The U.S. Makes a Mockery of Treaties and International Law

K.J. Noh

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden Cabinet are fond of proclaiming the “rules-based international order” (RBIO) or “rules-based order” every chance they get: in press conferences, on interviews, in articles, at international fora, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails. Along with the terms “human rights” and “democracy,” the RBIO is routinely used to claim a moral high ground against countries that they accuse of not following this RBIO, and wielded as a cudgel to attack, criticize, accuse, and delegitimate countries in their crosshairs as rogue outliers to an international order.

This cudgel is now used most commonly against China and Russia. Oddly enough, whenever the United States asserts this “rules-based order” that China (and other “revisionist powers”/enemy states) are violating, the United States never seems to clarify which “rules” are being violated, but simply releases a miasma of generic accusation, leaving the stench of racism and xenophobia to do the rest.

This is because there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the RBIO.

The RBIO isn’t “rules-based,” it isn’t “international,” and it confounds any sense of “order,” let alone justice. It is, at bottom, the naked exercise of U.S. imperial power and supremacy, dressed up in the invisible finery of an embroidered fiction. The RBIO is a fraudulent impersonation of international law and justice.

There are many layers to this misnomer, to be deconstructed piece by piece.

‘RBIO’ in Contrast With ‘International Law’

First, the RBIO is not “international” in any sense of the word.

There actually is a consensual rules-based international order, a compendium of agreed-upon rules and treaties that the international community has negotiated, agreed to, and signed up for. It’s called simply “international law.” This refers to the body of decisions, precedents, agreements, and multilateral treaties held together under the umbrella of the Charter of the United Nations and the multiple institutions, policies, and protocols attached to it. Although imperfect, incomplete, evolving, it still constitutes the legal foundation of the body of international order and the orderly laws that underpin it: this is what constitutes international law. The basic foundation of the UN Charter is national sovereignty—that states have a right to exist, and are equal in relations. This is not what the United States is referring to.

When the United States uses the term RBIO, rather than the existing term “international law,” it does so because it wants to impersonate international law while diverting to a unilateral, invented, fictitious order that it alone creates and decides—often with the complicity of other imperial, Western, and transatlantic states. It also does this because, quite simply, the United States does not want to be constrained by international law and actually is an international scofflaw in many cases.

The United States as International Outlaw

For example, the United States refuses to sign or to ratify foundational international laws and treaties that the vast majority of countries in the world have signed, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), ICESCR (the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), CRC (the Convention on the Rights of the Child), ICRMW (the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families), UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), PAROS (the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space), the Ottawa Treaty (the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention), and the majority of labor conventions of the ILO (International Labor Organization). In fact, the United States harbors sweatshops, legalizes child labor (for example, in migrant farm labor), and engages in slave labor (in prisons and immigration detention centers). Even the U.S. State Department’s own 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report acknowledges severe problems in the U.S. of trafficking and forced labor in agriculture, food service, manufacture, domestic service, sex work, and hospitality, with U.S. government officials and military involved in the trafficking of persons domestically and abroad. Ironically, the United States tries to hold other countries accountable to laws that it itself refuses to ratify. For example, the United States tries to assert UNCLOS in the South China Sea while refusing—for decades—to ratify it and ignoring its rules, precedents, and conclusions in its own territorial waters.

There are also a slew of international treaties the United States has signed, but simply violates anyway: examples include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, UN treaties prohibiting torture, rendition, and kidnapping, and of course, war of aggression, considered “the supreme international crime”—a crime that the United States engages in routinely at least once a decade, not to mention routine drone attacks, which are in violation of international law. Most recently, the AUKUS agreement signed between the United States and Australia violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by exploiting a blind spot of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

There are also a multitude of treaties that the United States has signed but then arbitrarily withdrawn from anyway. These include the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, the Agreed Framework and the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, the Geneva Conventions, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and many others.

There are also approximately 368 treaties signed between the Indigenous nations and the U.S. government; every single one of them has been violated or ignored.

There are also unilateral fictions that the United States has created, such as “Freedom of Navigation Operations” (FONOPs): this is gunboat diplomacy, a military show of force, masquerading as an easement claim. FONOPs are a concept with no basis in international law—“innocent passage” is the accepted law under UNCLOS—and it is the United States and its allies who are violating international laws when they exercise these FONOPs. Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZs) are likewise notions that have no recognition in international law—the accepted concept is “sovereign airspace”—but the United States routinely claims that China is violating Taiwan’s ADIZ or airspace—which covers three provinces of mainland China. These are some examples of the absurd fictions that the United States invents to assert that enemy states like China are violating the RBIO. This is weaponized fiction.

