Amazon posts record $3.6 billion profit in first three months of 2019

Niles Niemuth

Amazon announced record first quarter profits on Thursday, more than doubling the amount made during the same period last year.

The international e-commerce and tech company is controlled by CEO Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest person in modern history, with a net worth that currently exceeds $150 billion. It pulled in $3.6 billion in profit in the first three months of the year out of $60 billion in global sales. This was up from $1.6 billion in profits out of $51 billion in sales in the first quarter last year.

While Amazon retail sales are growing more slowly than in the past, the company was able to increase its profit margin by increasing the exploitation of employees and expanding sales of its cloud computing and advertising services.

“Right now, we are on a nice path where we are getting the most of out of the capacity we have,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, boasted in a conference call with investors. He was referring to a four percent fall in the cost for fulfilling orders, due to declines in the number of new warehouses and fewer new workers.

Costs declined despite a much-heralded increase in the minimum wage for all Amazon workers in the US last year to $15 an hour. This wage increase, praised by Senator Bernie Sanders, turned out to be an accounting trick that has allowed Amazon to claw back stocks and other benefits from workers.

Amazon-owned distribution center in Kentucky

Despite these massive profits, Amazon’s accounting department has been able to utilize a variety of tax credits and tax breaks on executive stock options to pay no federal income taxes for the last two years. In 2018, Amazon received a rebate of $129 million, for an effecting tax rate of -1.2 percent. In 2017, Amazon received a rebate of $140 million, making its then effective tax rate -2.5 percent.

Since 2009, the second largest private employer in the United States has paid just 3 percent in income taxes on $27 billion in profits, well below the 21 percent corporate tax rate signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2017.

With its record breaking first quarter, Amazon is on track to top the $11.2 billion in profits that it made in 2018. However, this is not enough for Wall Street, which responded to the earnings report by holding the company’s stock steady for the day Thursday. The message is clear: the exploitation of workers in the US and around the world must be increased ever further to ensure an even bigger haul next quarter and every quarter thereafter.

On May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual International May Day Online Rally, with speakers and participants from throughout the world.

Amazon has promised that the pressure on its already hyper-exploited workers will increase with the announcement that it will transition from free two-day shipping for its Prime service subscribers to free one-day shipping.

“The one-day free shipping will come at a price to the employees,” Amazon whistleblower Shannon Allen told the World Socialist Web Site. “Coming soon to an Amazon [fulfillment center] near you: increased employee injuries, suicidal thoughts, increased anxiety and depression. And for the confident worker—isolation, increased productivity for the same amount of pay, less bathroom breaks, less water breaks, all while watching from your front-row station as your fellow employees get hauled away in the ambulance.”

“Speak up, have a backbone,” Allen appealed to Amazon workers. “That quote is written on the walls at Amazon. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

Amazon’s workers are already among the most physically exploited, with warehouse workers in the US earning an average annual salary of $28,000 while being expected to sort and pack products and boxes at extraordinary rates. Many workers have suffered debilitating injuries due to broken equipment, strain from repetitive movement and heat exhaustion. Workers report urinating in bottles at their work stations rather than miss time sorting packages by walking to and from the bathroom.

An analysis by The Verge of documents submitted by Amazon in a labor dispute with a former worker found that the company has established an almost entirely automated system for tracking and firing workers who fail to “make rate.” More than ten percent of the workforce at one warehouse in Baltimore, about 300 full-time employees, were fired simply for missing package quotas. Extrapolated to the entire workforce across the United States, this implies that thousands lose their jobs every year for not moving quickly enough.

Out of the sweated labor of hundreds of thousands of workers around the world, Bezos added $50 billion to his net worth in 2018, making more in one second, $2,950, than the average Amazon worker in India made in an entire year, $2,796. If Bezos’ $150 billion fortune were divided up equally among his employees, each one would get a bonus of $232,000.

Bezos used his fortune to purchase the Washington Post for $250 million cash in 2013, giving him a critical tool for influencing national politics and developments in the nation’s capital. Shortly after his purchase of the paper, Amazon won a $600 million contract with the CIA. The company is currently bidding for a $10 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Department of Defense and is planning to open its second headquarters in northern Virginia, just five minutes from the Pentagon.

With its ability to extract massive profits from a highly exploited global workforce, Amazon is becoming the model for companies around the world. Last month, Amazon and automaker Volkswagen announced a partnership to create an industrial cloud to “reinvent [VW’s] manufacturing and logistics processes.” The joint venture promises the “Amazonification” of the auto industry, with the further casualization of labor and the implementation of technologies that allow for ever more precise tracking and control of workers’ every movement.

Amid mass beheadings, Wall Street scrambles for Saudi profits

Bill Van Auken

The hideous public beheadings of 37 men in a single day in Saudi Arabia last Tuesday have provoked scant protest from Western governments or the corporate media.

The same newspapers and broadcast networks that have summoned up their moral outrage over abuses, both manufactured and real, by governments in Russia, China, Iran, Syria and Venezuela are clearly unmoved by these criminal executions. They maintain their stony silence even though those who were decapitated with swords included three young men who were arrested as minors, tortured into signing confessions and convicted of “terrorism” for daring to join protests against the country’s monarchical dictatorship.

One of those beheaded was Abdulkarem al-Hawaj, arrested when he was just 16 by Saudi security forces for attending a protest in the country’s Eastern Province, home to most of Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority population. Beginning in 2011, the oil-rich province has seen protests over the systematic discrimination and oppression against Shias at the hands of a monarchy whose rule is bound up with the official state-sponsored religious doctrine of Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative Sunni sect.

Abdulkarem’s real “crime” was apparently the fact that he used social media to encourage participation in a demonstration. He was held in solitary confinement, beaten, tortured with electric cables and hung in chains by his wrists until he submitted to signing a false confession.

Also murdered in the barbaric execution spree was Mujtaba al-Sweikat, who was 17 when he was arrested at an airport as he was about to board a plane to the United States, where he was to become a student at Western Michigan University. His crime was also daring to demonstrate against the Saudi royal dictatorship.

