Macron mobilizes 15,000 cops as protesting farmers threaten to blockade Paris

Samuel Tissot

Over the weekend, protesting French farmers released plans to blockade Paris and major economic centers in the capital region starting today. After French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s concessions announced on Friday failed to stem farmers’ anger, an emergency cabinet meeting was held where it was decided to mobilize 15,000 cops to keep farmers from strangling Paris’ main motorways and economic hubs with farm equipment.

Farmers block the M6 motorway near Lyon, central France, Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2024. French farmers protest across the country and in Brussels against low wages, mounting costs and other problems. [AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani]

Many of the farmers’ blockades that were in place at the end of last week were pulled back after Attal’s Friday speech, in order to prepare a new wave of disruptions across the country and to target the capital for the first time since the protests began.

The Seine-et-Marne branch of the National Federation of Agricultural Owners’ Unions (FNSEA) announced it plans to block the A4, A5 and A6 motorways as they join onto the Parisian ring roads starting at 2 p.m. on Monday. The Parisian regional branch of the Young Farmers union announced plans to block other major motorways around the capital and that they would also target the Rungis market, the largest food market in the world by turnover, which supplies produce for Paris and the surrounding region.

According to other regional sections of the farmers’ unions, plans to mount blockades have also been prepared for other regions. Michel Joux, president of the FNSEA Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, told BFMTV, “We are going to intensify our action at the national level. Our Parisian friends are going to block Paris. We are going to lay siege to France’s second-largest city, Lyon.” On Sunday, a blockade cut circulation on the A7 motorway between Lyon and Marseille.

After the emergency cabinet meeting on Sunday evening, fascistic Interior Minister Darmanin announced that 15,000 police officers would be mobilised on Monday to “ensure that no tractor enters Paris and the large provincial towns” as well as to the Rungis Market and the Parisian airports. Before the meeting started, a gendarmerie unit with armored vehicles had already been deployed outside the Rungis market. Helicopters will also be mobilised against the farmers.

Darmanin said that “it is a difficult week that is starting” and warned that circulation in the Paris area would be “extremely difficult” on Monday.

On Sunday, the Macron government laid out a strategy of combining vague promises of more concessions with threats of a violent crackdown. After the half-measures announced by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal failed to stem the protests, he conceded on Sunday that he had “not responded” to “all the unease and all the unhappiness” of farmers but “resolved to move ahead quickly.”

Later on Sunday Marc Fesneau, the Minister of Agriculture, promised new measures, both at the European and national level, to be announced on Tuesday. The cabinet was then convened for a 6 p.m. meeting and decided to mobilize 15,000 cops against protesters.

An anonymous high-ranking police official told the right-wing daily Le Figaro that their concern is “the number of machines that could come together.” The 1,000 multi-ton tractors heading for Paris could “be a headache for police forces, who don’t have equipment to remove them as they do for poorly-parked cars.” The police official said their plan was to block farmers “some distance away from Paris” and hope that “farmers would not risk breaking their machines, which they use to work, by forcing a police barricade.”

The government is making plans for the repression of the farmers in case it cannot engineer a stand-down, working through the pro-government bureaucrats who lead the farmers’ unions. Official circles mainly fear that popular sympathy for the farmers’ struggle could reignite the wave of mass protests and wildcat strikes independently of the union bureaucracies that broke out in the country in April 2023 after President Macron forced through his pension cut.

Workers must oppose plans for a crackdown on farmers, who are protesting hardships created by European Union (EU) military build-up and plans to slash EU food production. These plans are directed above all against the workers. However, workers cannot wait for the union bureaucracies to organize such opposition. General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union President Sophie Binet has issued a vague call for a “convergence” with farmers, but the union bureaucracies do not intend to take any action that would lead to an overt clash with the Macron government.

Exploiting the inaction of the union bureaucracies, neo-fascist National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen has begun campaigning among farmers, denouncing the EU and the FNSEA, the farmers’ union closest to the government, while posing as a defender of French farmers. On Thursday, she spoke at a farm to warn of a “crisis that is starting and that can be long, violent and brutal.”

“The FNSEA has already lost control. I think that for a long time, farmers have no longer been able to rely on their unions,” Le Pen said. She blamed the FNSEA and President Emmanuel Macron for having “covered the agricultural world with charges, norms, taxes and injustice.” She hailed farmers’ union bureaucracies closer to the RN like the Rural Coordination, which, she said, “warn of the consequences of the EU and reject the government’s bogus offers.”

Interviewed about Le Pen’s comments, RN lawmaker and Rural Coordination farmers’ union official Christophe Barthès told Le Monde he hoped the farmers’ unions would maintain control: “For the time being, the union is holding back the anger. But it will have to get most of its demands to keep the rank-and-file from getting the better of them.”

Le Pen and the RN are not friends of the farmers, but of the riot police Macron is sending to assault them, seeking to block the entry of broader layers of the working population into struggle against Macron. They clearly aim to profit politically, notably in this year’s European elections or in the 2027 French presidential elections, from Macron’s repression of farmers and workers and the bankruptcy of the union bureaucracies and their pseudo-left political allies.

This underscores the necessity, as rail workers in Germany mount a powerful nationwide strike, of organizing an international movement in the European working class against war and against the EU.

The French farmers’ movement erupted last week in the wake of farmers’ actions in Germany and Poland since the beginning of the year. On Sunday, Belgian farmers also blockaded the E42 motorway just north of Namur. The eruption of social opposition across Europe reflects the international nature of the struggle against capitalist governments’ austerity policies and the impact of the NATO-proxy war against Russia in Ukraine on social conditions across Europe.

