By Vijay Prashad
SANTIAGO, Chile, Sep 12 2025 (IPS)

At eighty, the United Nations is bogged down by structural limitations and political divisions that render it powerless to act decisively – nowhere more clearly than in the Gaza genocide.

There is only one treaty in the world that, despite its limitations, binds nations together: the United Nations Charter. Representatives of fifty nations wrote and ratified the UN Charter in 1945, with others joining in the years that followed.

The charter itself only sets the terms for the behaviour of nations. It does not and cannot create a new world. It depends on individual nations to either live by the charter or die without it.

The charter remains incomplete. It needed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and even that was contested as political and civil rights had to eventually be separated from the social and economic rights. Deep rifts in political visions created fissures in the UN system that have kept it from effectively addressing problems in the world.

The UN is now eighty. It is a miracle that it has lasted this long. The League of Nations was founded in 1920 and lasted only eighteen years of relative peace (until World War II began in China in 1937).

The UN is only as strong as the community of nations that comprises it. If the community is weak, then the UN is weak. As an independent body, it cannot be expected to fly in like an angel and whisper into the ears of the belligerents and stop them.

The UN can only blow the whistle, an umpire for a game whose rules are routinely broken by the more powerful states. It offers a convenient punching bag for all sides of the political spectrum: it is blamed if crises are not solved and if relief efforts fall short. Can the UN stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza?

UN officials have made strong statements during the genocide, with Secretary General António Guterres saying that ‘Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop’ (8 April 2025) and that the famine in Gaza is ‘not a mystery – it is a man-made disaster, a moral indictment, and a failure of humanity itself’ (22 August 2025).

These are powerful words, but they have amounted to nothing, calling into question the efficacy of the UN itself.
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The UN is not one body but two halves. The most public face of the UN is the UN Security Council (UNSC), which has come to stand in as its executive arm. The UNSC is made up of fifteen countries: five are permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the others are elected for two-year terms.

The five permanent members (the P5) hold veto power over the decisions of the council. If one of the P5 does not like a decision, they are able to scuttle it with their veto. Each time the UNSC has been presented with a resolution calling for a ceasefire, the United States has exercised its veto to quash even that tepid measure (since 1972, the United States has vetoed more than forty-five UNSC resolutions about the Israeli occupation of Palestine).

The UNSC stands in for the UN General Assembly (UNGA), whose one hundred and ninety-three members can pass resolutions that try to set the tone for world opinion but are often ignored. Since the start of the genocide, for instance, the UNGA has passed five key resolutions calling for a ceasefire (the first in October 2023 and the fifth in June 2025).

But the UNGA has no real power in the UN system. The other half of the UN is its myriad agencies, each set up to deal with this or that crisis of the modern age. Some predate the UN itself, such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which was created in 1919 and brought into the UN system in 1946 as its first specialised agency.

Others would follow, including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which advocates for the rights of children, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which promotes tolerance and respect for the world’s cultures.

Over the decades, agencies have been created to advocate for and provide relief to refugees, to ensure nuclear energy is used for peace rather than war, to improve global telecommunications, and to expand development assistance. Their remit is impressive, although the outcomes are more modest.

Meagre funding from the world’s states is one limitation (in 2022, the UN’s total expenditure was $67.5 billion, compared with over $2 trillion spent on the arms trade).

This chronic underfunding is largely because the world’s powers disagree over the direction of the UN and its agencies. Yet without them, the suffering in the world would neither be recorded nor addressed. The UN system has become the world’s humanitarian organisation largely because neoliberal austerity and war have destroyed the capacity of most individual countries to do this work themselves, and because non-governmental organisations are too small to meaningfully fill in the gap.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the entire balance of the world system changed and the UN went into a cycle of internal reform initiatives: from Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace (1992) and An Agenda for Development (1994) and Kofi Annan’s Renewing the United Nations (1997) to Guterres’ Our Common Agenda (2021), Summit of the Future (2024), and UN80 Task Force (2025).

The UN80 Task Force is the deepest reform imaged, but its three areas of interest (internal efficiency, mandate review, and programme alignment) have been attempted previously (‘we’ve tried this exercise before’, said Under-Secretary-General for Policy and Chair of the UN80 Task Force Guy Ryder).

The agenda set by the UN is focused on its own organisational weaknesses and does not address the largely political questions that scuttle the UN’s work. A broader agenda would need to include the following points:

Move the UN Secretariat to the Global South. Almost all UN agencies are headquartered in either Europe or the United States, where the UN Secretariat itself is located. There have been occasional proposals to move UNICEF, the UN Population Fund, and UN Women to Nairobi, Kenya, which already hosts the UN Environment Programme and UN-Habitat.

It is about time that the UN Secretariat leave New York and go to the Global South, not least to prevent Washington from using visa denials to punish UN officials who criticise US or Israeli power. With the US preventing Palestinian officials from entering the US for the UN General Assembly, there have been calls already to move the UNGA meeting to Geneva. Why not permanently leave the United States?

Increase funding to the UN from the Global South. Currently, the largest funders of the UN system are the United States (22%) and China (20%), with seven close US allies contributing 28% (Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, and South Korea).

The Global South – without China – contributes about 26% to the UN budget; with China, its contribution is 46%, nearly half of the total budget. It is time for China to become the largest contributor to the UN, surpassing the US, which wields its funding as a weapon against the organisation.

Increase funding for humanitarianism within states. Countries should be spending more on alleviating human distress than on paying off wealthy bondholders. The UN should not be the main agency to assist those in need. As we have shown, several countries on the African continent spend more servicing debt than on education and healthcare; unable to provide these essential functions, they come to rely on the UN through UNICEF, UNESCO, and the WHO. States should build up their own capacity rather than depend on this assistance.

Cut the global arms trade. Wars are waged not only for domination but for the profits of arms dealers. Annual international arms exports are nearing $150 billion, with the United States and Western European countries accounting for 73% of sales between 2020 and 2024. In 2023 alone, the top one hundred arms manufacturers made $632 billion (largely through sales by US companies to the US military).

Meanwhile, the total UN peacekeeping budget is only $5.6 billion, and 92% of the peacekeepers come from the Global South. The Global North makes money on war, while the Global South sends its soldiers and policemen to try and prevent conflicts.

Strengthen regional peace and development structures.

To disperse some of the power from the UNSC, regional peace and development structures such as the African Union must be strengthened and their views given priority. If there are no permanent members in the UNSC from Africa, the Arab world, or from Latin America, why should these regions be held captive by the veto wielded by the P5? If the power to settle disputes were to rest more in regional structures, then the absolute authority of the UNSC could be somewhat diluted.

With the genocide unrelenting, another wave of boats filled with solidarity activists – the Freedom Flotilla – attempts to reach Gaza. On one of the boats is Ayoub Habraoui, a member of Morocco’s Workers’ Democratic Way Party who represents the International Peoples’ Assembly. He sent me this message:

What is happening in Gaza is not a conventional war – it is a slow-motion genocide unfolding before the eyes of the world. I am joining because deliberate starvation is being used as a weapon to break the will of a defenceless people – denied medicine, food, and water, while children die in their mothers’ arms. I am joining because humanity is indivisible. Whoever accepts a siege today will accept injustice anywhere tomorrow.

Silence is complicity in the crime, and indifference is a betrayal of the very values we claim to uphold. This flotilla is more than just boats – it is a global cry of conscience that declares: no to the siege of entire populations, no to starving the innocent, no to genocide. We may be stopped, but the very act of sailing is a declaration: Gaza is not alone. We are all witnesses to the truth – and voices against slow death.

Vijay Prashad is Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
https://thetricontinental.org/

IPS UN Bureau

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Sbongile Tabhethe works in the food garden at eKhenana land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, 9 June 2020. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

By Vijay Prashad
Jun 10 2022 (IPS-Partners)

In March 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres warned of a ‘hurricane of hunger’ due to the war in Ukraine. Forty-five developing countries, most of them on the African continent, he said, ‘import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, with 18 of those import[ing] at least 50 percent’. Russia and Ukraine export 33% of global barley stocks, 29% of wheat, 17% of corn, and nearly 80% of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. Farmers outside of Russia and Ukraine, trying to make up for the lack of exports, are now struggling with higher fuel prices also caused by the war. Fuel prices impact both the cost of chemical fertilisers and farmers’ ability to grow their own crops. Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that ‘one of every five calories people eat have crossed at least one international border, up more than 50 percent from 40 years ago’. This turbulence in the global food trade will certainly create a problem for nutrition and food intake, particularly amongst the poorest people on the planet.

Poorer countries do not have many tools to stem the tide of hunger, largely due to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules that privilege subsidy regimes for richer countries but punish poorer ones if they use state action on behalf of their own farmers and the hungry. A recent report by no less than the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development provided evidence of these subsidy advantages from which wealthier countries benefit. At the 12th WTO ministerial conference in mid-June, the G-33 countries will seek to expand the use of the ‘peace clause’ (established in 2013) to allow poorer countries to protect their farmers’ livelihoods through the state procurement of food and enhanced public food distribution systems.

Two young girls return to their homes after drawing water from a stream that the farm dwelling community shares with wild animals, 29 July 2020. Credit: New Frame / Magnificent Mndebele

Those who grow our food are hungry, yet, stunningly, there is little conversation about the poverty and hunger of farmers, peasants, and agricultural workers themselves. More than 3.4 billion people – nearly half the world’s population – live in rural areas; amongst them are 80% of the world’s poor. For most of the rural poor, agriculture is the principal source of income, providing billions of jobs. Rural poverty is reproduced not because people do not work hard, but because of the dispossession of rural workers from land ownership and the withdrawal of state support from small farmers and peasants.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (South Africa) has been paying very close attention to the plight of farmworkers in the region as part of our overall project to monitor the ‘hurricane of hunger’. Our most recent dossier, This Land Is the Land of Our Ancestors, is a fine-grained study of farmworkers from their own perspective. Researcher Yvonne Phyllis travelled from KwaZulu-Natal to the Western and Northern Cape provinces interviewing farmworkers and their organisations to learn about the failures of land reform in South Africa and its impact on their lives. This is one of the few dossiers that begins in the first person, reflecting the intimate nature of politics surrounding the land issue in South Africa. ‘What does the land mean to you?’, I asked Yvonne while we were together in Johannesburg recently. She answered:

I grew up on a farm in Bedford, in the Eastern Cape province. My upbringing gifted me some of the best lessons of my life. One lesson was from the community of farmworkers and farm dwellers; they taught me the value of being in community with other people. They also taught me what it means to nurture and cultivate land and how to make my own meaning of what land is to me. Those lessons have informed my personal beliefs about the nature of land. All people deserve to live from the land. Land is not only important because we can produce from it; it forms part of people’s histories, humanity, and cultural heritage.

Six generations of the Phyllis family have lived in this house and worked on this farm. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi

The process of colonialism by Dutch (Boer) and British settlers dispossessed African farmers and converted them into either landless workers, unpaid labour tenants, or the rural unemployed. This process was hardened by the Native Land Act (no. 27 of 1913), whose legacy continues to be felt today. Seventeen-year-old composer Reuben Caluza (1895–1969) responded to the law with his ‘Umteto we Land Act’ (‘The Land Act’), which became one of the first anthems of the liberation movement in the country:

The right which our compatriots fought for
Our cry for the nation
is to have our country
We cry for the homeless
sons of our fathers
Who do not have a place
in this place of our ancestors

The Freedom Charter (1955) of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies promised those who struggled against apartheid, which formally ended in 1994, that ‘The land shall be shared among those who work it’. This promise was alluded to again in the 1996 South African Constitution, chapter 2, section 25.5, but it excludes explicit mention of farmworkers.

This is the site of the ancestral graveyard of the Phyllis family on which Yvonne’s father Jacob and their family worked, 6 June 2021. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi

In fact, right from the 1993 Interim Constitution, the new post-apartheid system defended the rights of farm owners through a ‘property clause’ in chapter 2, section 28. Differences within the ANC led to the abandonment of the more progressive Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in favour of the neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy – a self-imposed structural adjustment programme. What this meant was that there were simply insufficient political will and state funds allocated for the land restitution, land tenure reform, and land redistribution programmes. As our dossier notes, to this day the promises of the Freedom Charter ‘have yet to be fulfilled’.