His father, who represented him at his sham trial, accused the state of creating the “illusion” of a “terrorist cell” where none existed. “He was subjected to psychological and physical abuse which drained his strength,” Sweikat’s father told the court. “The interrogator dictated the confession to Sweikat and forced him to sign it so that the torture would stop. He signed it.”

As in all the other cases, the court ignored the evidence of torture and forced confessions and imposed the sentence of death by decapitation already dictated by the House of Saud.

The US government has said next to nothing about these atrocities. A State Department spokesman issued a boilerplate statement allowing that “We have seen these reports. We urge the government of Saudi Arabia, and all governments, to ensure trial guarantees, freedom from arbitrary and extrajudicial detention, transparency, rule of law, and freedom of religion and belief.”

During the same two days after the Saudi public beheadings, which included the crucifixion of one of the victims and the display of a severed head on a pike to intimidate anyone thinking of opposing the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the US State Department managed to churn out statements condemning Russia for “gross human rights violations” in Chechnya; Venezuela for use of “intimidation and imprisonment” against the US-funded right-wing opposition; and Havana for acting to “suppress the human rights of the Cuban people.”

Washington’s patent indifference to the mass executions in Saudi Arabia exposes the cynicism and hypocrisy of all of US imperialism’s “human rights” pretensions and its feigned outrage over alleged crimes carried out by governments it views as strategic rivals or ones it is seeking to overthrow. The United States has long counted Saudi Arabia as a pillar of imperialist domination and reaction in the Middle East, and the Obama administration exhibited a similar reaction to the mass execution of 47 men in January 2016.

But just as blatant as the complicity of the US government with the crimes of the Saudi regime is the embrace of the bloody monarchical dictatorship by Wall Street and global finance capital.

In October of last year, a significant number of Wall Street moguls and chiefs of international finance houses canceled their trips to an annual Saudi investment conference known as “Davos in the Desert.” The gathering—which was attended by lower-ranking operatives of their firms—came just weeks after the brutal murder and dismemberment of the well known Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul.

A regime insider who had served as an aide to the Saudi intelligence chief and a semi-official interlocutor between the House of Saud and the Western media before falling out with Riyadh, Khashoggi’s grim fate at the hands of a Saudi military and intelligence death squad was traced by the CIA and other intelligence agencies directly to an order given by Crown Prince bin Salman.

While the death of the well-placed journalist, who had been given a column in the Washington Post after going into self-exile in the US, elicited a brief period of attention and protests from the US media and politicians, six months have passed, and the crime has largely been forgotten. US officials speak vaguely about the need for “accountability” while studiously ignoring that the author of the grisly assassination is none other than their closest ally, bin Salman.

Six months was more than enough time for Wall Street to cast aside any inhibitions and jump with both feet into the latest Saudi “Financial Sector Conference,” which convened at the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center. While its opening came in the immediate wake of the mass executions, the conference center is miles away from Riyadh’s Deera Square where the executioners hack off heads with swords, so the Wall Street CEOs did not have to worry about staining their Prada shoes with blood.

On May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual International May Day Online Rally, with speakers and participants from throughout the world.

The mood at the conference was a reprise of the giddy reception that bin Salman received during his visit the US just a year ago, when he was embraced as a visionary and “reformer” by billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah Winfrey.

HSBC’s John Flint

“We are excited about the role that we can play here,” HSBC CEO John Flint told this week’s Riyadh conference. “This is an economy we have a lot of confidence in. I think the future is bright.”

He boasted that a number of former HSBC bankers had joined the head-chopping Saudi regime. “That’s been a privilege of ours, to see so many of our ex-colleagues actually in the audience and serving their country now.”

Among the others attending at the conference were BlackRock Inc’s CEO Larry Fink, JPMorgan’s chief executive officer Daniel Pinto, the World Bank’s vice president for development finance Akihiko Nishio, as well as representatives of various other banks and hedge funds.

BlackRock’s Fink was among the most effusive. He brushed aside any qualms about the hideous crimes of the Saudi regime, which include not only this week’s mass executions and the assassination of Khashoggi, but the near-genocidal US-backed war that has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis and brought millions to the brink of starvation.

“The fact that there are issues in the press does not tell me I must run away from a place. In many cases, it tells me I should run to and invest because what we are most frightened of are things that we don’t talk about,” he stated, uttering not a word more about the “things we don’t talk about.”

The magnet pulling in all of the finance capitalist parasites is Saudi Arabia’s state-run oil company, Aramco, whose income equals that of the five biggest energy conglomerates in the world and tops the combined net profits of Apple and Google.

Many of the banks and finance houses represented in Riyadh, including JPMorgan, HSBC, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, participated this month in Aramco’s floating of $12 billion worth of bonds.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih told the conference in Riyadh that Aramco’s bond sale was “only the beginning,” holding out the prospect that the oil giant may go for an initial public offering (IPO) as early as next year.

“There will be more,” he added. “I won’t tell you what and when, and it won’t be bonds only. Aramco sooner than you think will be accessing equity markets.”

Blackrock’s Larry Fink

Blackrock’s Fink, who described “reforms” by the Saudi monarchy as “amazing,” said he saw “very large opportunities” across the Middle East, insisting that the region is “becoming more secure.”

To describe the Middle East, after a quarter-century of US imperialist wars that have killed millions and shattered entire societies, as “more secure” is delusional.

No doubt for Fink and his fellow financial oligarchs the mass beheadings of “terrorists”--a synonym for agitators, troublemakers and dissidents--is not a problem, but rather an attraction. They feel that the defense of their vast wealth under conditions of unprecedented social inequality and an increasingly combative working class will require similar measures at home and abroad.

GM continues tax avoidance schemes while it slashes thousands of jobs

George Kirby 

In the past decade since the federal bailout of US car companies, automaker General Motors has extorted billions in tax cuts and credits from all levels of government, despite raking in massive profits.

These tax benefits have saved automakers billions while starving the public treasury of revenue. As reported by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy 60 Fortune 500 corporations nationally paid $0 in federal taxes in 2018 despite billions in profits. GM paid no taxes on its reported $4.3 billion in profits.

Meanwhile, in the midst of downsizing, including the closure of five plants in North America, GM and other major corporations are continuing buybacks of stocks instead of investing in new plants and equipment.

