IMF declares its Sri Lankan program a “brutal experiment”

Saman Gunadasa & K. Ratnayake

On Monday, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $US2.9 billion bailout loan to the Sri Lankan government over four years. Two days later the Central Bank of Sri Lanka received its first installment of $330 million.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is notorious for enforcing IMF austerity measures in the past, was jubilant about the loan’s approval. In a special statement to the nation, he declared: “Sri Lanka will no longer be treated as a bankrupt country.”

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, accompanied by heads of the armed forces, at 75th Independence Day ceremony in Colombo on February 4, 2023. [Photo: Sri Lanka president’s media division]

The IMF said that although its loan is relatively small, it will be a catalyst for another $7 billion from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank and others.

The Sri Lankan media was also elated with headlines such as “IMF had extended a lifeline” to the country. The big business lobbies hailed the IMF’s decision and called on everyone to support it.

In reality, the IMF loan is tied to an unprecedented austerity program that effectively puts the country under the governance of this institution of international finance capital.

IMF mission chief for Sri Lanka, Peter Breuer explained on Tuesday: “Sri Lanka will be the first country in Asia-Pacific to undergo a governance diagnostic exercise by the IMF.” The exercise rested on five pillars, he said, including an ambitious revenue-based fiscal consolidation, debt sustainability and great exchange rate flexibility.

In order to obtain the loan, the Sri Lankan government has already had to make deep inroads into social services, jobs and living conditions. As Breuer admitted: “[T]hat has just shown what a brutal experiment it is to have to adjust the economy from one equilibrium to the other, without any external support.”

Before releasing the loan, the IMF demanded a long list of austerity measures, with Wickremesinghe boasting that the government had met all 15 targets. The measures included a huge devaluation in the rupee, a reduction in imports, increases in the value added tax (VAT), income taxes for many workers, increases in fuel prices and electricity tariffs, and cuts to pensions.

These devastating inroads into the social position of working people came on top of the consequences of an unprecedented economic crisis that sent prices soaring and created widespread shortages of basic goods.

An uprising of the suffering masses erupted last April and eventually forced the former president to flee the country and resign in July. The Sri Lankan political establishment, with the backing of imperialist powers, anti-democratically installed Wickremesinghe as the president to impose the IMF’s requirements.

After this week’s loan approval, further measures in the “brutal experiment” are in pipeline, including the privatisation or commercialization of state-owned enterprises (SOE), scrapping what remains of free public health and education, and hundreds of thousands of public sector job cuts.

On Tuesday, the cabinet approved the divestment of seven SOE’s shares owned by the state and established a SOE restructuring unit to oversee the process.

Speaking at a press briefing on Thursday, Wickremesinghe said the state-owned Sri Lanka Telecom, Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation, Grand Hyatt and Hilton hotels, Litro Gas Lanka and Lanka Hospital Corporation would soon be sold off.

Answering questions, Wickremesinghe bluntly declared: “Not all of them are loss making. We do have to repay debt. You can’t keep these and pay back loans.” Asked why Sri Lanka should sell SOEs that aren’t making losses, he responded: “Why is the state engaged in business? That’s not our mandate.”

During the IMF’s press briefing, a Sri Lankan journalist asked about recent protests against the income tax hikes that the trade unions have been compelled to call amid widespread anger and opposition among workers and professionals.

The answer was revealing of the IMF’s attitude to the immense burdens placed on working people.

Breuer began by declaring that he understood the hardships, including “incredible increases in the cost of living… the loss of employment, loss of livelihood, rising energy costs and falling real incomes that have really hit the population large, and in particular, the poor and vulnerable.”

But as he made clear, the IMF’s priority was determined by the requirements of international finance capital. Sri Lanka “collects the least amount of fiscal revenue in the world,” Breuer complained, amounting to 8.3 percent of the GDP in 2021 as compared to expenditures of 19.9 percent.

Breuer bluntly declared that “external creditors are not willing to provide to fill that gap. So tax reforms are badly needed to correct this imbalance.”

The IMF insisted that the negative revenue gap of 5.7 percent of GDP compared to public expenditure in 2021 be turned into a 2.3 percent surplus of GDP starting in 2025. “That is quite ambitious. But what is the alternative?” he asked.

The main Sri Lankan business lobby, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, congratulated the government. Its statement declared that “long overdue economic reforms [were] a vital impetus towards sustainable economic revival.” It urged all political parties, civil society, trade unions and the public “to view the IMF program positively and support [it].”

Speaking in parliament on Wednesday, Wickremesinghe challenged the opposition parties to show whether there was any alternative. Facing a mounting wave of protests and strikes, he invited to them to join him in pushing through the IMF austerity agenda. At the same time, he is intensifying repression against workers and the poor.

As teachers have begun to protest against arbitrary transfers, the president threatened to impose the draconian essential public services act to ban protests and strikes. On Wednesday, he signed a proclamation that keeps the armed forces on standby in all 25 districts in the country. Already, many government sectors, including electricity, railway, ports, postal, telecom, petroleum, health and health, have been declared essential services.

