the refugee caravan, which includes many women and children, spread on Twitter and Telegram, the government’s crisis team met in Warsaw: President Andrzej Duda, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Poland’s de facto head of government and deputy prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, as well as the ministers of interior and defense and intelligence chiefs.

Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszak declared martially that his ministry, together with the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for police and border protection, was “ready to defend the Polish border.” The border fortifications near the small town of Kuznica were secured by hundreds of military police, border guards and soldiers. The refugees, who were apparently chanting “Germany, Germany” and trying to create gaps in the barbed wire border with simple cutters and tree trunks, were forced away from the border with tear gas and pepper spray.

As if reporting from a war zone, a spokesman for the Polish Border Guard said, “We withstood the first wave and are waiting to see what happens in a while when night falls. We are well prepared.” In the meantime, the refugees, whose numbers were said to have risen to about 1,000 by evening, have set up a tent camp on the Belarusian side of the border and lit campfires.

The Polish government will prevent refugees from entering Poland at all costs. That is why the troop deployment at the border has now risen to 12,000 soldiers to hunt down refugees in addition to thousands of border guards and military police. The government’s crisis management team has announced that it will put the Territorial Defense Force on alert. The 29,000-strong force is a sort of volunteer army and reports directly to the defense minister. It was formed in 2016 for the purpose of suppressing rebellion, among other things, and recruits heavily from nationalist and far-right circles.

The mobilization of additional troop units is evidently directed not only against the refugees, but also against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. The rhetoric of Warsaw and the EU toward the Belarusian government and its closest ally, Moscow, is becoming increasingly hostile.

Poland’s intelligence coordinator Stanislaw Zaryn on Twitter announced another hostile act against Poland, claiming, “According to the latest information, this huge group of migrants is under the control of armed Belarusian units that decide where it can and cannot go.” He further claimed, “More and more frequently, Belarusians bring groups of migrants to the Polish border, up to 250 people, to escort them en masse to the Polish side. They control and organize these groups and also help cut through the border fortifications.”

Zaryn could not provide any proof for his claims.

Piotr Wawrzyk, secretary of state at Poland’s Foreign Ministry, told state radio, “Belarus wants to provoke an incident of shooting and killing.” Meanwhile, Poland’s Morawiecki accused Lukashenko of deliberately creating the refugee crisis together with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said, “We are dealing with a mass organized, well-directed action by Minsk and Moscow.”

The German government sounded the same horn. A Foreign Office spokesman announced that there were “indications that the Minsk regime is repeatedly sending people to the border, in some cases by force, despite the adverse conditions and wintry temperatures.” The German government is therefore working on a joint EU response “to this perfidious and inhumane behavior of Mr. Lukashenko.”

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Monday evening that Belarus must stop the “cynical instrumentalization of migrants” and called on “member states to approve the extended sanctions regime against the Belarusian authorities responsible for this hybrid attack.”

NATO, which has been consulted by the Polish government, openly threatened Belarus with acts of war. According to information obtained by Die Welt, a representative of the military alliance said in Brussels on Monday that NATO views “the recent escalation on the border between Poland and Belarus” with concern. He warned Belarus against “instrumentalizing people against the military alliance” and threatened that NATO “stands ready to support allies and provide security.”

All the lies and threats cannot hide the fact that Warsaw and Brussels—accompanied by a deafening smear campaign in the media—are implementing the program of the far right at Europe’s external borders. They are willing to repel refugees by any means available, including force of arms if necessary.

Since the Polish government declared a state of emergency on the border with Belarus, thousands of refugees have remained unprovided for in the forests and swamps. Journalists and aid organizations are strictly forbidden from entering a three-kilometer-wide strip along the border. With temperatures hovering around freezing, the refugees, many of whom have no blankets, tents or even shoes, are trapped in no-man’s land, defenseless against the cold. At least 10 refugees have died in the border region in recent weeks.

Every day, the massive police and army force intercepts more than 700 refugees who have managed to cross the border and herds them back into Belarus in violation of international law. On October 26, a Polish law legalizing these illegal and internationally prohibited pushbacks came into force. Since then, any border guard commander may immediately deport refugees who have entered Poland without permission and prohibit their re-entry for up to three years.

Although this means the de facto abolition of the right of asylum in Poland, and despite the regulation massively violating EU law, the Polish actions enjoy the support of Brussels. The EU is even urging Poland to accept more European help in warding off refugees. For example, units of the EU border agency Frontex are to be dispatched to Poland as soon as requested by the government in Warsaw.

Germany is playing a particularly aggressive role in enforcing the fascistic “Fortress Europe” policy. On Tuesday morning, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Democratic Union) explicitly backed the illegal pushbacks and the construction of a massive border wall. In an interview with the Bild newspaper, he said that the Polish government has “reacted correctly so far.” “I say as well that we need structural security at the borders. That’s where we need to publicly support the Poles!”

The brutal, inhumane and thoroughly illegal action against defenseless refugees is a warning. It shows the methods the ruling class will resort to in their efforts to suppress the growing opposition to social inequality and the pervasive policies in the pandemic that have already claimed more than 1.4 million lives in Europe alone. Workers across the continent must defend the refugees. This is not only a humanitarian necessity, but a fundamental part of the struggle against dictatorship, fascism and war.

Australian government funds Pacific telco purchase to head off Chinese influence

Martin Scott

Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra, is set to acquire Digicel Pacific, the largest mobile phone carrier in the Asia-Pacific region, in a government-backed plan to advance the country’s anti-China foreign policy agenda.