In February of this year US corporations carried out $770 billion in stock buybacks as reported by Goldman Sachs, the leading global investment bank, with the GM board of directors authorizing $14 billion in stock buybacks.

According to one report, GM paid just $18 million in federal taxes between 2010 and 2016, while recording $50 billion in profits, an effective tax rate of some .036 percent.

In tax year 2017, GM had $8.6 billion in future tax credits on its books carried forward from losses prior to the 2009 bankruptcy. Federal tax laws allow companies to carry forward losses suffered in prior years, reducing or eliminating current tax liabilities. In the case of GM it carried over losses from the period prior to the 2009 bailout by the US treasury. Further, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 enacted by the Trump administration entailed a massive lowering of the corporate tax rate, already one of the lowest in the world, from 35 to 21 percent.

At the same time GM and other Detroit-based automakers have pocketed state tax credits, designed to supposedly preserve jobs. In 2015, Detroit automakers began restructuring programs, reducing investments and implementing other forms of cost cutting. In November 2018 GM announced the closure of five factories in North America and the elimination of some 14,000 jobs.

In the state of Michigan, MEGA [Michigan Economic Growth Authority] tax credits were issued in the mid-1990s to GM in order to supposedly maintain jobs in the state. A MEGA credit is worth 100 percent of a state’s personal income tax rate multiplied by the actual wages and benefit costs on new or retained jobs. If the credit exceeds the tax owed, the company receives a refund. Additionally the credit could be received for 20 years.

In 2009 Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm gave GM a tax credit of $1.07 billion over 20 years that was tied to preserving 20,000 jobs and making $2.5 billion in capital investments. During contract negotiations between the United Auto Workers and GM in 2015, the automaker agreed to a continuation of tax credits by the Michigan Economic Development Corp (MEDC) from 2015-2029.

While MEGA was advertised as a tax break to retain jobs, the auto companies never the less wiped out tens of thousands of jobs while attacks on wages and working conditions continued. Despite the recent massive layoffs, GM is still eligible for the full tax credit. Two of GM’s recently announced plant closures are in Michigan, including the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant and its Warren transmission plant. GM has also slashed thousands of engineering and other white-collar jobs in the state.

As reported by Automotive News, “By July 2014, GM's remaining tax credits were worth $2.1 billion, the last public disclosure of their value made by MEDC, according to state records.”

On May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual International May Day Online Rally, with speakers and participants from throughout the world.

Aware of the anger this would generate, the administration of Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed a non-disclosure agreement in December of 2015 to prevent the amount of the tax breaks from being made public.

In the meantime, attempts by the legislature to force disclosure of the amount of the tax credits have failed.

Similar deals were struck in other states. The Job Retention Credit and Job Creation Credit enacted in Ohio under Democratic Governor Ted Strickland required GM to retain 3,700 jobs and create another 200 jobs by 2010 in Lordstown. Under these requirements GM received $46 million in “retention” and $14 million in “job creation” credits through 2018.

However, the claim that these tax credits were a job creation or retention mechanism is bogus.

The Lordstown GM plant is an example. According to one report GM received over $60 million in tax credits from the state of Ohio over the past decade to supposedly keep jobs at the Lordstown plant, which closed in March.

The policy of tax handouts to the auto companies has dovetailed with the concessions policy of the United Auto Workers based on the lie that workers have common interests with the employers.

For over 40 years, the UAW sought to sabotage and curtail working class struggle, gutting wages and creating myriad joint union-management committees to increase productivity and undermine working conditions, claiming this was necessary to boost corporate “competitiveness” and undercut the overseas rivals of US carmakers.

With The UAW national contracts set to expire in September, workers are determined to regain ground lost in the 2015 contracts that saw the implementation of further concessions, including maintenance of the two-tier system and a vast expansion of the number of super-exploited temporary part-time workers.

Despite billions of dollars in tax credits, GM and other carmakers are set to continue their assault on jobs and wages, using the threat to jobs as a bludgeon to blackmail workers. Meanwhile, all levels of government are continuing to impose cuts to social services, claiming “there is no money.”

This scandalous situation is another demonstration of the incompatibility of a system based on private ownership and private profit with the essential needs of the working class, the vast majority in society.

Leaked documents implicate French government in war crimes in Yemen

Kumaran Ira

Disclose, an independent investigative media, published on April 15 a devastating report exposing France’s role in the Saudi-led coalition’s war crimes in Yemen. The coalition has massacred thousands of civilians in operations using weapons supplied by France, Britain, the United States and other countries. Yet top French officials continued to deny this in public, issuing bald-faced lies contradicted by their own intelligence briefings.

On Wednesday, Disclose and its partners, including Radio France, Mediapart, Arte Info and Konbini revealed that the state is moving to prosecute those who helped expose these crimes. Police summoned two Disclose journalists and one Radio France journalist for questioning over the revelations.

Disclose’s report cites a classified 15-page French military intelligence (DRM) report dated September 25, 2018. The report provides overwhelming evidence that French-made artillery, tanks and laser-guided missile systems were used against civilians in a war that has turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian disaster zone.

The DRM report, titled “Yemen: security situation” was given to President Emmanuel Macron for a defence council meeting at the Élysée presidential palace on October 3, 2018. The report covers French weapons sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), both involved in the war in Yemen, even mapping out the positioning of French-made weapons on the Saudi-Yemeni border. Macron’s foreign and defence ministers, Jean-Yves Le Drian and Florence Parly, were both present at the Élysée briefing.

The DRM report states that CAESAR howitzers, one of the most powerful weapons made by French state-owned company Nexter Systems, were deployed along the Saudi-Yemeni border. This howitzer can fire six shells per minute up to 42 kilometres. The DRM report includes a map titled “Population under threat of bombs” which, Disclose writes, “shows where 48 CAESAR guns are positioned close to the Saudi-Yemeni border, their turrets facing three different zones in Yemen, in which are located towns, villages, farms and farmers’ hamlets.”

The DRM report states CAESARs were likely used to “back up loyalist troops and Saudi armed forces in their progression into Yemeni territory.” That is, French-made guns were used to bombard Yemeni territory to prepare a Saudi invasion.