EU governments have sent hundreds of billions of euros in military aid for the war and used it as a justification for a massive rearmament campaign. All of these measures have been funded by deep cuts to social programs—particularly, in France, to pensions, and also to farm subsidies. Farmers were heavily impacted by hikes in fertilizer prices, which rose sharply in early 2022 and are still twice the price they were in 2020.

Massive wave of COVID infections throughout Europe

Tamino Dreisam

The coronavirus pandemic is spreading unchecked across Europe, causing rising death rates and pushing hospitals to their limits.

People wearing face masks as they wait for a doctor appointment inside a hospital in Barcelona, Spain, Monday, Jan. 8, 2024. A massive wave of COVID-19 infections and other respiratory viruses are putting a severe strain on the system. [AP Photo/ Emilio Morenatti]

On January 10, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated: “In December, almost 10,000 deaths from COVID-19 were reported to WHO, and the number of hospital admissions increased by 42 percent compared to November with the number of ICU admissions at 62 percent. However, the trends [on mortality] are based on data from fewer than 50 countries, mainly in Europe and the Americas. It is certain that there is also an increase in other countries that is not being reported.”

The current wave is being driven primarily by the JN.1 (Juno) variant. It is an offshoot of BA.2.86 (Pirola). Pirola has more than 20 mutations on its spike protein, Juno has just one more. However, this makes the variant significantly more immune-resistant.

The British Office for National Statistics also recently reported that, in addition to the normal symptoms of a coronavirus infection, Juno can also cause sleep problems and anxiety. According to the survey by British scientists, 10.8 percent of those infected experienced sleep problems and 10.5 percent reported anxiety disorders.

The variant is already occurring in many European countries, including Iceland, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe also reported a significant increase in respiratory illnesses at the end of last year. In Spain and Italy, the rising numbers of patients have pushed hospitals to their limits. The COVID wave also coincides with rising flu and RSV infections across Europe.

In the UK, Juno is causing new record highs. At the end of October, the JN.1 share was still at 1 percent, in mid-November it was at 5 percent, but by Christmas had risen to 51.4 percent. Professor Steve Griffin, a virologist at Leeds University, said, “There has clearly been a massive surge in COVID infections in recent weeks. This is undoubtedly due to socialising indoors over the festive period. It is also likely that the return to schools, universities and businesses will increase this even further.”

Asked if the UK could set a new record this month, he replied, “Yes, I think we could see something similar to BA2 [the previous record wave].” Data scientist Professor Christina Pagel from University College London also expects infections to rise for another week or two, “equaling” or “even surpassing” the record waves at the beginning of 2020.

In Germany, the number of infections reached a record high at the end of the year, with hospitalisation rates on a par with previous waves. Although the wave receded in the first weeks of January, according to data from Fluweb, the incidence rate remains at 500. Almost 8,000 people had to be hospitalised in the first three weeks of the year and 1,316 have already died.

The situation in Spain is particularly dramatic. Hospitals have been under increasing pressure since the beginning of the year as a result of a “triple-demic” of COVID-19, influenza A and RSV. In large parts of the country, emergency departments are heavily overloaded due to the high volume of patients. The Universitario La Paz hospital in Madrid, which treats around 500,000 patients, making it one of the largest hospitals in Spain, has had to postpone operations to make room for new patients.

Due to the dramatic situation, the Spanish government was forced to reintroduce compulsory masks in healthcare facilities. However, local governments, such as those in the Basque Country, have reacted by taking legal action against the mask requirement.

The rising number of deaths from flu and COVID-19 is even putting pressure on funeral services. According to an article in Euro Weekly News, funeral service operators are warning they will struggle to cope with the rising number of deaths by the end of January.

Manuel Tejadas, head of the Interfunerarias funeral service chain in Catalonia, said, “We are overwhelmed. I haven’t seen such an increase in deaths since the pandemic.”

Piles of corpses are also being reported in hospitals in the regions of Madrid and Valencia. “Hospitals are continually calling us to collect bodies and we are very overloaded here,” explains Tejadas. In some cases, families have to wait up to four days for a funeral. That is twice as long as the usual period of between 24 and 48 hours.

Doctors and local newspapers in Italy are also warning that hospitals could be overwhelmed by the flu and COVID wave. Hundreds of patients are having to wait days to be transferred to normal hospital wards or intensive care units. According to the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS), cases of respiratory infections reached record levels in the last two weeks of 2023, surpassing corresponding periods during the pandemic. At the end of December, the number of deaths peaked at 425 per week, and the figure remained at 371 in the first weeks of January.

Foce, the Italian association of oncologists, cardiologists and haematologists, issued an appeal to the Italian government, warning: “For some weeks now, we have been observing the phenomenon of worsening chaos in our emergency systems. Emergency departments are in a nightmare situation and hospital wards are “under siege.’” It continues: “It is clear that the claim made at the end of July that the COVID pandemic is ‘numerically over’ is not true. The virus never disappeared.”

In Portugal, Health Minister Manuel Pizarro also publicly admitted that he was concerned about the increase in admissions to intensive care units as a result of respiratory infections. “The virus is causing very serious illnesses,” he explained. At the beginning of January, there were long waiting times of sometimes more than 10 hours in hospitals across the country.