Telstra CEO Andrew Penn (Screenshot, Youtube/UNSW Business School)

The high level of cooperation between the Australian and US governments on this intervention makes clear that the central objective of the deal is to stem the growth of China as a rival to the US and its allies in the Asia-Pacific.

Under the arrangement, the federal government will stump up more than 80 percent of the $US1.6 billion purchase price in the form of a cheap loan to the fully-privatised Telstra, while assuming the financial risk. The government will also take care of costs associated with foreign exchange and repatriation of profits, by using customer revenue in overseas currency to pay for existing aid programs and paying Telstra in Australian dollars.

Telstra CEO Andrew Penn made clear in a statement just how favourable the deal was to the company: “We put in $US270m and for that we get 100 percent of the equity and we then get a dividend, which we expect to be $US45m, and our dividend is preferred above everything else.”

When Telstra confirmed in July 2021 that it was making a bid to acquire Digicel Pacific, Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to discuss the government’s backing of the deal.

Morrison said: “It is a matter between him and his shareholders. They have commercial objectives, which they pursue, and I wouldn’t expect them to be doing anything that wasn’t in their commercial interests.”

Telstra Chairman John Mullen has made clear that such a deal would not have gone ahead if it was not bankrolled by the Australian taxpayer.

Mullen said in July: “It would have come across the desk like so many other things. But would it have been something that would have gone further in discussion with if it wasn’t for the government interest? Probably not.”

In fact, according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), the Morrison government has been “in ongoing dialogue with US officials,” since 2020. This involved concerns Digicel “could be used to spy on neighbouring countries and visiting Australian government ministers, control media communications to disseminate political propaganda for China-friendly Pacific political leaders, and as a patronage vehicle to corrupt the region’s political elite.”

Talks have reportedly continued under the Biden administration, with some in ruling circles considering the Digicel intervention a test for the US-led Build Back Better World plan, launched at the G7 summit in June to combat China’s huge One Belt, One Road infrastructure initiative.

Biden’s plan represents a continuation of the trade war instigated by Donald Trump, who, in 2018, imposed steep tariffs on goods imported from China. While this was ostensibly about addressing a trade imbalance between the two countries, the main concern in Washington was China’s growth as an economic rival, driven by its rapid industrial and technological development.

The Digicel operation follows previous moves to block Chinese telecommunications investment in the Asia-Pacific and around the world over unsubstantiated claims that such networks would be used for espionage.

In 2018, after the Solomon Islands awarded Huawei a contract to build an undersea cable network, the Australian government stepped in, demanding the Solomons instead sign on to an Australian fibre link. Huawei’s plans for an undersea network in Papua New Guinea were quashed by a joint intervention of the US, Japan and Australia the same year.

Also in 2018, Australia, following talks with its “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance partners—the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand—banned Huawei and another Chinese company, ZTE, from supplying 5G network equipment. According to US restrictions, companies must obtain a licence to sell any product with a US-made microchip to Huawei.

The talks also resulted in the arrest in Canada of Huawei Deputy Chairperson Meng Wanzhou, who was held in home detention for more than 1,000 days and faced extradition to the US on trumped-up claims that she had violated US sanctions against Iran.

The Digicel Pacific deal will be funded by Export Finance Australia (EFA), previously known as the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation, part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). The Liberal-National government passed new legislation on October 19 to facilitate this financial arrangement, with the full support of the opposition Labor party.

Trade and Investment Minister Dan Tehan said in June that the new laws would give the EFA “broader powers to finance transactions that serve Australia’s national interests and priorities.”

Speaking in support of the bill, Labor MP Madeline King lamented the lack of progress of the government’s “Pacific Step-Up,” a program to bolster the position of Australian imperialism in the region.

King said: “Despite the talk about a Pacific step-up and engagement in our region under Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia is more dependent than ever on China for our exports and export related jobs, and, in fact, we depend on the Chinese market more than any other country in the world.”

In other words, King is attacking the Morrison government from the right for not moving quickly or aggressively enough to wind back ties with Australia’s largest trading partner and fall into line with the US-led anti-China offensive.

While the “Pacific Step-Up,” first announced in 2016, has been promoted by the federal government as an aid and development package, even a cursory examination of its contents makes the real intentions clear.

Projects funded by the program, including undersea communications cables, power stations, and airport upgrades, have clearly been selected for their strategic significance and to block Chinese investment and influence.

Digicel Pacific, with 1,700 employees and 2.5 million subscribers across the Asia-Pacific, derives most of its revenue from Papua New Guinea. Digicel Pacific’s parent company, Digicel, is based in Bermuda and provides phone services across the Caribbean.

In recent years, as mobile phone use shifted from voice calls to internet data, the company faced declining revenues and mounting debt. This process was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with Digicel particularly exposed because its major markets in the Asia-Pacific and Caribbean regions are heavily dependent on tourism.

Digicel filed for bankruptcy in May 2020 in both Bermuda and the United States as part of an operation to refinance $US7.4 billion in debt.

Around this time, rumours began circulating that China Mobile was interested in acquiring Digicel Pacific. The AFR, citing an anonymous source, claimed on May 14, 2020: “China Mobile had been conducting due diligence on Digicel’s Pacific business since the start of this year.”