Rather than expropriate land from the primarily white land-owning class to compensate for historical injustices, the state provides for compensation to landowners and operates on the principle of ‘willing buyer, willing seller’. Bureaucratic red tape and a lack of funds have sabotaged any genuine land reform project. In his 2014 Ruth First Lecture, Irvin Jim, general secretary of the largest trade union in the country, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), noted that the centenary of the 1913 Land Act was not commemorated by the government but only by the militant strike by farmworkers in 2012 and 2013. ‘The strike is still fresh in our memories’, Jim said. ‘It continues to highlight the colonial historical fact that the land, and the produce that comes from it, are not being equitably shared among those who work the land’. Due to the neoliberal orientation of the land question, some of the programmes set up for restitution and redistribution have ended up benefitting large landholders over subsistence farmers and lifelong farmworkers.

Former labourers Freeda Mkhabela, Lucia Foster, and Gugu Ngubane (from left to right) are among the activists struggling against landlessness as well as poor pay and working conditions and for better treatment of farmworkers, 26 May 2021. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

A genuine agrarian reform project in South Africa would not only meet the cries for justice from the land but would also provide a pathway to deal with the hunger crisis in the countryside. Our dossier ends with a six-point list of demands developed from our conversations with farmworkers and their organisations:

1. The government of South Africa must consult farmworkers and farm dwellers to incorporate their contributions into the development of a land reform programme which addresses their land needs.
2. Labour tenants’ claims to land ownership should be given priority in order to avoid land reform that solely enriches Black elites.
3. The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform, and Rural Development should facilitate the process of white farm owners apportioning some of their farmland to lifetime employees and descendants of families who have worked on farms for several generations.
4. The government must purchase farms for farmworkers and assist them with capital for start-up costs, farming equipment, and agricultural skills.
5. Land reform in South Africa must take into account the social factors that contribute to food insecurity and acknowledge the opportunities to rectify it through land redistribution.
6. The process of land reform must address the marginalisation of women workers in the agricultural industry and the lack of land ownership by women farmers to ensure gender parity in both spheres.

Loo ngumhlaba wookhokho bethu! This is the land of our ancestors! That’s the slogan that gives our dossier its title. It is about time that those who work the land get to own the land.

Laila Shawa (Palestine), The Hands of Fatima, 1989.

By Vijay Prashad
May 21 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Israel’s massive war machine attacks the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) with total disregard for international law. Since the OPT is an occupied territory, the United Nations does not permit the occupier – Israel – from altering the character of the land under occupation. However, this has not impeded Israel, whose attempt to evict families in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood resulted in the entry of Israeli border troops inside the al-Aqsa mosque, followed by waves of aerial bombardment that has resulted in daily death and injury toll that will be known only when the dust settles.

Importantly, the Palestinians did not surrender to this violation of international law. They fought back in Jerusalem and across the West Bank, in Gaza and the lands surrounding Israel. Thousands of people marched to the Jordan-Palestine border and the Lebanon-Palestine border, disregarding Israel’s threat to fire at them. From Gaza, different factions fired rockets to pressure Israel to desist from its violence in Jerusalem. The rockets from Gaza followed the violent and illegal provocations by Israel in the OPT; these rockets were not the first mover in the events of May 2021.

For the past fifteen years, Israel has punctually bombed Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2018, and 2019. Apart from this hot violence, Israel has persecuted a policy of strangulation against not only Gaza but all of the OPT, a policy of cold violence that seeks to get Palestinians so demoralised that they leave the OPT. If Israel refuses the one-state solution (a democratic state of Palestinians and Jews) and the two-state solution (Israel and Palestine), it seeks instead a three-state solution (sending the Palestinians to Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon). This is by definition ethnic cleansing. The bombings of 2021 have been particularly harsh, the targets including buildings that house the press and refugee camps. In Shateh (Gaza), a bombing raid on 15 May left scores of people dead. The Abu Hatab family lost ten members, eight of them children. Grotesque violence of this kind defines the Israeli apartheid project to annihilate the Palestinians; Rogers Waters calls this violence ‘primal disdain’.

Juhaina Habibi Kandalaft (Palestine), Jaffa, 2015

Given the clear violations of international law and the asymmetrical violence of the Israeli bombings, it was widely expected that the UN Security Council would call for a ceasefire. But the US government of President Joe Biden informed the other members of the Council that it would not vote for any resolution of that kind. The US alone blocked the release of a council statement on the worsening situation last week. The US also initially opposed holding an open session on Friday – as proposed by Norway, Tunisia, and China – which was eventually held on Sunday. For these reasons, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the United States and twenty-four other countries for standing with Israel. Amongst these countries is Brazil, whose president, Jair Bolsonaro, backed Israel’s right to use terrible force against the Palestinians. This statement from Bolsonaro came just a few days after the police operation against the people of Jacarezinho in Rio de Janeiro, which resulted in the massacre of twenty-five people. The gap between Jacarezinho and Gaza is only one of scale, the brutality equivalent.

On 15 May, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and No Cold War held a seminar, ‘China, USA, and Brazil’s quest for an independent foreign policy’. Former President Dilma Rousseff spoke about how, during her presidency (2011-2016) – and during the administration of her predecessor Lula da Silva (2003-2011) – the Workers’ Party led a process to establish institutions of multipolarity such as the expanded G20 (2008) and the BRICS project (2009). These are not perfect systems, certainly, but they were intended to produce platforms that were not fully subordinated to the United States. Neither have been able to live up to their potential; ‘asymmetrical relationships’, she said, ‘are not equal to multipolarity’. The G20 continues to take its lead from the Western powers and BRICS has been weakened by the rightward shift in Brazil and India. ‘The B and the I of BRICS suffered problems’, she said. ‘The B because of Bolsonaro’. Regarding the strategic necessity of returning to the project of multipolarity for economic recovery, Rousseff explained, ‘Our recovery would have to be necessarily political’.

Gabriela Tornai (@gabrielatornai_) / Design Ativista, Comida, direito do povo! (‘The people’s right to food’), 2021.

Brazil, being the largest economy in Latin America, would need to play a key role in the construction of multipolar institutions and in opening up the possibility for international law to set aside the imperial vicissitudes of the United States and its allies. For Brazil to play this role, the political bloc that stands against Bolsonaro and the right has to strengthen, and it has to be converted into a winning electoral coalition for the presidential election in 2022. Only if the left returns to power in Palácio do Planalto can Brazil once more play a role in building a multipolar world order.

Our May dossier, The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left, from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) delves deeply into just this subject. To better understand the problems and possibilities for the Brazilian Left, the team in São Paulo interviewed five leaders amongst the range of Brazil’s left: Gleisi Hoffmann, a chair of the Workers’ Party; Kelli Mafort of national board of the Landless Workers’ Movement or the MST; Élida Elena, vice president of the National Union of Students and a member of the Popular Youth Uprising (Levante Popular da Juventude); Jandyra Uehara of the National Executive Board of the Unified Workers’ Central; Juliano Medeiros, national chair of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL); and Valério Arcary, a member of PSOL’s national board. Through conversations with these leaders, the dossier traces the path followed by the Brazilian Left, examining the instruments used to foster unity of the organised sections of the Left and of the people behind these sections. It also explores the debate over whether to build a wider anti-Bolsonaro broad front or a narrower left front, as well as the impact of Lula’s recent pardoning from false corruption charges and his newly renewed eligibility to run for office in the next presidential election.

Cristiano Siqueira (@crisvector) / Design Ativista, Atenção, novo sentido (‘Attention: new direction’), 2019

Polls released recently show Lula ahead of Bolsonaro in the first round by 41% to 23%; in every second round scenario, Lula defeats his opponents (55% to Bolsonaro’s 32%, for instance). MST leader Kelli Mafort says that ‘The Lula factor exercises tremendous influence over the Brazilian left. The urgency of the current situation calls for him to continue to be a leader in solving Brazil’s problems, but it also helps urge activists to carry out base building work, expand solidarity actions, and confront the fascist Bolsonarism [that permeates] the working class’. To root out Bolsonarism would require that Brazil settle accounts with Bolsonaro’s criminal behaviour during the pandemic, which has already set in motion a charge of crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Evidence of Bolsonaro’s genocidal policies was made clear in June 2020 by Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapó, who said, ‘President Bolsonaro wants to take advantage of the virus; he is saying that the Indian has to die’.

Mafort’s point about the need to build the bases of the key classes is echoed by the others interviewed for the dossier. They assert that winning the election is fundamentally important but that, in order to secure not only the presidency but a new project for Brazil, building the strength of the working class and the peasantry is essential. The contours of this new project will contain a programme for the post-pandemic scenario for Brazil and the importance of an independent, internationalist foreign policy for Brazil.

Letícia Ribeiro (@telurica.x), photography by Giovanni Marrozzini / Design Ativista, Guardiãs (‘Guardians’), 2019.

Since last year, the United States has used its position of political pre-eminence to get several Arab monarchies (Morocco and the United Arab Emirates) to recognise Israel, which means to set aside the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians. This process of undermining Palestinian rights will continue if the US is left unchallenged on the world stage. Genuine multipolarity would prevent the US from using its force against the Palestinians, the Yemenis, the Sahrawis, and others. The defeat of the ruling classes in countries such as Brazil and India – subordinate to US interests – is essential for advancing the interests of the people of the world, from Palestine to Colombia.

In 2014, the last time Israel bombed Gaza with this level of extreme ferocity, the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon watched as families fled from their bombed homes for UN schools, which were also bombed. He imagined the danger through a conversation between a child and a grandfather (sidu). They are talking about Jaffa (now inside Israel) and wondering about the Palestinian’s right to return, guaranteed by UN Security Council resolution 194 (1948).

Are we going back to Jaffa, sidu?
We can’t
Why?
We are dead
So are we in heaven, sidu?
We are in Palestine, habibi
and Palestine is heaven
and hell.
What will we do now?
We will wait
Wait for what?
For the others
….
to return

This story was originally published by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Senderos latinos / Latino paths, Honduras, 2019

By Vijay Prashad
Apr 15 2021 (IPS-Partners)

On a Sunday night on 21 March 2021, gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.

Jorge Vásquez of the National Platform of Indigenous Peoples said that Juan Carlos Cerros had been threatened for his leadership of the Lenca peoples and their fight to protect their land. Carlos Cerros was killed, Vásquez said, ‘because of the work we do’. None of his killers have been arrested.

Two and a half weeks later, on 6 April, Roberto David Castillo Mejía entered the Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Castillo, the former president of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA), the company behind the Agua Zarca dam project on the Gualcarque River, came to face charges that he was the mastermind in the 2016 assassination of Berta Cáceres, the leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisation of Honduras (COPINH). The next day, on a plea from the defence, the Court agreed to suspend the trial for the fourth time.

Before the suspension, the legal team representing Berta and her family presented new evidence that established a wider conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family. The lawyers filed paperwork that showed confirmation of a payment of $1,254,000 from DESA to Potencia y Energia de Mesoamerica S.A. (PEMSA). This money went from DESA’s chief financial officer, Daniel Atala Midence, to David Castillo, who then funnelled it to the military officer Douglas Bustillo, who coordinated the assassination of Berta.

In 2013, DESA had initiated the construction of a hydroelectric dam without consulting the Lenca community, who consider the river to be a sacred and common resource. Berta Cáceres opposed the Agua Zarca dam and defended the land of the Lenca people. As Vásquez said of the murder of Carlos Cerros, Berta too was killed for the work she did. She was killed, her family says, by a conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family, the main financial backers of the dam project. The Atala Zablah family’s company, Inversiones Las Jacaranda, raised their money – despite pleas from Berta – from FMO (a Dutch development bank), FinnFund (a Finnish development investor), and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration (a multilateral development institution).

Bertha and Laura Zúniga Cáceres at a mural made by el Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 2021.

‘We are in a lot of uncertainty’, Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, the daughter of Berta Cáceres, told me; ‘the justice system in Honduras has never cared about this’. The ‘this’ in her statement relates to the role of DESA and its executives. The authorities have been shielding the Atala Zablah family and the ruling party, which had itself tried to collude in the cover-up.