The massive new coronavirus wave is a direct result of the ruthless pandemic policy of all European governments. They are putting profits before the lives and health of the population and have long since cancelled all measures to contain the pandemic.

Amid fourth winter of death, COVID excess death toll approaches 30 million globally

Benjamin Mateus

After more than two months of silence, on Wednesday the London-based weekly financial outlet, The Economist, finally updated their global daily estimate of excess deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to their projections, the cumulative global excess death toll now stands at 28.5 million, 4.1 times higher than the official COVID death toll, which surpassed 7 million at the end of 2023.

For inexplicable reasons, The Economist’s tracker, which uses a machine-learning model that provides estimates of excess death for every country on every day since the pandemic began, suddenly stopped updating in mid-November, just as the winter surge of the JN.1 variant began.

Global excess death estimates through November 8, 2023, before the latest update by The Economist [Photo by Our World In Data, The Economist / CC BY 4.0]

To place this into context, in the US, the winter surge began to accelerate in mid-October and peaked just before the New Year. In the aftermath of the Biden administration scrapping the COVID public health emergency (PHE) declaration last May, this wave was completely covered up in official figures. Only estimates of the actual toll of infections were provided through wastewater collection data tracking levels of SARS-CoV-2 across the country’s sewage systems, in particular those curated by Biobot Analytics.

Principled data scientists, based on their own initiative, like Jay Weiland and Dr. Mike Hoerger, model these wastewater data and provide estimates of the actual infection rates through their social media accounts. They also provide ample warning and guidance on how to protect oneself and take measures to minimize the impact of infections on one’s health, performing essential roles of public health abandoned by the CDC and the entire political establishment.

Although daily COVID-19 infections are trending down again in the US, the rates of infection continue to remain high, with an estimated nearly 1 million cases per day earlier this week. In all, more than 100 million Americans are believed to have been infected in the past three months of the current surge, accounting for nearly one-third of the population. The overwhelming majority of these are reinfections, which have been proven to compound one’s risk of Long COVID, heart attack, stroke and other long-term consequences associated with COVID-19 infection.

Daily COVID infections in the US during winter wave 2023-2024. [Data from Dr. Mike Hoerger]

Extrapolating these infection estimates to the rest of the world, this could very well mean that upwards of 1-2 billion more infections have transpired during the ongoing global wave of JN.1, meaning that tens of millions or more Long COVID cases should be expected to develop in the coming weeks to months. More concerning, the cumulative long-term impact of these repeated infections remains a disturbing unknown, but all data indicate that this will increase cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurological disorders being diagnosed.

With respect to immediate mortality from acute COVID infections, at their first press conference in 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) remarked that the pandemic continues to rage and close to 10,000 people officially died of COVID-19 in December, pushing the cumulative toll above 7 million. This grim statistic passed with virtually no comment from the mainstream media to commemorate the horrific milestone or issue a reminder of the deadly nature of the ongoing pandemic.

The WHO also acknowledged that the deaths were significant undercounts. Fewer than 50 countries, mostly in Europe and the Americas, were reporting these figures to the international health agency. Considering the complete dismantling of all pandemic tracking measures and attempts to obfuscate the real figures, even these numbers must be viewed as misrepresenting the real scale of mortality that is being covered.

Returning to The Economist’s excess death tracker, with the benefit of hindsight, a clear surge in mortality was well underway in October, peaking at over 10,000 daily deaths at the end of November. These figures remained elevated through December. The data for January, which shows a sudden drop in deaths, may be the lag factor in obtaining data from a host of countries and institutions that inform their models, and will likely be revised upwards in the future.

What is evidently clear though, is that official COVID deaths and excess deaths now differ by as high as 50-fold or more. Specifically, while on November 27, only 183 COVID deaths were officially reported, there were 10,200 excess deaths above the pre-pandemic period.

What is most concerning is that excess deaths remained stubbornly high throughout the entirety of 2023. While official COVID deaths for 2023 stood at only 284,000 globally, the excess death toll was 3.2 million, a figure that is more than 11 times higher. During the JN.1 surge, while official public health agencies have counted a mere 31,802 COVID-related deaths across the globe, excess deaths have been estimated at over 700,000 so far, or 22-times higher.

Relatedly, the actual figures for hospitalizations and ICU admissions have risen considerably in December but are based on incomplete data provided to the WHO from a handful of countries, underscoring the complete blackout on the real state of the pandemic and its impact on healthcare systems. As World Socialist Web Site writer Evan Blake noted in a recent widely shared thread on the latest excess death figures and the JN.1 surge, “Hospitals have been slammed across North America, Europe and other countries for the fourth year in a row. This wave, as with all others, will have untold long-term consequences for the health of society as a whole.”

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There are important parallels between the ongoing pandemic and Israel’s escalating genocide against the Palestinian people, which has the full support of the US and European imperialist powers. In both cases, the ruling elites have sought to normalize mass death and misery, while imposing regimes of censorship to cover up these social crimes that have radicalized masses of people and accelerated the global class struggle.

As the evolution of the highly mutated Pirola variant and its progeny JN.1 has aptly shown, not only has SARS-CoV-2 been given ample berth to infect anyone at any time who is not constantly on guard against the airborne pathogen, it has repeatedly demonstrated that it has the ability to find ever more novel mechanisms to evolve into immune-evasive variants and remain highly infective. This raises many additional concerns, as noted in recent studies on JN.1’s ability to reach the lower respiratory tract and possibly achieve a virulence akin to the pre-Omicron variants.