Both Digicel and China Mobile denied a Chinese acquisition was on the cards, but the mere possibility was enough to spark discussion in Canberra and Washington on the geostrategic implications.

Digicel owner, Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, approached Bondi Partners, founded by former Australian Treasurer and Ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, for political guidance on the deal. The Australian government subsequently approached Telstra for advice on how to counter the rumoured Chinese offer.

By all accounts, Telstra was not interested in acquiring the company in a “free-market” transaction. However, Canberra’s determination to block any Chinese development in the region was enough to warrant not just footing the bill, but drafting new legislation to maximise potential profits and sweeten the deal for Telstra.

The federal government, in taking the unusual step of bankrolling the acquisition of one corporation by another, has demonstrated its close alignment with the US offensive to undermine China economically.

The Digicel Pacific deal has nothing to do with protecting mobile phone users in the Asia-Pacific region from Chinese espionage. Instead, the Australian government has stepped in to prevent Chinese investment, and therefore influence, in key strategic locations as part of wider preparations for a US-led conflict with China.

New Zealand recalibrates Pacific strategy countering China

John Braddock

In a major speech on the Pacific at the NZ Institute of International Affairs on November 3, New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced a “transition” from the Labour-Green government’s Pacific Reset policy to a focus on building “resilience” across the region.

New Zealand foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta (Screenshot: Youtube, NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade)

The Pacific Reset was first announced in 2018 by Winston Peters, leader of the right-wing NZ First Party and foreign minister in the Labour-led coalition government. The strategy was aimed at boosting New Zealand’s presence in the Pacific through stepped-up diplomatic, aid and military measures to counter China’s presence.

New Zealand and Australia treat the Pacific as their sphere of influence and are increasingly alarmed at any Chinese investment and diplomatic influence. Along with Australia’s Pacific Step-up policy, Canberra and Wellington have both significantly increased their diplomatic, and above all military, presence as Washington’s aggressive confrontation with China has intensified.

Mahuta declared the government’s aim is not to replace, but to “build on” the Pacific Reset while shifting towards “resilience.” The shift, she claimed, reflects the biggest issue facing the Pacific in climate change, along with recovering from the impact of COVID-19, which has killed thousands in countries such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea.

Asked how the new approach would differ from the “reset,” Mahuta said it would be more about building “in-country capacity” among Pacific nations. The diplomatic language deliberately obscures deepening apprehension that the COVID pandemic is producing a devastating crisis within the economic and social fabric in the Pacific Islands.

The regional powers are not concerned with the health and well-being of the largely impoverished peoples, but with further disruption to their geo-strategic dominance as international rivalries intensify. Several Pacific countries, whose vital tourism industries have been all but destroyed, are turning to Chinese-led funding agencies to prop up their budgets after exhausting traditional financing options.

Mahuta, who has previously spoken out against China’s loans in the Pacific, raised the issue of indebtedness in response to a media question. “Much of the aid that we put into the Pacific is by way of grant, and I think it’s a stark difference between how we see ourselves supporting aspirations of the Pacific and how China does,” she declared.

Unproven allegations about “debt trap diplomacy” have been advanced by Washington amid its anti-China diplomatic offensive. At a Pacific leaders’ conference in Hawaii in June, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken angrily declared that China was breaching “international standards” and using “economic coercion” in its provision of aid and concessionary loans.

Reading from the same playbook, Mahuta told her International Affairs audience that “without a concerted effort around building the medium to long term resilience of Pacific economies, not only are they vulnerable to climate change, but they’re vulnerable to increasing debt levels that will set their people back in some quite catastrophic ways potentially.”

In 2019, 67 percent of Chinese aid was given in the form of loans, mainly for infrastructure projects, up from 41 percent the year before. However, Beijing slashed its overall aid budget from $US246m in 2018 by 31 percent, to $US169m in 2019.

Australia and New Zealand meanwhile both boosted their financial aid. The Lowy Institute reported last month that while Canberra’s total foreign aid has shrunk, the Morrison government was “retooling” its budget towards the Pacific. Australia accounted for 42 percent of all aid to the region between 2009 and 2019, but money directed towards health has been cut in favour of infrastructure projects as competition with China ramps up. Overall aid to the Pacific declined by 15 percent in 2019, with health spending accounting for just 11 percent of the $US2.44bn.

The Pacific risks a “lost decade” following the pandemic, according to the Lowy Institute, with the islands’ sharpest economic contraction in four decades. The level of aid remains totally inadequate. An estimated additional $US3.5bn will be needed for the region to recover from the pandemic. Donors, however, “appear in short supply,” it stated.

Australia and New Zealand occupy a position of neo-colonial domination over much of the Pacific. The financial and aid contributions they make are inevitably tied to protecting their own interests. The strings attached are increasingly resented by local Pacific leaders.

This is particularly the case with Canberra’s obstruction over climate change. According to a new Greenpeace report, “Australia: Pacific Bully and International Outcast,” the Australian government engages in “bullying tactics” by using aid money as a bargaining chip to “buy silence” over the existential crisis facing Pacific island states from rising sea levels. Australian National University academic Terence Wood has found that Australia’s three biggest “climate” projects dating from 2018 were all to do with “governance” and had no obvious link to climate adaptation.

The intensifying conflicts over aid and state finances are set against the escalating US-led drive to war against Beijing. Mahuta’s speech followed the announcement of the AUKUS agreement which heralds a major shift in the strategic alignments of the imperialist powers, with significant implications for the Pacific.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern publicly welcomed the AUKUS deal, under which the US, UK and Australia will vastly increase military cooperation as they expand their military build-up throughout the region. It includes an agreement to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines.

