13 Apr 2019

Greece: Syriza government mobilises riot police against refugees

John Vassilopoulos

Riot police attacked refugees, including women and children, with tear gas and stun grenades over three days last week in the village of Diavata, 60 kilometres south of the Greek-Macedonian border. The attack by police was brutal, with fires started by exploding stun grenades.
Around 900 refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, set up a makeshift camp with around 100 tents in Diavata last Thursday, next to the official refugee camp in the village. This followed a false report on social media claiming that the border was now open for refugees to cross and continue their onward journey into Northern Europe. By Sunday, the area had been cleared of the 60 or so remaining migrants, who were sent back to the camps in which they were being held. Police detained those who could not produce valid ID.
Dozens of refugees demanding “open the borders” also occupied Larissa Station—Athens’ central railway station—last Friday, asking to be transported to the border. This resulted in the cancellation of scheduled intercity trains and suburban rail services. The station was cleared by the afternoon.
The source of the social media post, according to a news report on Greek TV station Ant1, was a supposed NGO, “Caravan of Hope.” It claimed that Greece was to open the border with North Macedonia on April 5 at noon. The same report showed footage of a refugee’s mobile phone containing the same social media message in Arabic.
On Monday, three men who were arrested on Saturday appeared in court in Thessaloniki. A Palestinian, aged 28, a Syrian, 32, and an Iraqi, 28, were charged with resisting arrest and sentenced to 12 months in prison. All three told the court they were misled, with the Palestinian man stating, “We were told that the Red Cross and other NGOs would take us out [of the country]. I believe we were fooled.”
Some reports made unsubstantiated claims that behind the hoax were networks of traffickers who have a vested interest in the border being opened. But the lie seems more likely to have been a right-wing initiative aimed at stoking tensions between Greece and Macedonia.
Greece’s land border with Macedonia has been closed to refugees since early 2016. This was around the same time that the European Union and the pseudo-left Syriza government cut their rotten deal with Turkey, which stipulates that all refugees crossing into Greece from Turkey will be interned there until their case is processed and they are ultimately deported back to Turkey.
Whatever the source of the false report, it served to highlight the desperation of the more than 70,000 refugees who are being detained in overcrowded camps on Greece’s mainland and islands.
Dealing with the massive backlog of asylum claims involves processes that few refugees understand, and has pushed refugees—many already traumatised from the brutality of the wars they have fled—to breaking point. Some are being forced to wait for years in hellhole camps before they are even formally interviewed regarding their asylum claim. Speaking to the Associated Press at Diavata, Shapour Karimi, 43, an Iranian and father of one, said, “I arrived a year and a half ago and they have set my (asylum application) interview for December 2021.” He added, “What will I do all this time? A solution must be found so we can depart.”
One of the asylum seekers present at the Diavata camp before the riot police attacked spoke to the BBC. Bilal Jaf, a 25-year-old Kurdish migrant from Iraq, said, “We’re afraid that the police will try to evacuate our makeshift camp… I have been living in Greece for 11 months, waiting for my asylum request to be examined. I don’t know for how long I should wait for that.”
In an interview on Friday on state radio ERA 1, the Syriza-led government’s Migration Policy Minister Dimitris Vitsas praised the police’s conduct in Diavata, stating, “They are doing their job in the best possible way.”
In a separate Open TV interview, Vitsas displayed the government’s callous contempt for the plight of refugees, declaring that a refugee’s “first obligation is to respect the laws of the state, which one could say is hosting him. This must be understood.”
He slandered the refugees at Diavata, stating that some of them “will want to act tough and that as time goes on and they can’t get what they want they will start to do other things such as attacking the police. I call on them not to have their kids in front of them because this is not very brave.”
Syriza Public Order Minister Olga Gerovassili declared that “the borders for another country will not open” and warned refugees “mustn’t risk the privileges that they have and they shouldn’t use their children as human shields because some traffickers gave them false hopes.”
Syriza took power in January 2015 and played a pivotal role in continuing and deepening the austerity that has pauperised millions of Greeks. It has served as a reliable partner of NATO, with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras promoting Greece under its governance as a force for stability “in the Balkans as well as in the unstable region of Southeastern Europe.”
Its crackdown on refugees, asylum seekers and migrants is of a piece with its overall bourgeois, pro-imperialist agenda.
There is little to distinguish the comments of its ministers from the fascistic anti-immigrant rhetoric espoused by far-right forces throughout Europe and internationally. As far-right politics are being ever more openly adopted by the ruling elites of Europe, and fascistic movements encouraged, Syriza is only too happy to lend its services to this effort. In enforcing the EU’s anti-immigrant policy on the continent’s southern border, Syriza willingly acts as the jailer of all refugees stranded within its country’s borders.
As for the “hosting” to which Vitsas refers, this is a lie contradicted by numerous reports on the atrocious conditions facing refugees in what are essentially concentration camps run by Greece. The Diavata camp is one of three temporary facilities on the Greek mainland, with an official capacity for 936 people. In January, the infomigrants web site reported on the horrific conditions at the camp, with many detainees struggling to survive in freezing conditions during a cold snap.
The report noted, “The camp is full to capacity, with around 800 registered asylum seekers. On top of these, there are between 500 and 650 people living at the site without having been registered by migration authorities.” It cited the comments of Mike Bonke, the country director of the Arbeiter Samariter Bund, an NGO providing support services to Diavata: “Most of them have built their own makeshift shelters and tents, which are not providing them with the protection needed… They have no (safe) heating, washing and sanitation and cooking facilities.”
In a statement last month, Emmanuel GouĂ©, head of the Doctors Without Borders mission, said, “Greece has become a dumping ground for the men, women, and children that the European Union has failed to protect.” He added, “What was once touted as a ‘refugee emergency’ has given way to inexcusable levels of human suffering across the Greek islands and on mainland Greece. The EU and Greek authorities continue to rob vulnerable people of their dignity and health, seemingly in an effort to deter others from coming. This policy is cruel, inhumane, and cynical, and it needs to end.”