In 2009, the US government actively participated in and egged on the oligarchy to undertake a coup d’état against the left-leaning government of Manuel Zelaya. Since then, Honduras has been governed by the far-right National Party, whose current leader and Honduran president is Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH). After Berta Cáceres was assassinated, President Hernández’s minister of security Julián Pacheco Tinoco wrote to Pedro Atala Zablah, one of the leaders of the Atala Zablah family and a board member of DESA. He wanted to assure Atala Zablah and his family that the government would not pursue the case with any seriousness; the case, he said, would be seen as a ‘crime of passion’. Zúniga Cáceres tells me that ‘neither did the army act alone nor did the company act alone either’. There is, she says, ‘coordination between the economic and military power centres, which is the essence of the dictatorship under which we live in Honduras’.

This week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published a dossier on the 2009 coup and on the regime of JOH. It looks at how these processes have created a climate of impunity for class violence by the elites – such as the Atala Zablahs – against leaders such as Berta Cáceres and Carlos Cerros, brave people who defend the dignity and land of all people in Honduras. We researched and wrote the dossier with COPINH and Peoples Dispatch (special thanks to Zoe Alexandra). The dossier, Pity the Nation: Honduras Is Being Eaten From within and without, comes in three parts:

1. Part 1 details the fact of the 2009 coup, authorised by the United States government of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
2. Part 2 unmasks the structure of extreme right terror sown by the coup regime, which has its tentacles deep in the world of narco-trafficking.
3. Part 3 provides three examples of the broad attack on the Honduran Left: the assassination of Berta, the attack on the trade unions, and the forced disappearance of Garifuna leaders in July 2020.

The third section ends with a quote from Miriam Miranda, a leader of the Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH): ‘We are tired of the lies from the government of Honduras. [Government reports] have no substance. They don’t say anything. They make a joke of us, the Garifuna people. We do not want lies. We want the truth. We want life to be worth more in our country. We have to build new paths. We will continue fighting so that this becomes a reality’.

In Yoro, Honduras, the people speak of the lluvia de peces, or the rain of fish, which they commemorate with a festival during the rainy season. Miracles such as this, it is hoped, will rescue people from the tribulations of hunger. Roberto Sosa (1930-2011), one of the great poets of Honduras, was born in Yoro, but he moved away from the miraculous toward the politics of the people and the Left. In 1968, he published his finest collection of poems, Los pobres (The Poor), which won the Adonáis Prize. The headline for this newsletter comes from one of the poems from this collection, La Casa de la Justicia. Here’s an extract:

I entered
the House of Justice
of my country
and found it to be
a temple
of snake charmers.

….

Grim judges
speak of purity
with words
that have acquired
the brightness
of a knife. The victims – in constrained space –
measure terror in a single blow.

Roberto Sosa’s line, ‘I entered the House of Justice of my country and found it to be a temple of snake charmers’, has been quoted often in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 coup and in the years that have followed. After the coup, Sosa said that Honduras had been turned ‘into a jail country’ (en un país cárcel). ‘Today, the entire country is militarised’, Sosa said, but he took refuge in the ‘massive and organised resistance that has not stopped demonstrating against the coup government, a resistance that does not retreat’.

There is no retreat even today. None for the people of Honduras.

Liu Xiaodong (China), Refugees 4, 2015.

By Vijay Prashad
Oct 1 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Here’s a story that encapsulates the terrible situation of our world: Associated Press reporters were on a Turkish coast guard vessel which picked up 37 migrants, including 18 children, from two orange life-rafts in the Aegean Sea on 12 September. The refugees were from Afghanistan, a country that shudders from an endless war. One of the refugees, Omid Hussain Nabizada told the reporters that the Greek authorities held them in Lesbos, put them onto life rafts, and then sent them into the turbulent seas. They were left there to die.

Since 1 March, Greece has suspended the right of refugees to claim asylum. The authorities have placed refugees into makeshift camps. The Moria Reception and Identification Centre in Lesbos (Greece) was built to hold 3,500 people but at its height it housed 20,000 people (due to the pandemic, the population was reduced to 12,000). Four days before Nabizada and others were rescued from the Aegean Sea, a fire tore through the Moria camp. Around 9,400 people lost their overcrowded shelters. This camp was constructed in 2015 to briefly hold migrants as they made their way to Europe from Afghanistan, Syria, and other areas where the West has perpetuated its many wars.

When the other European countries began to shut their doors to refugees, Greece became Europe’s plug; the refugees got stuck in places such as Moria.

In August, the engine of a boat exploded off the coast of Zuwarah (Libya), killing 45 refugees from Chad, Mali, Ghana, and Senegal. Fortunately, 37 people survived the explosion. It was a reminder that the passage of refugees across the Mediterranean Sea has not abated. In fact, the UN Refugee Agency said that 2020 has seen a threefold increase in refugee traffic in Italy and Malta as compared to 2019. The numbers of those on the move has not slowed down, despite the pandemic.

During the Great Lockdown, as aircraft fly relatively empty across much of the world, rubber boats and old trucks continue to carry large numbers of the impoverished peoples of our planet in search of a better life.

Oweena Camille Fogarty (Mexico), Untitled.

In 2018, a World Bank study showed that half the world’s population – 3.4 billion people – live below the poverty line, a number that increased during the pandemic. The Bank used the measure that a person who makes less than $5.50 per day is poor. Over the course of the past half century, states have increasingly privatised the delivery of key social services, such as education, childcare, health care, sanitation, and housing. These social costs are now borne by people with meagre means. That is why, in 2006, economist Lant Pritchett suggested that the threshold for measuring the poverty line be lifted to $10 a day. But even at this level, it is just not possible to cover the basic costs in a privatised society. Nonetheless, based on this threshold, Pritchett published an important paper which suggested that 88% of the world’s population lived in poverty.

The crushing weight of the Great Lockdown during the pandemic has worsened the social and economic condition of the vast majority of the world’s population. In June, the World Bank estimated that around 177 million people will slip into ‘extreme poverty’, the first such slip in thirty years. Half of those who will fall under the poverty line due to the pandemic will be in South Asia, while a third will be in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A new study from the International Labour Organisation shows that the working people around the planet lost 10.7% of their income in the first nine months of 2020; this equals a loss of $3.5 trillion. Workers in the poorer states bore the brunt, with losses of around 15% of their income, while workers in the richer countries saw losses of 9% of their income. The ILO found steady cuts in employment in the first two quarters of the year, with every indication that these losses will continue for the rest of the year, if not permanently.

Maysa Yousef (Palestine), Identity of the Soul, 2014.

Migrants like Omid Hussain Nabizada leave their homes where employment has collapsed and make perilous journeys. If they survive the passage, they at best find menial jobs (if they are able to find employment at all), earn a pittance, save that money, and then send it home. In 2019, such migrants sent $554 billion in remittances to their families in their countries of origin. Some countries – such as Haiti, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan – rely on these remittances for more than a quarter of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In April 2020, the World Bank estimated the ‘sharpest decline of remittances in recent history’, dropping by 19.7% to $445 billion. These declines, along with a decline in foreign direct investment and the collapse of exports for many of the countries of the Global South, have already created a dangerous balance of payments problems in many countries.

Refusal by wealthy bondholders (London Club), and the countries that back them (Paris Club), to allow for debt cancellation or even proper debt suspension puts immense pressure on these states as well as on the families that will lose an important source of basic income.

The lack of basic services – particularly health care in the midst of this pandemic – will create deeper distress. In 2017, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation warned that half of the world’s population did not have access to essential health services and that, each year, 100 million people are driven into poverty by the lack of income to pay for health care costs. This number is conservative, since in India alone – according to the national survey on social consumption – 55 million Indians were impoverished due to health care costs in 2011-12. That warning was not heeded.

Francisco Amighetti (Costa Rica), La Niña y el viento, 1969.

On 10 September 2020, World Suicide Prevention Day, the WHO’s Director-General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus reminded us that every forty seconds someone somewhere dies by suicide. Importantly, he noted that the means by which many commit suicide must be kept away from people, ‘including pesticides and firearms’. The mention of pesticides points a finger at the endless suicide epidemic in rural India, where hundreds of thousands of farmers and agricultural workers have taken their lives; this was revealed in a series of powerful reports by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Senior Fellow P. Sainath. The National Crime Records Bureau in India showed that, in 2019 – before the pandemic – every fourth suicide was committed by daily wage earners. These are the people hardest hit by the pandemic and the Great Lockdown; we have to wait until next year’s report to grasp the full impact of the deep social impact on farmers, agricultural workers, and daily wage earners, all of whom will be struck by the three pro-agribusiness farm bills foisted on the Indian population by its government this month.

Last week, the foreign correspondent Andre Vlteck (1962-2020) died in Istanbul. A few years ago, André introduced me to the Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez, particularly his song La Maza. Here are a few lines from Silvio, in honour of Andre:
If I didn’t believe in what I believe
If I didn’t believe in something pure
If I didn’t believe in every wound
…
If I didn’t believe in what hurts
If I didn’t believe in what stays
If I didn’t believe in what fights
…
What would my heart be?
What would the mason’s hammer be without a quarry?

The greatest tyrant in our time is a social system that impoverishes the majority of the world’s people, such as the people who drowned recently in the Mediterranean Sea, so that a small minority can live a life of luxury. If I didn’t believe in another world, I would find it hard to breathe.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Mir Suhail, Tough Goal, 2020

By Vijay Prashad
Apr 3 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Madness engulfs the planet. Hundreds of millions of people are in lockdown in their homes, millions of people who work in essential jobs – or who cannot afford to stay home without state assistance – continue to go to work, thousands of people lie in intensive-care beds taken care of by tens of thousands of medical professionals and caregivers who face shortages of equipment and time. Narrow sections of the human population – the billionaires – believe that they can isolate themselves in their enclaves, but the virus knows no borders. The global pandemic driven by the variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus holds us in its grip; even as China seems to have bent the curve of infections, the charts for the rest of the world are forbidding: the light at the end of the tunnel is as dim as it has ever been.

Incompetent and heartless governments put the hammer down on society without any planning or concern for those with few resources. It is one thing for the elite or the middle class to stay at home, work using the Internet, and muddle through teaching their children from home; it is another for the billions of migrant labourers and day labourers, people who live hand to mouth, and people who have no homes. Lockdowns, quarantines, social distancing – these words mean nothing for the billions of people who work hard each day to socially reproduce the world and to produce the millions of commodities; they have not benefited from their work, but they have certainly enriched the few who are now hiding with their wealth behind their curtains, afraid of the reality that made them rich.

Vito Bongiorno, Terzo Millennio (Third Millennium), 2011

Italian author Francesca Melandri’s ‘Letter to the French from the Future’ (Libération, 18 March) says, ‘Class will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden is not the same as living in an overcrowded housing project. Nor is being able to work from home or seeing your job disappear. The boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was’. Her judgment is mirrored by OluTimehin Adegbeye, who looks at the six million daily wage workers in her city of Lagos (Nigeria); if they survive the coronavirus, they will perish from hunger (and, amongst them, the most at risk are women and girls who will be tending to the sick in their families and – like medical personnel – will likely catch the coronavirus in large numbers). In South Africa, the state is threatening to evict workers from shacks, saying that they need to break up these congested areas; Axolile Notywala from Ndifuna Ukwazi of Cape Town says, ‘De-densification is just a fancier word for forced eviction’. This is what is happening to the global working class in this CoronaShock.

Ram Rahman, Workers near Kashmere Gate Inter-State Bus Terminal, Delhi, 28 March 2020

The display of disparities condenses at the Anand Vihar bus terminal in Delhi (India), where thousands of factory workers and service sector workers stood cheek-by-jowl as the country closed down. P. Sainath, our Senior Fellow, writes that ‘the only transportation now available’ to the working class is ‘their own feet. Some are cycling home. Several find themselves stranded midway when trains, buses, and vans stop functioning. It’s scary, the kind of hell that might break loose if this intensifies. Imagine large groups walking home, from cities in Gujarat to villages in Rajasthan; from Hyderabad to far-flung villages of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh; from Delhi to places in Uttar Pradesh, even Bihar; from Mumbai to no-one-knows-how-many destinations. If they receive no succour, their rapidly diminishing access to food and water could trigger a catastrophe. They might fall to age-old diseases like diarrhoea, cholera, and others’.

