KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, Jun 7 2022 (IPS) – Food crises, economic stagnation and price increases are worsening unevenly, almost everywhere, following the Ukraine war. Sanctions against Russia have especially hurt those relying on wheat and fertilizer imports.

Unilateral sanctions illegal

Unilateral sanctions – not approved by the UN Security Council – are illegal under international law. Besides contravening the UN Charter, unilateral sanctions inflict much human loss. Countless civilians – many far from target countries – are at risk, depriving them of much, even life itself.

Sanctions, embargos and blockades – ‘sold’ as non-violent alternatives to waging war by military means – economically isolate and punish targeted countries, supposedly to force them to acquiesce. But most sanctions hurt the innocent majority, much more than ruling elites.

Like laying siege on enemy settlements, sanctions are ‘weapons of mass starvation’. They “are silent killers. People die in their homes, nobody is counting”. The human costs are considerable and varied, but largely overlooked. Knowing they are mere collateral damage will not endear any victim to the sanctions’ ‘true purpose’.

U.S. sanctions’ victims

The U.S. has imposed more sanctions, for longer periods, than any other nation. During 1990-2005, the U.S. imposed a third of sanctions regimes worldwide. These were inflicted on more than 1,000 entities or individuals yearly in 2016-20 – nearly 80% more than in 2008-15. Thus, the Trump administration raised the U.S. share of all sanctions to almost half!

Tens of millions of Afghans now face food insecurity, even starvation, as the U.S. has seized its US$9.5 billion central bank reserves. President Biden’s 11 February 2022 executive order gives half of this to 9/11 victims’ families, although no Afghan was ever found responsible for the atrocity.

Biden claims the rest will be for ‘humanitarian crises’, presumably as decided by the White House. But he remains silent about the countless victims of the U.S.’s two-decade long war in Afghanistan, where airstrikes alone killed at least 48,308 civilians.

Now, the U.S.-controlled World Bank and IMF both block access to financial resources for Afghanistan. The long U.S. war’s massive population displacement and physical destruction have made it much more vulnerable and foreign aid dependent.

The six decade-long U.S. trade embargo has cost Cuba at least U.S.$130 billion. It causes shortages of food, medicine and other essential items to this day. Meanwhile, Washington continues to ignore the UN General Assembly’s call to lift its blockade.

The U.S.-backed Israeli blockade of the densely populated Gaza Strip has inflicted at least U.S.$17 billion in losses. Besides denying Gaza’s population access to many imported supplies – including medicines – bombing and repression make life miserable for its besieged people.

Meanwhile, the U.S. supports the Saudi-led coalition’s war on Yemen with its continuing blockade of the poorest Arab nation. U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have ensured the worst for Yemenis under siege.

Blocking essential goods – including food, fuel and medical supplies – has intensified the “world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis”. Meanwhile, “years of famine” – including “starving to death a Yemeni child every 75 seconds” – have been aggravated by the “largest cholera outbreak anywhere in history”.

Humanitarian disasters and destroying lives and livelihoods are excused as inevitable “collateral damage”. Acknowledging hundreds of thousands of Iraqi child deaths, due to U.S. sanctions after the 1991 invasion, an ex-U.S. Secretary of State deemed the price “worth it”.

Poverty levels in countries under U.S. sanctions are 3.8 percentage points higher, on average, than in other comparable countries. Such negative impacts rose with their duration, while unilateral and U.S. sanctions stood out as most effective!

Clearly, the U.S. government has not hesitated to wage war by other means. Its recent sanctions threaten living costs worldwide, reversing progress everywhere, especially for the most vulnerable.

Yet, U.S.-led unilateral sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and other countries have failed to achieve their purported objectives, namely, to change regimes, or at least, regime behaviour.

Changing U.S. policy?

Although unilateral sanctions are not valid under the UN Charter, many U.S. reformers want Washington to “lead by example, overhaul U.S. sanctions, and ensure that sanctions are targeted, proportional, connected to discrete policy goals and reversible”.