Wickremesinghe has depended on the trade unions to limit and derail the struggles of workers. When compelled to call strikes and protests, the trade unions have diverted the struggles into futile calls for the government to make concessions. Wickremesinghe has flatly ruled out any changes to the austerity program.

The opposition parties do not oppose the IMF’s austerity measures. Following the loan approval, Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) leader Sajith Premadasa in parliament simply called on the government to reveal the IMF’s conditions. Last year, the SJB vociferously criticised the government for not seeking an IMF bailout sooner.

Last October, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake told the “Swarnavahini” talk show that Sri Lanka had “no other alternative to going to the IMF” after the country had defaulted on foreign loans. Speaking in parliament, its propaganda secretary Vijitha Herath yesterday reiterated the same, saying his party has no objection to going to the IMF.

Strike wave sweeps across the Netherlands

Daniel Woreck & Parwini Zora

Since the beginning of 2023, the Netherlands has been shaken by a wave of strikes in the public and private sectors unseen in scope for years. Hardly any week since January has passed without Dutch workers entering into a struggle for better wages, working and living conditions.

A climate protest in The Hague, Netherlands, Saturday, March 11, 2023. [AP Photo/Peter Dejong]

This new wave of strikes takes place against the backdrop of relentless anti-Russian hysteria and intensified propaganda in the media to justify NATO’s war in Ukraine. Rutte’s right-wing government is increasingly involved in financing, arming and guiding the Ukraine military in NATO’s proxy war against Russia.

On March 16, around 200,000 health care workers at 64 Dutch hospitals were on strike for a day, including in major cities like Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, Eindhoven and Rotterdam.

In Amsterdam, at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital, a leading facility for treating cancer patients, doctors and health care workers in 48 departments struck for the first time ever. At the Spaarne Gasthuis hospital in Haarlem, 30 kilometers from Amsterdam, 48 departments were also on strike. At the Wilhemina Hospital in Assen, 33 departments were on strike. A one-day national strike was called by four trade unions, the FNV, the largest trade union federation in the Netherlands, the CNV, NU’91 and the FBZ, the Federation of Professional Organisations.

After decades of austerity, the outbreak of the pandemic—the Dutch ruling elite was among the first to implement a criminal “herd immunity” policy—conditions for staff and patients in public health care have turned from bad to worse and then from worse to a disaster.

As a result, one that could have been avoided by implementing a policy based on science, over 200,000 health care workers of a total of 592,000 were infected. Thousands are suffering from Long COVID symptoms. Many have lost their jobs and are out of work, awaiting a to-be-decided compensation as low as €28,000 if they receive anything at all. During a renewed rise of COVID-19 infections and hospitalisations at the beginning of 2022, over 110,000 operations had to be postponed.

Health care workers are demanding higher salaries, compensation for irregular working hours and on-call duty, similar to the demands of workers in public transport, railway, municipal and retail sectors.

After the collective labour agreement for the health care sector came to an end on January 31, unions are reluctantly demanding a 10 percent wage increase as well as an additional €100 per month travel allowance to deflect the widespread discontent and anger amongst workers faced with rocketing food and fuel prices, exorbitant utility payments and higher interests on mortgages and rents.

Not placated by the crumbs negotiated by the unions, angered transport workers are preparing a new round of strikes. The unions are separating them into regional strikes and spreading them over six weeks, from February 28 until April 7. Transport workers are divided into two unions. The FNV is demanding a 16.9 percent pay increase over the next 12 months for its membership, whereas the CNV is bargaining for a 14 percent increase spread over 18 months.

Heeding a call from the state secretary for infrastructure to suspend the strikes in advance of the provincial council elections, the trade unions have promptly suspended the strikes under the guise of entering a 10-day round of negotiations.

Marijn van der Gaag, representative of the FNV, told nltimes.nl, “The workload is so extremely heavy. Solutions really have to be found.” He added that the FNV can live with the compromise of suspending the strikes to give negotiations with employers a chance, concluding, “This means we will have 10 days to reach a result together.”

CNV negotiator Hanane Chikhi also told the media that the union could accept a compromise.

Alongside workers traditionally under the grip of trade unions, workers employed in the liquor store chain Gall & Gall and the department store chain De Bijenkorf, both owned by multi-billionaires, went on strike for two weeks demanding a starting wage of €14 per hour.

At more than one hundred different locations, strikes broke out in more than 10 different sectors. At the beginning of February, the FNV warned the Rutte government that a “strike storm” was imminent. FNV Vice President Zakaria Boufangacha said, “We have never started a year with so many strikes and actions.”

Elise Merlijn, manager and spokesperson for FNV, told the press, “We know that the anger among employees is enormous. Employees feel left out in the cold. All that is being asked is to maintain purchasing power and reduce the workload, so that the groceries can be paid for and the wonderful work that is being done is sustained.”

According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), in 2022 the country reached a record inflation level of 10 percent while wages were stagnant. This was the highest inflation in the last five decades.