Neeraj Kumar, age 30, works at a cloth factory, where workers are paid on a piece-rate basis. ‘We have no money left’, he told The Wire. ‘I have two children. What will I do? We live in rented accommodation and did not have any money or food left’. He will have to go to Budaun, two hundred kilometres away. Mukesh Kumar is from Madhubani (Bihar) and has a 1,150-kilometre journey ahead of him. He worked at a food outlet, where he used to get food as part of his wages. But the outlet is closed. ‘I have no money left’, he said. ‘I have no one here who would look after me if I get infected. So, I am leaving’.

The Delhi office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research did a survey of garment workers, most of whom do not have permanent jobs. ‘We are here for work’, one worker told us. ‘We left our families in our villages. We try to work as much as possible to earn that little extra income to feed and support our families’. Three-quarters of the workers we interviewed said that they are the only wage-earning member in their family; the agrarian crisis has beaten down the earning capacity of their families, who rely on remittances from these migrant workers, even though they themselves provide unpaid labour for the social reproduction of family life in the village. Now it is these workers – with no state support – who are marching back home, some carrying the coronavirus, back into the heart of the agrarian crisis.

Ram Rahman, Kashmere Gate, Delhi, 28 March 2020

Umesh Yadav, a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, wrote as these masses of workers left Delhi: ‘These migrant workers did not suddenly fall from the sky. They have existed on the peripheries of the cities, in the ghettos and the slums; they are deliberately kept invisible and unnoticed by the elite’. A hasty show of compassion for them as they form long lines on the roads that leave the cities is not enough; the system that uses them, keeps them barely alive, and then throws them out must be struggled against, another system put in its place. The hideousness of social inequality produces a heap of sorrow and anger amongst the damned of the earth.

What happens when the government tells three hundred million casual workers to sit at home for three weeks after they have made their long exodus? These are workers who have never been paid enough to save, and who have few resources to sustain themselves during this period. It is essential for the government to organise the provision of food through public distribution systems and through free canteens (as pointed out by Subin Dennis of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research). If there are no such schemes, the global pandemic will lead to widespread hunger and famine. It might also lead to a deepening crisis in the countryside, as the winter (rabi) crops such as mustard, pulses, rice, and wheat might not be properly harvested due to a labour shortage occasioned by the lockdown. A failure of the winter crops in India would be cataclysmic.

Satish Gujral (1925-2020), The Despair, 1954

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that at least 25 million people across the world will lose their jobs due to the coronavirus, and that they will lose income worth about $3.4 trillion. But, as the ILO’s Director-General Guy Ryder correctly said, ‘it is already becoming clear that these numbers may underestimate the magnitude of the impact’. There were already 71 million displaced people before the CoronaShock – one person displaced every two seconds. Numbers are bewilderingly difficult to estimate – how many people will lose everything, with nothing from any of these ‘stimulus packages’ trickling down to them? These enormous infusions of trillions of dollars trickle down from central banks into the coffers of financial institutions and large corporations and into the vaults of the billionaires. By some miracle, the money that falls from heaven gets stuck in the penthouses. None of the hundreds of millions who will find their lives disjointed will be able to catch any of that money because none of it will reach them.

Kaifi Azmi (1919-2002) whose verses dug deep into the soil of the Indian peasantry and workers, wrote a sublime poem called Makaan (House), which is a song of the construction workers:

Once the palace was built, they hired a guard to keep us out.
We slept in the dirt, with the sound of our craft;
Our heartbeat pounding with exhaustion,
Bearing the picture of the palace we built in our tightly shut eyes.
The day still melts on our heads like before,
The night pierces our eyes with black arrows,
A hot air blows tonight.
It will be impossible to sleep on the pavement.
Arise everyone! I will rise too. And you. And you too.
So that a window may open in these very walls.

Kerala – the state governed by the Left Democratic Front – is a window in the ghastly wall. The government is opening thousands of camps for migrant workers in Kerala who would need accommodation. As of 28 March, 144,145 migrant workers had been housed in 4,603 camps, and more camps are being opened. The government is also building camps for homeless and destitute people – 44 camps have been opened so far in which 2,569 people are staying. The state has opened community kitchens across the state to provide free hot meals; for those who cannot come to the kitchens, the food is delivered to their homes.

Please break the walls and build windows.

Yu Youhan, We Will Be Better, 1995.

By Vijay Prashad
Jan 16 2020 (IPS-Partners)

On Wednesday, 15 January, China and the United States agreed to suspend their full-scale trade war. From February 2018, the United States placed tariffs on Chinese goods that entered the US market, and then China retaliated. This tit-for-tat game continued for almost two years, causing massive disruption in the global value chain. In October 2019, the International Monetary Fund’s G-20 Surveillance Note reported that the global GDP suffered by a 0.8% drop merely because of the tariffs on goods such as aluminium, steel, soybeans, and car parts between the United States and China. Western attacks on Chinese 5G technology – and on the tech firm Huawei – are part of the pressure on China to buckle before the US-led order. But China did not bend. As a prelude to the ‘phase one’ deal, the United State Treasury Department stopped calling China a ‘currency manipulator’, a term that has haunted China’s for decades.

The suspension of the trade war comes with a ‘phase one’ deal whose text includes nine chapters on topics such as intellectual property rights to financial services. Most significantly, China has agreed to stop asking firms that invest in China to share their technology; this is a major departure for the Chinese model of development. The ‘phase one’ deal is merely the first stage in an ongoing process of negotiations and confrontations, which will be expected to continue for a long time yet. If ‘phase one’ goes well, and if the implementation and dialogue mechanisms work, then the two countries will move to ‘phase two’. Chinese diplomats say that they do not anticipate an immediate return to the pre-confrontation period, namely before the trade war began in February 2018.

News of a potential trade deal immediately moved the International Monetary Fund to revise its 2020 growth forecast for China from 5.8% to 6%. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the GDP numbers for the United States would be boosted to 2.5% for 2020 (though the IMF continues to predict a 1.9% GDP for the United States). It is likely that the low expectations for the global economy (at 2.5% GDP growth for 2020) might also be revised upwards for the year, although predictions for a severe global contraction remain intact; Deloitte’s CFO Signals for the fourth quarter of 2019 suggests that US companies have begun to further constrain investment in anticipation of a serious downturn – but not a recession – of the economy. US firms lost at least $46 billion as a consequence of the trade war started by US President Donald Trump in February 2018. Pressure from US firms on the White House and Trump’s need to make his ‘victory’ in the trade war an election issue drove the US to the table. By the fourth quarter of 2018, China’s economic growth rate was the slowest it has been since 1990, which is why China had been willing to discuss outstanding issues since February 2018.

Shi Guorui, The Yangtze River, 2013.

In the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Dossier no. 24 – The World Oscillates Between Crises and Protests – there is an important section on the new ‘bipolar world’. It is widely recognised that US power has dwindled since the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003 and since the world financial crisis of 2007-08; at the same time, it is hard to deny the rapid growth of China’s economy and of China’s growing importance on the world stage. A decade ago, when China and Russia joined Brazil, India, and South Africa to form the BRICS, it appeared as if the global architecture was shifting from US unipolarity (with its allies as the spokes around the US hub) to multipolarity; but, with the deepening crisis in countries like Brazil and India, the new global architecture – according to Tsinghua University’s Institute for International Relations – will be one of bipolarity, with the US and China as the two poles of the global order.

China’s growth rates since the reform era began in 1978 remain perplexing. The attempt to explain this has spawned an enormous literature, some of it only partially explanatory but most of it petrified in clichés. Professor Wang Hui of Tsinghua University suggests that China’s policy framework is not along orthodox neoliberal lines, but that it has emerged out of the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to sovereignty, out of the immense advances in health and education in the first decades of the revolutionary period, out of the enhancement of China’s economy by the socialist commodity economy of that period, out of the sustained struggles in the countryside to transform land relations, and out of the deep pragmatism of the Communists (‘cross the river by feeling for the stones’). Professor Hui warns that the stresses of market society have begun to engender new – and dangerous – contradictions for China. One of the overwhelming contradictions is the threats from the United States.

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline – Big Family no. 4, 1995.

The United States – which has the habit of dominance – tried its best to both manage and to prevent the growing global role of China. To manage China means to intimidate it to remain subordinate to US economic interests: Washington accused Beijing of currency manipulation and tried to get China to revise its currency to the benefit of the United States; this did not happen, and its failure to happen is a sign that China will not bow to US authority.

Accusations about the currency were quickly followed by claims that China had forced technology transfers or had stolen intellectual property, that China prevented access to financial services, and that it would not cut its industrial subsidies. Each US President over the course of the past decade – George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump – has accelerated the accusations against China and portrayed China as having advanced entirely by deceit.

When China refused to accept the US’ demands, and when it continued to develop its economic project – the Belt and Road Initiative – the United States moved to politically and militarily threaten China along several axes, some of these developed by Wu Xinbo, Dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University.

Indo-Pacific Strategy. In 2017, the United States and India began to develop an ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategy that would bring these two countries together against China’s Belt and Road Initiative (along the land of Eurasia) and its String of Pearls Initiative (in the Indian Ocean). The first Indo-Pacific Strategy document, produced by the US Department of Defence in June 2019, points its finger at China, which it says ‘seeks to reorder the region to its advantage by leveraging military modernisation, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce other nations’. The United States and India – alongside Japan and other smaller states – are to create a bloc to prevent the emergence of China as a continental and global power. It is with no irony that the US defence department complains about ‘influence operations’ and ‘predatory economics’, both of which are closely understood to be US policies (including the Indo-Pacific Strategy itself).

The Use of Taiwan. The Indo-Pacific document promotes the defence of Taiwan as an essential pillar in US strategy. China has long insisted on pushing for the diplomatic isolation of Taiwan and for its eventual incorporation into China. Since it does not have an embassy in Washington, Taiwan has had – since 1971 – a Coordination Council for North American Affairs and then the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office; Trump changed it to the Taiwan Council for US Affairs, a name that has incensed Beijing. Not only have Trump and his officials said that they would like to increase US-Taiwan relations; the US has sold Taiwan F-16 fighters and fully backed the re-election of Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party – which asserts Taiwan’s independence from China – in the January 2020 presidential elections.

Liu Bolin, Hiding in New York No. 9 – Gun Rack, 2013.

Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The Indo-Pacific document of the US Defence Department says that the US – and India – express ‘deep concern’ about the fate of the Muslim population in China; at the same time, the US has said that it stands with the protest movement in Hong Kong. The concern about Chinese Muslims is not credible coming from the US, where Trump’s Muslim Ban defines his own attitude, and from India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has driven a citizenship and refugee policy that is clearly anti-Muslim. The United States and its allies use the Hong Kong and Xinjiang cases to put pressure on China; people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang would be delusional if they believe that the US actually cares about democracy and Muslims.

In 1965, at the urging of several national liberation movements and governments in eastern Africa, the People’s Republic of China began to work with them to build the Tanzam Railway or the Great Uhuru Railway. This railway cut through old colonial boundaries that isolated Zambia and kept Tanzania from the interior of the continent. Mao told Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere that – despite China’s own poverty – as a national liberation project, the Chinese Revolution was ‘duty bound’ to assist their comrades in Africa to build the longest railroad on the continent. This is what they did.

China in Africa. For the past decade, the US and the Europeans have complained that China is the new colonial power in Africa. It is true that Chinese investment into Africa has increased astronomically, but in many countries the main economic partner remains the old colonial adversary. Nonetheless, this narrative of China as a colonial power is not about facts, but it is to serve a purpose – to disparage China’s commercial strategy in the Global South and the challenge that it poses to the hegemony of the US and its allies. The actual procedure from China is well-described in the 2013 Human Development Report: ‘China is providing preferential loans and setting up training programmes to modernize the garment and textile sectors in African countries. China has encouraged its mature industries such as leather to move closer to the supply chain in Africa and its modern firms in telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, electronics and construction to enter joint ventures with African businesses’. A few years ago, I asked Tanzania’s former Foreign Minister Ibrahim Kaduma what he thought of Chinese commercial interests in Africa. ‘African states need to come up with their own assessment of their path forward’, he said; they should not be guided by Western fearmongering.

Ta Men, Snow, 2016.