China’s deputy chief of mission in New Zealand, Wang Genhua, issued a sharp warning about AUKUS at an event hosted last week by think-tank Diplosphere, saying that it would be “almost necessary” for Australia’s submarines to have nuclear weapons. Stating that the US and UK “cannot be trusted,” Wang declared there will be “more nuclear arms race across the Pacific region, more nuclear tests, and nuclear pollution will take place in the region.”

Ardern previously claimed that New Zealand could not have joined AUKUS, even if invited, because of the country’s long-standing anti-nuclear policy. However, New Zealand remains involved in provocative military exercises. In October the naval frigate Te Kaha and an Air Force Orion joined the Bersama Gold 21 war games, alongside the UK Carrier Strike Group and allied forces in the South China Sea.

As pressure mounts internationally for New Zealand to line up explicitly with the Biden administration’s drive to war, Ardern is, publicly at least, continuing the fraught balancing act to protect the country’s crucial trading relationship with Beijing.

In an interview with US television network NBC over the weekend, Ardern welcomed Washington’s bigger “engagement” in the Indo-Pacific region, while claiming that her government simultaneously has “mature” ties with China that allow for “disagreement.” Speaking by telephone to President Xi Jinping on Friday, prior to this week’s APEC conference, Ardern emphasised that New Zealand has an “independent and values-based” foreign policy.

In fact, as a minor imperialist power, New Zealand has always relied on the backing of a dominant power in order to pursue its interests, particularly in the Pacific. In a November 4 article highlighting the dangerous flashpoint of Taiwan, the Stuff website argued that it is in Wellington’s interests to side with Taiwan, and the US, against Beijing in the growing conflict.

Echoing statements from Washington, the article by Lucy Craymer declared that “analysts say an invasion [of Taiwan by China] is conceivable,” threatening “the security of our region.” Craymer falsely stated that the “US military presence in the region has waned, allowing the balance of power to start to shift.” In fact, the US has moved substantial military resources into the region in the past decade, is carrying out provocative military exercises, and has sent Special Forces troops to train in Taiwan. The Stuff article approvingly described New Zealand’s participation in war games in the South China Sea as a “show of force” to “stand up to” China.

Sri Lankan government to impose drastic austerity measures

Saman Gunadasa

Sri Lankan Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse has made clear that his 2022 budget will be ruthless. “The people will not gain anything. Instead, we will be taking from them,” he told the media on November 1.

The recently appointed finance minister, who is the younger brother of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, will present the budget to parliament on Friday.

On November 2, Treasury Secretary S.R. Attygala told a media briefing that the government wants to drastically cut the fiscal deficit to 4.5–5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), down from last year’s 14.7 percent.

Sri Lankans lining up to buy cooking gas [Source: WSWS Media]

Slashing the budget deficit by two-thirds means that the government will abolish its remaining meagre subsidies to small farmers and the poor and impose higher taxes that will drive up the price of all essential items. Since early last year, the government has printed close to three-trillion rupees to bridge the budget gap, triggering a sharp 27 percent devaluation of the rupee.

In the lead up to Friday’s budget announcement, the government continues to remove limited price controls. On November 3, the Consumer Affairs Authority lifted price controls on 14 essential food items, including dhal, sugar, sprats, green gram, potatoes, large onions, canned fish, chickpeas, wheat flour, full cream milk powder, dried fish, coconut, chicken and maize.

Sri Lanka’s official year-on-year food inflation hit almost 13 percent last month.

The decision followed the removal of controls on other essential food items in September, including rice and flour, which led to 10 to 40 percent increases respectively, and an 80 percent rise in the cost of cooking gas.

On August 30, President Rajapakse suddenly imposed a national state of emergency under the pretext of stopping the hoarding of food stocks and guaranteeing an uninterrupted supply of essentials at controlled prices.

Rajapakse appointed a retired Army officer as the commissioner general of essential services to undertake the relevant measures. Last week, however, the government abolished this position, indicating there will be no more price controls nor “uninterrupted” supplies of essentials.

In another indication of Sri Lanka’s deepening economic crisis, the media reported last week that over 900 shipping containers of essential goods were being held at Colombo Port. This included 350 shipping containers of sugar, which is already in short supply in the market. Importers said they were unable to clear the goods because they had not been issued the necessary foreign currency due to US dollar shortages in Sri Lanka.

The scarcity of essentials, such as cooking gas, milk powder, sugar, and kerosene, has created immense difficulties for working class and poor families who have to wait in long queues for dwindling supplies or return home empty-handed. The shortages and the skyrocketing prices mean that hunger and starvation is rising across the country.

Last week government authorities issued a circular telling pensioners about a plan to deduct 400 to 600 rupees ($US2 to $US3) from their monthly pensions. The measure has been introduced under the pretext of expanding a pensioner insurance scheme. It is, however, the beginning of cuts in current pension expenditure which is regarded as a burden on the state coffers.

In early October, Finance Minister Rajapakse released his total budget expenditure estimates for 2022 which constitute a reduction of about 173 billion rupees on the current year. The cuts will mainly apply to health, provincial councils, samurdhi (a small welfare allowance for the poor), water supply, women and child development, rural housing and labour spending.