UK cancer patients’ lives imperilled, suffering deepened by treatment delays

Ajanta Silva

The plight of cancer patients in the UK is one of many indicators of the devastating impact of funding cuts to the National Health Service (NHS). These have been carried out by the Conservative-led government and their devolved counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
In England alone, more than 127,000 cancer patients have been left waiting more than two months to start their treatment over the last five years. According to official NHS figures released in January, almost one in four patients were waiting longer than the officially set targets of treating them within 62 days after an urgent GP referral is made and cancer is diagnosed. Figures show the long waits have reached their highest levels since records began in 2009.
NHS Scotland statistics for October to December 2018 show nearly one in five people diagnosed with cancer were waiting more than two months for treatment. Treatment for women with cervical cancer during that period has seen an alarming drop in the numbers starting treatment—just 53.7 percent of patients—compared to 89.7 percent between July and September 2018. Only one Scottish health board out of 15—NHS Lanarkshire—met the Scottish government’s 95 percent target of cancer patients beginning treatment within two months from diagnosis.
In Wales, a significant shortage of specialists poses real risks to cancer care and treatment. Only three extra cancer doctors joined NHS Wales in the past five years, according to Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) figures. This is in spite of rising cancer rates and patient numbers.
Speaking to the BBC, Dr. Martin Rolles, the RCR’s cancer lead in Wales, said, “The risk really is the deteriorating quality of the service. We won’t be able to give the patients the time they need. Individual oncologists will struggle to see patients in a timely manner, so there may be increasing delays in treatment.
“There are increasing risks because overworked doctors tend to make mistakes. It will affect the quality of the patient experience and it will affect the quality of the very good service that we try to provide in Wales.”
Statistics released by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland show a huge failure in missed targets for 95 percent of patients starting treatment within 62 days following an urgent GP referral for suspected cancer. About four out of 10 patients were left waiting longer than two months without treatment in 2018. Patient experience is going from bad to worse, with only 60.5 percent of patients getting treatment within the expected timeframe in December 2018—compared to 66.8 and 68.7 percent, in the same month in 2017 and 2016, respectively.
To achieve the best and successful outcomes, and to alleviate anxiety, fear, depression and the suffering of patients, cancer treatment should be started as early as possible when the diagnosis is confirmed.
In England, however, the target set by the government for NHS trusts currently stands at only 85 percent of patients beginning treatment within two months.
Even this arbitrary target of leaving 15 percent of patients without early treatment was breached by many NHS trusts, due to pressures they are under as a result of funding cuts.
According to the Macmillan cancer charity, “[A]lmost three quarters of NHS hospital trusts in England (73 percent) missed the 62-day target in December 2018, with 52 trusts—over one in 3—missing it by 10 percentage points or more.”
Macmillan points out that an “average 2,630 patients waited longer than 62 days to start treatment after an urgent GP referral per month in 2018, compared to 1,711 in 2014 (a 54 percent rise).” This happened regardless of the fact that the more than “62-day patient numbers only rose by 25 percent from 2014 to 2018 comparatively.”
Responding to this year’s cancer waiting times, Dr. Fran Woodard, executive director of policy and impact at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: “January 2019 marks five years since the 62-day cancer target was first missed and despite the best efforts of hard working NHS staff, more than 127,000 people have been left waiting too long to start vital treatment throughout that time.”
“Behind the numbers are real people who tell us how delays cause real anxiety for them and their loved ones at a time when they are already trying to deal with the many worries cancer is throwing their way.”
One of the main factors in treatment delay is staff shortages, especially of clinical oncologists—those who treat cancer patients with chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. A census carried out by the Royal College of Radiologists in 62 major cancer centres in the UK found that more than 7.5 percent of consultant posts, which amount to 70 full-time posts, were vacant. Most of the vacant posts had been unfilled for at least a year. These centres mainly rely on the good will of the full-time doctors who work over six hours extra a week in average.
The long delays patients experience in getting their diagnoses confirmed with investigative procedures and tests, including obtaining biopsies from tumours, histopathology reporting of biopsies, CT scans and MRI scans, contribute to long waits in commencing cancer treatment.
The removal of malignant tumours, which needs specialist surgical interventions, is also affected by pressures such as staff shortages, lack of beds and long waiting lists for surgical operations.
There is a massive backlog for patients who need surgeries, with 220,000 patients waiting more than six months and 36,857 waiting more than nine months.
Referral to treatment (RTT) waiting times for consultant-led elective care in England reveal the human cost of the pressures created by relentless NHS funding cuts over the last eight years. NHS England’s statistical press release last month stated that the “number of RTT patients waiting to start treatment at the end of January 2019 was 4.2 million patients. Of those, 2,157 patients were waiting more than 52 weeks.”
A senior doctor who works in a Cancer Treatment Centre in Wales spoke to the WSWS about the crisis that leads to treatment delays. “I have seen a surge in patient numbers and referrals for cancer treatment over the last five-six years. But our facilities, resources and staff levels have not increased with the rising demand. We work several hours unpaid extra every week to fulfil the needs of the patients.
“One of the main problems we face in starting early treatment for patients with cancer is the delays getting biopsies and surgical interventions done. I think the surgical teams are struggling to keep up with the demands for surgical operations.
“Having CT scans [using x-rays and a computer to create detailed images] and MRI scans [that create images using magnetism and radio waves] done for inpatients is not too difficult. However, PET scans [creating 3-dimensional (3D) pictures of the inside of the body], which we require prior to starting treatment, are not readily available because there aren’t enough machines.
“Although we get all the investigations, necessary tests and imaging done, sometimes treatments get deferred due to lack of beds in the oncology/haematology ward. Treatments for patients who need intensive treatment and whose conditions are severe cannot be started in the day unit.
“We have a severe shortage of oncology trained nurses and the other staff. The government does not train enough specialists in cancer treatment and care. Under these conditions, it is inevitable that we miss the treatment targets.”
The patient suffering and human cost of vital treatment delays are yet to be fully gauged.
What is certain is that the statistical proof of the failure to treat cancer patients in a timely manner will do nothing to stem the assault on the NHS by the political representatives of the ruling elite. In the face of damming evidence to the contrary, a Tory government NHS spokesperson downplayed the plight of cancer patients, saying that “more people than ever before are coming forward for cancer checks, with a quarter of a million more getting checked this year and thousands more being treated within the two-month target.”