The outbreak of strikes among workers in the Netherlands is part of the reemergence of class struggle of workers internationally. From the beginning of this year, in Sri Lanka, a former Dutch colony, thousands of health care workers across the island went on strikes demanding higher wages to compensate for inflation now hovering at around 50 percent and to end harsh austerity measures implemented by the government of President Ranil Wickremasinghe. In the UK, hundreds of thousands of National Health Service (NHS) nurses and other workers have taken strike action that the health unions are working to sabotage and betray. Hundreds of thousands of other workers and youth have mounted strikes and mass protests.

In France, a revolutionary confrontation is developing between the working class and the government of President Emmanuel Macron. In Germany, hundreds of thousands are participating in public sector warning strikes and are demanding a full strike that the trade unions desperately seek to prevent. In Belgium, on March 10, public sector workers went on a nationwide strike.

Teachers in Bolivia stage national strike against police repression by MAS government

Andrea Lobo

A national strike of the 140,000 public school teachers in Bolivia took place Friday after the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government of President Luis Arce ordered the brutal police repression of a peaceful march of teachers in La Paz on Wednesday.

Tens of thousands of teachers and supporters flooded downtown La Paz in the largest marches seen since the 2019 protests against the US-backed coup that overthrew MAS president Evo Morales.

Leaders of the CTUB sign agreement with Education minister Edgar Pary for the return to in-person classes for the 2022 school year. [Photo: Flickr, Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional]

Defying the threat by the government to withhold wages for missing work, there was widespread participation in the strike, with teachers setting up numerous roadblocks on the national borders and across major cities, including Sucre, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija and Potosí. Parents associations and university students were important contingents.

Teachers have maintained partial strikes and daily marches centered in La Paz for three weeks to protest the worsening conditions for students and teachers under the ostensibly “left” government.

Their demands include a major increase in the education budget, the hiring of more staff and the end of a new curricular program that compels teachers to work more unpaid hours.

For years, the issue raised most frequently by teachers has been the accumulation of unpaid hours, referred to as the “historic deficit.”

Despite the large class sizes, usually more than 30 students, teachers in public schools in many parts of the country rely on the already impoverished working class parents to get paid at all, without any insurance, pension payments, or other benefits.

Remote lessons during the pandemic were provided in many cases without payment, while Arce refused to implement a program to buy computers and improve connectivity to maintain remote classes. Instead, like his fascistic predecessor Áñez, Arce has ordered teachers and students back into unsafe classrooms.

While inflation remains low compared to other countries, teachers insist that wages are not enough to meet their essential needs. In general, the deterioration of conditions on many fronts has reached a breaking point that has become intolerable for teachers, parents and students.

The Arce administration has refused to meet any of these demands, with the education minister Edgar Pary insisting that the sector already represents 10.8 percent of the national budget. This compares to 21 percent in 2006, when the MAS first came to power.

At the time, a boom in commodity prices driven by Chinese demand allowed the bourgeoisie in Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and other countries to extract greater profits from the working class, pay the financial vultures and also provide limited increases in social spending.

The situation today has changed, however, and the government made clear its unwillingness to make any concessions by ordering riot police that had been continuously harassing demonstrators to violently attack a march in La Paz on Wednesday.

The police violently dispersed the crowd with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets, and chased down the protesters with batons. “They have broken heads, broken bodies. There are women injured,” yelled one teacher, who was visibly shaken, to reporters at the site.

Another added, “They dragged fellow elderly teachers on the ground. This government claims to be the government of the people, but it is not. It never was.” This was followed by chants calling for the resignation of education minister Pary.

The Urban Teachers Union Confederation (CTUB), which has sought to limit the impact of the demonstrations and channel the anger behind endless appeals and futile talks with the government, felt compelled to call for the one-day strike with mobilizations on Friday and to radicalize its rhetoric.

The head of the confederation, Ludwig Salazar, said on Thursday that 30 teachers had been injured in the repression, which left them no option but to strike. “We are reaching a limit in terms of a dialogue. Teachers at the national level are furious and all of them want a strike with mobilizations on Friday, and we are not going to be able to prevent this action.”

Confirming the right-wing character of the MAS government, minister Pary responded to the strike by declaring that teachers don’t have the right to strike. “You have the right to protest, but not the right to affect anyone else’s right, of citizens, of the police officials, and above all of the right of students to education,” he declared in a press conference Thursday night.

The policies of the MAS authorities for years explode any claims by the authorities to be concerned by children’s rights.

Akin to a dictatorship, Pary has insisted that major policies like the budget will be worked out only with the official union sanctioned by MAS, the Bolivian Workers Central (COB). The CTUB does not recognize the COB, which has become deeply discredited after years of enforcing austerity measures and sanctioning the 2019 coup.

But the strategy of the CTUB bureaucrats, who merely want a seat at the table, is not an alternative. The entire union apparatus insists that it’s possible to pressure the MAS government for concessions by mobilizing on a nationalist basis and not trying to mobilize miners and other major sections of the working class in Bolivia or internationally. Moreover, the CTUB has a long record of helping the government impose its social cuts and the unsafe return to in-person classes.