CAESAR heavy artillery is shelling zones in Yemen inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people, according to the DRM. It states, “The population concerned by potential artillery fire: 436,370 people.” Based on data from the NGO Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), Disclose writes: “Between March 2016 and December 2018, a total of 35 civilians were killed in 52 bombardments localised within the range of the CAESARs. On June 14th 2018, Saudi ‘artillery fire’ in the north of the country left two children dead and several adults wounded.”

Fully aware of the mounting death toll from the Saudi-led coalition’s indiscriminate attacks, Paris kept selling CAESARs to Riyadh. The report states, “No less than 129 CAESARs are due to be delivered to Saudi Arabia between now and 2023.” Using satellite images and open-source information, Disclose traced the itinerary of one of these deliveries from the French port of Le Havre to Saudi port of Jeddah in September 2018.

Disclose said satellite images, video and civilian photographs showed French Leclerc tanks were used in coalition offensives, including the November 2018 battle for the rebel-held port of Hodeidah. According to ACLED, they were responsible for 55 civilian deaths. French-made Mirage 2000-9 fighter planes, Cougar transport helicopters, the A330 MRTT refueling plane and two French-built warships were also involved in the offensive.

The DRM report also indicates that a new Paris-Riyadh arms deal, codenamed ARTIS, was agreed at the end of last year. This exposes as lies official denials that any such deal was in discussion.

On October 30, 2018, Parly told news channel BFM-TV: “We have no ongoing negotiations with Saudi Arabia.”

The contents of the DRM report expose this as a lie, Disclose notes: “But at that very same date, the French government was involved in negotiations over the final details of the contract with Saudi Arabia, which covered a period lasting up to 2023.” Under the ARTIS contract, France will deliver equipment, including Titus armoured infantry carriers, one of Nexter’s newest products, and the 105LG towed howitzer, from 2019 to 2024.

On May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual International May Day Online Rally, with speakers and participants from throughout the world.

The signing of the ARTIS contract requires approval from the Macron administration. Disclose writes, “Before signing a contract such as ARTIS, Nexter was required to first obtain an export licence from France’s general directorate of armament, the DGA, which is part of the defence ministry. Subsequently, such contracts must be approved by the CIEEMG, a special commission that sits under the authority of the French prime minister’s office.”

In its decision, the CIEEMG supposedly considers “the internal situation of the country that is the final destination [of the weapons], and also of its practices regarding the respect of human rights.”

The French bourgeoisie’s human rights propaganda is a lying political cover for a policy of war and the enrichment of French defence contractors via mass killings and terror. Since the Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen’s civil war in 2015 to fight Shiite Houthi rebels it accuses of ties to Iran, Saudi Arabia has imposed sanctions and blockaded Yemen, provoking the world’s gravest humanitarian crisis. Nearly 14 million people are on the brink of starvation as the Red Sea blockade blocks supplies of food, fuel and medicine destined for more than 20 million Yemenis.

Since launching the war, the coalition has carried out an unrelenting onslaught of airstrikes in Yemen. According to the DRM, the coalition has carried out 24,000 air strikes since 2015, including 6,000 in 2018. These attacks caused at least 8,000 civilian deaths.

France has denied playing any role in these strikes. On February 13, speaking before the foreign affairs commission of France’s National Assembly, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian insisted, “We supply nothing to the Saudi air force.”

The DRM report exposes his comment as a lie, reporting that Saudi fighter-bomber aircraft are equipped with the Damocles laser-guided system made by the French defence firm Thales.

Parly publicly claimed that the French government wants to end the Red Sea blockade. On October 30, 2018, she told BFM-TV: “It is a priority for France that humanitarian aid can get through.”

This was another lie, as Parly had received evidence that French-made warships participate in the naval blockade starving millions of Yemenis, and in the shelling of the Yemeni coast.

In addition to serving its geostrategic interests, French imperialism’s weapons sales are aimed above all at the working class. Even as it covertly armed the Saudi royals, Paris was openly providing billions of euros in arms to Egypt’s bloody military dictatorship, which seized power in 2013 via a coup targeting revolutionary struggles of the working class, gunning down thousands in the streets. Macron himself personally visited Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last month.

This implicates the Macron regime in repression of the Egyptian workers via killings and torture of tens of thousands of political prisoners. In a recent report, Amnesty International stated that “armoured vehicles were used by Egyptian security forces to disperse peaceful sit-ins across the country violently,” adding: “French vehicles were not merely assisting the security forces, but were themselves tools of repression, playing a very active role in the crushing of dissent.”

As it carries out unprecedented mass arrests of ‘yellow vest’ protesters in France itself, the Macron administration is desperate to hide its political criminality from the public. It is continuing to lie to the public about its knowledge of its own participation in war crimes in Yemen.

“To my knowledge, French weapons are not being used in an offensive capacity in the war in Yemen,” Parly told Radio Classique last week in response to the revelations of Disclose. “I do not have any evidence that would lead me to believe that French arms are behind civilian victims in Yemen,” she boldly lied.

UN official visits Julian Assange, investigating Ecuador’s illegal surveillance

Mike Head 

The United Nations special rapporteur on the right to privacy, Joe Cannataci, was finally permitted yesterday to meet with Julian Assange inside London’s Belmarsh prison.

The WikiLeaks journalist and publisher has been held virtually incommunicado, in denial of his fundamental legal and democratic rights, since the British police dragged him out of Ecuador’s embassy more than two weeks ago.

This has become a global battle for free speech and the right of the public to know the truth about the crimes being committed by governments and their state agencies around the world.

Assange is being persecuted, and subjected to an unprecedented legal assault, for publishing millions of secret documents exposing political conspiracies and corporate crimes. Without this extraordinary record of authentic investigative journalism since 2006, this information would have remained suppressed.

Confronted by worldwide protests and petitions against the illegal termination of Assange’s political asylum and the immediate launching of proceedings to extradite Assange to the US, the British government felt compelled to grant the UN access. Cannataci became the first person allowed into Belmarsh prison to visit Assange, who has even been denied his right to speak to his family.

For weeks, the UN has been investigating the blanket surveillance conducted by Ecuador’s government against Assange inside its embassy.