French government offers minor concessions to try to strangle farmers’ protests

Alex Lantier & Samuel Tissot

Yesterday, newly installed French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal made his first public statement on mass farmers’ protests shaking the country. Speaking in the Haute Garonne department around Toulouse, he offered minor concessions in a cynical attempt to shut down the protests, without satisfying farmers’ demands, before they trigger mass strikes by workers.

As Attal spoke, protesting farmers were blockading roads across most of France. At least 72,000 farmers were protesting in 85 of France’s 101 departments, the National Federation of Unions of Agricultural Owners (FNSEA) stated. Last night, there were 60 blockades of major roads, mainly in France’s economic or agricultural centers: the southwest, where protests began, the Mediterranean coast, the southeastern Rhône valley linking Lyon and Marseille, Brittany in the west, the northern area around Lille, and the Paris area.

Farmers block a highway leading to Paris, Friday, Jan. 26, 2024 in Saclay, south of Paris. Snowballing protests by French farmers crept closer to Paris with tractors driving in convoys and blocking roads in many regions of the country to ratchet up pressure for government measures to protect the influential agricultural sector from foreign competition, red tape, rising costs and poverty-levels of pay for the worst-off producers. [AP Photo/Christophe Ena]

In the southeast, protesting farmers burned a rural savings bank in Narbonne, a customs office in Nîmes, and highway toll booths near Montpellier.

Farmers organized at least five major blockades of highways in the Paris area and maintained their threat yesterday to take their tractors into the capital to blockade the government. “All we have to do is to cross this barrier to arrive to the gates of Paris,” said FNSEA official Alexandre Plateau at a highway blockade at Saint Arnoult, outside Paris. He added, “It is a possibility for us even this evening, all of our members and other farmers are ready to do it.”

The protests are overwhelmingly popular. Over 85 percent of the French population support the farmers, and France’s fascistic Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has promised, for the time being, not to unleash riot police against them. Moreover, it is more or less apparent that FNSEA officials have lost control of the protests on the ground, as reports emerge that farmers started major highway blockades across southern France without its approval.

Attal’s speech was part of an attempt by the government to divide and disorient the farmers and create better conditions for the FNSEA and other federations, like the Rural Coordination or the Peasants Confederation, to wind down the movement. The strategy was spelled out bluntly in a column published Wednesday night by editorialist Cécile Cornudet on the web site of France’s main business daily, Les Echos.

Cornudet’s comment, titled “Attal Government: The Unions are Our Friends!,” began by admitting that the French government and the peasant confederations have lost control of the situation. “Anger is spreading,” she wrote, recalling the mass “yellow vest” protests against social inequality in 2018-2019. “Nothing is worse than a movement with a thousand slogans … without anyone we can speak to, to negotiate with and to channel the movement. It is like the time of the ‘yellow vest’ movement.”

The ruling class and the government, she argued, should use the farmers’ federations the same way they use France’s corrupt trade union bureaucracies: to channel and strangle the rank-and-file.

She wrote, “Since the anger erupted among the rank-and-file, the FNSEA therefore had to take the lead and act quickly to try to restore its credibility. It took two days to extend what it was doing, then it presented 40 well-organized demands Wednesday, there will be an arbitrage meeting with the government on Thursday, and then the announcements of Gabriel Attal on Friday. It’s a well-oiled machine, well-orchestrated.”

As there are reports that truck drivers, fishermen and taxi drivers are joining farmers protests, Cornudet argued for making concessions, to wind down the movement and keep it from spreading to broader layers of working people. She wrote, “We must reply quickly now, because letting anger prosper is the best way to let it spread, maybe like wildfire.”

In line with this counter-revolutionary script, Attal appeared Friday afternoon at a farm whose owner, TF1 reported, had been vetted by his public relations team and the Interior Ministry. Jérôme Bayle, who reportedly participated in some initial highway blockades around Toulouse and over the last 24 hours has suddenly been widely promoted in capitalist media as the “gutsy rancher who speaks for the movement” (according to Libération), was also conveniently on hand.

Attal began with a few nationalist platitudes, declaring that he was bringing “Two slogans. First, protect our heritage and our identity” and also to “Buy French,” as “farmers are France.” He also warned against violence and thanked the farmers confederations. He then listed the measures his government is adopting to ask farmers to end the movement.

Attal proposed to suspend a planned tax hike on diesel fuel used for agricultural equipment, increase emergency funds for agriculture in Brittany, and to sanction agribusiness or supermarket chains that violate the Egalim law on how food sales revenues are to be shared. He also pledged to limit ecological restrictions on farmers’ construction projects and opposed a trade deal between the European Union (EU) and Mercosur, the South American free trade zone. This would aim to prevent South American farmers’ products from reaching EU markets.

These measures would harm Mercosur farmers and are totally inadequate as a response to the economic crisis facing farmers in France and across Europe. It does not address the collapse in the real value of EU farm subsidies due to inflation. Nor does it provide the massive financial assistance needed to help farmers meet targets, dictated by the EU’s “Farm-to-Fork” program, for reduced use of energy, nitrate-based fertilizer, and other products the EU is trying to limit with its anti-climate change strategy.

TF1 reported that the Attal government itself did not expect its proposals would satisfy the farmers, and that protests would continue for a few days. Nevertheless, the hand-picked crowd around Attal duly applauded, and Bayle gave press interviews declaring that the movement is over, before going to have a drink with Attal.