Last year, the Biden administration began a comprehensive review of U.S. sanctions policies. It has promised to minimize their adverse humanitarian impacts, and even to consider allowing trade – on humanitarian grounds – with heavily sanctioned nations. But actual policy change has been wanting so far.

U.S. sanctions continue to ruin Iran’s economy and millions of livelihoods. Despite COVID-19 – which hit the nation early and hard – sanctions have continued, limiting access to imported goods and resources, including medicines.

A U.S. embargo has also blocked urgently needed humanitarian aid for North Korea. Similarly, U.S. actions have repeatedly blocked meeting the urgent needs of the many millions of vulnerable people in the country.

The Trump administration’s sanctions against Venezuela have deepened its massive income collapse, intensifying its food, health and economic crises. U.S. sanctions have targeted its oil industry, providing most of its export earnings.

Besides preventing Venezuela from accessing its funds in foreign banks and multilateral financial institutions, the U.S. has also blocked access to international financial markets. And instead of targeting individuals, U.S. sanctions punish the entire Venezuelan nation.

Russia’s Sputnik-V was the first COVID-19 vaccine developed, and is among the world’s most widely used. Meanwhile, rich countries’ “vaccine apartheid” and strict enforcement of intellectual property rights – augmenting corporate profits – have limited access to ‘Western’ vaccines.

The U.S. has not spared Sputnik-V from sanctions, disrupting not only shipments from Russia, but also production elsewhere, e.g., in India and South Korea, which planned to produce 100 million doses monthly. Denying Russia use of the SWIFT international payments system makes it hard for others to buy them.

Rethinking sanctions

Economic sanctions – originally conceived a century ago to wage war by non-military means – are increasingly being used to force governments to conform. Sanctions are still portrayed as non-violent means to induce ‘rogue’ states to ‘behave’.

But this ignores its cruel paradox – supposedly avoiding war, sanctions lay siege, an ancient technique of war. Yet, despite all the harm caused, they typically fail to achieve their intended political objectives – as Nicholas Mulder documents in The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War.

As Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela were not major food or fertilizer exporters, their own populations have suffered most from the sanctions against them. But Russia, Ukraine and even Belarus are significant producers and exporters.

Hence, sanctions against Russia and Belarus have much wider international implications, especially for European fuel supplies. More ominously, they threaten food security not only now, but also in the future as fertilizer supplies are cut off.

With tepid growth since the 2008 global financial crisis, the West now blocks economic recovery. Vaccine apartheid, deliberate supply disruptions and deflationary policies now disrupt international economic integration, once pushed by the West.

As war increasingly crowds out international diplomacy, commitments to the UN Charter, multilateralism, peace and sustainable development are being drowned by their enemies, often invoking misleadingly similar rhetoric.

Source: Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Mobilizations will continue and key roads remain blocked as the indefinite Ecuador-wide protests against the neoliberal policies of Guillermo Lasso’s administration head into a fourth day.

Security forces have been unsuccessful in trying to lift 24 hour roadblocks, which have now been reinforced by communities.

The government’s attempt to quell protests by sweeping up alleged leaders not only failed, it backfired. News of the arrest of Leonidas Iza, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), mobilized thousands of people to the Latacunga prison where he was taken and prompted a sea of condemnation of the government from a broad range of organizations, human rights groups and prominent figures.

Lawmakers of the left-wing Revolución Ciudadana were among those who denounced Lasso’s politically-motivated arrest and persecution of the indigenous leader.

Iza’s 24 hours in custody ended when a judge accepted his request for alternative measures while the prosecutor initiates an investigation into the ‘paralysis of public services’ due to the national strike.

His arrest was immediately denounced by the indigenous movement and lawyers as illegal, arbitrary and highly irregular.