The mass teachers strike in Bolivia is objectively part of a worldwide eruption of the class struggle against capitalism and its nation-state system, which offer nothing but endless pandemics, a drive to World War III, bank bailouts and a reduction of the living standards of workers everywhere.

This week, 65,000 public school workers in Los Angeles struck for three days to protest almost exactly the same issues as teachers face in Bolivia: understaffing, low pay, and increased workloads. On Tuesday and Wednesday, teachers in the southern Puno region in Peru walked out as part of ongoing demonstrations demanding the resignation of the Dina Boluarte regime installed in a US-backed coup last December.

The other “pink tide” allies of Arce across Latin America have responded with similar hostility to the demands by teachers. The Peronist government of Alberto Fernández in Argentina has continued imposing massive cuts to teachers’ real wages while deploying the National Police to crack down on their demonstrations. In Mexico, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has repeatedly sent National Guard soldiers to attack teachers and teaching students blocking railways to protest cuts and unpaid wages in Michoacán.

The authoritarian response by the Arce administration to teachers’ basic demands makes clear that it is determined to make workers pay for the deepening economic crisis, while the ruling elites continue to amass profits.

Arce’s fading populism has largely rested on paltry cash transfers for the poorest Bolivians and a “Tax on Big Fortunes,” but these amount to mere window-dressing for a pro-rich agenda.

The “voluntary” tax was limited to a yearly 1.4-2.4 percent charge on the less than 200 individuals with fortunes larger than US$4.3 million. The revenue amounted to only $26.5 million in 2021, compared to more than $1 billion collected annually from the regressive value-added tax, which hits individuals with lower incomes disproportionately. Meanwhile, the rich Bolivians continue to syphon hundreds of millions of dollars to tax havens, and “competitive” tax rates are given to corporations.

Moreover, Arce has allowed those that profited from ransacking the public treasury under Áñez to go unscathed. According to the French daily Liberátion, Áñez handed $600 million to reimburse large private companies in Santa Cruz for taxes under the pretext of the COVID-19 pandemic.

MAS is also being rocked by a series of corruption scandals based on allegations from within the party and the government. The National Statistics Institute reported that the state-owned oil company YPFB imported last year 30 percent more diesel than what was consumed, provoking questions by the media and former MAS officials whether there is a corruption scheme to sell the rest and pocket the money.

While YPFB officials have denied any surplus, it has not provided any documentation to explain the data. Increasing suspicions, historically a net exporter of fossil fuels, Bolivia imported last year $1 billion more fuel than it exported. Beyond the higher prices due to the war in Ukraine, natural gas production—Bolivia’s main export—has fallen by nearly a third since 2015 due to a lack of investments and exploration.

All of these policies that have overwhelmingly benefited the rich have left the country’s international reserves at a record low level of $3.5 billion, compared to $15.5 billion in 2014, while the public debt has increased to about half of the country’s GDP.

The response of the Arce administration has been to drive the country deeper in debt and attack the living standards of the working class. Only months after returning a $327 million IMF loan adopted by the Áñez regime, the Arce administration agreed to a new $326.4 million loan from the IMF and $300 million more from the World Bank.

US Congress holds anti-China witch-hunt at TikTok hearing

Andre Damon

On Thursday, the US House Energy and Commerce Committee put on a five-hour spectacle of xenophobia, anticommunism and anti-Chinese invective, focused on demands to ban TikTok, the sixth most popular social network in the world.

During the hearing, China was repeatedly presented as a “threat,” an “adversary” and a “danger.” The hearing capped a month in which the US made major steps to provoke a war with China by moving to abandon the one-China policy and “strategic ambiguity” that have governed Sino-American relations for decades.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Thursday, March 23, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Committee Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers began the hearing with an unhinged, John Birch Society-style rant, recalling General Buck Turgidson’s ravings about “our precious bodily fluids” in Stanley Kubrick’s film, “Dr. Strangelove.”

“TikTok is a weapon by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you see, and exploit your future generation,” she said. “From the data it collects to the content it controls, TikTok is a grave threat of foreign influence in American life.... Banning your platform will address the immediate threats.”

Rodgers added, “We do not trust TikTok will ever embrace American values, values for freedom, human rights and innovation.”

The statements by Rodgers, an anti-abortion fanatic who supported the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, were warmly greeted by the committee’s Democrats.

“I agree with much of what you just said,” declared the committee’s ranking member, Democrat Frank Pallone. TikTok is “controlled by its Beijing communist-based parent company ByteDance.” He added, “Now the combination of TikTok’s Beijing communist [sic] based China ownership and its popularity exacerbates its danger to our country.”

Rodgers and other members accused China, without substantiation, of using TikTok as a means of surveilling the US public on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

They did not evince the slightest self-awareness that they represent a government that operates the world’s largest warrantless surveillance system. The US National Security Agency’s explicit goal is “total information awareness,” to “collect it all, know it all, process it all and exploit it all.”

By contrast, the members of the committee could not demonstrate a single instance of the Chinese government using TikTok to do anything remotely like what the US government is demonstrably proven to do every single day.