“Now some people are sending me messages saying you can’t stop, you have to think of this guy, this guy, or that guy. But we’ve been here for nine days,” he said. Speaking of Attal’s government, he added: “They kept their word, we’re keeping our word.” Indeed, it seems Attal agreed to this cynical charade based on a promise from Bayle that he would work with the government to wind down the protests.

Most of the protesting farmers reject Attal’s attempt to strangle the protest, however. Many social media posts showed assemblies of farmers gathering to watch Attal’s remarks and booing him as they ended.

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The FNSEA, which is desperate to establish control over the protests and shut them down, therefore felt compelled to continue posturing as supporters of the movement.

FNSEA President Arnaud Rousseau went on TF1’s prime time 8 p.m. news show to say it would continue supporting the protests despite Attal’s speech. “It’s a bit too thin, with his announcements he managed to take care of one highway blockade,” Rousseau said, adding: “What was said today does not calm the anger, we are going to have to go further.” Rousseau appealed to Attal to meet with him this morning to “keep working on the demands that are advanced by the FNSEA and the Young Farmers [association].”

Protests erupt in Russia over sentencing of Bashkir nationalist Fail Alsynov

Lev Novitsky & Clara Weiss

In mid-January, the Republic of Bashkortostan, also known as Bashkiria, (including the regional capital Ufa) was shaken by protests in support of Fail Alsynov, a leading Bashkir nationalist activist. Bashkiria is home to about 4 million people and named after its native Bashkir people, a Turkic ethnic group. The Republic is one of the most important oil-producing regions in Russia. It is also rich in other raw material resources. 

Bashkiria or Bashkortostan on the map of the Russian Federation [Photo by Stasyan117 / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

The protests were reportedly the largest in Russia since the NATO-provoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which marked the eruption of open conflict between the NATO imperialist powers and Russia. 

The protests developed initially in the small town of Baimak during the court hearing and after the verdict in the case of Alsynov. The court scheduled the verdict announcement for January 17. On January 16, he was classified as a terrorist and extremist, and the next day he was sentenced to four years of imprisonment in a general regime penal colony.

The number of protesters on January 15 was in the hundreds or thousands. Already by January 17, it had grown to potentially tens of thousands, according to some media reports. During the first protest on January 15, people gathered near the court where Alsynov was tried to support him. They chanted the words “Freedom!” in Russian and Bashkir, “Freedom to Fail Alsynov!” and “Fail, we are with you!” The police did not intervene.

The January 17 protest in Baymak started in the same place near the court building where the activist was sentenced. People refused to disperse and shouted “Shame!” This time there were clashes with law enforcers after the announcement of the prison sentence. The footage showed officers of the National Guard of Russia, armed with shields and batons, pushing back the protesters, who threw snowballs in response. 

The protesters managed to block the truck carrying Alsynov from passing for quite a long time. Messenger apps and social networks, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, were disrupted by authorities, and the entrance to the city was blocked. By the end of the day, the situation in the city had stabilized.

Later, police in the region opened a criminal case against the protesters for being involved in “mass riots,” while Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin, rejected the categorization of them as riots.

Already on the morning of Friday, January 19, a rally in support of Alsynov took place in Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria, in one of the city’s main squares. Reports indicate that between several hundred and more than a thousand people took part in the protest. When people began to dance and sing national songs, the police warned the crowd that the rally was unauthorized, arrested several people and eventually forced the people out of the square.

The immediate basis for Alsynov’s arrest in August 2023 was a phrase he used in April 2023 at a rally against a gold mining company: “Kara khalyk.” It literally means “black people,” a derogatory and racist term in Russian to denote people from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Alsynov claims that his words have been mistranslated. Regardless of the interpretation of that word, the statement for which he was sentenced oozes of nationalism. He said, “Armenians will go to their homeland [after the war in Ukraine], the ‘kara khalyk’ to their own, Russians to their Ryazan, Tatars to their Tatarstan.” “We won’t be able to resettle, we have no other home, our home is here!”

Prior to his August arrest, in March 2023, his home was raided by officers of the FSB, the Russian secret service, and he was charged with “discrediting” the Russian army. Alsynov has described the war in Ukraine as a “genocide” of the Bashkir people, pointing to the large number of Bashkirs drafted into the Russian army.

Of course, the Kremlin’s persecution of Alsynov has nothing to do with concern with the right of immigrants and non-Bashkir national minorities. The Kremlin itself has pursued a viciously racist policy of discrimination toward immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia who are brutally exploited by Russian companies.

In order to understand what is at stake in the case of Alsynov, it is necessary to review his political history and the character of Bashkir bourgeois nationalism. 

Fail Alsynov

Fail Alsynov became known as a leader of the Bashkir nationalist and separatist movement for serving first as the deputy chairman of the Bashkir national organization “Kuk-Bure” and then as the leader of the nationalist organization “Bashkort,” which was banned and categorized as extremist in Russia. 

Bashkir bourgeois nationalism originated at the end of 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It erupted into the open after the overthrow of the Tsar in the February Revolution in 1917. Already then Bashkir nationalists began to issue ecological demands, such as the demand to stop cutting down Bashkir forests. Such demands remain central to the Bashkir nationalist movement to this day, and they have also prominently been raised by Alsynov. Like other bourgeois nationalist movements in the former Russian Empire, the Bashkir nationalists were bitterly anticommunist and fought against the Soviet power.