After his arrest on a highway in Cotopaxi at 12:30am, following the first day of mobilizations, Iza was taken by special police and military forces to Quito. Hours later, Iza was taken to Quito’s Eloy Alfaro Military College. From there, Ecuador’s Armed Forces transported him by helicopter to Latacunga, where he was held at a heavily-guarded air force base, and for many hours, unable to contact relatives of lawyers.

Now released from custody, the CONAIE leader has vowed to intensify the struggle and consolidate the strength of the various other organizations and sectors of the country which have joined the strike.

The leader says the strike is indefinite and will continue until the government responds to the 10 points laid out by CONAIE. Other unions, workers associations, agricultural and production sectors, and many of the other agglomerations participating in the protests, are making their own set of demands.

The 10 points set out by CONAIE are as follows:

1. Fuel price reduction and freeze and no more fuel price hikes. Subsidies for sectors which need it most, such as peasants, transport sector, fishing
2. Economic relief for more than 4 million families with a moratorium of at least one year and renegotiation of debts with reduction of interest rates in the financial system (public, private and cooperative banks). No to the seizure of assets such as houses, land and vehicles for non-payment.
3. Fair prices for farm products: milk, rice, bananas, onions, fertilizers, potatoes, corn, tomatoes and more; no to the collection of royalties on flowers so that millions of peasants, small and medium-sized producers can have a guaranteed livelihood and continue producing.
4. Employment and labor rights. Policies and public investment to curb labor precariousness and ensure the sustainability of the popular economy.
5. Moratorium on the expansion of the mining/oil extractive frontier, audit and full reparation for socio-environmental impacts for the protection of territories, water sources and ecosystems.
6. Respect for the 21 collective rights: Intercultural Bilingual Education, indigenous justice, free, prior and informed consultation, organization and self-determination of indigenous peoples.
7. Stop the privatization of strategic sectors which belong to the Ecuadorian people (Banco del Pacífico, hydroelectric plants, IESS, CNT, highways, health, among others).
8. End speculation and abusive pricing of staple products by intermediaries.
9. Health and education: Urgent budget amid hospital shortages due to lack of medicine and personnel. Guarantee youth access to higher education and improve infrastructure in schools, colleges and universities.
10. Security and effective public policies to curb the upsurge of violence, hired killings, delinquency, drug trafficking, kidnapping and organized crime.

Rice growers, banana producers, transport workers, feminist collectives, high school and university students, teachers, health workers and other social movements have participated in actions around the country since Monday. At least several dozen trucks transporting large numbers of people from outside of the province, intending to join protests, arrived in the south of Quito throughout the day.

In Quito, thousands have marched in daily protests to the heavily-policed historic center, where access to the Carondelet presidential palace is completely fenced off and guarded by police in riot gear.

Scenes of police repression against mostly young demonstrators in the city’s Plaza Santo Domingo circulated on social media on Wednesday afternoon. Police repression against students was also filmed across the country at University of Cuenca.

Other incidents of police repression have been reported at roadblocks outside of the cities. The absence of media/cameras and human rights defenders along stretches of road and in rural areas has made the documentation of repression and abuses by state agents difficult if not unlikely.

Communities of CONAIE will for now, protest Lasso’s economic policies locally and have no current plans to head to Quito to protest—the way the movement did during the October 2019 anti-IMF uprising, in which 11 people were killed by Lenin Moreno’s security forces.

https://twitter.com/PrensaCamila/status/1181639205543391232

Iza made an appeal to avoid “any situation of violence, any situation of confrontation, we need our demands to be sustained with this struggle, with this resistance in the territories” adding that many demonstrators had already been arrested, beaten and injured.

The leader concluded by saying an announcement on collective actions for Wednesday would be made in the morning.

Perception of president Guillermo Lasso’s government has plummeted to an all-time low (17%), according to a PerfilesOpinion poll conducted in the two largest cities, Quito and Guayaquil, between June 3rd to 5th. 81% of people surveyed said his administration is “bad” or “very bad”.