On April 10, WikiLeaks revealed that hundreds of thousands of documents, audio recordings, videos and photos were taken in the embassy. Assange was arrested the very next day, preventing a scheduled April 25 visit by Cannataci.

Ecuadorian officials spied on every aspect of Assange’s life for more than a year, including his medical consultations and confidential meetings with his lawyers. The obvious purpose of this illegal operation was to gather or concoct evidence that the Trump administration could use to indict and extradite Assange on manufactured conspiracy and espionage charges.

Outside the prison yesterday, Cannataci told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “There are strong indications that some elements of his privacy may have been breached.” He added: “The case is important because it concerns a very special set of circumstances where a person who is not formally under detention yet was subjected to surveillance.”

Having met with Assange for two hours, the UN special envoy reported that Assange was “in fairly good shape and certainly very cogent in replying to our questions.” This is another indication of Assange’s defiant determination to fight his removal to the US, despite the damage done to his health by his seven-year confinement inside the Ecuadorian embassy.

Interviewed by the Italian newspaper Repubblica, Cannataci pointed to the far-reaching nature of the spying. He said he was seeking access to the material currently held by the Spanish police, who are investigating an attempt to extort WikiLeaks for copies of the documents and videos.

“If and when my access is granted, that evidence might consist of thousands of hours of surveillance footage, which will take some time to watch.”

The UN rapporteur agreed with the Repubblica journalist, Stefania Maurizi, that the spying operation against Assange threatened an entire range of human rights, including lawyer-client confidentiality. “[T]here are many dimensions to the case, including freedom of expression, including whistleblowing, protection of journalistic sources,” he said.

The UN is investigating whether Ecuador violated Assange’s privacy under two cornerstones of international law—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—by placing him under strict surveillance.

On May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual International May Day Online Rally, with speakers and participants from throughout the world.

Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer representing Assange, an Australian citizen, said in a statement that his legal team welcomed the UN’s continued engagement in the case. “It is a matter of grave concern that Ecuador expelled Mr Assange from the embassy before the scheduled UN visit could take place,” she said.

Robinson said the legal team had also requested a visit to Assange by the UN special rapporteur on torture. She recalled that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had ruled in late 2015 that Assange was “arbitrarily detained,” as a result of having to remain in the embassy to protect himself from US extradition, and called for his release.

Chelsea Manning, the courageous whistleblower who leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video and many thousands of incriminating US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, has been held in solitary confinement for over six weeks because she has refused to give perjured testimony against Assange before a Grand Jury. Her continued detention is a transparent attempt to force her to cooperate in the US-led vendetta against Assange.

If Assange is dispatched to the US on bogus computer hacking charges, he will soon face additional charges, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or the death penalty. This would set an international precedent for the jailing of journalists everywhere who expose government crimes and wrongdoing.

Since Assange’s arrest, numerous corporate publications have lined up directly behind this offensive. They have brazenly used Ecuador’s video footage and other illegal surveillance material to repeat the personal smears against Assange fabricated by the corrupt Ecuadorian regime to justify its termination of his political asylum.

These lies and slanders against Assange are in contrast to the immense support that he enjoys among the millions of workers, students and young people internationally who regard him and Manning as heroes. The mass opposition to Assange’s persecution must be transformed into a political movement to prevent his extradition and secure his freedom. The WSWS and the Socialist Equality Parties (SEP) around the world are playing a central role in this decisive fight.

Over the past 18 months, the SEP (Australia) has held a series of rallies, demanding that the Australian government immediately fulfil its obligations to Assange, as an Australian citizen, by securing his return to Australia, with a guarantee against extradition to the US.

Another rally, aimed at placing this demand at the centre of the May 18 Australian federal election, will be held in Sydney this Saturday, followed by meetings in a number of cities.

The SEP in the UK has taken part in protests and vigils calling for an all-out mobilisation against the moves to extradite Assange. It will participate in a London public meeting, called by the Julian Assange Defence Committee, today.

This crucial struggle is entirely bound up with the fight for genuine socialism. As the all-out assault on Assange and Manning by governments and the corporate media conglomerates demonstrates, securing fundamental democratic rights requires nothing less than the worldwide transformation of society by the working class to meet social needs, not the profit interests of the financial aristocracy.

New study documents over 1,600 killed in US siege of Raqqa, Syria

Bill Van Auken

“Indiscriminate” US air strikes and artillery bombardment of the Syrian city of Raqqa between June and October of 2017 claimed the lives of at least 1,600 civilians according to a comprehensive new report issued jointly by the human rights group Amnesty International and the conflict monitoring organization Airwars.

The real death toll is unquestionably far higher—reports from Raqqa residents place it at over 3,000. The 1,600 figure provided by Amnesty and Airwars is based upon extensive corroborating evidence, including the naming of 1,000 of the victims and Amnesty’s verification of the deaths of 641 of these named casualties during two months of investigation and interviews on the ground in Raqqa.

Image courtesy of Amnesty International

Thus far, the US-led “coalition” that has carried out the nearly five-year-long war in Iraq and Syria in the name of combating the Islamic State (ISIS) has admitted to killing just 159 civilians in the four-month siege of Raqqa—less than one-tenth the number of fatalities verified by the new report.

The Pentagon’s figure is ludicrous on its face. The city was subjected to a relentless bombardment that left at least 11,218 buildings destroyed, over 70 percent of the city in ruins. Both ISIS, and more decisively, the US bombing campaign, cut off escape routes for civilians trying to flee the carnage.

The campaign recalls nothing so much as the infamous statement of a Vietnam War-era US officer that “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” In this case, however, it was a city inhabited since remote antiquity, with a population of over 220,000 before the onset of the US-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria.

In addition to the tens of thousands of munitions dropped on Raqqa by US and allied warplanes, the report cites the boasting of a US military official that US Marine Corps units fired some 30,000 artillery rounds into the city during the siege—the equivalent of one strike every six minutes over the course of four straight months. The rounds fired by the Marines’ 155mm howitzers into Raqqa’s crowded urban neighborhoods have a targeting margin of error of 100 meters, roughly the length of an American football field. The use of such an indiscriminate weapon in a populated city itself constitutes a war crime.