With the establishment of the Soviet Union in December 1922, which acknowledged the equal rights of national minorities in its constitution, and the creation of autonomous republics, the early Bolshevik regime under Lenin and Trotsky fought for the internationalist unification of the oppressed masses of the former Russian Empire. This involved, in the case of the Bashkir people, the granting of significant rights of autonomy to what was then the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

The borders of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics as it was constituted on December 30, 1922

However, the nationalist reaction under the Stalinist bureaucracy encouraged the resurgence of the most vile forms of bourgeois nationalism, including Great Russian chauvinism but also extreme nationalism of national minorities. 

After the destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism in 1991, nationalist organizations mushroomed in Bashkiria. In 2006-2007 “Kuk-Bure” was founded, and Alsynov, then only in his early 20s, became its deputy head. The ideology of the organization was inspired by both the Turkish and Russian far right. “Kuk Bure” means “Grey Wolf,” an allusion to the Grey Wolves movement, a far-right Turkish paramilitary organization that has been involved in terrorist attacks and assassinations. “Kuk-Bure” reportedly also used the Grey Wolves’ salute.

A close friend and associate of Aslynov, Ruslan Gabbasov, recalled in his memoirs, “Notes of a Bashkir nationalist,” that the organization was also principally influenced by the neo-fascist ideology of the Russian National Unity (RNE) party, the largest fascist organization in Russia in the 1990s, which demanded the expulsion of all non-Russians from the country and idealized Adolf Hitler. He wrote, “… Azat Salmanov [one of the founders and leaders of the organization] ... borrowed the entire ideology of Kuk Bure from his classmate, a Russian skinhead named Maxim. Maxim was a member of the Bashkir branch of the RNE [Russian National Unity—an ultranationalist, neo-fascist organization in Russia]. At that time, Azat was not very interested in Bashkir nationalism, but gradually, communicating with Maxim, he began to adopt the ideas of the RNE.” According to Gabbasov, Salmanov would then later “apply” the ideology of the RNE “in the formation of Bashkir nationalist ideology. ... Subsequently, he used it all in ‘Kuk Bure.’”

Members of Kuk-Bure were reportedly involved in violent clashes with both Russian nationalists and immigrants from the Caucasus. 

After the dissolution of Kuk-Bure, Alsynov became a leading figure in the organization Bashkort, which largely recruited from disaffected rural youth. Like Kuk-Bure, the organization embraced a pan-Turkic ideology and reportedly maintained ties to nationalist circles in Kazakhstan. Its demands included greater autonomy for the Republic of Bashkortostan within the Russian Federation, national quotas for Bashkir people and the nationalization of enterprises that were involved in the processing of raw materials.  

In 2019-2020, Alsynov led protests against the development of Mount Kushtau by the Bashkir Soda Company (the region’s largest industrial company). After that, his organization was banned as “extremist,” and the governor of the region, Radiy Khabirov, wrote a statement denouncing Alsynov.

With his protest against companies and demands for environmental protection, Alsynov no doubt seeks to appeal to widespread and legitimate social discontent over extreme levels of poverty, as well as the destruction of the environment. However, there is nothing progressive about Alsynov’s political program. It expresses the interests not of the people of Bashkiria but rather those of a small stratum of the Bashkir elite and upper class that benefited from the restoration of capitalism and see the Putin regime as an obstacle to their further self-enrichment. They hope to benefit from more direct links with American and European imperialism and immediate access to the world market.

Bashkiria is one of the richest regions in Russia. It provides for a large share of Russia’s oil reserves and also holds significant natural gas, coal, ferrous metal ores, timber and other raw material resources.

Consequently, the social interests of a section of the regional elite and upper middle class coincide with the aims of the US and the European imperialist powers, which seek to bring about the disintegration of Russia and its transformation into a raw material appendage of imperialism. As was the case in the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the fueling and exploitation of national, ethnic and religious tensions is a central component of that strategy.

There are many indications that significant ties already exist between the Bashkir nationalist movement and the imperialist powers. The above-quoted Ruslan Gabbasov, whom the Russian outlet Novaya Gazata, which is itself sympathetic to the pro-US “liberal” opposition in Russia, described as Alsynov’s “closest associate,” is a former journalist at Idel.Realii, the Tatar-Bashkir service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Radio Free Europe is widely known to be associated with the CIA since the Cold War. Today, Gabbasov lives in Lithuania, a NATO country and one of the key bulwarks in the war against Russia. 

The Putin regime, for its part, has nothing to counter-pose to the growing nationalist and separatist tendencies within the oligarchy and upper middle class other than the promotion of Great Russian chauvinism and state repression, combined with ongoing attempts to find a negotiated settlement with the imperialist powers. It sees its greatest enemy not in the imperialist powers or rival factions of the oligarchy, but the working class.

Sri Lankan government imposes repressive social media laws

Saman Gunadasa

The Sri Lankan government bulldozed its anti-democratic Online Safety Bill (OSB) through the parliament on Thursday. The new measure, which has nothing to do with online safety or fighting internet crime, is a direct attack on free speech and freedom of expression, directed against suppressing all anti-government dissent and particularly its socialist and working-class opponents.

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

The government was in so much haste to push through the new media law that the Speaker declared the bill passed without a vote on Thursday, immediately after the final committee stage discussions in parliament. The first reading of the bill was passed the previous day with 108 votes from government MPs and 62 against. The new measure will become law as soon it is signed by the Speaker.