Source: Kawsachun News

In April 2018, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said that Ghana has “not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America.” His comments came after Ghana’s parliament had ratified a new defense cooperation agreement with the United States on March 28, 2018, which was finally signed in May 2018. During a televised discussion, soon after the agreement was formalized in March 2018, Ghana’s Minister of Defense Dominic Nitiwul told Kwesi Pratt Jr., a journalist and leader of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, that Ghana had not entered into a military agreement with the United States. Pratt, however, said that the military agreement was a “source of worry” and was “a surrender of our [Ghanaian] sovereignty.”

In 2021, the research institute of Pratt’s Socialist Movement produced—along with the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—a dossier on the French and U.S. military presence in Africa. That dossier—“Defending Our Sovereignty: U.S. Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity”—noted that the United States has now established the West Africa Logistics Network (WALN) at Kotoka International Airport in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In 2019, then-U.S. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said that a weekly U.S. flight from Germany to Accra was “basically a bus route.” The WALN is a cooperative security location, which is another name for a U.S. military base.

Now, four years later after the signing of the defense cooperation agreement, I spoke with Kwesi Pratt and asked him about the state of this deal and the consequences of the presence of the U.S. base on Ghanaian soil. The WALN, Pratt told me, has now taken over one of the three terminals at the airport in Accra, and at this terminal, “hundreds of U.S. soldiers have been seen arriving and leaving. It is suspected that they may be involved in some operational activities in other West African countries and generally across the Sahel.”

U.S. Soldiers Don’t Need Passports

A glance at the U.S.-Ghana defense agreement raises many questions. Article 12 of the agreement states that the U.S. military can use the Accra airport without any regulations or checks, with U.S. military aircraft being “free from boarding and inspection” and the Ghanaian government providing “unimpeded access to and use of [a]greed facilities and areas to United States forces.” Pratt told me that this agreement allows U.S. soldiers “far more privileges than those prescribed in the Vienna Convention for diplomats. They do not need passports to enter Ghana. All they need is their U.S. Army identity cards. They don’t even require visas to enter Ghana. They are not subject to customs or any other inspection.”

Ghana has allowed the United States armed forces “to use Ghanaian radio frequencies for free,” Pratt said. But the most stunning fact about this arrangement is that, he said, “If U.S. soldiers kill Ghanaians and destroy their properties, the U.S. soldiers cannot be tried in Ghana. Ghanaians cannot sue U.S. soldiers or the U.S. government for compensation if and when their relatives are killed, or their properties are destroyed by the U.S. Army or soldiers.”

Why would Ghana allow this?

The U.S.-Ghana agreement permits this disregard for Ghana’s sovereignty. Pratt told me that the political ideology of the Ghanaian government that is in power now has been to adhere to a long history of appeasement toward the demands made by colonial and Western states, beginning with Britain—which was the colonial power that ruled over the Gold Coast (the former name for Ghana) until 1957—and leading up to providing “unimpeded access” to the United States troops under the defense deal.

The current president of Ghana, Akufo-Addo, comes from the political ideology that the former prime minister of Ghana (1969-1972) Kofi Abrefa Busia also conformed to. In the early 1950s, Pratt told me, those following this ideology “dispatched a delegation to the United Kingdom to persuade the authorities that it was too early to grant independence to the Gold Coast.” This led to a coup in Ghana, where those supporting this ideology “collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the [then-President of Ghana] Kwame Nkrumah government on February 24, 1966, and resisted [imposing] sanctions against the South African apartheid regime in 1969,” Pratt said. The current government, Pratt added, will do anything to please the United States government and its allies.

Why is the United States interested in Ghana?

The United States claims that its military presence on the African continent has to do with its counterterrorism campaign and aims to prevent the entry of China into this region. “There is no Chinese military presence in Ghana,” Pratt told me, and indeed the idea of Chinese presence is being used by the United States to deepen its military control over the continent for more prosaic reasons.