The United States also takes great pains to undermine international structures and institutions; for example, not liking the decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it has disabled the WTO’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism; it has undermined—and threatened—the ICC (by passing the American Servicemembers Protection Act [ASPA], also known as the Hague Invasion Act), and more recently, sanctioned the ICC prosecutor and her family members; it thumbs its nose at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its decisions, and generally is opposed to any international institution that restricts its unbridled, unilateral exercise of power. Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, in blunt candor, asserted that there is “no such thing as the United Nations,” but this unhinged ideology is quietly manifested in the day-to-day actions of the United States throughout successive U.S. administrations.

Whose Rules? The United States Applies Its Laws Internationally

On the flip side of this disdain for agreed-upon international law and institutions is the United States’ belief that its own laws should have universal jurisdiction.

The United States considers laws passed by its corrupt, plutocratic legislature—hardly international or democratic by any stretch of the imagination—to apply to the rest of the world. These include unilateral sanctions against numerous countries (approximately one-third of the world’s population is impacted by U.S. sanctions), using the instruments of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the U.S. legislature and courts, as well as currency and exchange systems (SWIFT). These unilateral sanctions are a violation of international law and humanitarian law, as well as perversions of common sense and decency—millions have perished under these illegal sanctions. To add insult to injury, the United States routinely bullies other countries to comply with these unilateral sanctions, threatening secondary sanctions against countries and corporations that do not follow these U.S.-imposed illegal sanctions. This is part of the general pattern of the exercise of U.S. long-arm jurisdiction; examples abound: the depraved arrest, imprisonment, and torture of journalist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange—an Australian national—for violating U.S. espionage laws; the absurd kidnapping of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou (a Chinese national) on Canadian soil, for violating illegal U.S. sanctions on Iran (which Canada does not itself uphold); and many other examples, too many to enumerate.

This long-arm bullying is often exercised through a network of kangaroo courts within the United States, which arrogate to themselves unitary, plenipotentiary international powers to police the citizens of other countries. Not surprisingly, the United States also applies its own laws in a similarly corrupt way within its own borders, with its own gulag system fed through these kangaroo courts. The most dramatic examples of the corruption of these courts can be noted in the routine exoneration of police-inflicted murders of civilians, except under the most extreme protest and activism; and absurd judgments, such as the prosecution of Steven Donziger by a Chevron-linked corporate law firm; or the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse by a judge allowing the accused to run the juror lottery. Note, however, the system itself is set up for conviction: over 99 percent of federal cases that go to court result in conviction; most do not even go to trial: 90 percent of U.S. federal indictments are settled by defendants pleading “guilty” or “no contest” to charges filed against them. The idea that there is any impartial notion of justice is belied by the fact that fair and adequate legal representation is unaffordable for most defendants; that appointed public defenders are so overstretched that they often spend literally minutes on each case, simply counseling defendants to plead guilty—which most do—and individuals, in the rare cases where they do win, are often bankrupted and psychically destroyed by a system that has unlimited resources and finances to beat down its victims. This corrupt system of oppression, despite its obvious injustices and iniquities, is exacerbated within vast gray areas of the justice system where even counsel, appeal, scrutiny, or oversight does not apply, and where a single individual may be judge, jury, and executioner. These include, for example, certain parole and probation systems, review boards within prisons, debt collection systems, immigration proceedings, asset forfeiture systems, and many other quasi-judicial systems of oppression.

Generally, these violations and injustices are excused or erased by the international and national media, which are complicit in maintaining an illusion of impartial, high-standards justice in the United States. This is an illusion without substance: the U.S. legal system, like the U.S. health care system or the U.S. educational system, is essentially a failed system that is designed to work only for the rich and powerful. It delivers substandard, so-called care, if not outright abuse, harm, violence, and death, to the vast majority of people who have the misfortune to enter its sausage-making chambers.

Routine Exemptions, Deadly Disorder

Nevertheless, from time to time, dramatic incidents of the United States flaunting the international “rules-based order”—i.e., international law by the United States—occasionally make headlines (before being rapidly silenced).

One type of recurring violation is the abuse of diplomatic immunity. This type of case is mundane and repetitious: a U.S. (or Western-allied) government employee kills or harms native citizens; the United States immediately claims diplomatic immunity. Sometimes the perpetrator is drunk, out of control, or paranoid; often they are spies or contractors. For example, according to recent reports, Anne Sacoolas seems to have been a drunk U.S. spy who killed a British teenager in 2019. She was spirited away immediately as a diplomat.

Raymond Allen Davis was a U.S. contractor, possibly acting CIA station chief, who shot dead two people in the street in Pakistan. Another person was killed by a vehicle picking up Davis to take him away from the crime scene. Davis was spirited out of the country, no explanations were given, and the murders were erased from media consciousness.