The Online Safety Bill provides President Ranil Wickremesinghe with wide-ranging powers to suppress anti-government opposition and take harsh punitive measures against anyone deemed to have violated its laws. The measures are clearly aimed at crushing all working-class resistance to the government’s International Monetary Fund-dictated attacks on jobs, wages, and social conditions.

Wickremesinghe will appoint a five-member Online Safety Committee and its chairman to implement the new Act’s regulations. He also has the power to remove the committee members and its chairman at any time. The committee can request the courts to imprison Sri Lankan citizens—in or outside the country—accused of violating the online safety laws. It can also order internet service providers or their intermediaries to disable the accused services and to block any financial support.

The broad-ranging and anti-democratic scope of the repressive laws are spelled out on part 12 of the bill. It states: “Any person, whether in or outside Sri Lanka, who poses a threat to national security, public health or public order or promotes feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of people, by communicating a false statement, commits an offence.”

Punishment for any such offence, which clearly means the prosecution of organisations and individuals calling for mobilisation of workers and youth, is imprisonment for five years and a heavy fine. If charged and convicted for the same offence a second time the punishment and fine is doubled.

Forty-five petitions from various civil society groups and opposition parties opposing the planned law were filed in the Supreme Court last year when the bill was published in the gazette. Petitioners noted that the planned measures contravened Sri Lanka’s constitution and violated the fundamental rights of its citizens.

The OSB was so blatantly anti-democratic that the Supreme Court said that 31 parts of the planned measures violated Sri Lanka’s constitutionally guaranteed rights and it presented a number of proposed amendments. If these amendments were not included in the bill’s final form, it stated, then it would need a two-thirds majority of MPs to approve it.

One of the Supreme Court’s objections related to the executive president having the sole authority to appoint and remove members of the Online Safety Committee. It called for committee members to be approved by the existing but already politically compromised ten-member Constitutional Council, which is currently tasked with the appointment of independent commissions.

Parliamentary opposition parties have alleged that the government not only ignored many of the Supreme Court’s proposals but introduced new provisions during the final day of discussion on the bill.

Sri Lankan workers and the oppressed masses have been kept in the dark about the final shape of the new social media law and will only be able to get access to it after it is approved by the Speaker then prepared for implementation by the attorney general.

The OSB has been opposed by the Asian Internet Coalition (AIC), an alliance of global online technology corporations such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple and X/Twitter which cites 13 points of concern. The opposition of these global giants has nothing to do with the defence of democratic rights but reflects concerns about the impact on their business profits.

Minister of Public Security Tiran Alles, who introduced the bill, responded by assuring AIC that he would accommodate their interests in a separate amendment in the future.

This week’s ruthless ramming through of the Online Safety Bill follows the Wickremesinghe government tabling on January 10 of its draconian Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB).

The bill, which is to replace the country’s notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) of 1979, is even more repressive, expanding terrorism to include any anti-government activity, political dissent or opposition.

The “offence of terrorism,” it states, is “intimidating the public or a section of the public,” as well as “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.”

It also targets anyone “who publishes or causes to be published a statement, or speaks any word or words, or makes signs or visible representations which is likely to be understood by some or all of the members of the public as a direct or indirect encouragement or inducement for them to commit, prepare or instigate the offence of terrorism.”

The ATB’s broad-ranging definition of “terrorism” means that Sri Lanka’s capitalist state apparatus can be unleashed against any individual or organisation calling for mobilisation of workers and youth against the government which is escalating its assault on their jobs, wages and democratic rights. Those accused of terrorism can be punished with life imprisonment while those accused of “direct or indirect encouragement” of terrorism can be jailed for 10 years with heavy fines.

The PTA was ruthlessly used by successive Colombo governments against anti-government activists, including workers, the rural poor, youth and students and the broad Tamil minority, particularly during the 26-year war against Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Today the Sri Lankan government is confronted with rising mass working-class opposition to its brutal austerity measures, as seen in recent protests and strikes.

While the Wickremesinghe regime depends on the trade union bureaucracies to divide and politically disorient the working class, it is determined to bolster its state power to crush any resistance by workers. It has currently unleashed a vicious witch hunt against Ceylon Electricity Board employees who held a three-day protest to oppose the privatisation of the state-owned corporation.

The Sri Lankan ruling class and its government are acutely fearful of the masses increasing their use of internet and social media platforms to not just voice their opposition to the government, the state apparatus and the opposition parties but to coordinate and organise their struggles. This technology was powerfully used during the mass uprising against former President Rajapakse and his government in April–July 2022.

Every government—from the major powers to the ‘backward’ countries—are stepping up their attacks on freedom of expression, gagging social media, websites and other internet facilities.

Early this month President Wickremesinghe announced that there will be presidential elections in September and national elections in January 2025. The ruling party and the opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and its National People’s Power (NPP) are stepping up their election propaganda, even as the government implements its anti-democratic measures.

While the SJB and the JVP/NPP have criticised the Online Safety Bill, they both insist that government regulation of social media can be introduced without taking harsh measures. These parties are committed to the IMF austerity agenda and will impose these policies if given the chance. If elected, they will no less ruthlessly attack basic democratic rights.

During debate on the Online Safety Bill, leading NPP parliamentarian Dr. Harini Amarasuriya said the measure was anti-democratic but insisted that there “needs to be measures” so that people are not harmed, people are not slandered.”

SJB parliamentary opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa echoed this stating, “Hate statements, multiple news items and information based on wrong information must be regularised with legal process and to reveal the truth. Character assassination based on lies should be avoided.”