Desperate for foreign direct investment, Colombo is now offering even more generous concessions to multinational companies (MNCs). Finance Minister Rajapakse recently held a closed door meeting with the heads of various MNCs operating in Sri Lanka to discuss what they expect from the budget. Companies in attendance included A. Baur and Company, AIA Insurance, CEAT Lanka, Dole Lanka, INSEE Cement, Itochu of Japan, Huawei Technologies, Standard Chartered Bank, and Ernst & Young.

According to the limited media reports, the finance minister assured the MNCs that the government would maintain “consistency in fiscal policy,” i.e., retain a low tax regime. In fact, corporate tax rates in Sri Lanka were reduced in the last budget to between 14 and 24 percent, the lowest in South Asia. The MNCs submitted a shopping list of “recommendations,” including fast government approvals of land for growing export crops and reduced government intervention on pricing. Rajapakse assured the meeting that he would consider their “recommendations” and attempt to resolve them.

Sri Lanka’s economic crisis has been exacerbated by the pandemic with dramatic falls in exports and foreign remittances and a collapse of the tourist industry, leading to major foreign debt repayment problems for the government.

Late last month, Moody’s Investors Service further downgraded Sri Lanka’s credit rating, putting it in the same league as Ethiopia, Laos and the Republic of Congo. The agency said the government was too reliant on “piecemeal funding such as swap lines and bilateral loans” and, “in the context of very low foreign exchange reserves,” this posed “default risks.”

Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange reserves fell to $2 billion at the end of September, sufficient for only around 1.3 months of imports. The country, however, needs to pay 4 to 5 billion rupees annually in international debt servicing until 2025. Moody’s also predicts that Sri Lanka will have to borrow a staggering 25–27 percent of GDP per year in 2022 and 2023.

Sri Lanka’s Central Bank angrily rejected Moody’s assessment, declaring that the downgrading was “untimely” because the forthcoming budget would “set the tone for policy initiatives and structural reforms that could help alleviate the external challenges.”

These “policy initiatives and structural reforms,” are already underway as the government intensifies its moves to privatise the state-owned power and petroleum sectors and the ports, in line other “structural reforms” dictated by the International Monetary Fund. These reforms are aimed at driving up the price of fuel, electricity and other utilities so existing government subsidies to state-owned sectors can be withdrawn and the industries turned into profitable investments for international finance capital.

The government privatisation agenda is deeply unpopular and led to nationwide protests by electricity, petroleum and port workers on November 3. This Friday’s austerity budget will further intensify social tensions and force the working class into struggle against the Rajapakse regime.

Rise in US child COVID-19 cases foreshadows coming winter surge

Chase Lawrence

Across the globe, COVID-19 cases are continuing to rise as a result of the further relaxing of mitigation measures and the approach of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. In the US, the 14-day average in cases is now trending upwards after a brief decline. This includes children who have experienced the devastating impact from COVID-19 in 2021 due to the reopening of schools. The weekly American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) report released Monday found that for the first week since September 2 there was an increase in recorded childhood cases, as another 107,350 children officially tested positive for COVID-19, roughly 24 percent of all US cases recorded in the last week.

A teacher reaches her hand out to Pedro Garcia, 4, as he arrives for the first day of school at the Mosaic Pre-K Center in Queens, Monday, Sept. 21, 2020 in New York [Credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan]

The weekly child death toll continues to hover over 15 deaths per week. Mortality data in the AAP report shows 17 reported deaths this week in the following US states and territories: California (1), Colorado (1), Guam (1), Maryland (1), South Carolina (1), Tennessee (1), Texas (8), Virginia (1) and Washington (2). An online search for local or national news reports on these tragic deaths produces zero results.

For 13 straight weeks, the AAP has reported over 100,000 weekly new cases in children. Fourteen states reported that more than 12 out of every 100 children had contracted COVID-19, meaning that in a class of 25 children, three can be expected to have been infected with the virus. Significantly, a look at the regional data in the AAP report shows the biggest jump in infection rates has been seen in the West, Northeast and Midwest regions while the South has continued to decline.

Data from the AAP report showing official child COVID-19 cases in each region of the US

Recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mimics this regional trend, with the centers of viral transmission switching from the South and Southeast regions on August 12 to the West and Northwest as of November 7. On Sunday, a tweet by Eric Topol, cardiologist and professor of molecular medicine in Southern California, went viral pointing out that the maps are “almost opposites.”

The AAP data offers only a glimpse into the monumental catastrophe that has been inflicted on children, with actual cases, hospitalizations and deaths far higher than the official figures.

For instance, Texas reports age distribution of cases for only 3 percent of the population on its state COVID-19 dashboard, resulting in a significant undercount of child cases on the AAP report. However, the state does report positive COVID-19 cases found among children in schools and data from the Texas Department of State Health Services which shows that at least 359,985 cases have been reported among children in schools since the start of the pandemic. Given the overall lack of testing in Texas schools, cases are undoubtedly much higher.

As cases have accelerated, safety measures such as mask wearing and testing are being repudiated by both Democratic and Republican state governments well before the majority of children are vaccinated. In Florida, Democrats capitulated to the state’s fascistic Republican Governor Ron DeSantis by lifting mask mandates in the state’s three largest school districts—Orange County, Broward County and Miami-Dade County—which serve a combined roughly 830,000 students.