No clear winner in Israeli elections

Barry Grey

Exit polls released after the end of voting Tuesday evening in Israel's national elections gave conflicting projections, with most giving opposition candidate Benny Gantz a narrow victory over the four-term incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, one poll projected a tie, and a majority of polls indicated that Netanyahu's Likud party would have an easier time putting together a majority coalition with other right-wing and far-right parties in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, than Gantz and his Blue and White party would have assembling a so-called "center-left" ruling coalition.
The term "center-left" is a misnomer, since the choice presented to the electorate was between a far-right incumbent lurching toward outright fascism and an apartheid state and a right-wing former army chief of staff who sought to attack Netanyahu as being weak on national security and boasted of how many Palestinians he had killed in the 2014 Israeli war against Gaza.
The unclear result reflects the profound crisis of the Israeli state and the absence of any means within the Zionist political establishment for the Israeli working class, Jewish and Arab alike, to express its social concerns and interests. Ballots are still being counted, including hundreds of thousands of votes of soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, poll workers, on-duty police and Israeli diplomats working overseas, and the official result will not be announced until April 17.
Haaretz projected a 37-35 seat plurality for Gantz's party over Netanyahu's Likud, with a total of 61 seats required to form a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. But Gantz's ability to secure a majority coalition was damaged by the collapse of the Labor Party, which secured a historic projected low of only seven seats, the same number as the Israeli Arab coalition Haddash-Ta'al. The virtual disintegration of Israel's founding party, which controlled the government for the first three decades of the country's 71-year history, is a measure of the rightward movement of the Israeli ruling class and the Zionist project upon which it is based.
Both Gantz and Netanyahu claimed victory and the right to form the next government.
Gantz set up the Blue and White party as an electoral vehicle for elements in the military and big business seeking to oust Netanyahu. He ran alongside two other former military commanders and Yair Lapid, a former television host who heads the centrist party Yesh Atid. Gantz and Lapid issued a joint statement declaring: “These elections have a clear winner and a clear loser. Netanyahu promised 40 seats and lost. The president can see the picture and should call on the winner to form the next government. There is no other option!”
In a tweet, Netanyahu avoided mention of his own apparent loss and focused instead on the combined seats for the Israeli right: “The right-wing bloc led by Likud won a clear victory… I will start assembling a right-wing government with our natural partners this very evening.”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will begin meeting with the leaders of the various parliamentary parties and designate one of them to form the new government. He is not required to choose the biggest vote-getter, although that is usually the practice. He also takes into account which party and leader have the best chance of forming a stable majority with other parties.
The designated leader has 42 days to form a majority in the parliament. If he or she fails, the president names a different leader and the process is repeated. If neither one can form a majority, a new election must be held in November.
According to Haaretz, the projected breakdown of seats in the Knesset is:
* White and Blue: 37
* Likud: 35
*Shas (an ultra-orthodox Sephardic party): 7
* United Torah Judaism: 7
* Hadash-Ta'al: 7
* Labor: 7
* Rightist Union: 5
* Meretz: 5
* Yisrael Beiteinu: 4
* Kalunu: 4
The Kan poll projected that parties on the right would secure a total of 64 seats, as compared to 56 for the so-called center-left (consisting of Blue and White, Labor, Hadash-Ta’al and Meretz).
During the voting, Netanyahu posted an “emergency” video warning that turnout was down 20 percent in Likud districts and urging right-wing voters not to vote for marginal parties and thus detract from his vote. The alternative, he said, was a “left-wing takeover.”
It also came to light that Likud had mobilized some 1,200 supporters to secretly take cameras to polling places in Arab neighborhoods and film the proceedings, supposedly to ward against voting fraud. Arab leaders, who were desperately seeking to reverse an unusually low turnout among Israeli Arabs, denounced the illegal action as an attempt to intimidate Arab voters. The Central Elections Committee filed a police complaint over the action.
The election campaign was dominated by Netanyahu’s increasingly racist and fascistic moves, including his use of snipers to kill hundreds of unarmed Palestinians protesting at the Gaza-Israel border, his repeated attacks on Iranian forces in Syria, and his pledge only days before Election Day to begin annexing the West Bank if reelected.
Netanyahu brought into his electoral coalition the fascist Jewish Power party, which stems from the Kach party of Meir Kahane, banned as a terrorist organization. Jewish Power openly advocates violence against Arabs and the expulsion of the Palestinian population.
He featured in his campaign propaganda his close relations with US President Trump, with billboards and placards showing the two standing side-by-side. Trump intervened openly in favor of Netanyahu, announcing last month US support for Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, seized in the 1967 Six Day War, and this week officially designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.
Gantz refused to challenge Netanyahu’s promise to begin annexing the West Bank. He chose as his main slogans, “Only the strong win” and “Israel before everything.” He made vague statements about pursuing peace with the Palestinians, but said should that fail, he would set about shaping a “new reality”—a clear reference to the expansionist Greater Israel agenda he shares with Netanyahu.
He sought to attack Netanyahu from the right for failing to respond with sufficient force to a handful of rockets fired from Gaza on Israeli towns.
Both sides had little to say about the acute social crisis in Israel, which has the highest official poverty rate, more than 21 percent and over 30 percent for children, of any developed country. Israel is also the second most economically unequal advanced country, topped only by the US.

Polish teachers strike confronts social disaster wrought by capitalist restoration