From February 2018, various dispute settlement mechanisms – including the Strategic Economic Dialogue – set up by the US and China have failed to operate. The most recent ‘phase one’ deal creates new platforms for discussion and debate and provides a roadmap to settle the chaos unleashed by this trade war. But this agreement is a ceasefire – not a peace treaty. The contests will continue; instability will remain. ‘Chaos and disorder’, as the Tsinghua University scholars write, will be the way ahead.

Rana Javadi, Never-Ending Chaos, 2013.

By Vijay Prashad
May 31 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – Word comes from friends in Iran of foreboding, a general sense of fear that the United States might bomb the country at any time.

A friend in Tehran asks me to read Simin Behbahani’s The World is Shaped Like a Sphere, a poem for our times. Behbahani (1927-2014), a superb lyricist, wrote this poem in 1981 (translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa):

It was our agreement to call this the East,
though we could push it westwards, with ease.
Don’t speak to me of the West, where the sun sets,
if you always run after the sun,
you will never see a sunset.

The world divided by a line is a dead body cut in two
on which the vulture and the hyena are feasting.

Iraq – at the behest of the Arab Gulf and the United States – had attacked Iran in 1980, inaugurating a futile war that would go on till 1988. Angry that the Gulf Arabs had not properly financed the war nor honoured the sovereignty of Iraq’s oil fields, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in August 1990. It is worth recalling that in the summer of 1990, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – set up out of anxiety for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – hastened to normalize relations with Iran. Kuwait resumed flights to Iran and linked investment and shipping deals with Iran. The GCC, which had egged Saddam to attack Iran, now seemed to curry favour with Iran against Iraq. The blood of Iraqis and Iranians stained the long border between those two countries; the people of both countries had been treated as pliable marionettes by the Gulf Arabs and the West. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait started the Gulf War, which does not seem to have ended. Today, the Gulf War manifests itself in the fierce siege against Iran.

Gohar Dashti, Today’s Life and War, 2008.

Iran sits at the precipice of disaster. US President Donald Trump’s harsh sanctions and his threats of war send shockwaves through the region. Buyers of Iranian oil have decided to wait and see how the situation unfolds. The key player here is China. How China will react defines the next stage, as I write in my column. All is tense. Shahram Khosravi, an anthropologist, wrote a moving account of a conversation with his friend Hamid – a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War. Our newsletter this week features Shahram’s account, a window into the life of one Iranian rattled by the sanctions and by the premonition of war. It is below:

Shahram Khosravi, Hamid, 2018.

In Iran, the term ‘war’ is often used in reference to the US sanctions. ‘Why don’t they [the US] leave us in peace?’, asked my friend Hamid late last year.

Hamid and I were both born in 1966 in the same village along the Zagros mountains in the Bakhtiari region of southwestern Iran. At nineteen, Hamid was sent do to two years of compulsory military service. The Iran-Iraq War was in its fourth year. Hundreds of thousands of young men, many teenagers, had already been killed. After ten days of training, Hamid went – Kalashnikov in hand – to the front. On a cold February day in 1986, the gates of hell opened. Saddam Hussein’s forces unleashed mustard gas on the Iranian troops. Twenty thousand died immediately, while an additional 80,000 survivors suffered—and many continue to suffer— the impact. Hamid’s lungs were badly damaged; he cannot talk without coughing. His skin is burnt in many places. He suffers from depression.

Hamid blames the US and the Iraqi government for his injuries. He is right. Recent CIA documents confirm US complicity in the use of mustard gas on young people like Hamid. Now the US sanctions have become harsher. As a temporary labourer, Hamid can barely tolerate the unbearable economic pressure of the sanctions on his weak shoulders.

Medicines are exempt from the sanctions, but they are nonetheless scarce and expensive. Companies that sell medicines to Iran shy away from the unstable economic situation and fear retribution from the United States. Sanctions target shipping and banking, making it hard to get the medicines to the country and pay for them. Insecure markets are a good business environment for speculators, who buy and hoard medicines, forcing prices upwards.

Foreign investments collapsed, and capital fled the country. An official source says that since the summer of 2017, about US $20 billion has left Iran. Companies have also fled, which means that parts for machinery and cars cannot be easily sourced. Production of vehicles has fallen by 72%.

Hamid has been in the informal sector for decades. He rarely gets paid in time. Not getting paid on time is now normal – often with six months of salary in arrears. Each week, workers somewhere in Iran go on strike to demand their salaries. Delayed salaries mean workers have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. Less fortunate people turn to usurious moneylenders (who charge interest rates at 70%). The interest eats into their unpaid salaries. The US sanctions have cut their lifeline. They are drowning.

While Hamid – in a small village – struggles to survive, middle-class Iranians seek a way to flee the country. I have never seen such widespread desire to leave the country. People from the middle-class do not see any future in Iran. Lines outside European embassies are getting longer and longer, as announcements of property auctions ‘due to emigration’ are getting more common. Buyers are few. The ‘bazaar is sleeping’, people say. ‘Nothing happens now. No one sells, no one buys’.

‘Iranians’, it is said, ‘have become like calculators’. Life is filled with numbers. Following the exchange rate of the dollar has become an obsession. Everyone waits to find out where the Rial – Iran’s currency – will settle. The structure of social life is suspended. Hamid checks the dollar’s price each day. Far from his village, Donald Trump tweets about the war against Iran. On 19 May, Trump threatened Iranians with an ‘official end’ – a threat of extermination. When he does so, the Rial responds and Hamid sees and feels the impact. Sanctions and Trump’s threats cast a shadow of death, even as no gun has yet been fired. Premature death is so frequent that it is now seen as normal. Iran has become preoccupied with death due to the sanctions and the rhetoric of war. Shortages of medicines have already killed people.

So have plane crashes. In 1995, US President Bill Clinton put sanctions against Iran’s civilian aviation industry. This prevented Iran from buying new aircraft and spare parts. Iran’s dozen airlines have the oldest fleets in the world. In February 2018, an Aseman Airlines flight with 66 on board crashed in the Zagros mountains – not far from Hamid’s village.

Hamid worries for his son, Omid, now age 19. ‘If they start a new war….’, he says, and then stops, his eyes down, coughs overcoming him. He has seen how wars break bodies and souls. If the US felt no compunction in providing Iraq with chemical weapons to use against Iran in the 1980s, why would they not allow Saudi Arabia and Israel to do the same now? Our generation was gassed by the US-backed Saddam Hussein. Is it now Omid’s generation turn to break down under the harsh sanctions and the shadow of American bombers?

Kiarash Eghbali, Old woman at Shariati Hospital, Tehran, 2016.

A war against Iran – as Hamid says – will be catastrophic, not only for Iran but for Eurasia. It would divide the world into two, vultures and hyenas feasting on both halves.

Tito Zungu, Airplane (South Africa, 1970).

By Vijay Prashad
May 9 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – When the late South African artist Tito Zungu wanted to depict the world of the migrant labourer, he settled on the envelope. It was by infrequent letters that the migrant would be able to be in touch with family – letters dictated to professional letter writers at one end, which would be read out by professional letter readers at the other. With pencil and coloured pens, Zungu drew airplanes and boats as well as transistor radios on these envelopes – images that showed how the migrants moved and how they sought some entertainment.

Around the time that Zungu drew on envelopes, the great South African musician Hugh Masekela turned his attention to the migrant miners. His song, written in 1971, Stimela: The Coal Train captured the great damage done to the people of Africa by migration and mining (Stimela is the Nguni word for train).

There is a train, Masekela sings, that comes from Namibia and Malawai, from Zambia and Mozambique. It is full of conscripted labour, people who come to work in Johannesburg’s gold mines. ‘For almost no pay’, these miners go ‘deep down in the belly of the earth’. The ‘evasive stone’ does little for the miners, their pay low, their food terrible, their homes ‘flea-ridden’. And then these miners dream, but their dreams drift into the awfulness of reality,

They think about the loved ones they may never see again
Because they might have already been forcibly removed
From where they last left them.

The wealth goes elsewhere. It is no coincidence that the English named their new coin the ‘Guinea’ in 1663 – a reference to Africa’s western coast (which was in turn was named this way by the Portuguese and Spanish to honour the great commercial city Djenné – now in central Mali). English money is shaped by plunder from Africa. This was the situation in the 17th century and it remains the situation – in large measure – today.

Naeem Mohaiemen, ‘Do not fear/I will arrange a procession/soldiers will march past carrying flowers not guns/only for you/my love’ (after Shahid Kadri), 2017.

Silence is not the mood of the miners. They have fought against the theft of their labour from the days of colonialism into these neo-colonial times. Their protests have been fierce, and the reaction to them has been deadly. The attack on the miners at Marikana (South Africa) in 2012 is emblematic, but it is also quite ordinary.

Miners – like landless workers – are familiar with gunfire and teargas, from one end of Africa (Marikana, South Africa) to the other (Jerada, Morocco). But state violence and the violence of corporations does not stop the miners and the landless workers. In South Africa, an election was held on Wednesday, 9 May, where the miners and landless workers lined up to vote (resulted are expected on 11 May). Many of them are part of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and of the Abahlali baseMjondolo – the ramparts of the working-class in the country. Despite the expected victory of the African National Congress – whose hold over the electorate has not slipped in the post-apartheid period since 1994 – tens of thousands of landless workers put in their ballot for the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP), a new formation in the country. They emerged after the Marikana massacre, whose platinum mine was owned by Lonmin – a firm that had on its board of director Cyril Ramaphosa, the current leader of the African National Congress. Whether it is in South Africa or Zambia, Sudan or Ghana, the landless workers on the continent – against incredible odds – continue to struggle for more of the surplus, to battle for a future.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes our Dossier no. 16, Resource Sovereignty: The Agenda for Africa’s Exit from the State of Plunder. This dossier takes up the themes of resource theft and resource sovereignty. To understand these themes, we turned to Gyekye Tanoh, head of the Political Economy Unit at the Third World Network (Africa), based in Accra (Ghana). Gyeke’s interview is rich and rewarding. He takes us through a journey of the plunder on the continent – from the theft of surplus value from the landless workers to the various forms of deeply corrupt theft of resources through illicit financial flows, by repatriation of profits, through mispricing and by deflation of the value of the raw materials removed from the continent. He offers a shocking piece of data from a recent Bank of Ghana report – of the $5.2 billion worth of gold exported by foreign-owned mining firms from Ghana, the government received only $68.6 million in royalty payments and only $18.7 million in corporate income taxes. That’s 1.7% of the value of the gold – the price of which inflates as soon as it leaves Ghana’s shores. Furthermore, the return to the communities that live above the gold is a mere 0.11%. Those who mine the gold get the least return from it.

Capitalism’s scandalous mining behaviour camouflages its plunder behind the discourse of ‘good governance’. The claim made is that it is not the foreign-owned mining firms (many of them Canadian, for which see our Briefing no. 1), but the corrupt elite in Africa that is responsible for the enduring poverty. No doubt corruption of any sort is a drag on the lives of the landless workers. This corruption, Gyeke explains, is symptomatic of the structure of the world economy. From many countries on the continent, debt servicing payments – often for odious debts – are larger than the sum of money pocketed by government officials and local elites.

We highly recommend this interview with Gyekye. It is filled with insights that bear serious reflection and further debate and discussion.

Residents from Lesetlheng village in South Africa’s North West Province celebrating outside the Constitutional Court after it set aside the High Court interdict evicting them from their farm land. Ihsaan Haffejee, 2018.

So much plunder, so much poverty. The weapons that the poor wield today are their ballot papers, their running shoes and their organisations. The ballot papers allow them – if they have the right – to exercise their vote. This right is being slowly eviscerated by money, fake news and voter suppression. The running shoes allow them to migrate to ever distant shores, but as the walls grow more dangerous around the West, these shoes are less and less useful. Finally, the landless workers have the weapon of organisation, to form political platforms that amplify their class interests. But these are weaker these days, fighting to shift the tide of history. It is the guns of money that are first turned on them. It is what killed Berta Cácares in Honduras in 2016. It is what threatens the lives of those who stay firm against plunder: people like Francia Márquez, a leader in the fight against illegal gold mining in Colombia (who survived an assassination attempt on 4 May). Francia Márquez won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018 for her work against the extraction sector, the same award given to Berta Cáceres in 2015, the year before she was assassinated.