This mindset of exceptionalism and impunity is not anecdotal, but manifests on a general, structural scale in the numerous one-sided U.S. status of forces agreements (SOFAs) in the countries where the United States has troops stationed. These give a blanket immunity similar to diplomatic immunity: the violating U.S. soldier or contractor cannot be arrested and rendered to domestic courts unless the United States chooses to waive immunity; U.S. extraterritorial exemption/immunity can be applied despite cases of murder, mayhem, violence, torture, rape, theft, sexual trafficking, and a host of other sins.

This type of exceptionalism also applies to national health policies and international health regulations. For example, multiple COVID-19 outbreaks have been traced to U.S. violations of domestic public health measures—screening, testing, contract tracing, and isolation—in many territories or countries (especially island regions) where the United States has military bases. For example, several major COVID outbreaks in Okinawa have been traced to U.S. troops entering the island without following local health protocols.

The United States takes the cake for hypocrisy, however, when, in several COVID lawsuits, it accused China—without evidence—of violating UN/World Health Organization (WHO) International Health Regulations by failing to notify the United States and the rest of the world in a timely manner about the outbreak of COVID-19. This is entirely refuted by the facts and the well-established timelines: no other country has worked as assiduously and as rapidly in investigating, ascertaining, and then notifying the world of the initial outbreak, as well as sharing necessary information to control it. The United States, however, has carved out a pandemic-sized exemption from reporting any infectious diseases to the WHO if it deems it necessary for its national security interests. Ironically, this exemption is carved out for the single institution most likely to propagate it—the U.S. military: “any notification that would undermine the ability of the U.S. Armed Forces to operate effectively in pursuit of U.S. national security interests would not be considered practical.”

When the United States disingenuously uses the term RBIO, or rules-based international order, it may be playing at international law, but once its applications are unpacked and defused, it becomes clear that it is a weaponized fiction that the United States uses to attack its enemies and competitors.

If “hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,” the RBIO is the vicious first tribute that the United States sends to its law-abiding opponents to undermine international order, no less dangerous for its falsehood.

Coming This 2022: Refugees, Democracy and Human Rights

Ramzy Baroud

Refugees

Although 2021 is now behind us, there are many issues that will linger for a while, or much longer, and will certainly dominate much of the news in 2022, as well. These are but a few of the issues.

NATO-Russian Brinkmanship 

Exasperated with NATO expansion and growing ambitions in the Black Sea region, Moscow has decided to challenge the US-led Western alliance in an area of crucial geopolitical importance to Russia.

Ukraine’s quest for NATO membership, especially following the Crimea conflict in 2014, proved to be a red line for Russia. Starting in late 2021, the US and its European allies began accusing Russia of amassing its forces at the Ukrainian border, suggesting that outright military invasion would soon follow. Russia denied such accusations, insisting that a military solution can be avoided if Russia’s geopolitical interests are respected.

Some analysts argue that Russia is seeking to “coerce the west to start the new Yalta talks,” a reference to a US, UK and Russia summit at the conclusion of World War II. If Russia achieves its objectives, NATO will no longer be able to exploit Russia’s fault lines throughout its Western borders.

While NATO members, especially the US, want to send a strong message to Russia – and China – that the defeat in Afghanistan will not affect their global prestige or tarnish their power, Russia is confident that it has enough political, economic, military and strategic cards that would allow it to eventually prevail.

China’s Unhindered Rise 

Another global tussle is also underway. For years, the US unleashed an open global war to curb China’s rise as a global economic power. While the 2019 ‘Trade War’, instigated by the Donald Trump administration against China delivered lukewarm results, China’s ability to withstand pressure, control with mathematical precision the spread, within China, of the Covid-19 pandemic, and continue to fuel the global economy has proved that Beijing is not easy prey.

An example of the above assertion is the anticipated revival of the Chinese tech giant, Huawei. The war on Huawei served as a microcosm of the larger war on China. British writer, Tom Fowdy, described this war as “blocking exports to (Huawei), isolating it from global chipmakers, forcing allies to ban its participation in their 5G networks, imposing criminal charges against it and kidnapping one of its senior executives”.

However, this is failing, according to Fowdy. 2022 is the year in which Huawei is expected to wage massive global investments that will allow it to overcome many of these obstacles and become self-sustaining in terms of the technologies required to fuel its operations worldwide.

Aside from Huawei, China plans to escalate its response to American pressures by expanding its manufacturing platforms, creating new markets and fortifying its alliances, especially with Moscow. A Chinese-Russian alliance is particularly important for Beijing as both countries are experiencing strong US-Western pushback.

2022 is likely to be the year in which Russia and China, in the words of Beijing’s Ambassador to Moscow, Zhang Hanhui, stage a “response to such overt (US) hegemony and power politics”, where both “continue to deepen back-to-back strategic cooperation.”