Clara Weiss & Jerry White

The strike by hundreds of thousands of Polish teachers shut down 75 percent of the country’s schools and kindergartens on Tuesday, according to teacher unions. Educators on Monday began an indefinite national strike—the first since 1993—to demand improved wages and classroom conditions and to oppose efforts by the extreme right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS) to rewrite the school curriculum to promote the government’s nationalist and xenophobic agenda.
A 90-minute negotiating session on Tuesday between the heads of two unions and Deputy Prime Minister Beata Szydło broke down, with the government saying it had no money to increase its pay offer of 15 percent over several years, which would be tied to an increase in the number of weekly lessons a teacher must give from 18 to 25.
Students protest in Warsaw in support of striking teachers
Szydło called on teachers to return to their classrooms to give final exams to millions of elementary and middle school students that are scheduled for today, while school directors attempt to recruit retired teachers, religious school teachers and non-striking teachers to conduct the tests.
However, the teachers, who are demanding a 30 percent pay raise, remain defiant and are continuing the strike. The walkout has won the strongest support in the cities, but even in rural areas with a lower participation rate, the strike shut down more than half the schools and kindergartens. In total, at least 15,000 schools and kindergartens have been closed due to the strike, and many have hand-made signs hanging on school gates declaring, “Strajk.”
“I absolutely support their strike,” Tomasz Pietka, father of a 4th-grader in Warsaw, told an Associated Press reporter. “They are really earning peanuts for a job that involves responsibility and knowledge,” he said. According to a social media analysis by the internet platform politykawsieci.pl, the hashtag #StrajkNauczycieli had a record reach of 60 million on the internet, with some 300,000 references. (Poland has a population of 40 million.)
Polish media also indicated that high school and middle school students throughout the country were ready to walk out or had already done so. In the capital city of Warsaw, students organizing a “student strike” wrote on Facebook: “We are a group of young people who want to say enough! We have enough of the ossified education system... We will create an organization which will conduct a fundamental reform of the school system in Poland. Our primary goal is to demonstrate solidarity with the teachers. We want to show that the youth are not indifferent and that we will not passively watch what happens to our schools.”
The Polish teachers have joined an international wave of struggles by educators. This includes strikes by the largest number of US teachers in a quarter of a century, national strikes by teachers in the Netherlands and Argentina last month, a walkout by as many as 700,000 educators in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in June, and ongoing strikes by teachers in France, as well as in Tunisia and other African countries.
Students carrying signs in support of their teachers at a school in Gdynia. Credit: Strajk Uczniowski
Like the millions of other teachers around the world, teachers in Poland barely survive on their salaries and are forced to work additional jobs to pay their bills. Newly hired young teachers make the minimum salary of 1,800 zlotys (US $470) a month, leaving them in dire poverty. The maximum salary of around 5,603 Zloty ($1,471) a month cannot keep up with the cost of basic food items and other living expenses, which are similar to those in Western European countries.
Talks between the unions and government over wages and conditions broke down Sunday. Facing immense pressure from teachers, two unions—the Polish Teachers Union (ZNP) and the Trade Unions’ Forum (FZZ)—rejected the government’s pay offer and called the strike.
The only union to accede to the government’s demands was Solidarity’s teacher union, which is aligned with the ultra-right PiS government. On Monday, union head Ryszard Proksa, who is also a PiS local government official, denounced rebellious teachers who walked out in defiance of Solidarity and threatened retribution against striking union branches.
Politico cited one teacher disgusted by the union’s strike-breaking. “When the agreement was announced last night, I felt betrayed,” said Marlena KaĹ‚uĹĽniak, who teaches German in a primary school in the mountain resort town of Zakopane. “I am handing in my resignation from Solidarity today.”
The other two unions are seeking a quick end to the strike. SĹ‚awomir Broniarz, leader of the main ZNP union, has said the union wants to “put out this fire” and called early Tuesday for a mediator to help end the standoff with the government, according to the Associated Press. ZNP, the largest teacher union, has already made numerous concessions while demanding cuts to other social programs to fund wage increases for teachers.
While the government claims there is no money for teacher salaries or to improve education, it is spending $48 billion by 2026 to expand its armed forces in line with preparations by the United States and NATO for war with Russia. By 2030, the government plans to raise military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP, in line with Washington’s demands.
The opposition party, the neo-liberal Civic Platform (PO), has attacked the government over its education reform and for its failure to successfully negotiate with the trade unions. When it was in power, the pro-European Union PO implemented some of the most anti-social measures in the history of Poland, in the name of the free-market transformation of the economy. In 2012, it raised the retirement age to 67, attacked the nationalized health care system and shut down state-owned industries, including mining, steel and shipbuilding. It also undertook an assault on education and cultural institutions, liquidating public schools, destroying technical and occupational high schools, decreasing the educational budget and subsidizing private schools for the affluent minority.
A sign reads "strike" in an empty classroom. Credit: OgĂłlnopolski Strajk Nauczycieli OSN
The restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist regime in 1989 has led to a social and economic disaster, not only in Poland but in all of the former Soviet and Eastern European countries. The promises that capitalism would lead to rising living standards and the flourishing of democracy have been belied by the grim reality of social deprivation, the enrichment of corporate and financial oligarchs and the spread of ultra-right and fascistic parties throughout the region.
According to a 2015 report, since 1989, the share of national income going to the richest group of Poles, (one percent of society), has doubled. A report by Poland’s central bank found that in 2016, the top 10 per cent of households held as much as 41 per cent of total net assets, while the net assets of the bottom 20 percent households accounted for barely 1 percent of all household assets.
According to a recent Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development survey, workers and young people in Poland are near or at the top of all 21 OECD countries in several categories of economic insecurity. Sixty-nine percent of all 18-to-29-year-old Poles say they expect to do worse than their parents, while a majority feel that they do not have access to good quality and affordable public services, including housing and health care.
Thirty years after the restoration of capitalism, there has been a rise of the class struggle throughout eastern Europe. The strike by teachers, one of the biggest in decades, follows a two-week strike by workers at the national airline LOT and Polish Amazon workers, and strikes by autoworkers and other workers in Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
The ruling classes and the unions fear the teachers strike could spark a far broader movement of the working class, which could spread across borders and undermine the anti-immigrant agitation every capitalist government has employed in order to impose its program of austerity, social inequality and militarism.

Libya’s descent into civil war: The bitter fruit of the pseudo-left's pro-imperialism