In 2001, then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group published the National Energy Policy. The contents of this report show, Pratt told me, that the United States understood that it could “no longer rely on the Middle East for its energy supplies. A shift to West Africa for [meeting the] U.S. energy needs is imperative.” Apart from West Africa’s energy resources, Ghana “has huge national resources. It is currently the largest producer of gold in Africa and… [is among the top 10 producers] of gold in the world. It is the second-largest producer of cocoa in the world. It has iron, diamond, manganese, bauxite, oil and gas, lithium, and abundant water resources, including the largest man-made lake in the world.” Apart from these resources, Ghana’s location on the equator makes it valuable for agricultural development, and its large bank of highly educated English-speaking professionals makes it valuable for meeting the demands of the West’s service sector.

Apart from these economic issues, Pratt said, the United States government has intervened in Ghana—including in the coup of 1966—to prevent it from having a leadership role in the decolonization process in Africa. More recently, the United States has found Ghana to be a reliable ally in its various military and commercial projects across the continent. It is toward those projects, and not the national interest of the Ghanaian people, Pratt said, that the United States has now built its base in a part of Accra’s civilian airport.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Lebanon was invaded 40 years ago by the Zionist regime that occupies Palestine. At least 48,000 Arab people were killed or injured in the attack that started June 6, 1982.

Apartment buildings in Beirut were seen on TV being bombed by Israeli war planes while Lebanese villages were shelled by Israeli tanks. The world was horrified by Lebanese and Palestinian children being killed.

The Israeli planes, cluster bombs, tanks and shells were made in the USA. Behind Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Israeli General Ariel Sharon was U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the White House.

Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, called Israel “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” 

While Lebanon was being devastated, the U.S. was installing 108 Pershing 2 nuclear missiles in West Germany. Each of these deadly weapons could carry a nuclear payload three times greater than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Hiroshima’s bomb killed 100,000 people, including 30,000 Korean slave laborers. With a range of over 1,000 miles, the Pershing 2 missiles could strike the Soviet Union in just six minutes.

Millions of people demonstrated in Western Europe against this dangerous escalation in the arms race. At the same time a “nuclear freeze” movement arose in the United States that demanded a stop to any more nuclear weapons.

Reagan’s supporters denounced the nuclear freeze movement. This writer saw preacher Ernest Angley claim on TV that Jesus Christ would return to earth via a worldwide nuclear war.

Six days after Israel invaded Lebanon, a million people came to New York City’s Central Park on June 12, 1982. They demanded a nuclear freeze and peace.

But none of the speakers mentioned the slaughter in Lebanon. The rally organizers thought it was more important to get the endorsement of racist New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a big supporter of Israel.

Koch was hated by the Black and Latinx communities. The year before Koch had closed Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital.

A sit-in there was viciously attacked by police on Sept. 19, 1980, injuring 30 people. The Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, who had been a co-worker of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., called the police brutality as bad as anything that occured in Birmingham or Selma, Alabama.

From Lebanon to Ukraine

The refusal of the “official” U.S. peace movement’s leadership to denounce Israel’s invasion was repulsive. It broke down the anti-war movement.

Later, some of these leaders were apologetic, especially after the September 1981 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Over 3,000 people died there. An official Israeli inquiry admitted that Ariel Sharon was to blame.

In contrast, 100,000 people marched on the Pentagon on May 3, 1981, to demand an end to Reagan’s wars in Central America. For the first time, a Palestinian representative spoke to the crowd.

The march was called by the People’s Anti-war Mobilization (PAM) and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). PAM activists later formed the ANSWER coalition.

PAM called demonstrations against the invasion of Lebanon. At the June 12 rally, PAM supporters distributed tens of thousands of leaflets condemning the U.S.-Israeli invasion.

There were few altercations in Central Park with supporters of Israel. Did the June 12 organizers really believe that Jewish people coming to a peace rally were all supporters of war criminals like Begin and Sharon?