In New York City, the largest school district in the US with roughly 1.1 million students, recently elected Democratic Mayor Eric Adams has promised to rescind mask mandates in city public schools once he becomes mayor in January. Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district with over 600,000 students, plans to end their testing program for students by the end of the year.

According to a school opening tracker by Burbio, 68 percent of the top 500 school districts have mask policies in place. However, a recent investigative report by NBC News noted that based on Burbio’s data, more than a dozen of the 200 largest school districts in the country lifted mask mandates in recent weeks.

With the winter months swiftly approaching and another deadly surge clearly on the horizon, plans by major school districts to lift all restrictions well before most children are vaccinated will knowingly result in the mass infection, long-term illness and deaths of countless children.

Over the course of the pandemic, an average of 1,200 deaths has occurred every day. The ruling class has sought to ignore and normalize death, with horrific consequences. The Astroworld festival disaster, where eight people were crushed to death and hundreds injured in a crowd surge at a concert in Houston, Texas, typifies this process. Amid the raging pandemic, festival grounds were allowed to be severely overcrowded with no intervention from the police or the operators of the festival grounds. The whole arrangement echoes the ruling class policy of mass death: a mass reopening so that business can profit, without any regard for human life. The same state where this tragedy took place has experienced a horrific 109 child deaths from COVID-19, by far the highest number of any state.

In the face of escalating cases and mass deaths, the US has rescinded all restrictions on international flights and land travel that had been in place for 20 months, in advance of a surge in expected travel to the country. Delta Airlines is expecting a 50 percent increase in inbound flights in the coming weeks.

In countries across the world, remaining safety measures are being repudiated, with the disastrous model of the United States being used as an example elsewhere. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Europe has experienced a more than 55 percent increase in cases over the past month, with record number of cases in Russia and Germany. Despite this catastrophic surge, Germany has declared that the pandemic is over and that most remaining protective measures will be eliminated on November 25. In Eastern Europe, cases are surging in Slovenia, Estonia and Georgia.

The WHO has warned of 500,000 new COVID-19 deaths in Europe and the former Soviet republics by February, beyond the 1.4 million who have already died. Last week, WHO Director for Europe Hans Kluge urged health authorities to act immediately to halt the spread of the virus and prevent another deadly winter, stating, “We must change our tactics from reacting to surges of COVID-19 to preventing them from happening in the first place.”

Countries in Asia, including Singapore and Vietnam, have abandoned their elimination strategy and experienced a surge in cases. In Japan, as cases have declined but not reached zero, government officials are loosening restrictions, with quarantine for business travel being reduced from 10 days to three.

The looming winter surge threatens to bring mass death and infections the world over, yet it is entirely preventable. Efforts being made by governments to lift any remaining mitigation measures accelerate the very real possibility for more virulent and vaccine-resistant variants to develop and spread.

As was explained in the October 24 webinar held by the World Socialist Web Site and International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) “How to end the pandemic,” the only way to stop the pandemic is through a global elimination strategy. This requires the temporary closure of schools and nonessential businesses for a period of a few months, coupled with a massive investment in testing, quarantining, and contact tracing, a globally coordinated mass vaccination program, and full economic support to families and employees of businesses closed for health reasons.

This program must be taken up by the working class, the only social force able to implement the necessary health measures which are objectively in their interests, in opposition to the financial elite who have seen their stock values increase to obscene levels as millions have perished from COVID-19. The global ruling elite is diametrically opposed to any comprehensive program aimed at eliminating COVID-19 as it impinges on their profits and threatens a collapse of the increasingly fragile stock market.

A program to end the pandemic requires mass education of the population, to arm the working class with the real science of how the virus spreads and a revolutionary socialist perspective to explain the underlying economic forces that are dictating policies worldwide.

COVID-19 infections continue to explode in Germany

Marianne Arens

Hardly any other country is currently recording such a rapid rise of COVID-19 infections than Germany. On Monday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported a record seven-day incidence rate of 201 infections per 100,000 inhabitants, which by far exceeds the previous high of 198 on December 22, 2020. On Tuesday it rose to 214 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. There were 20,800 confirmed COVID-19 infections on Monday, followed by 26,622 on Tuesday.

A medical worker carries out a Corona test in a shopping mall in Frankfurt, Germany, on November 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

The highest seven-day incidence rates among Germany’s 16 states are in Saxony (491), Thuringia (427) and Bavaria (316). Districts like Sächsische Schweiz/Ost-Erzgebirge are already approaching an incidence rate of over 1,000, with the current rate standing at 924 infections per 100,000 residents over the past seven days. This means that almost one in 100 residents there was infected with COVID-19 in the last week. Only two federal states, Schleswig-Holstein (75) and Bremen (89) have incidence rates below the mark of 100 infections per 100,000 inhabitants.

Since the government scrapped the incidence rate of 50 as the benchmark for the reintroduction of stricter measures in early September, the number of infections has risen steadily. But cases have truly exploded over the past three weeks. The graphs expressing increased infection rates all point in only one direction: steeply upwards. On average, over 24,000 people are being infected every day, a figure that was last reached at Christmas time last year, shortly before the pandemic claimed its highest daily death tolls.

A quarter of a billion people worldwide have contracted COVID-19, and officially over 5 million, unofficially up to 17 million, have died. In Germany, according to the Worldometers website, the number of officially registered deaths is 97,073. At the current rate of fatalities, this figure will soon pass 100,000.