Bill Van Auken

The threat of a bloody battle for Tripoli has continued to mount, with “Field Marshal” Khalifa Haftar massing troops and tanks south of the Libyan capital and warplanes belonging to his so-called Libyan National Army bombing the city’s sole functioning airport, stranding civilians seeking to escape the country.
Partial casualty figures include 51 dead and over 181 wounded. Thousands have fled their homes to escape the fighting, and there are reports that thousands of refugees and migrants, held under unspeakable conditions in concentration camps run by various rival militias, are frantic over the prospect of becoming helpless victims of a potential massacre.
In the midst of the escalation toward full-scale civil war, the United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet warned that any attacks on civilians in Libya could amount to war crimes and demanded that all sides “respect international humanitarian law" and "take all possible measures to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and prisons.”
The UN human rights body’s attitude toward the latest flareup of violence in Libya stands in stark contrast to its response to the one-sided US-NATO war waged in 2011 under the pretext of protecting civilian lives from repression at the hands of the government headed by Col. Muammar Gaddafi. A UN resolution allowing for a no-fly zone was used as the pretext to launch a seven-month-long bombing campaign in support of CIA-backed Islamist militias to destroy Libya’s security forces and vital infrastructure and overthrow its government. This campaign culminated in the carpet bombing of the coastal city of Sirte, a Gaddafi stronghold, and the lynch-mob torture and murder of Gaddafi himself.
The UN human rights advocates held their tongues throughout this campaign of imperialist slaughter, whose victims numbered in the tens of thousands, far beyond any estimate of the number who lost their lives to the repression of the Gaddafi regime.
Only in March of 2012, months after the end of the regime-change operation, did the UN Human Rights Commission issue a report that allowed it had “confirmed civilian casualties and found targets that showed no evidence of any military function.” It confined its investigation to just 20 airstrikes, when the total number of bombings was well over 1,000 times that number.
The present crisis and threat of a full-blown bloodbath in Libya are the direct product of the supposedly “humanitarian” intervention waged eight years ago under the fraudulent banner of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) proclaimed by the liberal advocates of imperialism in respect to the oppressed peoples of former colonial countries where the major powers continue to pursue their strategic interests.
Among the protagonists on either side of the developing conflict are the so-called “revolutionaries” and “democrats” the war was supposedly launched to protect. These include Khalifa Haftar himself, the former Gaddafi general who was flown into Benghazi after spending decades as an asset of the US Central Intelligence Agency and living in close proximity to its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he obtained US citizenship.
An indispensable role in promoting the “humanitarian” intervention in Libya by the US and its NATO allies was played by a coterie of pseudo-left political organizations, politicians and academics who amplified and embellished upon the phony pretexts advanced by Washington, Paris and London for a war of imperialist aggression against a former colonial country.
Among those embracing the war was University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment web site had gained a following for its limited opposition to the Iraq war and its criticism of Israeli policy.
Cole expressed his enthusiasm for the US-NATO intervention by declaring, “If NATO needs me, I’m there.” Now that full-scale fighting is erupting once again in Libya, it is unknown whether Professor Cole feels a renewed urge to put on a uniform, and if he did so whether he would choose to mount one of Khalifa’s tanks or get on one of the machine gun-mounted pickups of the Tripoli militias.
At the outset of the war, Cole published “An Open Letter to the Left” in which he demanded that so-called “leftists” “learn to chew gum and walk at the same time,” i.e., posture as somehow left-wing, while supporting imperialist war.
The “left,” he insisted, had to determine its attitude to wars launched by the US on “a case-by-case basis,” declaring that “To make ‘anti-imperialism’ trump all other values in a mindless way leads to frankly absurd positions.”
Cole said that he was “unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on and glad that the UNSC [United Nations Security Council]-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed.”
Cole’s reduction of anti-imperialism to a subjective “value” that must be balanced with other equally important ones, such as “human rights,” exposes the entirely petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist outlook underlying his rush to enlist in imperialism’s war.
These petty-bourgeois ideologists reject the conception that imperialism is an objective economic, social and political stage in the historical development of capitalism, based on monopolization of the economy, the dominance of finance capital and the carve-up of the entire planet by a handful of advanced capitalist countries—the advent of a period of global war and revolution. Instead, they claim that it is merely an excess committed by an otherwise healthy system, which is capable of performing “humanitarian” rescues of oppressed populations as well.
A similar, if not even more reactionary role was played by Gilbert Achcar, an academic working at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies while serving as a principal propagandist for the wars in both Libya and Syria for the Pabloite International Viewpoint. At the outset of the war in March 2011, Achcar gave an interview praising the US-NATO intervention. He stated, “… given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would inevitably have resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it… You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.”
After the war was over, the claims of an imminent massacre in Benghazi were proven to be a sheer fabrication.
As the war went on, Achcar became even more militant in support for imperialist regime change, demanding that the US and other Western powers deliver more arms to the “insurgency” and, in August 2011, chiding them for failing to drop sufficient amounts of munitions on the Libyan population, describing the airstrikes—whose victims would number in the tens of thousands—as “low-key.”
The same essential arguments would be reprised for the regime-change war in Syria, with political charlatans like Achcar and Ashley Smith, of the recently dissolved International Socialist Organization (ISO), demanding more weapons for Syria’s CIA-orchestrated “revolution” and condemning the Obama administration for not enforcing its “red lines,” including through a potential confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia, in order to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad.
The politics of these scoundrels and their organizations have nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism, and whatever “socialist” rhetoric they employ is nothing more than a cover for their unrestrained integration into bourgeois, imperialist politics. They function as a species of specialized NGOs, acting much like the National Endowment for Democracy, serving as political fronts and conduits for the operations of the CIA and US imperialism.
Never did any of these self-proclaimed “socialists” question the motives of the humanitarian imperialist wolves in the Middle East. They dismissed out of hand any suggestion that their war on Libya was motivated by the desire of the major imperialist powers and their energy conglomerates to exert unfettered control over the country’s oil reserves, the largest on the African continent. Or, for that matter, that the war in Syria was provoked with the aim of installing a US puppet regime in a country that has long been a strategic crossroads of the Middle East.
As for the “revolutionaries” they backed in Libya and Syria, neither Cole, Achcar, Smith nor any of the other pseudo-lefts produced any program for which they were supposedly fighting, any analysis of the class forces that they represented or, for that matter, the name of a single supposed leader who could speak for their aims. Behind this wall of silence lay the fact that the CIA-backed and armed criminals mobilized against both Gaddafi and Assad were dominated by CIA assets and Islamist militias, with Al Qaeda-linked forces as their predominant element.
In its 2016 statement Socialism and the Fight Against War, the International Committee of the Fourth International established the objective foundations of the transformation of radicalized middle-class political tendencies that emerged as part of the movement against the Vietnam war into cheerleaders for imperialist intervention:
Over the past four decades, these layers have undergone a profound social and political transformation. The vast rise in share values—facilitated by the continuous imposition of wage and benefit concessions on workers, the intensification of the rate of exploitation, and the extraction of an ever–greater mass of surplus value from the working class—has given a privileged section of the middle class access to a degree of wealth they could not have imagined at the outset of their careers. The protracted stock market boom enabled imperialism to recruit from among sections of the upper-middle class a new and devoted constituency. These forces—and the political organizations that give expression to their interests—have done everything in their power to not only suppress opposition to war, but also to justify the predatory operations of imperialism.
The intervening years have only seen an intensification of social inequality and polarization along with a global upsurge in the class struggle that is pushing these tendencies ever further to the right.
The Libyan events make it even clearer that these accomplices of imperialist intervention have blood on their hands. The political education of the working class requires that they be exposed for the reactionaries and political criminals they are.