The World ‘Hanging by a Thread’

However, other conflicts exist beyond politics and economy. There is also the war unleashed on our planet by those who favor profits over the welfare of future generations. While the Glasgow Climate Pact COP26 began with lofty promises in Scotland in November, it concluded with political compromises that hardly live up to the fact that, per the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “we are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe”.

True, in 2022 many tragedies will be attributed to climate change. However, it will also be a year in which millions of people around the world will continue to push for a collective, non-political response to the ‘climate catastrophe’. While Planet Earth is “hanging by a thread” – according to Guterres – political compromises that favor the rich become the obstacle, not the solution. Only a global movement of well-integrated civil societies worldwide can compel politicians to heed the wishes of the people.

Refugees, Democracy and Human Rights

The adverse effects of climate change can be felt in myriad ways that go beyond the immediate damage inflicted by erratic weather conditions. War, revolutions, endemic socio-economic inequalities, mass migration and refugee crises are a few examples of how climate change has destabilized many parts of the world and wrought pain and suffering to numerous communities worldwide.

The issue of migration and refugees will continue to pose a threat to global stability in 2022, since none of the root causes that forced millions of people to leave their homes in search of safer and better lives have been addressed. Instead of contending with the roots of the problem – climate change, military interventions, inequality, etc. – quite often the hapless refugees find themselves accused and demonized as agents of instability in Western societies.

This, in turn, has served as a political and, at times, moral justification for the rise of far-right political movements in Europe and elsewhere, which are spreading falsehoods, championing racism and undermining whatever semblance of democracy that exists in their countries.

2022 must not be allowed to be another year of pessimism.  It can also be a year of hope and promise. But that is only possible if we play our role as active citizens to bring about the coveted change that we would like to see in the world.

UK first European country to record 150,000 official COVID deaths

Robert Stevens

Calling for the UK’s self-isolation period for those infected with COVID to be reduced to five days, UK Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi declared Sunday, “I hope we will be one of the first major economies to demonstrate to the world how you transition from pandemic to endemic, and then deal with this however long it remains with us, whether that’s five, six, seven, 10 years.”

Zahawi’s comments came one day after the UK became the first country in Europe and the seventh in the world to reach the horrific milestone of 150,000 deaths from COVID-19. Only the US, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru have recorded more deaths. The UK has a population of just 68.4 million. Except Peru, other countries recording more deaths than Britain all have substantially larger populations.

The deaths are the responsibility of the Conservative government and the outcome of a murderous herd immunity agenda, aimed from the start of the pandemic at the mass infection of the population.

The move to reduce the self-isolation period, already cut from 10 days to seven, is criminal, given that the UK Health Security Agency, which is still in favour of the reduction, admitted that between 10 and 30 percent of people are still infectious on day six.

Zahawi spoke while denying reports that the government was planning to end the free provision of lateral flow tests, a move that would lead to an end of all monitoring of the spread of COVID. Tests are in any case increasingly hard to get hold of already.

A section of the 500-metre-long National Covid Memorial Wall, which has 150,000 hearts on representing the number of people who have lost their lives to COVID. The wall is opposite the Houses of Parliament in London. (WSWS Media)

The government openly declared that herd immunity was “desirable” when the pandemic first hit, only imposing a national lockdown in late March 2020, weeks after the virus had been circulating within the population, under mass pressure.

After reopening the economy in late spring-early summer 2020, more deaths piled up in the second wave of the pandemic. Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his infamous statement in late October 2020, “No more f**king lockdowns, let the bodies pile up in their thousands”. The premature end of the first lockdown and the delayed and even more limited character of the second led to many more deaths in January and February 2021 than at any other stage in the pandemic.

At the end of July last year, Johnson declared “Freedom Day” with the economy and schools opened. The then dominant Delta variant was allowed to continue its spread unhindered with the government declaring the UK aimed to be the first country in the world where COVID was endemic in the population.

The vast majority of the 150,000 official deaths are attributable to previous variants of the disease. It is not clear exactly how many deaths can be attributed to the new Omicron variant since it became dominant in Britain last month. However, since Omicron was first detected in Britain on November 27 a further 5,230 people have died from COVID.

The Johnson government’s COVID death tally is highly manipulated, with deaths recorded only if they take place within 28 days of the person recording a positive test. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of death certificates in the UK that mention COVID-19 now exceeds 174,000.

Since Omicron was detected, populations internationally have been bludgeoned with incessant propaganda from governments that it is mild and will soon pass. But hospitalisations and deaths are rising daily. The 150,000 total was reached with the 313 deaths announced Saturday, the third time in the past 10 days that more than 300 have died in a 24-hour period and giving a seven-day tally of 1,271.