In 1899, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague pledged to end war, to create ‘a real and lasting peace’. Since 1899, there have been hundreds of attempts to use negotiation to end war, with the formation of the United Nations to provide an institutional space for negotiation rather than war. Wars come now with frightening regularity. US warships are on their way to the coast of Iran. The US threatens Venezuela with war. Trade wars are on between the US and China, an issue discussed by economist Prabhat Patnaik in our seventh dossier. The high-minded aspirations of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and of the UN remains, but it is cheapened by the need of powerful and rich countries to exercise their dominion by boycotts and bombardments.

The escalation of pressure on Iran – by sanctions and threats of war – should chill the heart of any sensitive person (my column documents these threats, and the impact of sanctions on Iran). War against Iran will inflame the region that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Hindu Kush Mountains. It is to be avoided. But wars are not irrational. They are used by powerful states to exercise dominion, to send a message to the landless workers that they must bend their heads and go into the mines without making too much noise.

Colonel Ewart Grogan, a British officer and settler-colonial leader in Kenya, said of the Kikuyu, ‘We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs’. What Grogan meant was that having stolen the land of the Kikuyu peoples, they must now be converted into labourers. But the crucial word here is ‘stolen’. To steal requires force. It is by war that the world is made, and it is by war that the unequal power relations are maintained.

Excerpt:

By Vijay Prashad
Mar 1 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – The mood in Caracas (Venezuela) is sombre. It appears that the attempted coup against the government that began on 23 January is now substantially over (as the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tells me). The Lima Cartel is divided. The Europeans have cold feet. On the one-month anniversary of that attempt, a massive crowd of the poor gathered in the centre of Caracas to demonstrate their support for the Bolivarian Revolution. An elderly couple carried a sign which captured the mood – Somos los Invisibles. Somos los Invensibles. Venceremos (We are the Invisible. We are the Invincible. We will Overcome).

It is hard to gauge the numbers of people at that rally. A picture from a drone suggests a large crowd, but it misleads. Most crowd counting software assumes a certain body size and a certain amount of space between people in a crowd. Those assumptions do not apply in this case. The supporters of the government and of the Bolivarian Revolution bear the marks of their history on their bodies. They are small and thin, darker skinned and worn by decades of work that has earned them just about enough to survive. The reason why they adore Hugo Chavez – his image everywhere – and why they call themselves Chavistas is that it was the arrival of Chavez in the 1990s that gave them hope and that inspired their political activity. Not for them the accusations that this government – led by Nicolas Maduro – is responsible for their hunger. They know that their Bolivarian Revolution is a process and that they are active in that process.

This Wednesday, thirty years ago, thousands of Venezuela’s poor felt maligned by the increase in bus fares. They ran across their country, their rage captured in the disorder they produced. That event is called the Caracazo. It is this event that inaugurates the Bolivarian Revolution. A few days before the anniversary, I visited Mariela Machado, a Black, poor, working-class woman who leads a community in one of the many self-organised housing projects in Caracas. It was the Caracazo and Chavez that gave her the strength to overcome the centuries of disparagement and poverty that weighed on her. She, and her neighbours, had done their best to build a community – with a common kitchen, a bakery, a meeting hall and shared space that is clean and decent. Most of the leaders of such neighbourhoods are women – all are poor, most are workers, many are Afro-Venezuelans. I asked Mariela what would happen to her and her neighbourhood if this government fell. ‘We would be evicted,’ she told me. The fierce defence of the Chavistas against the overthrow of their government is linked to their fear that whatever changes had come in their lives would now be reversed. The old humiliation would return.

Even if the attempt to overthrow the government in Caracas is now mostly over, there is fragility in the Venezuelan government. It is a fragility shared with most countries of the tricontinent – of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Public finances across the world have been damaged by the departure of trillions of dollars away from the reach of governments and of productive activity. It is estimated that there is between $21 and $32 trillion in the tax havens. Global financial stock markets toy with over $200 trillion. This is social wealth diverted to unproductive uses. No schools are built with this money. No hospitals are built with this money. Profits on financial investment race to the rich, who have ceased to pay taxation and have ceased to risk their wealth in productive investments. The billionaires are on a tax strike and an investment strike. These two strikes – tax strike and investment strike – are their weapons in the class struggle (as laid out in our first Working Document, In the Ruins of the Present). Because of these strikes and the fragile global commodity chain, almost a billion people cannot find work that sustains them, while those who have work find their humanity broken by their jobs.

There is fragility in Venezuela’s reliance upon oil and its lack of food sovereignty. There are some long-term fundamental problems of the Venezuelan economy that long predate the arrival of Chavez and that will continue for some time yet. These are problems common to most countries – such as Nigeria – that have large populations, that rely upon oil exports that finance the imports of just about everything. The vulnerabilities are many. Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara would say, ‘he who feeds you, controls you’. It is an important reminder. Talk of increasing food production in Venezuela is important – and urgent (take a quick journey with Ricardo Vaz to Mérida, where the native potato is being rescued). All this will require deeper land reform, but also changes in the culture of consumption that have been produced by the inflow of oil rent. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso – one of Venezuela’s great oil ministers – called oil the ‘devil’s excrement’. He remains correct.

Over the course of the past week, almost five hundred people from 87 countries representing political groups and movements came to Caracas for the International Assembly of the Peoples – a new initiative that aims to create a platform for solidarity campaigns and to better connect sections of the Left. Reports of the deliberations – which were smart and imperative – made it to no mainstream press. Reporters from People’s Dispatch and ALBA as well as a few other services covered the discussions, which ranged from solidarity for the Venezuelan people to serious consideration of the way money and fake news has subverted electoral democracy. It will take time to digest the implications of these discussions – and it will take time to see what kinds of common actions develop. Certainly, the first common action is to make sure that there is no military intervention in Venezuela and to push for an end to the strangulation of the Venezuelan economy.

The governments of India and Pakistan are playing with fire. Aerial attacks on each other’s territory threatens to widen the conflict. The majority of Indians and Pakistanis – like the majority of Venezuelans – will not gain from a war. Suffering will be their coin. There are so many real problems that bedevil the countries of South Asia – hunger being one of them. Just before the aircraft fired across the border, hundreds of workers marched to the Indian parliament to demand higher wages and pensions and to prevent the privatisation of the child care centres. They handed over a petition that had 40 million signatures to the government.

The protest of the child care (anganwadi) workers brought to mind Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, The End and the Beginning (translated by Johanna Trzeciak):

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

Excerpt:

Oswaldo Guayasamín, The Workers, 1942.

By Vijay Prashad
Feb 22 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – As the United States and its allies put pressure on Venezuela, a poem by the Salvadoran radical Roque Dalton (1935-1975) clarifies the structure of politics in Latin America. Dalton came from one of Latin America’s smallest countries, El Salvador, which he used to call the little finger (pulgarcito). A deeply compassionate poet, Dalton was also a militant of the People’s Revolutionary Army, whose internal struggles claimed his short life. El Salvador, like so many other Latin American states, struggles to carve out its sovereignty from the tentacles of US power. That hideous Monroe Doctrine (1823) seemed to give the US the presumption that it has power over the entire hemisphere; ‘our backyard’ being the colloquial phrase. People like Dalton fought to end that assumption. They wanted their countries to be governed by and for their own people – an elementary part of the idea of democracy. It has been a hard struggle.

Dalton wrote a powerful poem – OAS – named for the Organisation of American States (founded in 1948). It is a poem that acidly catalogues how democracy is a farce in Latin America. It is from the poem that we get the title of our newsletter this week.

The president of my country
for the time being is Colonel Fidel Sanchez Hernandez
but General Somoza, president of Nicaragua
is also the president of my country.
And General Stroessner, president of Paraguay,
is also kind of the president of my country, though not as
much as the president of Honduras,
General Lopez Arellano, but more so than the president of Haiti,
Monsieur Duvalier.
And the president of the United States is more the president of my country
Than is the president of my country,
The one whose name, as I said,
is Colonel Fidel Sanchez Hernandez, for the time being.

Rafael Enriquez, Foreign Debt, OSPAAAL, 1983.

Is the President of Venezuela the President of Venezuela or is the President of the United States the President of Venezuela? There is absurdity here. Collapsed oil prices, reliance upon oil revenues, an economic war by the United States and complications in raising finances has led to hyperinflation and to an economic crisis in Venezuela. To deny that is to deny reality. But there is a vast difference between an economic crisis and a humanitarian crisis.

Most of the countries on the planet are facing an economic crisis, with public finances in serious trouble and with enormous debt problems plaguing governments in all the continents. This year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos (Switzerland) focused attention on the global debt crisis – from the near-trillion-dollar deficit of the United States to the debt burdens of Italy. The IMF’s David Lipton warned that if interest rates were to rise, the problem would escalate. ‘There are pockets of debt held by companies and countries that really don’t have much servicing capacity, and I think that’s going to be a problem’.

Hyper-inflation is a serious problem, but punitive economic sanctions, seizure of billions of dollars of overseas assets and threats of war are not going to save the undermined Bolivar, Venezuela’s currency.

European Parliament, Strasbourg, 2015.

Eradication of hunger has to be the basic policy of any government. According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation, 11.7% of the Venezuelan people are hungry. Hunger rates in other parts of the world are much higher – 31.4% in Eastern Africa. But the world’s attention has not been focused on this severe crisis, one that has partly generated the massive migration across the Mediterranean Sea. The picture above is from the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where – in 2015 – activists laid out the 17,306 names of people who have died attempting that crossing (the number is now close to 40,000 drowned). Members of the European parliament had to walk to their session over these names. They are harsh in their attitude to start a war against Venezuela, but cavalier about the serious crises in Africa and Asia that keep the flow of migrants steady.

The government of Venezuela has two programmes to tackle the problem of hunger:

a. Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción (CLAP). The Local Committees for Supply and Production are made up of local neighbourhood groups who grow food and who receive food from agricultural producers. They distribute this food to about six million families at very low cost. Currently, the CLAP boxes are being sent to households every 15 days.
b. Plan de Atención a la Vulnerabilidad Nutricional. The most vulnerable of Venezuelans – 620,000 of them – receive assistance. The National Institute of Nutrition has been coordinating the delivery of food to a majority of the country’s municipalities.

These are useful, but insufficient. More needs to be done. That is clear. Through CLAP, the Venezuelan government distributes about 50,000 tonnes of food per month. The ‘humanitarian aid’ that the US has promised amounts to $20 million – which would purchase a measly 60 tonnes of food.

1st US PSYWAR (Psychological War) battalion hands out anti-communist posters in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), 1965.

On the issue of ‘humanitarian aid’ to Venezuela, the international media has become the stenographers of the US State Department and the CIA. It focuses on the false claims made by the US government that it wants to deliver aid, which the Venezuelans refuse. The media does not look at the facts, even at this fact – that $20 million is a humiliating gesture, an amount intended to be used to establish the heartlessness of the government in Venezuela and therefore seek to overthrow it by any means necessary. This is what the US government did in the Dominican Republic in 1965, sending in humanitarian aid accompanied by US marines.

The US has used military aircrafts to bring in this modest aid, driven it to a warehouse and then said that the Venezuelans are not prepared to open an unused bridge for it. The entire process is political theatre. US Senator Marco Rubio went to that bridge – which has never been opened – to say in a threatening way that the aid ‘is going to get through’ to Venezuela one way or another. These are words that threaten the sovereignty of Venezuela and build up the energy for a military attack. There is nothing humanitarian here.

If you don’t let us breathe, we won’t let you breathe. Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2019. Photograph: Hector Retamal.

The term ‘humanitarian’ has been shredded of its meaning. It has now come to mean a pretext for the destruction of countries. ‘Humanitarian intervention’ was the term used to destroy Libya; ‘humanitarian aid’ is being used to beat the drum for a war against Venezuela.

Meanwhile, we forget the humanitarian solidarity offered by the Venezuelan government to the poorer nations and to poorer populations. Why is Haiti on fire now? It had received reduced price oil from Venezuela by the PetroCaribe scheme (set up in 2005). A decade ago, Venezuela offered the Caribbean islands oil on very favourable terms so that they would not be the quarry of monopoly oil firms and the IMF. The economic war against Venezuela has meant a decline in PetroCaribe. Now the IMF has returned to demand that oil subsidies end, and monopoly oil firms have returned to demand cash payments before delivery. Haiti’s government was forced to vote against Venezuela in the OAS. That is why the country is aflame (for more on this, please read my report). If you don’t let us breathe, say the Haitian people, we won’t let you breathe.