Sri Lankan government prepares new anti-terrorism laws

Dilruwan Vithanage & Saman Gunadasa

The Sri Lankan government’s Counter Terrorism (CT) Bill, which was approved by the cabinet last September, is expected to be soon presented to parliament, following final scrutiny by a special committee. If approved, the law will mark a significant step by the crisis-ridden United National Party-led government and President Sirisena towards a police state.
Under the bogus banner of “fighting terrorism,” capitalist governments around the world are imposing repressive measures to suppress the working class, the poor, refugees and asylum seekers, and political opponents, targeting socialists in particular. In the US, Trump has branded immigrants as invaders and terrorists and is deploying the police and the military. In France and the United Kingdom, laws are used to deploy armed forces against anti-government protests.
The official purpose of Sri Lanka’s CT Bill is to replace the infamous Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which was enacted in 1979 on the pretext of combatting Tamil militant groups. It was widely used during the almost 30-year communal war against Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), leading to arbitrary arrests, protracted detentions without trials and torture. Colombo also used it to suppress rural unrest in the period 1988–1990 during which tens of thousands of youth were killed.
Attempting to capitalise on the widespread opposition to the PTA during the 2015 presidential election campaign, Maithripala Sirisena promised to repeal the hated law if he came to power.
In 2016, the Sri Lankan cabinet approved a new counter terrorism bill. The bill, however, was even more repressive than the PTA and was denounced by civil liberties groups and other organisations, forcing the government to withdraw it.
According to human rights groups, the latest version of the bill is little different from the previous one and, in fact, bans virtually all activities and propaganda against Sri Lankan governments.
According to section 3 of the CT Bill, anyone found guilty of terrorism will be punished with 20-year or lifetime jail terms.
“Terrorism offences” include:
* intimidating a population;
* wrongfully or unlawfully compelling the government of Sri Lanka, or any other government, or an international organisation, to do or to abstain from doing any act;
* preventing any such government from functioning;
* causing harm to the territorial integrity or sovereignty of Sri Lanka or any other sovereign country.
* causing serious damage to public or private property
* obstruction to essential services
These vague clauses could be used to ban and punish any political party or group within or outside Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan president already has the power to declare any service or industry an essential service and ban strikes. Under the planned CT measures, strike action, protests and demonstrations by workers, students or the poor could be defined as “terrorist” offences.
The new bill can also limit or ban “freedom of expression.” According to section 10, “intentionally and unlawfully distributing or otherwise making available any information to the public, having intent to incite the commission of the offence of terrorism” is an offence. Under this sweeping provision, any anti-government literature could be deemed to be abetting terrorism.
It is an offence to “gather confidential information” in an “unauthorised manner” and “for the purpose of supplying such information to a person who commits an offence under this act.”
All these clauses are wide open to interpretation and could be used by the government to punish and imprison anyone it chooses. Hence political exposures, investigative journalists and whistle blowers will be easily targeted.
Section 13 of the bill states that those who fail “to provide information or provide false or misleading information in response to a question put to him by a police officer conducting an investigation under this Act” will be punished with up to two years imprisonment and fines.
“Any police officer, an officer or member of the armed forces or a coast guard officer” can take any one into custody without a warrant if the officer “receives information or a complaint which he believes to be reliable that a person has committed or concerned in committing an offence under this Act.”
In other words, the police and armed forces will have the power to arrest anyone at any time on suspicion of committing an offence. This is a direct violation of the fundamental rights supposedly guaranteed by Sri Lanka’s constitution.
Police officers and armed forces personnel will also have the right to “stop and search any person, vehicle, vessel, train or aircraft; question any person; enter and search any premises or land; and take into custody any document [related to committing an offence].”
Those arrested can be held for two days without being brought before a magistrate, which implies that they will not be permitted to get prior legal assistance. The magistrate can keep suspects in remand for up to six months, which can be extended indefinitely on an application by the Attorney General to the High Court.
Senior police officers can authorise “the detention of the suspect in an approved place of detention under approved conditions of detention.” This detention can be renewed every two weeks and for up to eight weeks. Sri Lankan police are notorious for maintaining torture chambers in their detention facilities.
Police authorities are also empowered to appoint teams of investigators and to establish a specialised Counter Terrorism Agency to maintain records which could be used and manipulated against anti-government political tendencies, including socialists.
Cosmetic changes have been made to the CT Bill in a crude attempt to make it appear less repressive than the PTA. Under the PTA, confessions from suspects—often extracted through torture—can be used against the accused. Under the new law, the burden of proof falls on the prosecuting authorities.
The media have nervously voiced concerns about the CTA. Sunday Times columnist Kishali Pinto Jayawardena on March 10 stated: “These [small changes] are ingenious traps set by ‘deep state’ security agents who have learnt to survive governments and political regimes with consummate ease. Flippant assessments of the gazetted draft CTA are a deadly mistake. Unquestionably this is an aggravation of the existing counter-terror regime, not a reduction, as blissfully believed by some.”
Former president and current opposition leader Mahinda Rajapakse told the media chiefs on April 1 that the CT Bill would “destroy democratic rights of people and lead the country to a repressive ‘police state.’”
Rajapakse’s attempts to posture as a democrat are utterly cynical. His government ruthlessly prosecuted the communal war against the separatist LTTE and used the reactionary PTA and emergency laws to the hilt. He is desperately attempting to exploit the mounting opposition against the UNP-led government, in a bid to return to power.
The current cash-strapped UNP-led government has been slavishly implementing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures and suppressing the protests of workers, students and farmers on a daily basis. If Rajapakse and his political supporters come to power they will continue these attacks.

Indian Court allows violent Hindu supremacists to go scot-free

Kranti Kumara 

In what is now a consistent pattern in court-cases involving terrorist acts committed by violent Hindu supremacists against Muslims, an Indian special court in late March exonerated four Hindu extremists who had been implicated in the February 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express.
Dubbed as a “peace” train, the Samjhauta Express plies biweekly between India’s capital, New Delhi, and the city of Lahore in Pakistan to facilitate mutual visits by family members permanently torn apart by the reactionary 1947 communal division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan.
The bomb blasts occurred while the train was en route to Pakistan. The resulting inferno in two passenger carriages burned 68 people, including children, alive. Forty-three of the victims (44 according to Pakistan) were Pakistani citizens and ten were identified as Indian citizens. Fourteen of the charred corpses have never been identified.
The acquitted, all of them linked to the shadowy Hindu terrorist organization Abhinav Bharat, include Swami Aseemanand, a self-styled extremist Hindu monk, and his cohorts, Kamal Chauhan, Rajinder Chaudhary and Lokesh Sharma. Aseemanand, who has been implicated in several other bombings against Muslims, was named by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) that carried out the botched investigation, as one of the ring leaders of the Abhinav Bharat terror network.
In delivering his verdict, the presiding judge said there were “gaping holes” in the evidence the prosecution had presented. He observed that “very strangely” the NIA, after learning that suitcases with unexploded bombs retrieved from the train had their covers stitched by a tailor in Indore—a city in Madhya Pradesh know to be hotbed of Hindu extremists—did not attempt to determine the tailor’s customers and investigate them.
“Thus, the investigating agency [lost] a very valuable piece of evidence by not conducting investigation properly in this regard.”
Although the judge expressed “deep pain and anguish” that “a dastardly act of violence” remains “unpunished for want of credible and admissible evidence,” he himself summarily dismissed a last-minute appeal by Rahila Wakeel, a Pakistani citizen and the daughter of Muhammad Wakeel who was killed in the blast.
In pleading with the court to hear her and other Pakistani eyewitnesses, Rahila pointed out that they had either never received the previous court summons issued by one or another of the eight judges who presided over this protracted case or had been denied visas by Indian authorities, making it impossible for them to appear in court.

BJP celebrates the acquittals

Home Minister Rajnath Singh of the ruling Hindu Supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has categorically ruled out any appeal of the verdict to a higher court. He added that it is his “personal stand” that “Pakistan is always responsible for such terrorist attacks.”
For his part, Prime Minister Narendra Modi immediately seized on the verdict in the Samjhauta Express case to pounce upon the Congress Party, whom he charged had coined the term “Hindu terror.” He thundered in front of his supporters: “How can the Congress be forgiven for insulting the Hindus in front of the world? Weren’t you hurt when you heard the word ‘Hindu terror’? How can a community known for peace, brotherhood and harmony be linked with terrorism?”
Singh’s cabinet colleague, the multimillionaire Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, also denounced the Congress Party for having pointed to the involvement of persons with longstanding ties to the Hindu right, including the RSS—the Hindutvaite organization to which Modi and most of the BJP’s principal leaders and activists belong—in bombings that targeted Muslims. Jaitley demanded that the Congress Party, which headed the government when the existence of a Hindu terrorist network was first exposed, issue a public apology to “Hindu society.”
The foul, celebratory statements being made by Modi and other high-officials of the BJP government over the Samjhauta Express verdict only serve to further demonstrate that violent Hindu communalist groups enjoy the patronage and the protection of the Modi government. Over the past five years of BJP rule, Hindu extremist violence, including the lynching of Muslims, attacks on Dalits and Christians and execution-style killing of critics of Hindu supremacism have all increased dramatically.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, Modi installed as Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a mahant (Hindu high priest), who was facing numerous criminal charges for inciting violence by members of the Hindu youth militia that he had founded, the Hindu Yuva Vahini. While UP has subsequently been the scene of numerous outrages against Muslims, including a wave of summary police executions under a government ordered shoot-to-kill crackdown on “crime,” the Chief Minister has ordered all the complaints the state had filed against him and his accomplices withdrawn.
There is a long history of communal mob violence incited and facilitated by RSS and BJP leaders. Modi himself first came to national prominence when as Chief Minister of the western state of Gujarat in 2002, he incited and presided over a pogrom against Muslims. Despite ample evidence that he and his henchman, the current BJP president Amit Shah, ordered police to effectively stand down allowing days of violence across the state that killed over 1,400 persons and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes, neither of them has been made to juridically answer for their criminal role.