There were 18,456 people in hospital with the disease on January 6, the latest date for which figures are available. The National Health Service is swamped. On Friday, the Financial Times reported that in Greater Manchester, with a population of approximately 3 million, COVID hospital cases have already surpassed the peak of last winter’s wave—1,229 versus 1,000 last January. “Meanwhile, separate data showed that one in seven staff at acute trusts in the area were absent on January 2, with more than 3,000 staff either off sick or self-isolating due to Covid.”

Allowing schools to be flooded with a variant that is more transmissible than ever before is producing a disaster.

Education staff continue to suffer and die from COVID. On January 2, Nick Stone, aged just 55, who taught modern languages for 30 years at City of Norwich School in Norfolk, died from COVID.

In just one local authority, Suffolk, the county council reported there were 1,842 cases of coronavirus among 5-19-year-olds before they even returned to school on January 5. The council did not reveal the number of schools impacted.

In East Lothian, Scotland, hundreds of high school pupils had to move to learning from home just two days after returning to their classrooms. The East Lothian Courier reported that “five of the county’s six high schools have made the decision to ask certain year groups to work from home due to crippling levels of staff absence related to Covid-19.”

The ruling elite’s indifference to life was reflected in headlines reporting the 150,000 milestone with a collective shrug. The Daily Mail headlined its online story: “Boris Johnson recognises ‘terrible toll’ of pandemic as figures hit grim milestone... but data shows fatalities levelling off amid hopes Omicron is LESS deadly than flu”. The Telegraph did not even report the grim COVID death tally in its Sunday edition, devoting its front page and a full inside page to photos of new dresses worn by the Duchess of Cambridge.

The Labour Party-supporting Daily Mirror wrote, “Covid has now killed 150,000 people in the UK—but new cases fall to a 10 day low”.

Numerous articles note that it is not known exactly how many died from COVID or from some other condition with COVID .

They write as if it was not well-established that among those who have died are people, particularly among the oldest generations, already suffering with other life-threatening illnesses. Everyone knows that co-morbidities are a significant factor in many COVID deaths and that the elderly and those with serious illness are particularly at risk. The real issue is that nothing has ever been done to prevent the most vulnerable from catching COVID, as was horrifically demonstrated in the first year of the pandemic when the disease was allowed to flood care homes with the loss of 20,000 lives.

This attempt to play down the danger of COVID takes place under conditions where no-one knows the long-term impact of Omicron. It appears that the variant does not attack the lungs with the same degree of severity as Delta, which could account for the lower fatality rate. But as with all variants of COVID it attacks organs throughout the body and does long-term damage. This is particularly concerning as the latest statistics on Long COVID from the Office for National Statistics show that the number of people with the condition has risen by at least 100,000, from 1.2 million to 1.3 million.

The Sunday Times summed up the attitude of those in power who view saving lives as an intolerable burden on the corporations and billionaires in an article headlined, “End of free lateral flow tests as country told to live with Covid”.

Written before official denials were issued, the article complains, “More than £6 billion of public money has been spent on mass testing using the [LFT] devices.”

It included a graph showing “The cost of Covid: How the £370bn additional spend on Covid measures breaks down”.

Among the bewailed costs were “£84 billion for health and social care”, £69.5 billion for the Coronavirus Jobs furlough scheme, “£67 billion for public and emergency services” and “£60 billion for individuals”, including £10.3 billion for the Universal Credit £20 weekly uplift payment for those without a job and the poorest paid workers.

Sudan’s prime minister resigns amid lethal military crackdown on protests

Jean Shaoul

Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdulla Hamdok resigned on January 2 amid a political deadlock with the military and nationwide protests that have continued since the military coup last October. His resignation came as security forces killed three people during the latest round of mass rallies, bringing the total killed to at least 60.

Military chief and de facto ruler General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is now openly in control.

Thousands of workers and youth have taken to the streets of Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, and its twin city Omdurman, against both Hamdok and the junta, demanding an end to military rule, including the fraud of transitional civilian-military rule.

Demonstration against the coup in Khartoum (Twitter)

The political crisis takes place as the economy faces collapse under the impact of the pandemic, with growing unemployment, 360 percent inflation and soaring food prices. It follows decades of criminal looting by the ruling elite, international sanctions and the secession of South Sudan, the main oil-producing region, in 2011. In West Darfur state, dozens of people have been killed and their villages burned in conflicts between pastoralists and farmers that have seen 83,000 people displaced, and thousands more in Kordafan state since October.

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has estimated that more than 14 million people, one in three of the Sudanese people, will need humanitarian aid in 2022, up from the 7.9 million assisted by the UN’s World Food Programme in 2021.

The military has closed telecommunication networks and deployed the security forces to suppress protests with tear gas and live and rubber bullets. They have blocked the bridges leading into the conurbation to prevent people joining the Khartoum rallies from other parts of the country.