In the course of the five-hour hearing, in which dozens of members of Congress ranted and talked over Chew, there was no actual examination of what a ban on TikTok would look like, or the mechanics thereof.

At a separate hearing Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged to “end” TikTok. During testimony to the House Appropriations Committee, Blinken was asked by Republican Congressman Ken Buck whether TikTok posed “a threat to United States security.”

Blinken replied in the affirmative. Buck added, “Shouldn’t a threat to US security be banned?” To this, Blinken replied, “It should be ended one way or another. And there are different ways of doing that.”

Given that TikTok is freely accessible on any computer or mobile device with a web browser, banning the service would require either criminally prosecuting people who use it or the creation of a national firewall that prevents users from accessing websites by government fiat.

These actions would be an unprecedented attack on the freedom of expression. They would make reading or listening to certain content illegal, create a national list of censored websites, or both.

Earlier this month, the White House endorsed the RESTRICT Act, passed by a group of bipartisan senators led by Mark Warner, a leading advocate of internet censorship, which would create mechanisms for the Commerce Department to ban websites and other services in the name of national security.

There are two aims of the US drive to destroy TikTok. First, the United States is seeking to undermine China’s economic development, which threatens the United States’ global economic hegemony.

To this end, the Trump and then Biden administrations have sought, with significant success, to cripple the international operations of Chinese corporations Huawei, ZTE and now, TikTok.

But the attack on the freedom of expression of the American population is an equally significant goal of the campaign against TikTok.

The Trump administration’s 2018 National Security Strategy, which proclaimed the doctrine of “great power conflict,” asserted that the US conflict with China requires “the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military.”

This totalitarian integration of the “law enforcement and military” and the information sphere forms the framework of the US effort to ban TikTok. All aspects of social and economic life are to be brought under state control in the name of “great-power competition.”

Thursday’s spectacle is a warning of just how committed the entire US political establishment is toward escalating the US conflict with China, and using this conflict as a framework to attack fundamental democratic rights.

IMF props up Ukraine with $15.6 billion loan package

Jason Melanovski

Ukraine and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have agreed upon a $15.6 billion loan package dedicated to propping up the Ukrainian government, which saw its economy shrink by over 30 percent in 2022, even as it sharply raised military spending to fund its ongoing war with Russia.

The lending agreement marks the IMF’s first ever loan to a country at war and is expected to be approved by the group’s executive board in the coming weeks.

IMF Headquarters, Washington, DC. [Photo by IMF / CC BY 4.0]

The announcement signals that the entirety of Western imperialism—with the United States leading the way as the IMF’s biggest shareholder—is prepared to back the Ukrainian government for years to come as long as the disastrous proxy war against Russia continues. 

In addition to the IMF package, in 2022 US Congress appropriated more than $122 billion for Ukraine. Military aid accounted for more than half of US spending on Ukraine.

Details are sparse regarding the terms of the deal. However, according to the IMF, “the agreement was expected to help unleash large-scale financing for Ukraine from international donors and partners.” 

“The overarching goals of the authorities’ program are to sustain economic and financial stability in circumstances of exceptionally high uncertainty, restore debt sustainability, and support Ukraine’s recovery on the path toward EU accession in the post-war period. The program has been designed in line with the new Fund’s policy on lending under exceptionally high uncertainty, and strong financing assurances are expected from donors, including the G7 and EU,” Gavin Gray, the IMF’s mission chief to Ukraine said regarding the agreement.

In October of last year, President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to his Western backers for $55 billion to cover an expected $38 billion budget gap in 2023 and an additional $17 to rebuild infrastructure damaged by the war.

Ukraine—which along with neighboring Moldova ranks among the poorest countries in Europe—is already the third largest debtor nation to the IMF in the world. Due to previous loans from the lending agency, Ukraine owes $360 million in surcharge fees alone to the IMF by 2023.

As is typical of IMF agreements, generalized “corruption” is blamed for the country’s poverty. The deal states that Ukraine is “committed to strengthening its governance and anti-corruption framework.”

In early March, Zelensky appointed Semen Kryvonos as the new director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), in response to a flurry of corruption scandals within the Zelensky regime. This included a procurement scam that nearly took down Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov.

While the head of NABU is theoretically a politically neutral and independent actor, in reality the Ukrainian oligarchy regularly use accusations of corruption and graft to target political opponents and curry favor with their Western backers in the EU and US.

Initial reports suggest Kryvonos is no different, as he reportedly possesses close ties to Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak. Earlier in 2014, Kryvonos was investigated by Ukraine’s own Security Service (SBU), after he allegedly demanded $120,000 in exchange for the reallocation of a plot of land. The case was later dropped due to a lack of evidence.

Kryvonos, a lawyer who previously served as the head of Ukraine’s State Inspection of Architecture and Urban Planning, is “no stranger to political circles and among the political elites of our country,” according to Olena Shcherban, an expert at the Anti-Corruption Center (ANTAC). 

The organization which Kryvonos now heads is itself an outcome of the 2014 coup, organized by the US and EU with the assistance of far-right nationalist organizations such as Svoboda and the Azov Battalion, that drove then-elected President Viktor Yanukovych from power.