A Hindu supremacist terror network

The exposure in the fall of 2008 of a Hindu terrorist-bombing network—one moreover with connections to active and retired military personnel—was something new, however. When evidence emerged tying some of those implicated to senior BJP and RSS leaders, the Hindu right responded with great nervousness. BJP leaders sought to distance themselves from the accused, while denouncing the concept of “Hindu terrorism”—i.e., of terrorist atrocities committed by Hindu supremacists akin to that perpetrated by Islamist terrorists—as a fabrication and “political conspiracy” of the Congress Party.
Subsequently, the BJP and RSS seized on the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, carried out by a Pakistan-based group, to drown out any and all discussion of the Hindu terror network. In this they were aided by much of the corporate media and by their sympathizers throughout the state apparatus.
As for the Congress Party, it oscillates between cowering before and conniving with the Hindu right. India’s police and courts have systematically failed to prosecute and convict those responsible for numerous communal outrages, including the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the 1992 razing of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and the 1984 Congress-led anti-Sikh riots.
One by one the court cases against the accused in the Abhinav Bharat have unraveled. In some cases, the Hindu extremists have been freed due to “lack” of evidence, “bungled” investigations and prosecution witnesses suddenly going hostile. In others, the cases are stalled in the courts, with many of the accused, including alleged ringleaders like former Military Intelligence officer Lieutenant-Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, allowed to remain at liberty on bail—something otherwise unheard of in Indian terrorist cases.
In addition to the aforementioned Samjhauta Express bombing, these cases include:
#The 2006 Malegaon bombing: In September 2006, Hindu extremists planted explosives in a cemetery next to a mosque in the town of Malegaon in the state of Maharashtra. The blasts killed 40 persons, mostly Muslims, and injured over 125. Initially, Muslim suspects were rounded up and charged. After years in custody, the nine Muslim accused were freed after a court concluded the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad had fabricated the evidence against them, so as to allow the true perpetrators to go free. In the meantime, Hindu extremists belonging to Abhinav Bharat were implicated in the Malegaon bombings. Years on, they have not been brought to trial. Special Prosecutor Rohini Salian was sacked after she complained of high-level pressure from the NIA to “go soft” on the accused.
The Makkah Masjid bombing: In May 2007, former members of the RSS planted bombs in Makkah (Mecca) Masjid in the city of Hyderabad located in the southern India. Swami Aseemanand and four others were charged and brought to trial. Despite Aseemanand voluntarily confessing in the presence of a magistrate, he and his co-defendants were all exonerated at trial.
The Ajmer bombing: In October 2007, three persons were killed in a blast at a Muslim shrine in the town of Ajmer in the northern state of Rajasthan. Two former RSS members were given life sentences, but Swami Aseemanand was acquitted. However, in August last year, the Rajasthan High Court suspended their life-sentences based on an appeal filed on their behalf by other Hindu extremists and they have now walked out of prison on bail.
The 2008 Malegaon and Modasa bombings: In September 2008, bombs exploded for a second time in Malegaon and in Modasa, a town in the state of Gujarat. Five were killed in the former and a 15-year old boy died in the latter blast. The NIA has closed the Modasa case and has yet to frame any charges in the second Malegaon bombing. The Hindu extremists arrested in connection with the 2008 Malegoan case, including Lt. Col. Purohit, have all been released.
While the authorities have systematically failed to convict those responsible for the wave of anti-Muslim bombings between 2006 and 2008, there has been a series of unsolved assassinations of prominent opponents of the Hindu supremacist right.
Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, a medical doctor and crusader against self-styled “godmen,” was assassinated on August 20, 2013 during his morning walk with all the evidence pointing to Hindu extremists who had denounced him as “anti-Hindu.”
On February 10, 2015, Communist Party of India national executive member Govind Pansare and his wife were shot dead by two men on a motorcycle when they were returning home from their morning walk. Pansare was a strident opponent of the vile Hindu caste system and was in the crosshairs of Hindu extremists.
Dr. Malleshappa Kalburgi, a 76-year old retired professor and vice-chancellor of Karnataka’s Hampi university, was shot dead by two assailants August 30, 2015, who came to his home posing as students. Kalburgi had been vehemently denounced by Hindu supremacist groups such as the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council) and the RSS, after having declared his opposition to idolatry during a June 2014 seminar in Bengaluru (Bangalore).
On September 5, 2017, Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old former Times of Indiajournalist and the publisher/editor of a Kannada-language weekly named Gauri Lankesh Patrike, was shot dead by Hindu extremists as she was entering her home in Bengaluru. She was targeted because of her trenchant criticism of the noxious Hindutva ideology developed by V.D. Savarkar and today espoused by the BJP and RSS.