Many intensive care units are already overcrowded again. At the beginning of the week, 2,532 intensive care patients were counted, and 1,280 patients are currently on ventilators. The scientific director of the Divi intensive care register, Prof. Christian Karagiannidis, warned on Monday on WDR public television that the intensive care units nationwide were approaching 90 percent capacity.

In North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the situation is currently worrying, as the director of care at the Münster University Hospital, Thomas van den Hooven, reported on Monday. He remarked that he views the next few weeks with concern. There are currently only 640 free intensive care unit beds in NRW that could be used for COVID-19 patients. Health care workers are tired and at the limits of their capacities, he added.

Like last year, retirement homes are once again becoming death traps. The RKI reported 135 active outbreaks in nursing and elderly care homes in the last week alone.

Outbreaks in workplaces are also increasing, although many corporations and companies systematically suppress all information about them, and the media largely ignores the issue.

A fire department magazine reported on an example of such an outbreak. At the Hamburg fire station in Stellingen last Tuesday morning, before the start of the shift, a routine round of rapid tests came back negative for all colleagues. During the day, however, the entire team was ordered to take a PCR test because a colleague reported a suspected case in his family. By the evening it was announced that no fewer than 12 out of 31 men had tested positive.

Twelve construction workers also tested positive on a construction site in Sylt. Numerous outbreaks have likely occurred in the last few weeks in several slaughterhouses in Lower Saxony.

In the district of Cloppenburg, the incidence rate of 200 infections per 100,000 people was exceeded by the end of October. In the district with the highest incidence rates in Lower Saxony, the hospitals are overloaded. Without giving precise details, the district administration reports that “a particularly large number of Eastern European workers are infected,” for example “from slaughterhouses in Garrel, Essen and Emstek, but also from vegetable farms.” The politicians responsible have apparently learned nothing from the massive outbreaks among meatpacking and agricultural workers last summer.

Children and young people are particularly affected everywhere. The number of infections among these groups, which are particularly worthy of protection, are rising rapidly.

News4Teachers reported that one of the most dangerous COVID-19 hotspots is the Elbe-Elster district in Brandenburg, which has a rate of infection of 615 per 100,000 people. The incidence among 5- to 14-year-old children there is an incredible 2,421. In other words, almost 1 in 40 children living in the district were infected over the past week. The health department in question, to which over 100 new COVID-19 cases are reported every day, has stopped tracking the contacts of those who test positive. Despite all this, schools and day care centers remain open.

Outbreaks in schools have driven up the infection rate in Brandenburg. It has now reached 227 infections per 100,000 residents in the past seven days. Among the teachers in Brandenburg, 124 were infected with COVID-19, more than twice as many as in the previous week (56).

Politicians from every party are determined to prevent a new lockdown at any cost. The “epidemic state of emergency of national scope” will expire on November 25. Rapid tests, which were previously available free of charge to the public, were discontinued last month, and most mask mandates in schools have been abolished.

Leading politicians from the so-called “traffic light” coalition, the Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens, which appear set to form the new federal government, are determined to continue the murderous COVID-19 policy of the outgoing grand coalition. They have vehemently ruled out consistent public health measures and lockdowns. On the Tagesschau on public broadcaster ARD, Katrin Göring-Eckardt (Greens) said on Monday, “You will not legally be able to have a complete lockdown with so many people who have been vaccinated.”

For the incoming government, vaccination remains practically the only countermeasure against the pandemic. This is criminal for several reasons. Firstly, the Delta variant, which now accounts for over 99 percent of infections, cannot be controlled by vaccines alone. Delta is about twice as contagious as the so-called “wild strain” of COVID-19. Second, due to the low vaccination rate, just 67 percent of the entire population, nearly 30 million people, including all children under the age of 12, are virtually without any protection against the virus. And third, a strategy that relies exclusively on vaccination while allowing the virus to run rampant creates the conditions for new, even more contagious virus mutations.

Germany’s federal and state governments are pursuing a deliberate policy of mass infection that places the protection of profits before human lives and endangers the health and lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Even the most elementary measures to protect the population have been dismantled with the cynical argument that the authorities are overwhelmed.

For example, the state of Baden-Württemberg has stopped tracking COVID-19 cases altogether. The Ärzteblatt reported on November 5, “In view of the skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases in Baden-Württemberg, health authorities will no longer call most infected people and their contact persons directly in the future. The Ministry of Health announced today that an infected person would have to take care of this themselves. The so-called ‘individual case management’ will be discontinued in the entire southwest to relieve the authorities.”

Under these conditions, it is the task of the working class to seize the initiative and enforce the measures that are scientifically necessary to eliminate COVID-19. These include strict lockdown measures—above all, the closure of schools and universities and nonessential production with full compensation—combined with mass vaccinations, contact tracing and the isolation of infected people.

Brutal police killing of 18 year old Roma youth sparks protests in Greece

John Vassilopoulos

More details have emerged about the horrific police killing of an 18 year-old Roma youth in the Greek capital, Athens, in the early hours of October 23. The killing took place in the Perama neighbourhood, 16 kilometres west of the centre of Athens, following a 30 minute car chase.

The victim, Nikos Sambanis, was from the Roma settlement in Sofos, an area in the Aspropyrgos suburb of Athens, 19 kilometres north-west of the city centre. He leaves behind a pregnant wife and two small children.