The refusal to mention Lebanon was a capitulation to the capitalist establishment.

In its first stages, the invasion of Lebanon was a U.S. proxy war against the Warsaw Pact. That was a defensive military alliance of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist countries against NATO.

By directing the Israel air force to shoot down 88 Soviet-built, Syrian-owned MiG jets on June 9 over Lebanon, the Pentagon was telling the Soviet Union that it could do the same over East Germany.

The U.S.-approved invasion of Lebanon and the installation of the nuclear first strike Pershing 2 missiles were both examples of the Reagan regime’s adventurism.

Israel’s nuclear stockpile was also U.S approved. These nukes were not targeted at Rockefeller’s oil wells in the Arab/Persian gulf. They were aimed at the Soviet Union then and Iran today.

The challenge today is NATO’s war against the Donbass republics and the Russian Federation. The U.S. and NATO instigated this war and are giving orders to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Congress can’t find any more money to fight COVID-19 but it’s spending over $50 billion to fund fascists in Ukraine, like the Azov battalion.

Hands off Russia and the Donbass republics!

June 7 was a bad day for Luis Almagro, secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS). During the ninth Summit of the Americas, a young man declared to him what he is: an assassin and puppet of the White House, instigator of the coup in Bolivia. He said that Almagro cannot come to give lessons on democracy when his hands are stained with blood. In another room at the summit in Los Angeles, Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemed to be doing no better: several journalists rebuked him for using freedom of the press to provide cover for the murderers of journalists and for sanctioning and excluding certain countries from this meeting. “Democracy or hypocrisy?” could be heard over the loudspeaker that day.

In reality, this stormy summit began with a large diplomatic stumble for the United States, when several Latin American presidents announced that they would not participate in the summit because of the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, as dictated by the White House, while the U.S. State Department still claims the open and unrestricted nature of the meeting’s call. Its website says, “Throughout, the United States has demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate, our commitment to an inclusive process that incorporates input from people and institutions that represent the immense diversity of our hemisphere, and includes Indigenous and other historically marginalized voices.”

Hypocrisy seems to be the glue of this summit, and mainstream U.S. media and analysts declared the June 6-10 meeting a failure before it even started. On June 7, the Washington Post assured readers that “This week’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles will be remembered for its absences rather than its potential agreements,” focusing its attention on Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was the most mentioned political figure in U.S. networks and media on June 7 and 8, even more than U.S. President Joe Biden, according to statistics from Google Trends. Richard N. Haass, who was the adviser to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and director of policy planning for the State Department, summed up the disaster superbly in a tweet: “The Summit of the Americas looks to be a debacle, a diplomatic own goal. The U.S. has no trade proposal, no immigration policy, and no infrastructure package. Instead, the focus is on who will and will not be there. Unclear is why we pressed for it to happen.”

As can be expected of a meeting for which the invitation list had not been declared just 72 hours before it began, apathy seems to dominate the debate rooms, to which almost no one goes, according to witnesses. Even so, the United States government did not miss an opportunity to secure the appearance of participation by the civil society groups on which it bets, and it met with the envoys from Miami, paid for by USAID, and awarded them with more money. During the summit, Blinken promised a new fund of $9 million to support “independent journalism” to those who already receive $20 million a year for promoting “regime change” in Cuba.

This political pageantry is happening in what is essentially a bunker, because the Los Angeles Police received more than $15 million to police the summit and militarize a city famous for its homelessness and belts of poverty. The U.S. Democratic Party elite, meanwhile, remain out of touch with the reality of their own country, shaken by daily massacres, increasingly powerless to meet the expectations of citizens, and with most decisions and legislative projects stalled. They are replicating the clichés of the Monroe Doctrine—America for the Americans—and demonstrating what appears to be a commitment to isolationism with respect to Latin America.