Guatemala and El Salvador discuss amnesty for war criminals

Andrea Lobo

The Salvadoran and Guatemalan legislatures are simultaneously discussing amnesty bills regarding war crimes and human rights abuses during the counterinsurgency wars waged by the brutal US-backed dictatorships between 1960 and the 1990s.
For decades, survivors and supporters of the hundreds of thousands of victims have pursued investigations and prosecutions hoping to expose the truth, hold accountable those responsible and lay the basis for others never to suffer the same fate.
JesĂşs, a survivor who lost his mother, father, brother and four-year-old son in a 1982 massacre by a US-trained Salvadoran death squad, told Amnesty International, “At night, I felt that I was not crying, but others said I was crying. I didn’t feel like I was crying. It took years and years until it passed a little. I would walk down the road crying, I would eat to cry, I would eat dinner to cry, every meal, crying.”
Since the “peace” accord was signed in 1992, like many others, he has fought for a trial for this crime to no avail, even after the Salvadoran Supreme Court ruled in July 2016 that a 1993 blanket amnesty law was unconstitutional, and ordered Congress to draft a new regulation guaranteeing “truth, reparations and justice” for victims.
In Guatemala’s case, an amnesty law blocking prosecution of war crimes among combatants was imposed following the 1996 settlement between the government and the guerrillas. Sixty-five military and paramilitary soldiers have been sentenced for crimes against civilians and about a dozen are awaiting trial.
The new bill “sends us back to the darkest era of state terrorism,” Ana Lucrecia Molina told reporters. Guatemalan military officials were convicted for the “disappearance” of her brother and raping of her sister during the war. The legislation would free those sentenced within 24 hours and block new prosecutions completely, with the fascistic legislator who introduced it, Fernando Linares Beltranena, boasting “The right is empowered now.”
In El Salvador, the bill was recently drafted by an ad hoc legislative commission formed in June 2018 and chaired by Rodolfo Parker, general secretary of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC)—itself part of the military junta that carried out the worst war crimes during the 1980s. “We hereby grant broad, absolute and unconditional amnesty to everyone, regardless of the sector they belonged to [during the war],” the draft begins, allowing war crimes to be investigated but blocking all prosecutions, and pardoning all those who were convicted and sentenced.
The UN, the Inter-American Human Rights Court, the European Union and the US government have all expressed opposition to the amnesty bills. A June 2017 leaked diplomatic cable from the US embassy in San Salvador noted that the processing of those accused of responsibility for the 1981 “El Mozote” massacre “is an important, positive step for rule of law and ending impunity.” The same cable, however, then opposed a 1973 Procedural Code that “allows private accusers to submit evidence, call witnesses, and cross examine witnesses and defendants” as opposed to later reforms “to have a judicial system driven by institutions.”
It adds that the Access to Public Information Institute (IAIP) in charge of releasing information for these judicial processes is financed by the USAID, while the Ministry of Defense has withheld and “deliberately destroyed” evidence, and the Attorney General’s office has worked to “undermine” the cases.
Through these institutions, and their Guatemalan counterparts, whose officials frequently parade through the offices of the US foreign-policy establishment, the US State Department has pulled the strings in a charade of “reconciliation” that its regional puppets have exploited since the 1990s to legitimize their rule and enforce the austerity, privatizations and super-exploitation dictated by the US financial aristocracy.
Moreover, while backing a limited exposure of these crimes—even jailing a few top officials in Guatemala—Washington has continued strengthening the same repressive apparatuses, in spite of reports of new death squads formed by elite forces across the region.
While Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales has said he’ll respect the congress’ vote on the issue, Salvadoran president-elect Nayib Bukele has criticized the amnesty bill, seeking to distance himself from the widely hated parties associated with the civil war, the ex-guerrilla Farabundo MartĂ­ National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the fascistic Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA). This is expected to lead promoters of the bill to speed up its approval before Bukele’s June 1 inauguration. A former FMLN mayor, Bukele leads a coalition of former Arena and FMLN politicians with close ties to US imperialism that seeks to streamline a further shift to the right under a new façade, the Great Alliance for National Unity (GANA).
On March 18, Rodolfo Parker quit the Salvadoran legislature’s ad hoc commission, but it was furnished with three other members implicated in possible crimes—a colonel, a commander and a guerrilla leader. The FMLN and ARENA have both expressed opposition to any legislation that grants less than total amnesty. Expressing broader sentiments in the ruling class outside of those implicated directly, former vice-president Enrique Borgo Bustamente (1994-1999) said last month that, for the sake of “stability,” “it’s time to forget what happened in this country 30 years ago.”
At the same time, US imperialism is explicitly discarding “democratic” sensibilities as it promotes far-right governments dominated by the military with the aim of prying the region away—through bullying and possibly even war—from the economic and political influence of its global rivals, namely China and Russia.
This shift back to a US policy of backing naked military and fascist rule is being accelerated by the resurgence of the class struggle internationally, paired with economic stagnation in the region and concerns of another financial crisis.
Moreover, Central America is a social tinderbox. Hundreds of thousands of migrants risk their lives each year and defy Washington’s troops on the border, attacks against the right to asylum and concentration camps, all to escape intolerable poverty and violence in Guatemala and El Salvador, where 80 and 72 percent of the respective workforces scrape by in the informal sector, without social security benefits or job security.
Trump’s mass deportations and the cutting of US aid to force the local elites to turn these countries into open air prisons can only result in a social explosion.
Reflecting this shift of US policy across the region, the Trump administration named Elliot Abrams as special envoy to oversee the ongoing US coup operation in Venezuela. Abrams oversaw the cover-up of human rights abuses by US-backed forces in Central America during the 1980s. His office in the State Department published a 1984 report defending that year’s approval of Decree 50 or “Law of Criminal Procedure Upon the Suspension of Constitutional Guarantees” that handed the judiciary to the military in El Salvador as necessary to face “state of emergency crimes.” It then dismissed widespread claims of “systematic killing of non-combatants by gunfire and aerial bombardment” as “bogus.” Similar reports were produced regarding the rest of Central America.
When asked in a congressional hearing last February if he would back a faction in Venezuela involved in war crimes like those he helped cover up in Central America, Abrams said “I’m not going to answer that question.”
Whether it’s the full amnesty demanded by the local ruling elites or the threadbare façade of “justice” regarding these crimes still advocated by the US State Department, the message is clear to the armed forces that they can ruthlessly crack down on any challenge from below with impunity and US support, just like the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt, the fascistic regime in Israel, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia or the Honduran regime that has employed murderous repression against the mass rebellions that followed the US-backed coup in 2009 and electoral frauds ever since.
Nearly a quarter million people were killed between 1962 and 1996 in Guatemala, 93 percent at the hands of pro-government forces. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification classified the massacre of Mayan Indians, treated by the military as a potential constituency for guerrillas, as genocide, including the destruction of up to 90 percent of the Ixil-Mayan towns and the bombing of those fleeing. In El Salvador, 988 of the 75,000 killed between 1980 and 1992—also overwhelmingly by pro-government forces—were massacred in the Morazán Department in the “El Mozote” case, whose prosecution is at risk.
Most of the victims were children, who were shot down, burned and raped en masse or hung upside down and bled from their throats. Refuting claims by defendants that victims were combatants, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team has stated: “We only found marbles, toys, coins, cooking utensils, sandals and flip-flops next to their bodies.” It was the largest single documented massacre in modern Latin American history.
What the ruling class wants to be “forgotten” is the fact that their only response to the crisis of global capitalism is dictatorship, war and barbarism.
No reconciliation is possible with imperialism and national bourgeoisies bound politically and financially, without exception, to US and foreign capital. The working class and youth in El Salvador and Guatemala can only face imperialism as part of an international struggle with their brothers and sisters across the region and, most importantly, in the United States, under a socialist and internationalist program to overthrow capitalism across the world and establish an economy based on satisfying the social needs of all humanity.