The report includes an interactive web site Rhetoric versus Reality: How the ‘most precise air campaign in history’ left Raqqa the most destroyed city in modern times providing photographs, videos, 360-degree views of the devastation, satellite imagery and gut-wrenching testimony of civilians who survived the US bombardment.

The report quotes Munira Hashish, whose family lived in Dara’iya, a low-income neighborhood in western Raqqa. While the family made repeated attempts to flee the city, it lost 18 members over a two-week period in August 2017. Nine of them were killed in a coalition air strike, seven died trying to flee down a road that had been mined by ISIS and two more were killed in a mortar attack by the US proxy ground troops of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

“Those who stayed died and those who tried to run away died. We couldn’t afford to pay the smugglers; we were trapped,” Munira Hashish said.

What remained of the family, she said, managed to escape “by walking over the blood of those who were blown up as they tried to flee ahead of us.”

Ayat Mohammed Jasem spoke of a September 25, 2017 airstrike that destroyed an entire five-story residential building, killing 32 civilians, including 20 children and virtually her entire family.

“Planes were bombing and rockets were falling 24 hours a day,” she said. “I saw my son die, burnt in the rubble in front of me. I’ve lost everyone who was dear to me. My four children, my husband, my mother, my sister, my whole family. Wasn’t the goal to free the civilians? They were supposed to save us, to save our children.”

Taha Mohammed Othman recounted arriving at the scene of a June 28, 2017 airstrike that destroyed his family’s apartment building, where they had sought to hide in the basement from unrelenting shelling:

“The first thing that I saw when I went to the collapsed building was my brother—Mohammed Mahmoud Othman [50]. He was dead. Then I saw his son, 17-year-old Mahmoud, trapped under a pillar. We tried but we couldn’t drag the pillar off him. Then I saw his 12-year-old brother Anas, who was dead. I couldn’t see their sister Amal, 13, but I could hear her. My brother’s wife Fatima was in there as well. I didn’t see her but later we dug out her body and buried her.”

In the crowded central Raqqa neighborhood of Harat al-Badu, Mohammed told Amnesty investigators how an October 3, 2017 airstrike wiped out his entire family. The attack came in the final days of the siege, after the US military and the SDF had already reached a deal with ISIS allowing 4,000 of its fighters and family members to flee the city. Mohammed lost his wife Aya and their two young daughters, as well as his father and mother, his sister, her husband and their four children.

On May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual International May Day Online Rally, with speakers and participants from throughout the world.

“I was with my family less than two hours before the strike,” he said. “We were all sheltering in the same apartment—but I left to help an injured neighbor. At about 10.30 other neighbors came to inform me that my entire family had been killed. I ran to the building and found it collapsed. Almost everyone was dead; only my brother was still alive—the explosion had thrown him across the road.

“My neighbors and I dug in the rubble with our bare hands. We had no tools. I found my daughters’ bodies—Rimas and Kafah. Kafah was only 11 days old. I buried them in a nearby house. My brother was left paralyzed. A year has passed but I have not been able to get a wheelchair for him. I have asked many organizations, but none has helped. My brother remains confined to bed.”

Ahmad, a resident of the Darai’ya neighborhood of Raqqa described the terror of a June 10, 2017 US artillery bombardment:

“The first artillery shell landed right behind the house where I was. Instinctively I fled across the road to the home of another relative, but the next shell struck that house, killing Mahmoud and his grandson; more shells hit other houses nearby. One killed two women and two children; another killed Ibrahim, his baby son, and his friend Rahmoun; another killed Hisham, and another still killed the daughters of Hsein Kenjo. It all happened in the space of a few minutes. The shells struck one after the other. It was indescribable, it was like the end of the world—the noise, people screaming. If I live 100 years I won’t forget this carnage.”

Among the survivors of this attack was 11-year-old Fatima Hussein Ahmad, who described how she lost her mother, Aziza, and her three younger sisters in the artillery barrage that morning. “I was thrown over there by the explosion,” she told Amnesty International. She lost her right leg and her left leg was badly injured and she still cannot stand on it, almost two years later. She uses a wheelchair donated by an NGO to get around and her only wish is to go to school, a wish that is denied to most of Raqqa’s children, with the majority of the city’s schools destroyed.

A spokesman for the US-led “coalition” insisted that the testimony of the survivors of the attack was “non-credible” and that “there is insufficient evidence to find that civilians were harmed in this strike.”

An equally horrific artillery strike took place in the same neighborhood a month later, on July 16, 2017, killing five women, six children and one man, with the youngest victim seven months old and the oldest 55. A man who lost his wife and three daughters in the attack—with two other children, ages six and 10 suffering terrible injuries—told Amnesty that there was no way to get away from the shelling.

“With all due respect, how did they know who they were hitting? They don’t even know our neighborhood or the people they hit and killed,” he said.

Amnesty and Airwars called upon the Pentagon and its anti-ISIS “coalition” to “end their denial about the shocking scale of civilian deaths and destruction caused by their offensive in Raqqa.” They appealed for “transparency” and for the US military to establish “an independent, impartial mechanism to investigate all reports of civilian harm, including violations of international humanitarian law, and make the findings public.”

That these appeals will fall on deaf ears goes without saying. The cover-ups and lies about what the former US defense secretary, Gen. James Mattis, described as a war of “annihilation” extend well beyond Raqqa. In Mosul, once a city of two million in Iraq, the devastation was equal if not greater, with an estimate by Iraqi Kurdish intelligence putting the number of civilian victims as high as 40,000.

The lies extend not only to the scale of the carnage unleashed by US imperialism in its latest Middle East war, but also its purpose. Washington’s strategic aim has never been that of “annihilating ISIS,” itself the product of the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, followed by Washington’s utilization of Islamist fighters as proxy ground forces in the regime-change wars in both Libya and Syria.

Rather than fighting “terrorism,” US imperialism’s central strategic objectives remain what they have been for decades: consolidating US hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East and preparing for war against the principal obstacles to this goal, Iran, Russia and China.

These predatory aims are the source of war crimes that over the past quarter century have claimed “collateral damage” that includes the lives of millions of Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Yemeni civilians.