The demonstrations are a continuation of the mass protests that erupted at the end of 2018 and precipitated the April 2019 pre-emptive military coup, led by al-Burhan with the support of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. The military ousted President Omar al-Bashir and his Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated military dictatorship, which had ruled since 1989, to prevent the overthrow of the entire state apparatus.

Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok (left) and US U.S. Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin at the White House in 2019

Al-Burhan then opened negotiations with the leaders of the protests, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), an umbrella group of 22 bourgeois and petty bourgeois opposition groups, including the trade unions and the Sudanese Communist Party. Just weeks later, soldiers and paramilitaries massacred more than 1,000 unarmed protesters, chasing them through Khartoum, tying concrete blocks to their feet and throwing them into the River Nile.

Despite this, in August 2019 the FFC signed a treacherous deal with the military, agreeing to serve under Hamdok, a British-trained economist and former member of the Sudanese Communist Party, in a transitional “technocratic” government, made up of “leftists” that served as a front for the Sovereign Council headed by al-Burhan.

Hamdok went on to implement a series of free market and political reforms, including the abolition of fuel subsidies, the privatisation of hundreds of Sudan’s state companies and a crackdown on corruption and the looting of state revenues by companies linked to al-Bashir and the military. These measures, demanded by the US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in return for relief on $60 billion of foreign debt, threatened the military’s substantial commercial, political and diplomatic interests.

Hamdok also acceded to Washington’s demand that Sudan join its Gulf allies and Israel in an anti-Iran block and handed al-Bashir, now in prison, to the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur, where 300,000 people were killed and millions displaced in fighting between 2003 and 2008, to get Sudan removed from the US State Sponsor of Terrorism List.

After a failed putsch in September, al-Burhan dissolved the Sovereign Council and dismissed Hamdok’s “technocratic” government. He arrested Hamdok and several members of his cabinet, later releasing them to house arrest, and declared a state of emergency. He sacked the Chief Justice presiding over crucial reforms to the judicial system and released key figures in and around former dictator al-Bashir’s National Congress Party.

Al-Burhan justified the coup as a means of avoiding “civil war,” claiming the military would establish a new government and promising elections in July 2023. He proceeded to release his allies in jail on corruption and related charges; stack state and federal institutions, the state-owned media and companies, and the Central Bank with generals, Islamists and other reliable allies of the al-Bashir regime; dismantle civilian committees that had seized the assets of al-Bashir and his cronies; and restore the intelligence services’ powers to arrest and detain. His forces clamped down on protesters, killing at least 40 unarmed civilians, injuring and detaining hundreds more, while raping or gang-raping at least 13 women, according to the UN.

Al-Burhan’s calculations that the government’s economic reforms would turn workers and rural toilers against Hamdok and that the signing of the Abraham Accords with Israel would be enough to end Sudan’s three decades as a pariah state were misplaced. His efforts to use his close relations with Russia, which is trying to establish a base at Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, and the millions of refugees and displaced people in Sudan as bargaining chips against the European powers also failed.

Four weeks later, after Washington and the World Bank had frozen aid funds and the debt-relief process, al-Burhan—unable to find any credible civilians to front a military-backed government—agreed to reinstate Hamdok as head of a transitional government until elections in 2023.

The deal was brokered jointly by US imperialism and its regional allies and by lawyers and leading lights of the Republican Party, National Ummah Party, Unified Unionist Party and former Sudan Communist Party leaders, sidelining the Forces for Freedom and Change movement. The FFC, the Sudanese Professionals’ Association and the Resistance Committees in Khartoum condemned the deal as treacherous.

Within weeks of Hamdok’s reinstatement, the military reneged on its commitments to release all the detained activists and revoke the hated General Intelligence Service’s powers of arrest and detention, authority to seize funds and other assets, and to prohibit or control the movement of people. He reappointed ambassadors dismissed following the October 25 coup. Al-Burhan said that those who had “insulted the army would be prosecuted and imprisoned.”

This, and the military’s continued crackdown on protests, left Hamdok unable to cobble together a cabinet that met with the military’s approval.

Announcing his resignation on television, Hamdok said that the country was now “at a dangerous turning point that threatens its whole survival.”

As well as the mass protests, Sudan faces rebel movements in Darfur, South Kordofan and the Blue Nile that may now abandon their October 2020 agreement with the civilian-fronted military government, as neighbouring Ethiopia descends into civil war and violent conflicts continue in South Sudan, Somalia and the neighbouring Sahel.

Sudan’s key position in the Horn of Africa, bordering on the Red Sea through which 12 percent of the world’s trade by volume passes, including much of the Middle East’s energy exports to Europe, has made it a focus of competing economic interests. China now rivals western countries in its loans and technical assistance to the region, while the Gulf countries have bought up some of the country’s most fertile land that is now cultivated by major corporations for export. The displaced Sudanese peasants have migrated to the cities.