The United States rarely takes into account the differentiating features of its Latin American neighbors: cultural, linguistic, religious, and traditional—in short, those that grant and promote a genuine way of understanding life and its miracles. It might seem incomprehensible at this point, but the U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America is articulated and carried out from exclusively ideological approaches, with simplistic decisions that end up harming everyone—including and especially the United States itself.

Defying the storm, the People’s Summit for Democracy has been installed at the doors of the meeting of the friends of the White House. Sponsored by some 250 organizations, most of which are local unions, the counter-summit is marching through the streets of Los Angeles on June 10, whether or not the authorities, who have done everything possible to silence the alternative meeting, give permission. But the media blockade is not having the expected success. Almagro and Blinken have gone viral on social media for reasons beyond their control, and they will not be the last to prove firsthand what the outrage of the excluded looks like.

This article was produced by Globetrotter and was first published on La Jornada. Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist and founder of the site Cubadebate. She is vice president of both the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) and the Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP). She has written and co-written several books including Jineteros en la Habana and Our Chavez. She has received the Juan Gualberto Gómez National Prize for Journalism on multiple occasions for her outstanding work. She is currently a weekly columnist for La Jornada of Mexico City.

Frederick Douglass Square in Brooklyn, New York, celebrated African Liberation Day on May 28. People gathered outside Sistas’ Place to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic 1972 ALD marches in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

As many as 60,000 people marched in Washington, while thousands demonstrated in San Francisco.

Fifty years ago much of Africa was still under white minority rule. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger worked overtime to keep Black people in South Africa and Namibia in chains under apartheid.

The white settler “Rhodesia” regime occupying Zimbabwe was given a life line by the segregationist Strom Thurmond and his fellow U.S. senators. They voted to allow chrome to be imported from “Rhodesia”―in violation of United Nations sanctions―to retaliate against African countries that voted to admit the People’s Republic of China to the U.N.

Africans had picked up the gun and were waging guerrilla war against Portuguese colonial rule in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

African Liberation Day became another front in this freedom struggle. War criminal Kissinger later admitted that the U.S. couldn’t send troops to Zimbabwe.

Speaking to the people

The December 12th Movement organized the Bedford-Stuyvesant rally. D12 chairperson Viola Plummer was a key organizer of the 1972 mobilizations for African freedom. The late Coltrane Chimurenga, Field Marshal of the December 12th Movement, helped initiate African Liberation Day in San Francisco.

Roger Wareham, a member of the December 12th International Secretariat and a human rights attorney fighting for reparations, chaired the event.

Starting off the rally were drummers, two of whom were from Côte d’Ivoire. A large banner proclaimed “Pan-Africanism Rising!” Of the 13 freedom fighters whose photos were featured on it, six had been assassinated.

A recording was played of the Honorable Marcus Garvey speaking. The Black leader and immigrant who led millions was framed, imprisoned and then deported to Jamaica by the U.S. government.

A wonderful video was shown of the African Liberation Day marches in 1972. It was produced by Roy Campanella Jr., son of the legendary baseball catcher for the Baltimore/Washington Elite Giants as well as for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The historian Walter Rodney, author of the classic “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” was shown speaking in San Francisco. Rodney was assassinated in 1980, a rubout that had CIA fingerprints.

Also shown on the video was the late Pan-African teacher, organizer and D12 leader Elombe Brath, Black Panther Party member Elaine Brown and the revolutionary poet and playwright Amiri Baraka.

The rally’s first speaker was D12 member Abdul Haqq, who gave a fiery talk about the need to fight. 

Other speakers attacked Black elected officials who are being used in the anti-Russia crusade. Among them is representative Gregory Meeks from Queens, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

There was also sad news to report. Former political prisoner James Haskins announced that his friend Thomas “Blood” McCleary, who had been a member of SNCC, the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, had passed. ¡Presente!

This writer for Struggle-La Lucha newspaper spoke of how African liberation fighters also brought freedom to Portuguese workers, who had lived for decades under a fascist regime.