In 2005, the same year as Venezuela set up the PetroCaribe scheme, it created the PetroBronx scheme in New York City (USA). Terrible poverty in the South Bronx galvanised community groups such as Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, Green Youth Cooperative, Bronx Arts and Dance, and Mothers on the Move.

They worked with CITGO, the Venezuelan government’s US oil subsidiary to develop a cooperative mechanism to get heating oil to the people. Ana Maldonado, a sociologist who is now with the Frente Francisco de Miranda (Venezuela), was one of the participants in the PetroBronx scheme. She and her friends created the North Star to be a community organisation that helped deliver the resources to the very poorest people in the United States. ‘People had to wear their coats inside their homes during the winter’, she told me. That was intolerable. That is why Venezuela provided the poor in the United States with subsidised heating oil.

Josh MacPhee, Malcolm X, Just Seeds.

The South Bronx and Harlem, the privations produced by racism – all this is familiar territory in Latin America. In 1960, Fidel Castro came to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly. He was refused a hotel in the city. Malcolm X, a leader of the African American community, came to his aid, bringing the Cuban delegation to Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, whose owner – Love B. Woods – warmly welcomed Fidel and his comrades. Four years later, at a meeting in Harlem, Malcolm X said in connection with his meeting with Fidel, ‘Don’t let somebody else tell us who our enemies should be and who our friends should be’.

Excerpt:

Faustino Perez, Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Day of Solidarity with the People of Venezuela, 1969.

By Vijay Prashad
Feb 1 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – On 15 September 1970, US President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger authorised the US government to do everything possible to undermine the incoming government of the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Nixon and Kissinger, according to the notes kept by CIA Director Richard Helms, wanted to ‘make the economy scream’ in Chile; they were ‘not concerned [about the] risks involved’. War was acceptable to them as long as Allende’s government was removed from power. The CIA started Project FUBELT, with $10 million as a first instalment to begin the covert destabilisation of the country.

CIA memorandum on Project FUBELT, 16 September 1970.

US business firms, such as the telecommunication giant ITT, the soft drink maker Pepsi Cola and copper monopolies such as Anaconda and Kennecott, put pressure on the US government once Allende nationalised the copper sector on 11 July 1971. Chileans celebrated this day as the Day of National Dignity (Dia de la Dignidad Nacional). The CIA began to make contact with sections of the military seen to be against Allende. Three years later, on 11 September 1973, these military men moved against Allende, who died in the regime change operation. The US ‘created the conditions’ as US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put it, to which US President Richard Nixon answered, ‘that is the way it is going to be played’. Such is the mood of international gangsterism.

Phone Call between Richard Nixon (P) and Henry Kissinger (K) on 16 September 1973.

Chile entered the dark night of a military dictatorship that turned over the country to US monopoly firms. US advisors rushed in to strengthen the nerve of General Augusto Pinochet’s cabinet.

What happened to Chile in 1973 is precisely what the United States has attempted to do in many other countries of the Global South. The most recent target for the US government – and Western big business – is Venezuela. But what is happening to Venezuela is nothing unique. It faces an onslaught from the United States and its allies that is familiar to countries as far afield as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The formula is clichéd. It is commonplace, a twelve-step plan to produce a coup climate, to create a world under the heel of the West and of Western big business.

Tweet from US Senator Marco Rubio on 24 January 2019.

Step One: Colonialism’s Traps. Most of the Global South remains trapped by the structures put in place by colonialism. Colonial boundaries encircled states that had the misfortune of being single commodity producers – either sugar for Cuba or oil for Venezuela. The inability to diversify their economies meant that these countries earned the bulk of their export revenues from their singular commodities (98% of Venezuela’s export revenues come from oil). As long as the prices of the commodities remained high, the export revenues were secure. When the prices fell, revenue suffered. This was a legacy of colonialism. Oil prices dropped from $160.72 per barrel (June 2008) to $51.99 per barrel (January 2019). Venezuela’s export revenues collapsed in this decade.

Step Two: The Defeat of the New International Economic Order. In 1974, the countries of the Global South attempted to redo the architecture of the world economy. They called for the creation of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that would allow them to pivot away from the colonial reliance upon one commodity and diversify their economies. Cartels of raw materials – such as oil and bauxite – were to be built so that the one-commodity country could have some control over prices of the products that they relied upon. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in 1960, was a pioneer of these commodity cartels. Others were not permitted to be formed. With the defeat of OPEC over the past three decades, its members – such as Venezuela (which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves) – have not been able to control oil prices. They are at the mercy of the powerful countries of the world.

Step Three: The Death of Southern Agriculture. In November 2001, there were about three billion small farmers and landless peasants in the world. That month, the World Trade Organisation met in Doha (Qatar) to unleash the productivity of Northern agri-business against the billions of small farmers and landless peasants of the Global South. Mechanisation and large, industrial-scale farms in North America and Europe had raised productivity to about 1 to 2 million kilogrammes of cereals per farmer. The small farmers and landless peasants in the rest of the world struggled to grow 1,000 kilogrammes of cereals per farmer. They were nowhere near as productive. The Doha decision, as Samir Amin wrote, presages the annihilation of the small farmer and landless peasant. What are these men and women to do? The production per hectare is higher in the West, but the corporate take-over of agriculture (as Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Senior Fellow P. Sainath shows) leads to increased hunger as it pushes peasants off their land and leaves them to starve.

Step Four: Culture of Plunder. Emboldened by Western domination, monopoly firms act with disregard for the law. As Kambale Musavuli and I write of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its annual budget of $6 billion is routinely robbed of at least $500 by monopoly mining firms, mostly from Canada – the country now leading the charge against Venezuela. Mispricing and tax avoidance schemes allow these large firms (Canada’s Agrium, Barrick and Suncor) to routinely steal billions of dollars from impoverished states.

Step Five: Debt as a Way of Life. Unable to raise money from commodity sales, hemmed in by a broken world agricultural system and victim of a culture of plunder, countries of the Global South have been forced to go hat in hand to commercial lenders for finance. Over the past decade, debt held by the Global South states has increased, while debt payments have ballooned by 60%. When commodity prices rose between 2000 and 2010, debt in the Global South decreased. As commodity prices began to fall from 2010, debts have risen. The IMF points out that of the 67 impoverished countries that they follow, 30 are in debt distress, a number that has doubled since 2013. More than 55.4% of Angola’s export revenue is paid to service its debt. And Angola, like Venezuela, is an oil exporter. Other oil exporters such as Ghana, Chad, Gabon and Venezuela suffer high debt to GDP ratios. Two out of five low-income countries are in deep financial distress.

Step Six: Public Finances Go to Hell. With little incoming revenue and low tax collection rates, public finances in the Global South has gone into crisis. As the UN Conference on Trade and Development points out, ‘public finances have continued to be suffocated’. States simply cannot put together the funds needed to maintain basic state functions. Balanced budget rules make borrowing difficult, which is compounded by the fact that banks charge high rates for money, citing the risks of lending to indebted countries.

Step Seven: Deep Cuts in Social Spending. Impossible to raise funds, trapped by the fickleness of international finance, governments are forced to make deep cuts in social spending. Education and health, food sovereignty and economic diversification – all this goes by the wayside. International agencies such as the IMF force countries to conduct ‘reforms’, a word that means extermination of independence. Those countries that hold out face immense international pressure to submit under pain of extinction, as the Communist Manifesto (1848) put it.

Step Eight: Social Distress Leads to Migration. The total number of migrants in the world is now at least 68.5 million. That makes the country called Migration the 21st largest country in the world after Thailand and ahead of the United Kingdom. Migration has become a global reaction to the collapse of countries from one end of the planet to the other. The migration out of Venezuela is not unique to that country but is now merely the normal reaction to the global crisis. Migrants from Honduras who go northward to the United States or migrants from West Africa who go towards Europe through Libya are part of this global exodus.

Step Nine: Who Controls the Narrative? The monopoly corporate media takes its orders from the elite. There is no sympathy for the structural crisis faced by governments from Afghanistan to Venezuela. Those leaders who cave to Western pressure are given a free pass by the media. As long as they conduct ‘reforms’, they are safe. Those countries that argue against the ‘reforms’ are vulnerable to being attacked. Their leaders become ‘dictators’, their people hostages. A contested election in Bangladesh or in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in the United States is not cause for regime change. That special treatment is left for Venezuela.

Alfredo Rostgaard, OSPAAAL poster, 1969.

Step Ten: Who’s the Real President? Regime change operations begin when the imperialists question the legitimacy of the government in power: by putting the weight of the United States behind an unelected person, calling him the new president and creating a situation where the elected leader’s authority is undermined. The coup takes place when a powerful country decides – without an election – to anoint its own proxy. That person – in Venezuela’s case Juan Guaidó – rapidly has to make it clear that he will bend to the authority of the United States. His kitchen cabinet – made up of former government officials with intimate ties to the US (such as Harvard University’s Ricardo Hausmann and Carnegie’s Moisés Naím) – will make it clear that they want to privatise everything and sell out the Venezuelan people in the name of the Venezuelan people.

Step Eleven: Make the Economy Scream. Venezuela has faced harsh US sanctions since 2014, when the US Congress started down this road. The next year, US President Barack Obama declared Venezuela a ‘threat to national security’. The economy started to scream. In recent days, the United States and the United Kingdom brazenly stole billions of dollars of Venezuelan money, placed the shackles of sanctions on its only revenue generating sector (oil) and watched the pain flood through the country. This is what the US did to Iran and this is what they did to Cuba. The UN says that the US sanctions on Cuba have cost the small island $130 billion. Venezuela lost $6 billion for the first year of Trump’s sanctions, since they began in August 2017. More is to be lost as the days unfold. No wonder that the United Nations Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy says that ‘sanctions which can lead to starvation and medical shortages are not the answer to the crisis in Venezuela’. He said that sanctions are ‘not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of disputes’. Further, Jazairy said, ‘I am especially concerned to hear reports that these sanctions are aimed at changing the government of Venezuela’. He called for ‘compassion’ for the people of Venezuela.

Step Twelve: Go to War. US National Security Advisor John Bolton held a yellow pad with the words 5,000 troops in Colombia written on it. These are US troops, already deployed in Venezuela’s neighbour. The US Southern Command is ready. They are egging on Colombia and Brazil to do their bit. As the coup climate is created, a nudge will be necessary. They will go to war.

Edson Garcia, Titina Silá (1943-1973).

None of this is inevitable. It was not inevitable to Titina Silá, a commander of the Partido Africano para a Independència da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) who was murdered on 30 January 1973. She fought to free her country. It is not inevitable to the people of Venezuela, who continue to fight to defend their revolution. It is not inevitable to our friends at CodePink: Women for Peace, whose Medea Benjamin walked into a meeting of the Organisation of American States and said – No!

It is time to say No to regime change intervention. There is no middle ground.

Excerpt:

By Vijay Prashad
Jan 25 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – In June 1931, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci wrote a letter to Giulia Schucht, who lived in Moscow and with whom he had two children. One of the children – Delio – had taken an interest in literature, with a particular fascination for fantasy literature. This gave Gramsci, locked in a fascist prison, the opportunity to recall a story from his village on the island of Sardinia.

A child sleeps, a mug of milk at his side for when he awakes. A mouse drinks the milk, which provokes a scream from the child and his mother. ‘In despair, the mouse bangs his head against the wall, but he realizes that this doesn’t help, and he runs to the goat to get some milk’, writes Gramsci. The goat says he will give milk if the mouse gets him grass, but the meadow is dry because of a drought. So, the mouse seeks water from the fountain, which has been ruined by war. It needs the mason, who needs stones, so the mouse heads to the mountain. But the mountain has been deforested by speculators, and it ‘reveals everywhere its bones stripped of earth’.

The mouse explains his predicament to the mountain, and he promises that when the boy grows, he – unlike the rest of humanity – will replant the trees, which motivates the mountain to give stones and so the child gets his milk. ‘He grows up, plants the trees, everything changes: the mountain’s bones disappear under new humus, atmospheric precipitation once more becomes regular because the trees absorb the vapours and prevent the torrents from devastating the plains, etc’. In short, Gramsci writes, the mouse conceives of a true and proper piatilietca’, a five-year plan.