In the absence of an independent socialist political leadership, the mass protests face the prospect of brutal suppression by the military and betrayal by various “progressive” middle-class forces backed by US imperialism.

The US, the former colonial power Britain and the major European powers have called for the military to negotiate with civilian groups, saying they would not support a military government. Reuters cited a European diplomat saying, “The military cares very much because they know that the country will not continue without economic support. If Sudan implodes, that has serious ramifications in a lot of geostrategic issues,” a reference to neighbouring Ethiopia, Libya and the Sahel.

2021 deadliest-ever year for drug overdose deaths in British Columbia

George Locke

British Columbia, Canada’s third-most populous province, recorded its highest-ever number of drug overdose deaths in 2021. According to the most recent available province-wide statistics, just in the first 10 months of last year, there were 1,782 drug overdose deaths surpassing the 1,760 registered throughout 2020.

BC has been in the grip of a deadly opioid crisis for years—driven by a combination of capitalist austerity, a drastic decline in social conditions and living standards, and the callous indifference of all the establishment parties to the plight of the working poor and most oppressed sections of the population. In April of 2016, then-BC Public Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall declared British Columbia’s first public health emergency under the Public Health Act in response to the ever-escalating number of people who were overdosing and dying from illicit drugs.

The same year the emergency was declared, 990 opioid deaths were registered across the province. The 1,782 deaths recorded for the first 10 months of 2021 means that the death toll has essentially doubled within five years. During 2021, fewer people were officially recorded as having died from COVID-19 than from a drug overdose. Another indication of the scale of the crisis was provided by a recent Angus Reid poll, which revealed that over 10 percent of the province’s approximately 5 million inhabitants knew someone who has died of an overdose.

The illegal drug supply became deadlier as fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 100 times more powerful than morphine and 50 times more powerful than heroin, became more prevalent on the illegal drug scene. In 2012, only 5 percent of illicit drug toxicity investigations detected fentanyl in the victim’s system. By 2020, there had been a dramatic and tragic increase, with over 85 percent of people who had succumbed to drug overdose deaths having fentanyl in their system.

By 2021, Fentanyl had replaced heroin as the opioid of choice for street users in British Columbia. For people who use opioids, fentanyl is cheaper and more potent than heroin, and for dealers the profit margins are higher and the logistics in terms of smuggling are simpler because of its size. Besides replacing heroin, traces of the drug have also been found in cocaine, MDMA, and crystal meth.

In the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, the slang “Toe Tag” referring to the piece of cardboard attached with string to the big toe of an unidentified dead person in a morgue, is the macabre term used for fentanyl.

Homeless in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (UBC Wiki)

Over recent years, the provincial government and local health authorities have adopted certain mitigation measures in response to the unfolding crisis. They rapidly expanded the availability of take-home naloxone kits, which have a high efficacy in reversing the deadly effects of fentanyl. They also improved and promoted education and training regarding overdose prevention and provided real-time information on overdoses so people would be aware when drugs of unusually high toxicity were circulating on the streets.

But these limited measures, which at best are Band-Aids on a gaping wound, have done little to stem the tide of deaths. The funerals and memorials have continued to mount, with over 7,700 people, at an average age of 43, prematurely going to their graves since the public health emergency was announced.

The pandemic has exacerbated the drug overdose epidemic because social services have been scaled back due to social-distancing measures and because scarce health care resources have been diverted to fight COVID-19. As a result, users have been left to fend for themselves.

Prior to the emergence of COVID-19, opioid fatalities had declined for the first time, year-over-year. In 2019, 982 people died, compared to 1,551 in 2018. The pandemic caused drug supply chains to be disrupted, resulting in illicit drugs becoming even more toxic, unpredictable and expensive. At the same time, social distancing guidelines led to more drug users using alone, heightening the risk of death.

As a result of the surge in fatalities, toxic drugs are now the leading cause of death for people between 19 and 39 and the fourth-highest cause overall in BC. First Nations people are five-times more likely to experience an overdose and three-times more likely to die than non-native British Columbians.

The epidemic of drug-related fatalities is the product of decades of savage attacks on working people and the neglect of burning social problems by successive provincial and federal governments, whether led by the Liberals, New Democrats, or Conservatives. In 1994, the Chief Coroner of the Province of British Columbia, Vince Cain, wrote a report regarding the inordinately high number of people who were overdosing. In his 118-page report, “Illicit Narcotic Overdose Deaths in British Columbia,” he clearly stated that the overdose problem was a public health and social issue. He recommended the decriminalization of simple possession and a safe supply to prevent unnecessary deaths. He called for addiction to be dealt with through a “medical model,” not a “criminal model,” and charged that cuts to social programs had led to increased levels of poverty resulting in more drug usage out of despair. Cain also called for a commission to review drug policies and social determinants related to addiction.