It is certain that the devastating report issued by Amnesty and Airwars will be essentially ignored by the same US corporate media that churned out endless propaganda for a “humanitarian” war to oust the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. A similar silence will inevitably be observed by the various pseudo-left organizations that portrayed the CIA-orchestrated war in Syria as a “revolution”, while demanding a far more aggressive US intervention.

US-backed Saudi regime beheads 37 political prisoners

Bill Van Auken

The monarchical dictatorship of Saudi Arabia announced on Tuesday that it had carried out another killing spree, publicly executing 37 people in the cities of Riyadh, Medina and Mecca, as well as in central Qassim Province and in the kingdom’s Eastern Province.

One of the headless corpses was then crucified and left hanging in public as a hideous warning to anyone who would even contemplate opposing the absolute power of the ruling royal family.

The regime announced that those who were brought into public squares to be decapitated with swords had been punished “for adopting terrorist and extremist thinking and for forming terrorist cells to corrupt and destabilize security.”

In Saudi Arabia, an antiterrorism law adopted in 2017 defines as a “terrorist” anyone “disturbing public order,” “shaking the security of the community and the stability of the State” or “exposing its national unity to danger.” The law essentially provides the death penalty for anyone daring to criticize the Saudi monarchy or its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Under bin Salman, the Trump administration’s closest ally in the Arab world, the number of executions has doubled. While last year, the regime beheaded 149 people, it has already chopped off the heads of 105 people in 2019.

It is known that at least 33 of the 37 put to death this week were Saudi Shias. In the case of 14 of them, their alleged “crimes” stemmed from the mass protests that swept Saudi Arabia’s predominantly Shiite Eastern Province in 2011, expressing popular demands for democratic reforms and an end to the discrimination and oppression of the Shiite population at the hands of a Sunni monarchy, whose rule is bound up with the official, state-sponsored religious doctrine of Wahhabism, an ultraconservative Sunni sect.

Another 11 were accused of spying for Iran.

None of these individuals were allowed to speak to lawyers during investigations that were carried out by means of torture. They were denied visits from their families and kept in solitary confinement during these ordeals, and were sentenced to death in sham mass trials that lacked even a modicum of due process.

The barbaric mass state murders carried out by the regime in Riyadh constituted a calculated political act driven by both domestic and international objectives. Its immediate aim is to intimidate the Shia minority, which constitutes approximately 15 percent of the population and is concentrated in the Eastern Province, a key oil-producing region.

At least three of those put to death were minors at the time of their alleged offenses, making their executions a flagrant violation of international law barring the death penalty for children.

Abdulkarim al-Hawaj, was 16 when he was arrested and charged with participating in demonstrations and using social media to incite opposition to the monarchy. He also was alleged to have helped make banners with slogans denouncing the regime. He was convicted based on a confession extracted through torture, including electric shocks and being held with his hands chained above his head.

Salman Qureish was arrested just after his 18th birthday for alleged crimes that took place when he was a juvenile. Denied his basic legal rights, he was sentenced to death in a mass trial.

Mujtaba al-Sweikat, arrested at 17 and executed Tuesday in Saudi Arabia

Mujtaba al-Sweikat was 17 when he was arrested at King Fahd International Airport, grabbed as he prepared to board a plane to the United States to begin life as a student at Western Michigan University. He was severely tortured and beaten, including on the soles of his feet, until he provided his torturers with a confession.

The faculty at Western Michigan University issued a statement in 2017 in response to the news of al-Sweikat’s imprisonment:

“As academics and teachers, we take pride in defending the rights of all people, wherever they may be in the world, to speak freely and debate openly without hindrance or fear. We publicly declare our support for Mujtaba'a and the 13 others facing imminent execution. No one should face beheading for expressing beliefs in public protests.

“Mujtaba'a showed great promise as an applicant for English language and pre-finance studies. He was arrested at the airport gates as he readied to board a plane to visit our campus. We were unaware that at the moment we were ready to welcome him, he was locked away, beaten and tortured and made to 'confess' to acts for which he was condemned to death.”

On May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding its annual International May Day Online Rally, with speakers and participants from throughout the world.

The Saudi regime, headed by its de facto ruler Prince Mohammed bin Salman, ignored this protest along with others from United Nations and human rights organizations, convinced that it enjoys absolute impunity based upon the support it enjoys from Washington.

The bloodbath organized by the Saudi regime on Tuesday was the largest since 2016, when it beheaded 47 men in a single day, including the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqral-Nimr, a leading spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s oppressed Shiite minority. The state killings touched off angry protests in the region, including in Tehran, where crowds stormed the Saudi embassy. The furor was seized upon by Riyadh as the pretext for breaking diplomatic relations with Tehran and escalating its anti-Iranian campaign throughout the Middle East.

Since then, relentless repression in the Eastern Province has been joined with the near-genocidal war that is being waged by Saudi-led forces against Yemen, claiming the lives of at least 80,000 Yemenis and leaving more than 24 million people—80 per cent of the population—in need of humanitarian assistance, many of them on the brink of starvation.

The Sunni monarchy views the rise of the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a potential threat to its own internal situation, fearing that it could inspire the oppressed Shia population to revolt.

The main responsibility for the crimes of the Saudi regime rests with its principal patron, US imperialism. The savage monarchy in Saudi Arabia, with its public beheadings, is not merely some remnant of feudal backwardness. It is rather the direct product of US imperialist intervention in the Middle East, from the concessions secured by Texaco and Standard Oil in the 1930s and 1940s to the current massive arms sales that make the Saudi monarchy today’s number one customer of the US military-industrial complex.

Washington has responded to the mass beheadings in Saudi Arabia with a deafening silence. While the day before the beheadings were announced, the State Department issued a statement in connection with its severe tightening of punishing sanctions against Iran, demanding that it “respect the rights of its people,” there was no such appeal to Riyadh, much less any condemnation of minors having their heads chopped off in public squares.

The Pentagon and the CIA are full partners in the Saudi monarchy’s repression at home, just as the US has provided the bombs and targeting information, along with the midair refueling of Saudi bombers, that have made possible the criminal war against Yemen.

While the savage state murder and dismemberment of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the monarchy’s consulate in Istanbul last October touched off a brief flurry of recriminations against Saudi Arabia, this heinous crime has largely been forgotten.