What the mouse and the mountain teach us is that everything is connected. There is war here but also deforestation for profit and drought and greed. The child, when grown, recognises the need for deliberate planning. But before the plan comes the recognition of linkages.

Excerpt:

By Vijay Prashad
INDIA, Jan 17 2019 (Tricontinental)

Over two days – 8 and 9 January – over 160 million workers went on strike in India. This has been one of the largest general strikes in the world. The workers, exhausted by almost three decades of neo-liberal policies and by the attack on the rights of workers, came onto the streets to make their case for better livelihood and workplace democracy. Blockades on train tracks and on national highways closed down sections of the country. In Bengaluru, Information Technology (IT) workers joined the strike, while in Himachal Pradesh – see the picture above from the town of Hamirpur – workers gathered to demand an end to precarious employment in government service. Workers from a broad range of sectors, from industrial workers to health care workers, joined the strike. There has been no response from the government. Please read my report on the strike.

My report is written from Kerala, where almost the entire workforce went on strike. This strike comes after the powerful Woman’s Wall that was built on 1 January to defend Kerala’s renaissance traditions. For a fuller sense of that struggle that brought five and a half million women to form a Wall along Kerala, see my report. The title for this newsletter comes from a well-known poem by the radical poet Vayalar Ramavarma (1928-1975). When workers struggle, Vayalar wrote, ‘isn’t it something to make the land proud’?

This two-day strike comes as workers around the world greeted 2019 with a wave of demonstrations – from the ‘month of anger’ launched in Morocco by trade unions to the protests in Sudan over rising prices, from the potential strikes of teachers in Los Angeles (USA) to the potential general strike in Nigeria over wages. An International Trade Union Confederation report from last year showed that ‘More countries are excluding workers from labour laws’ – 65% of countries, at last count, excluding migrant workers and public sector employees and others from the rights afforded to them. There is every indication that the attack on workers’ rights and workplace democracy will continue despite the unrest amongst workers.

Brinda Karat, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), reflects – in our January Dossier – on the record of the current far right government in India (the BJP) and on the challenges before the Left to produce an alternative agenda to put before the people in the April 2019 General Election. Karat offers a sharp assessment of the attacks on women and the denigration of the project of women’s emancipation in India:

Over the past several decades, women have entered public spaces to work and to live. They have established their talents, their skills, and their capacities in numerous spheres. There has been a backlash against this increased assertion. The backlash is shaped by extreme misogyny – or a strong feeling in sections of our society that women have a specific place and anyone who crosses the boundary is liable to be punished. These cultural walls behind which women and girls are expected to live (with some exceptions for certain classes), are stronger than the high walls of a prison. When a woman is raped, she is blamed for entering public space, for being a free citizen, for the clothes she wears, for the person she speaks to, for the place and time where she was. It is the woman who is held responsible for the crime. That is the character of the misogyny.

Karat’s interview goes into depth about the difficult situation under the government of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For example, she makes the following points:

1. Because of India’s government policies, agrarian distress is acute: An average of 12,000 farmers committed suicide every year of this government’s rule. Unemployment is at its highest.
2. India stands out for its increased inequalities in this period of Modi’s rule. Just 1% of the population holds 68% of all household wealth, an almost twenty-point increase in the last five years. On the other hand, according to the government’s socio-economic survey, over 90% of India’s people have an income of less than 10,000 rupees a year (US $143).

It is not axiomatic that high inequality and social distress lead to a progressive politics. In such a context, it is as likely that the culture of working-class solidarity erodes, and social violence grows, producing the seedbed of neo-fascist politics. To that end, Karat makes the case that the Left in India – but also elsewhere – needs to engage with the rigidities of our culture.

Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticization of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth. Then again in India class exploitation is intensified through the caste system and vice versa. To build resistance struggles against the caste system and caste oppression and to link such struggles with the fight against capitalism in terms of struggles and goals is also a challenge. Trade unions and other class organisations certainly have to be more assertive and attentive to these aspects.

The Left, Karat suggests, needs to enter fully into the struggle over how to define the terms of a culture. Questions of dignity as well as discrimination are fundamental to the development of a progressive politics. No emancipatory movement can turn its back on any form of social hierarchy. The democratic impulse must work its way into the most rigid of cultural forms.

The photographs in the dossier come from Rahul, an independent journalist based in Anantapur (Andhra Pradesh), whose work can be seen at the People’s Archive of Rural India.

Excerpt:

Kerala, 2019. Photo: Sivaprasad Parinhattummuri

By Vijay Prashad
KERALA, India, Jan 17 2019 (Tricontinental)

On 1 January, 5.5 million women formed a 620-kilometre wall across the length of the Indian state of Kerala (population 35 million). This was not like Donald Trump’s wall across the US-Mexico border, a wall of inhumanity and toxicity. The wall of these women was a wall for freedom, a wall against traditions whose purpose is to humiliate.

The immediate reason for the women’s wall was a fight over entry for women into the Sabrimala temple in southern Kerala. On 28 September 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled that women must be allowed to enter the temple since the selective ban on women was not an ‘essential part’ of Hinduism but instead was a form of ‘religious patriarchy’.

The Left Democratic Front government in Kerala embraced the judgment and fought off a challenge on the streets from the right-wing reactionary groups – including the ruling party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In October, the Chief Minister of Kerala – Pinarayi Vijayan, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – gave an important speech in defence of the breaking of customs. If a tradition is a shackle, it must be broken. Vijayan gave the call for this wall to be built by women on 1 January. People from across the state responded with enthusiasm. A hundred public meetings were held in the last months of 2018 to galvanise support; 175 progressive organisations joined the campaign. At 4pm, the women stood firm. They took an oath to fight for women’s emancipation and to conserve the values of Kerala’s renaissance traditions.

K. K. Shailaja, Kerala’s health minister and a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), stood at the head of the wall in Kasaragod in Kerala’s north. The wall ended in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital, where the last person in the chain was the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Politburo leader Brinda Karat.

The photograph above was taken by Sivaprasad Parinhattummuri. The central figure in the picture is Athira, a leader in Kerala’s left. She is currently the Malappuram District Committee member of the Democratic Youth Federation of India. She was a former Kerala State Committee member of the Student Federation of India. Athira had been imprisoned for her participation in a student struggle at Calicut University. She holds her six-month-old daughter Duliya Malhar.

Emboldened by the Wall, two women – Bindu Ammini (a lawyer who teaches at Kannur University) and Kanakadurga (who works for the Kerala Civil Supplies Corporation) – walked into the Sabrimala temple. History is on their side.

Excerpt:

Migration has allowed Sahanaz Parben to place her son in an elite cadet college, normally the domain of the well-to-do. She’s bought property in Bangladesh, and when she goes back she hopes to set up on her own. Photo: Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

By Vijay Prashad
DHAKA, Jan 23 2018 (IPS)

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2013.

It is past midnight. The aircraft come in from Saudi Arabia carrying workers who had been hastily ejected. They had gone from Ethiopia to work in a variety of jobs in a Kingdom flush with oil wealth.

It is December 2013. Ethiopian migrant workers descend from the aircraft. They carry plastic bags that hold their belongings. There are few signs that they have benefitted from their hard labor in Saudi Arabia. A few of the migrants walk down without shoes. The air is chilly. They must be cold in their shirts and pants, their feet on the hard ground.

What was the reason for their expulsion? The Saudi authorities said that these were migrants who came into the country without papers. They had crossed the dangerous Gulf of Aden in rickety boats. Saudi Arabia welcomes these migrants, even those without documents, largely because they – under duress – offer their services at very low rates of pay. At punctual intervals, the Saudi government goes after these undocumented workers, arresting them in public, throwing them in deportation camps in Riyadh and then shipping them home.

That was in 2013. Between June of 2017 and the end of the year the Saudi authorities detained 250,000 foreigners and sent home 96,000 Ethiopians. When the Saudi government feels particularly vicious, it carts the Ethiopians to the Saudi-Yemen border and merely leaves them on the Yemeni side. Yemen, still bombed almost daily by Saudi Arabia, is hardly the place to welcome desperate Ethiopians.

The periodic cycle of allowing undocumented workers into the country and then humiliating them by this kind of public ejection maintains the workers in fear and allows the human traffickers and the employers to keep wages as low as possible. There is no one to complain to.

Why do the Ethiopians keep returning to Saudi Arabia? Ethiopia is a country in dire economic distress. Six to nine million Ethiopians have needed food aid of one kind or another last year, as severe drought and poverty have combined to create a near famine situation. Southeastern Ethiopia, from where many of the migrant workers come, has seen the drought destroy livestock herds and reduce crop production.

Bangladeshi migrant worker Abul Hossain says it is against the law to be working at night in construction sites in Malaysia, but it is common practice and expected of the workers. Abul works in a construction site in Ampang in Kuala Lumpur. Photo: Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

It is in this same area that Ethiopia hosts 894,000 refugees from Eritrea, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. Those refugees come for reasons of hunger and conflict. Last year alone, 106,000 refugees entered Ethiopia, most of them from South Sudan (whose citizens now number 420,000 in Ethiopia). A country that hosts almost a million refugees – itself wracked by distress – sends perhaps a million to the Arabian Peninsula (there are half a million in Saudi Arabia itself). It is a cycle of refugees that now defines the planet.

I can’t get the lack of shoes out of my mind. Ethiopian workers say that they are mistreated routinely in Saudi Arabia – sexual violence against domestic workers, beatings of all workers, harassment by the police. This has become normal. It is the way we live now.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2018.

While in Dhaka, I visited the Drik Gallery III, where I saw the exhibition of photographs taken by Shahidul Alam of Bangladeshi migrants to Malaysia. The pictures are vivid illustrations of the hope in the eyes of the migrants and the great sense of disappointment, as life does not turn out as it was promised for most of them. Alam’s photography shines – his own personal compassion draws out emotions of great sincerity from the men and women he photographs.

Alam gave me his book – The Best Years of My Life – which collects the pictures that I saw in the gallery, with a moving text that he wrote to accompany his photographs. The book traces the journey of Bangladeshi migrants – chasing a dream – to Malaysia’s factories and fields, where they work for low wages, get cheated by traffickers, by officials and by their peers. The lure of savings to help their families at home leads the workers to sacrifice their own lives. Sahanaz Parben’s son (age 11) calls her aunty; he barely knows her. Babu Biswas’s children have seen him briefly three times over the past decade. “They are doing well,” he says.

The legal status of these migrants is often unclear. It is precisely their tenuous legal status that forces them to bid down the rate of wages. But the money of the ‘illegal’ migrant is not illegal. It is welcomed into Bangladesh. There are roughly 9 million Bangladeshi migrants (according to the World Bank). They send home 15 billion dollars. Based on a five-year average, this amounts to 10% of Bangladesh’s Gross Domestic Product.

This is not as high a percentage as that of Liberia, where more than a quarter of its GDP comes from remittances from migrant workers. These economies would crumble without the small amounts of money from millions of workers that adds up to large amounts of foreign exchange for these countries. It is worth noting that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Bangladesh is merely 0.9% of its GDP. The remittance of migrant workers is of far greater economic value than the FDI from foreign banks and corporations.

And yet, as Alam finds, the government of Bangladesh is cavalier towards the migrant. The High Commissioner Mohammed Hafiz seems a nice enough man. But he has essentially given up on his duties. “What can I do?” he asks.

The activists have it correctly. Parimala Narayanasamy of Coordination of Action Research on AID and Mobility (CARAM) tells Alam that “sending governments should come out strong to say that if any country needed workers, then they – the sending countries – should set the terms and conditions.” This is exactly what is not done, neither by the governments of Bangladesh nor of Ethiopia.

They treat the foreign bankers and corporate executives like heroes. They treat their own nationals that send in far greater amounts of money like criminals.

At Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka, I charge my phone. Two men come and ask to use my charger. They are off to the Gulf. I don’t have a charger that fits their phone. A woman comes to me, hands me her boarding pass and asks me when her flight gets into Abu Dhabi. She is to be picked up by her employer. The boarding pass does not have the time of arrival. She looks in her bag for her ticket. There is so little there. One of the men asks her if she has a charger. She does not. They smile at each other. They have so much in common. They will find a way to help each other. It is the way of these workers. They have themselves and their families. Everyone sees them as an inconvenience.