Twenty-eight years later, British Columbians are still waiting for that review.

By implementing these two recommendations, decriminalizing simple possession and providing a safe supply, many thousands of people would still be alive today. Instead, the 331 deaths deemed “inordinately high” in 1993 were surpassed in only the first sixty days of 2021 (with over 350 people perishing.)

Much like the COVID-19 pandemic, where the ruling elite has deemed working people dispensable and forced them into life-threatening working conditions with insufficient protections so as to safeguard corporate profits, governments have refused to take any serious action to deal with the overdose crisis because it disproportionately affects the working poor.

When a person in the top 10 percent income bracket uses drugs on a regular basis, they generally have a safe supply, often pharmaceutical grade, and can afford their drug of choice and pay for the necessities, shelter, food, cell phone etc. If things get out of hand, they can check themselves into privately run treatment centers charging exorbitant fees, where they receive professional care and guidance.

The conditions facing a person on welfare following a workplace accident ($935 a month) in the city of Vancouver, where a one bedroom on average rents for $1,800 per month, could hardly be more different. Perhaps they became addicted to their prescribed oxytocin and now, the prescription having expired, they rely on $30 of fentanyl to make it through the day. Someone in this situation would consider themselves lucky to be living out of their car.

The BC government is currently led by the NDP, which has upheld the austerity policies imposed by the previous provincial Liberal governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark. The NDP is part of a ruling class consensus based on the gutting of social programs and privatization of public services initiated in the early 1980s by Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US, and Brian Mulroney in Canada. Programs and institutions that provided medical care, education, pensions, cheap transportation and communication options, affordable housing, work at reasonable wages, and adequate child care were dismantled.

In Vancouver, homelessness went from being a minor issue in the early 1980s to a chronic social crisis, with the 2020 one-day count identifying over 3,600 people without a place to live, undoubtedly an underestimation. On the other side of the social divide, the average price of a house rose from $116,000 in 1984 to over $1,300,000 in 2021. With governments at all levels—federal, provincial and municipal—executing cuts to social programs, deep poverty has increased exponentially, causing people to lose hope and turn to drugs out of despair.

The social problems underlying the overdose epidemic find particularly sharp expression in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). In the early 1980s, this neighborhood was an edgy but relatively calm place to live. Woodward’s, an iconic Canadian department store, anchored a vibrant retail marketplace, bustling Chinatown was right next door, many of the cafes and restaurants were family-run, and schools and hospitals were close by.

The area’s rapid descent began in the mid-1980s when owners of residential hotels were permitted and encouraged by the city to evict between 800 and 1,000 of the city’s poorest tenants to make room for tourists to enjoy Expo 86. As the poor tenants were replaced by affluent tourists, the police stopped arresting individual drug users, and dealers introduced and sold expensive high-purity cocaine and heroin to a now more upscale clientele. While the police cracked down on prostitution in other areas of the city, they turned a blind eye when it resurfaced in the DTES.

Meanwhile, in 1985 the provincial government turned against the mentally ill with a policy of de-institutionalization. This led to the mass discharging of patients, with the promise that they would be integrated into the community. Many people with mental health problems moved to the DTES after being deinstitutionalized, attracted by the accepting culture and low-cost housing. However, they floundered without adequate treatment and support and soon became addicted to the neighborhood’s readily available drugs. Former mayor of Vancouver Larry Campbell bluntly summed up the responsibility of the political establishment for this social policy failure, declaring, “When we deinstitutionalized, we promised people that we would put them into the community and give them the support they needed. But we lied. I think it’s one of the worst things we ever did.”

In the 1990s, the situation in the DTES deteriorated further on several fronts. Woodward’s closed in 1993 and was redeveloped into high-end condos with devastating effect on the formerly bustling retail district. The supply of low-income housing shrank, partly because of the continued conversion of buildings into more expensive condominiums or hotels. More fundamentally, however, the federal government stopped funding for social housing in 1993, and the rate of building dropped by two-thirds despite rising demand. By 1995, reports emerged of homeless people sleeping in parks, alleyways, and abandoned buildings. Cuts to the provincial welfare program in 2002 caused further hardship for the poor and homeless.

Lacking any economic or social perspective, a drug economy proliferated among the neighbourhood’s poor, with an accompanying increase in crime. Crack cocaine arrived in Vancouver in 1995, and crystal methamphetamine started to appear in the DTES in 2003. In 1997, the local health authority declared a public health emergency as the rates of HIV infection, spread by needle-sharing amongst drug users, were worse than anywhere in the world outside Sub-Saharan Africa, and deaths from drug overdoses were skyrocketing.