Founded in 2015 by the right-wing nationalist government of Petro Poroshenko, NABU is almost entirely a US-created and directed organization and its staff were trained directly by the FBI and EU.

In 2020, the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that NABU was created by order of then US Vice-President Joe Biden in order to undermine Ukraine’s own State Bureau of Investigation and “put there emissaries who listen to the United States” at NABU.

By placing Kryvonos in an important political position within Ukraine and abroad, Zelensky, who already banned all oppositional parties last year, has solidified his political control over the country with the help of the US, as he prepares for the long-awaited “offensive” this spring demanded by his Western supporters.

This week Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak admonished Politico over a report that Ukraine would begin an offensive in May stating that such an operation “should be a surprise for the enemy.”

Beginning in the fall of last year, a number of reports have raised the possibility that Ukraine, with the help of more and more military aid from NATO, could launch a devastating offensive in the spring. March, April and now May have been mentioned as start dates.

As the Politico report underlined, the US is heavily involved in planning the offensive, if not outright directing it.

“There is a significant ongoing effort to build up the Ukrainian military in terms of equipment, munitions and training in a variety of countries in order to enable Ukraine to defend itself,” said Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley. who is in constant contact with Ukrainian Commander Valery Zaluzhny.

Milley’s remarks and the IMF loan make clear that the entire political structure of the Ukrainian state is now directed towards continuing its role as a proxy for imperialist war with Russia. In exchange, the Ukrainian oligarchy will receive more funds, weapons, and finally a long-desired seat at the tables of the EU and NATO.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian working class continues to bear the brunt of the imperialist war. A report released by the World Bank just prior to the IMF announcement found that as a result of the war 8 million Ukrainians now live in “abject poverty.”

The revival of the Berlin-Tokyo Axis

Peter Schwarz

Japan ranked only 18th among Germany’s trading partners last year, with a trade volume of €45.7 billion. Outside Europe, it ranked fourth. Germany’s trade volume with China was more than six times higher and that with the United States more than five times higher, while that with Russia was slightly higher.

Despite this, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz traveled to Tokyo last weekend accompanied by six ministers and a high-ranking business delegation for the first German-Japanese government consultations. According to government circles, such consultations are reserved for “close and strategically important partners,” which so far have included China. The chancellor had already visited Japan last April and will fly there again in May for the G7 summit. “Japanese-German relations are stronger and closer than ever,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stressed.

Participants in the first German-Japanese government consultations in Tokyo [Photo by Bundesregierung / Steins]

The rapprochement between the two countries evokes historical memories. The last time Germany and Japan were so closely allied was during World War II. The Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 and the Three-Power Pact of 1940 made Japan, along with Italy, Nazi Germany’s most important international allies. While the Nazis waged their murderous war of extermination against the Soviet Union, Japan conquered large parts of China and East Asia, committing bestial war crimes.

After their defeat in the war, both countries had to disarm. In its postwar constitution—formally still valid today—Japan renounced “for all time, war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes,” as well as the maintenance of “land, naval and air forces or other means of war.” Postwar West Germany’s armed forces were limited, at least officially, to defensive tasks.

Japan and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) resumed diplomatic relations in 1955, and trade and cultural exchanges developed from the 1970s onward. Politically, relations were largely free of tension but not particularly close. With the end of the Cold War, both countries began to shed their military restraint. The renewed rapprochement now comes at a time when they are abandoning all inhibitions and rearming massively.

The German-Japanese government consultations were dominated by the escalation of the Ukraine war against Russia and preparations for war against China. Whereas Germany had previously let its foreign policy in Asia be guided primarily by economic interests and maintained close relations with China, now military and political considerations and confrontation with China are taking centre stage.

Even the economic projects discussed and agreed upon in Tokyo were marked by war policy—or “security,” as it is officially termed. Topics ranged from access to rare minerals and raw materials to securing supply chains and defending against cyberattacks. “We want to reduce dependencies and increase the resilience of our economies,” Chancellor Scholz said.

Agreement had been reached on strengthening supply chains for minerals, semiconductors, batteries and other strategic areas to “counter economic coercion,” Premier Kishida added, alluding to China, which is a leader in mining rare earth minerals for batteries and producing solar panels.

Kishida had already created the world’s first Ministry of Economic Security after taking office in the fall of 2021. Then last year, Japan passed an economic security law that allows for far-reaching intervention in trade and business: securing supply chains for “strategic goods” such as semiconductors and medical products; keeping patents secret for technologies that can also be used for military purposes; establishing close cooperation between the state, universities and corporations in the development of critical technologies; and setting up state regulation of software in the infrastructure sector, targeting Chinese corporations, such as Huawei.

But German-Japanese cooperation is not limited to these issues. The governments also agreed to collaborate closely on military matters and defence production.

Both countries have more than doubled their arms budgets since the start of the Ukraine war a year ago. Germany has agreed to a special armaments fund of €100 billion and an immediate increase in the annual arms budget from 1.5 to 2 percent of GDP. The German government’s stated goal is to become “Europe’s leading military power.”