According to reports, police fired a total of 36 bullets into the car Nikos was in. The sounds of the police’s sirens followed by the barrage of shots were captured by a local resident in a video uploaded on Greek daily’s Kathimerini YouTube channel the following day. A second passenger, a 16 year-old boy, was injured by the gunfire and hospitalised. Also in the car was a 14 year-old boy, reportedly the driver of the car, who fled the scene. All of them were unarmed.

The post-mortem report revealed that Nikos received two bullet wounds, one in the stomach and one fatally in his chest. He died instantly.

Protests broke out following the police murder in and around Athens, as well as in the cities of Corinth and Patras, with groups of Roma blocking highways. A main protest was held in Athens attended by around 1,000 people on October 25, which was viciously attacked by riot police using stun grenades and tear gas. Footage of the attack by the riot police can be viewed here .

Riot police attacking October 25 Athens protest against the Perama police killing (Credit: still from video from kwstasarvaniths Instagram account)

The initial police report stated that the chase was initiated by members of the DIAS motorcycle police squad in the Ayios Ioannis Rentis neighbourhood, 8 kilometres west of Athens city centre, because they suspected the vehicle had been stolen. The report claimed that they had acted in self-defence after the car allegedly rammed into police motorcycles, injuring seven of the officers.

By the next morning the official version of the events was already unravelling. In another video shot by a resident and uploaded on the Kathimerini YouTube channel, one of the police officers can be clearly heard saying that none of them were injured. This led to the seven police officers being taken into custody at the Central Police Headquarters in Athens (GADA).

Leaks have confirmed that the DIAS squad had been told to abort the pursuit partway through the chase. The bulk of the police briefings, however, continue demonising the three youths, and are parroted uncritically by sections of the media.

Over the next days, stories emerged that the dead youth was a wanted criminal. As it turned out, Nikos’ criminal record was clean while all claims of a criminal past centred on an accusation that he stole a moped when he was 14.

To bolster police claims of self-defence, media reports also claimed that Nikos was the driver of the car, even though it later emerged that he was seated in the back seat. Scores of media reports also claimed that Nikos’ was 20 years-old, two years older than he really was. Thanassis Kambayiannis, the lawyer representing the Sambanis family, said this was the police’s way of making the shooting appear more “palatable” by presenting the dead youth as a fully-fledged adult. It was meant to divert from the fact that the other youths in the car were also minors.

There are an estimated 350,000 Roma in Greece. One of the country’s most oppressed minorities, they have faced chronic social exclusion as well as historic prejudice from the Greek state. Α tweet by Spanish journalist Hibai Arbide Aza, who recently participated in an investigative report on the lives of Greek Roma, noted that only 16 percent of Roma in Greece make it to 75 years of age, compared with 51 percent of Roma in other European countries.

On October 29, a reporting team from newsbeast.gr visited the settlement in Sofos the dead youth was from. The team wrote, “The picture is brutal, the roads non-existent, while most shacks are made from aluminium sheets, two beams and plastic canvas—ready to fall down at the first sign of wind.”

Speaking to the reporters, the dead youth’s father, Yiannis Sambanis said, “We are around 300 people living here. We don’t have electricity or water. We are able to get a bit of light through cables that we connect to batteries… We carry water using containers from a tap downhill. They have occasionally come with buses to test us for COVID, but for the vaccine they have never come. No-one has told us what we need to do. We want to be vaccinated.”

Sambanis senior told the reporters that he works as a rag-and-bone man and is routinely harassed by the police for his papers, telling him he doesn’t have a legal trading license.

In an unprecedented move, senior government figures intervened to lend their support to the seven police officers. On the same day as the seven were taken into custody, October 24, the New Democracy government’s Citizen Protection Minister Takis Theodorikakos visited them at GADA where they were being held. In a statement the minister said, “My move was of an exclusively human and symbolic character, to psychologically support young people who are serving in the Greek Police.”

The day after, October 25, Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis appeared on Skai TV’s morning news show explicitly justifying the actions of the police officers, stating, “a car being rammed is considered a deadly weapon, hence the way the DIAS squad handled the situation was entirely justified.”

Police claims that they acted in self-defence were demolished when the 14 year-old driver of the car came forward and appeared in a court hearing on October 27. Outside the court he told journalists, “We were scared in case they were going to kill us, which is why we didn’t stop in the first place. As soon as we stopped we put our hands up and they shot at us. They shot my friend and then I crashed the vehicle into their bikes, but there was no-one on them.”

On the same day as the young Roma appeared in court, all seven police officers were released without any restrictions until a trial date is set. They were charged with voluntary manslaughter, which all denied. Pleased that his intervention worked Theodorikakos stated that he was “satisfied” with the decision.

The police killing of Nikos Sambanis and its endorsement by the government should serve as a warning to Greek workers and youth. While Roma are disproportionate victims of police harassment and violence, with police raids in Roma settlement a common occurrence, police violence affects the entire working class. It is not only the efforts by the far-right to stoke prejudices against the Roma that must be resisted, but also the efforts by proponents of identity politics to present the issue of police brutality as a purely racial one.

In a written statement Kambayiannis drew attention to the fact that the police tactics that led to Kambanis’ killing were far from uncommon: “From the beginning of October, the systematic use of weapons by police in similar pursuits in the centre of Athens (e.g. on October 8 in Marni Street and on October 11 at Ayios Panteleimon) as well as in other cities (e.g. in Trikala on October 22 ), which is later justified by invoking a ‘vehicle-ramming incident’, shows beyond doubt that the orders come from above. The incidents are too many and common for them to be isolated.”