International Court of Justice rules against Israel but declines to order end to genocide in Gaza

Tom Carter

South African, left, and Israel's delegation, right, stand during session at the International Court of Justice, or World Court, in The Hague, Netherlands, Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Patrick Post]

On Friday, the International Court of Justice issued an 86-paragraph written decision on the request for “provisional measures” in the pending case by the government of South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Employing restrained but nevertheless damning language, the judges wrote, “At least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the Convention.”

At the same time, the ICJ declined to call for a halt to Israel’s months-long assault against the civilian population of Gaza, merely ordering as “provisional measures” that Israel comply with its existing obligations under international law and submit a report within a month. This blatant failure to demand the end of the slaughter, which follows logically from the court’s findings, will be seen for what it is: a capitulation to political pressures exerted by the imperialist powers.

The ICJ stops well short of the resolution passed by the UN General Assembly itself in December, in which 153 member states out of the 193 voted for a “ceasefire,” with 10 voting against (including the US and Israel) and 23 abstaining (including the UK and Germany).

Instead, the ICJ merely orders that Israel file a “report” in 30 days regarding its implementation of the order.

At this early stage of the proceedings, which were initiated on December 29, the judges are only tasked with determining whether the allegations are “plausible” before issuing interim orders. The case itself is likely to drag on for years before reaching any definitive conclusion.

The ICJ’s ruling will rightly be seen as a damning indictment, not only for the Israeli government, but for US-NATO imperialism, which has supplied, financed, justified and defended the ongoing genocide in Gaza.  

On January 3, for example, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby denounced the case as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” On Friday, the ICJ decided the precise opposite.

The ICJ decision is also a stinging rebuke to figures such as US State Department spokesman Matt Miller, who dismissed the allegation of “genocide” with a wave of the hand earlier this month, telling reporters that the US government is “not seeing any acts that constitute genocide.”

The German government, which sought to intervene in the case on behalf of Israel, likewise stands exposed. So does New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who authored a prominent column on January 16 calling the genocide charge against Israel a “moral obscenity.”

For tens of millions of students, workers, and young people who continue to attend protests and demonstrations around the world in defiance of all the repression, violent provocations, and witch-hunting accusations of “antisemitism,” the ICJ decision will justifiably be seen as a vindication.

The ICJ decision presents the following figures: “25,700 Palestinians have been killed, over 63,000 injuries have been reported, over 360,000 housing units have been destroyed or partially damaged and approximately 1.7 million persons have been internally displaced.”

The decision quotes UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, contradicting Israeli government assertions that it does not target civilians or hospitals: “Areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety have come under bombardment. Medical facilities are under relentless attack.”

The decision also quotes the Commissioner-General of the UN Nations Relief and Works Agency, Philippe Lazzarini: “In the past 100 days, sustained bombardment across the Gaza Strip caused the mass displacement of a population … constantly uprooted and forced to leave overnight, only to move to places which are just as unsafe. This has been the largest displacement of the Palestinian people since 1948.”

The ICJ’s decision juxtaposes this human suffering inflicted on a mass scale with genocidal rhetoric issuing from the highest levels of the Israeli state, including defense minister Yoav Gallant’s assertion that Gaza is populated by “human animals” and that, “We will eliminate everything.”

The ICJ also quoted Israel Katz, then Minister of Energy and Infrastructure of Israel, who wrote on October 13, “All the civilian population in [G]aza is ordered to leave immediately. … They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

The ICJ concluded that these facts “are sufficient to conclude that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible,” including “the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.”

While the proceedings in the ICJ have been underway, Israel has continued carrying out war crimes and massacres at a relentless pace. In the hours leading up to the ICJ’s decision Friday, Israeli forces fired on a crowd of thousands waiting for humanitarian aid in Gaza City, killing 20 and injuring 150. In a 24-hour period from Wednesday to Thursday, Israeli forces killed over 200 Palestinian civilians.

Referencing Israel’s ongoing blockade of food, energy, medical supplies and fuel to Gaza, the ICJ decision states that “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the court renders its final judgment,” which in turn justifies adopting “provisional measures.”

The hollow character of the ICJ’s “provisional measures” is underscored by the fact that Israel’s own appointee to the court, Aharon Barak, joined in many of them, including the admonition that Israeli officials refrain from further genocidal incitement and enable humanitarian assistance to reach Gaza.

For all of its significance as a rebuke to the accomplices of the genocide, as Foreign Affairs magazine noted yesterday, the ICJ’s decision was a political one: an attempt to find a “middle ground,” acknowledging on the one hand the “overwhelming world concern for extraordinary loss of life in Gaza” (mass popular protests around the world that continue in the face of all efforts to discourage and repress them), but without, on the other hand, actually ordering “an end to Israel’s military operation,” which “Israel and the United States would have almost certainly dismissed.”

Responding to the decision yesterday, Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu called the ruling “outrageous,” while Israel’s fascistic minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is named in the case, denounced it as “hypocrisy.” Netanyahu had previously stated that Israel’s operations in Gaza would continue no matter what orders the ICJ gave, saying, “No one will stop us—not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anyone else.”

The refusal of the ICJ to even call for a cease-fire in the face of overwhelming evidence of the genocide unfolding in Gaza underscores its character as an imperialist institution. In March 2022, within weeks of the start of the war in Ukraine, by contrast, the ICJ had no such qualms about ordering that Russia “shall immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February.”