Japan plans to increase military spending of 43 trillion yen (€300 billion) by 2027 and to double its military budget from 1 to 2 percent of GDP. In December 2022, Tokyo released a new National Security Strategy that drops the last veneer of a “pacifist” constitution and prepares the country for war against China, which is described as an “unprecedented and greatest strategic challenge.”

The security strategy aims to rapidly acquire “counterstrike capabilities.” New fighter jets, medium-range missiles and other weapons are expected to enable the Japanese army to strike targets deep inside China.

This would open up new opportunities for closer cooperation, including in arms matters, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said in a press briefing. He cited submarine propulsion systems as an example. Of course, “Japan as a strong naval nation is also an interesting partner for us.”

Both Japan and Germany have so far worked closely with the US in terms of military and armaments technology, whose military capabilities exceed its own many times over. But both are seeking to break free from dependence on the victorious power of World War II.

While Germany seeks to bolster Europe’s arms production and military clout, Japan wants to revive its own defence industry after decades of restraint. In December, it agreed with Italy and the United Kingdom to jointly develop a new fighter aircraft—the first major defence collaboration without US involvement.

Joint military manoeuvres are also to take place more frequently in the future. Two years ago, the German warship “Bayern” stopped off in Japan on a voyage of several months through the Indo-Pacific and South China seas. Last summer, six German Air Force Eurofighters participated in manoeuvres in Australia and visited Japan. Now, a legal framework is to be established for mutual logistical assistance and support, and once again a German Navy frigate will dock in Japan as a “commitment to freedom of the seas,” as Chancellor Scholz said. He was referring to those parts of the South China Sea claimed by China.

The extent to which a “new era“ is also taking place in Germany’s Asia policy was confirmed on Tuesday by the first visit to Taiwan by a member of the German government in 26 years.

Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (Liberal Democrat, FDP) visited the island to discuss cooperation on semiconductors, electric car batteries, hydrogen and artificial intelligence. The visit, which Stark-Watzinger said was closely coordinated with the chancellor’s office and the foreign ministry, was regarded as a deliberate provocation by Beijing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry protested sharply against this violation of the One China policy, to which Germany remains committed, at least in words.

The revival of the Berlin-Tokyo military axis confirms that NATO’s war in Ukraine is the prelude to a violent redivision of the world among the imperialist powers that will lead to a nuclear catastrophe if not stopped in time by a mass movement of the working class.

The Ukrainian war did not begin with Russia’s attack but with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and NATO’s systematic expansion eastward. Now, NATO is using the reactionary attack by the Putin regime to escalate the war. Its goal is not peace for Ukraine but the subjugation of Russia, with its huge reserves of raw materials, and the encirclement of China.

Japanese Prime Minister Kishida “spontaneously” traveled to Kiev immediately after the meeting with the German government to pay his respects to President Zelensky and demonstrate his full support for NATO’s war policy. He made a stopover in New Delhi to increase pressure on a reluctant Indian government to fully join the war front against Russia and China.

“You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours,” as the saying goes. Germany supports Japan, which is unwilling to accept China’s emergence as Asia’s dominant economic power; and Japan supports Germany, which sees the Ukraine war as an opportunity to emerge as Europe’s “leading power.”

It may seem a coincidence that Germany and Japan are allying once again. But geopolitics follows certain geographic patterns. Germany, as Europe’s dominant economic power, had sought to subjugate the continent during World War I and World War II; Japan forcibly subjugated large parts of East Asia for the same reason. Both eventually came into conflict with the United States, which would not allow competing world powers to emerge in Europe and East Asia.

US bombs Syria in defense of its illegal occupation

Bill Van Auken

The US Air Force carried out a series of strikes against targets in Syria’s eastern province of Deir Ezzor Thursday night, acts of illegal aggression to defend Washington’s criminal occupation of the country in defiance of Syrian sovereignty and international law.

According to the Pentagon, the bombing raids were ordered by US President Joe Biden after a drone struck a US military maintenance facility at the Kharab al-Jir military airport near the city of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, killing one military contractor and wounding five US military personnel along with another contractor.

US soldiers fire an M777 howitzer while deployed in Syria at Mission Support Site Conoco on December, 4, 2022. [Photo: US Department of Defense/ Army Sgt. Julio Hernandez]

US munitions fell on the Harabish neighborhood of the densely populated city of Deir Ezzor, as well as on the town of Al Mayadin and a target in the Al-Bukamal desert. The Pentagon claimed that the strikes hit “facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

Local residents, however, told Iranian and Lebanese media that the US missiles hit a grain depository and a rural development center. Iran’s state-run media stressed that no Iranian had been killed in the US strikes.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that the US bombings killed at least 11 militia members, including two Syrian citizens. Iran’s Press TV quoted local sources as saying that those killed in the American attacks were Syrian soldiers.

On Friday it was reported that the US military base near Hasakah came under rocket attack. White House national security spokesman John Kirby told the media that the missile caused no casualties.