While Riyadh is going through the motions of a trial of 15 state officials charged with carrying out the gruesome killing, no action is being taken against Crown Prince bin Salman, who ordered the killing, or his senior adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, who reportedly supervised the torture, murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi via a Skype connection from Riyadh.

Barely a year ago, Crown Prince bin Salman was feted as a “reformer” by the US government, Harvard and MIT, as well as a host of US billionaires, from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey.

With the media’s attention to the Khashoggi murder grown cold, this myth is once again being revived, even in the face of the mass beheadings. The day after the executions, top Wall Street financiers took the stage with regime representatives at a financial conference sponsored by the monarchy in Riyadh.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, HSBC CEO John Flint and JPMorgan's Chief Operating Officer Daniel Pinto were all present, along with Morgan Stanley's Asia managing director, Chin Chou, all of them anxious to cash in on a proposed initial public offering (IPO) by its national oil giant Aramco. 

BlackRock’s Fink brushed off a question about the mass executions, stating, “The fact that there are issues in the press does not tell me I must run away from a place. In many cases it tells me I should run to and invest because what we are most frightened of are things that we don’t talk about.”

The executions in Saudi Arabia provide an appropriate prism for viewing the entire US policy in the Middle East. The bloodbath is a manifestation of the predatory aims pursued by US imperialism in the region. Washington’s defense of and reliance upon this ultrareactionary regime exposes all of the pretexts given for successive US military interventions, from the so-called “war on terrorism” to the supposed promotion of “democracy” and “human rights.”

In the end, a US foreign policy that is founded upon a strategic alliance with the House of Saud will inevitably prove to be a house of cards that will come crashing down with the revival of the class struggle in the Middle East, the United States and internationally.

Sri Lanka Terror Strikes: What Next?

Bibhu Prasad Routray


Under the nose of a state that took peace for granted, members of two lesser-known radical organizations and sons of a millionaire spice trader conspired to carry out a mass carnage on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, an attack which has now been described as a reaction to the March 2019 attacks on two churches in New Zealand by a white supremacist. These radicals had pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State, identified suicide bombers, assembled suicide vests, and carried out synchronised attacks in multiple locations including churches and hotels with the intent of killing Christians. The attacks left 253 (according to revised estimates by the Sri Lankan authorities) people dead and a nation in shock. 

Much of the focus in the aftermath of the attacks has been on the intelligence failure and the phenomenon of expanding radicalism. The wife of a suicide bomber, who herself had pledged baya’ah to the Islamic State, blew herself up, killing her unborn child and three other children, as the police forces raided their home. While investigation in the coming days and months may reveal some of the details of the preparations leading to the attack, whether that will prevent the next attack by Islamist radicals, is a bigger question.

Available profiles of eight of the nine suicide bombers involved in the attack reveal the usual trend that the foot soldiers of the Islamic State have come to be associated with since 2014. Many of them have been educated, a mix of middle-class and wealthy family members, and are highly radicalised who either teamed up or were influenced by the ideologues of the Islamic State to carry out mayhem. Such acts have been perpetrated in many countries in past years, with varying degrees of ‘success’.

The ‘mastermind’ behind the attacks in Sri Lanka, preacher Zahran Hashim, had gone into hiding in 2017, after being accused by the police of causing violence between Muslim groups. One of the two brothers, Inshaf Ibrahim owned Colossus Copper, a manufacturing facility in an industrial estate in Colombo’s east. The factory, investigators believe, was used to assemble the suicide vests used in the attack. Inshaf’s brother Ilham had well known connections to National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), a Sri Lankan Islamist group suspected of involvement in planning the attacks. Abdul Lathief Jameel, who failed in his task of carrying out an explosion at Colombo’s Taj Samudra hotel and was killed by an accidental explosion in a small guest house, had studied in the UK and undertaken postgraduate studies in Australia before returning to settle in Sri Lanka. Inshaf’s wife, Fatima Ibrahim, was more than complicit, having taken her life, along with those of her children’s, by exploding her own suicide vest, rather than surrendering.

Unlike the lone terrorist in New Zealand, the Sri Lankan terrorists left no manifesto behind, leaving us to rely on the claims made by the Islamic State as well as the official statements to piece together the reason for the carnage. Several questions, however, still remain unanswered. Would Sri Lanka have been spared had the New Zealand attack not taken place? Do the Sri Lanka attacks underline the phenomenon of ‘expanding radicalism’ that seeks targets in countries where law-enforcement is lax? Were the inputs provided by Indian agencies comprehensive enough for the Sri Lankan authorities to act upon?

Sri Lanka has been on the edge over fears that there could be more bombers who could strike at a time of their choosing. The number of Islamic State suspects in Sri Lanka is estimated to be 130 to 140, of which approximately 76, including a Syrian national, have already been detained. Many of them could be NTJ members or those belonging to the Jammiyathul Millathu Ibrahim (JMI). Information on either the NTJ or the JMI is sketchy. The scale and sophistication in the attacks further point fingers at the involvement of foreign actors and hence, the spectre of a repeat of such attacks either in Sri Lanka or in a neighbouring South Asian country cannot be ruled out. The disintegration of its ‘Caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria has enabled the Islamic State to expand its sphere of attacks further afield.

Notwithstanding what the future holds, the terror attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand bare few uncomfortable facts. Terrorists can thrive under the nose of a complacent state, carry out attacks causing mass casualties, and be the cause and/or provide inspiration for a new set of attacks elsewhere. Their ‘success’ will not depend so much on the training that they have undergone but the level of radicalism that they have reached and organising abilities they possess. Since terrorism is a personal choice – bit of an aspirational pedestal to be climbed on by the radicalised – only an alert state can hope to minimise the impact of such attacks. Moreover, the state’s response in the aftermath of the attacks would decidedly determine if it succeeds in uniting the society sought to be communally fractured by the terror attacks.

Abilities to counter terror will have to be developed gradually through a comprehensive policy involving resource investment and cooperation with regional as well as global powers. It is clear that Sri Lanka’s victory over the LTTE, by means of mostly a conventional war laced with rampant human rights violations, did nothing to augment its capacities to deal with the terrorism of the Islamic State variety. A hard power approach now may further worsen the situation.