Late Friday there were reports that rocket attacks continued against three US bases, with at least one more US soldier wounded, and that the US military was carrying out strikes using fighter jets and attack helicopters.

US military spokesmen have made it clear that further and bloodier American military attacks may be in the offing. Gen. Erik Kurilla, the chief of US Central Command, which oversees all US military forces in the region, told the US Armed Services Committee Thursday that they “are postured for scalable options” in supposed retaliation to “additional Iranian attacks.” For his part, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowed that Washington “will always respond at a time and place of our choosing.”

The attempts by the Biden administration, the military and the US media to present US strikes in Syria as “retaliatory” responses to “Iranian aggression” are fraudulent and cynical.

US forces are illegally occupying Syrian territory. Some 900 US troops, joined by an even greater number of US military contractors, are engaged in this occupation, supplemented by special forces rotated in an out of the country. They have been deployed in Syria’s northeastern oil fields, denying the war-ravaged country access to sorely needed energy supplies and at Al-Tanf in the south, impeding traffic along the strategically vital Baghdad to Damascus highway.

The criminal character of this occupation, along with Washington’s attempt to economically strangle the country with sanctions, has only been deepened by last month’s catastrophic Turkish-Syrian earthquake, which killed thousands of Syrians and forced millions from their homes.

Continued under the pretext of combatting the remnants of ISIS (Islamic State), the occupation is in reality directed against the Syrian government, the Iranian-backed militias and the Russian military, which together played decisive roles in ISIS’s defeat. ISIS was itself the product of the CIA-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria, in which Washington poured billions of dollars of arms and money into Al Qaeda-linked militias, fostering a conflict that killed hundreds of thousands and turned millions into refugees.

The US occupation is a continuation of this savage war. It is a violation of international law, sanctioned neither by the Syrian government nor the United Nations. Under these conditions, the armed actions of those resisting this occupation and seeking to drive the US out of Syria and restore the country’s sovereignty are entirely legitimate.

The occupation follows three decades of US imperialist military intervention in the region which decimated entire societies, not only in Syria, but in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen as well, killing and maiming millions.

It is also directed at supporting the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine by countering Russia, whose military intervened in support of Syria’s government in Damascus and remains deployed there. The threat of a direct military confrontation was underscored this week by allegations from the US military command that Russia has violated a previous agreement by flying armed jets over the Al Tanf US garrison every day during the month of March.

At the same time, Washington leans ever more heavily on its military presence in the Middle East to oppose China’s growing economic and political influence in the Middle East.

China has become the largest investor in the Middle East, while its total trade with the region far outstrips that of the United States. In 2021, China’s imports from the Middle East—largely oil and gas—were four times those of the US, $130 billion versus $34 billion; and Chinese exports were nearly triple those of American, $129 billion versus $48 billion. In 2021 alone, Chinese investments in the region increased by 360 percent.

Twenty years after the US launched its criminal war against Iraq, the country ranks among the top partners in China’s s Belt & Road Initiative, under a deal which trades the export of 100,000 barrels of Iraqi oil per day for major building projects funded by China.

It is hardly a coincidence that the sudden eruption of US “kinetic activity” in Syria has erupted in the wake of Beijing brokering a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia, which was previously a key ally of Washington in supporting the Al Qaeda-connected militias in Syria, and Iran, which backed Damascus against them.

The US military escalation also comes just days after the report that Syria and Saudi Arabia have reached an agreement to reestablish diplomatic ties, and after Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has made state visits to the United Arab Emirates and Oman, also both previously aligned with Washington in seeking his overthrow. One Arab government after another is resuming ties to Syria, despite intense US pressure.

Washington’s continued use of military force in the Middle East, in an attempt to offset the decline of US imperialism’s economic and political domination of the region, serves to expose the rank hypocrisy of all the propaganda about defending “human rights” and “national sovereignty” in Ukraine.

The proxy war being waged by the US and NATO against Russia represents a continuation and dangerous escalation of the decades of US military aggression against the peoples of Syria, Iraq and the rest of the region, whose sovereignty and human rights were laid waste by “shock and awe” bombardments, colonial-style occupation, massacres and torture.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), which has indicted President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal for Russia’s evacuation of children from war zones in Ukraine, has kept its lips sealed in relation to Washington’s flagrant violations of international law through its continued occupation and bombing of Syria, not to mention the more than 30 years of US imperialist crimes that preceded it.

Every US president over the past three decades deserves to be standing in the dock of a war crimes trial for the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, along with unilateral sanctions regimes that have claimed the lives of millions, and the criminal CIA assassination and torture programs.

Washington, which has refused to recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction, has gone so far as to enact legislation threatening to use military force against The Hague should the court attempt to try US military or political figures, while imposing sanctions like those used against terrorists and drug traffickers on ICC jurists for even daring to investigate charges of US war crimes in Afghanistan.

While the Pentagon has shifted its focus from the decades of wars of aggression in the Middle East to the preparation of new and potentially world-catastrophic nuclear wars against Russia and China, it still has the capacity to unleash massive violence against the peoples of Syria, Iran, Iraq and the rest of the region.