Zayid Muhammad of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee reminded people how in 1998 former Mayor Rudy Giuliani had police helicopters attack the Million Youth March in Harlem. Zayid Muhammad was given a plaque to honor his longtime work.

Frederick Douglass declared that “without struggle, there is no progress.” Brooklyn’s African Liberation Day rally points the way forward.

Anxiety about the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) toward the Russian border is one of the causes of the current war in Ukraine. But this is not the only attempt at expansion by NATO, a treaty organization created in 1949 by the United States to project its military and political power over Europe. In 2001, NATO conducted an “out of area” military operation in Afghanistan, which lasted 20 years, and in 2011, NATO—at the urging of France—bombed Libya and overthrew its government. NATO military operations in Afghanistan and Libya were the prelude to discussions of a “Global NATO,” a project to use the NATO military alliance beyond its own charter obligations from the South China Sea to the Caribbean Sea.

NATO’s war in Libya was its first major military operation in Africa, but it was not the first European military footprint on the continent. After centuries of European colonial wars in Africa, new states emerged in the aftermath of World War II to assert their sovereignty. Many of these states—from Ghana to Tanzania—refused to allow the European military forces to reenter the continent, which is why these European powers had to resort to assassinations and military coups to anoint pro-Western governments in the region. This allowed for the creation of Western military bases in Africa and gave Western firms freedom to exploit the continent’s natural resources.

Early NATO operations stayed at the edge of Africa, with the Mediterranean Sea being the major frontline. NATO set up the Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH) in Naples in 1951, and then the Allied Forces Mediterranean (AFMED) in Malta in 1952. Western governments established these military formations to garrison the Mediterranean Sea against the Soviet navy and to create platforms from where they could militarily intervene in the African continent. After the Six-Day War in 1967, NATO’s Defense Planning Committee, which was dissolved in 2010, created the Naval On-Call Force Mediterranean (NOCFORMED) to put pressure on pro-Soviet states—such as Egypt—and to defend the monarchies of northern Africa (NATO was unable to prevent the anti-imperialist coup of 1969 that overthrew the monarchy in Libya and brought Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power; Gaddafi’s government ejected U.S. military bases from the country soon thereafter).

Conversations at NATO headquarters about “out of area” operations took place with increasing frequency after NATO joined the U.S. war on Afghanistan. A senior official at NATO told me in 2003 that the United States had “developed an appetite to use NATO” in its attempt to project power against possible adversaries. Two years later, in 2005, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, NATO began to cooperate closely with the African Union (AU). The AU, which was formed in 2002, and was the “successor” to the Organization of African Unity, struggled to build an independent security structure. The lack of a viable military force meant that the AU often turned to the West for assistance, and asked NATO to help with logistics and airlift support for its peacekeeping mission in Sudan.

Alongside NATO, the U.S. operated its military capacity through the United States European Command (EUCOM), which oversaw the country’s operations in Africa from 1952 to 2007. Thereafter, General James Jones, head of EUCOM from 2003 to 2006, formed the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008, which was headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, because none of the 54 African nations were willing to give it a home. NATO began to operate on the African continent through AFRICOM.

Libya and NATO’s Framework for Africa

NATO’s war on Libya changed the dynamics of the relationship between the African countries and the West. The African Union was wary of Western military intervention in the region. On 10 March, 2011, the AU’s Peace and Security Council set up the High-Level ad hoc Committee on Libya. The members of this committee included then-AU Chairperson Dr. Jean Ping and the heads of state of five African nations—former President of Mauritania Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso, Mali’s former President Amadou Toumani Touré, former President of South Africa Jacob Zuma and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni—who were supposed to fly into Tripoli, Libya, and negotiate between the two sides of the Libyan civil war soon after the committee’s formation. The United Nations Security Council, however, prevented this mission from entering the country.

At a meeting between the High-Level ad hoc Committee on Libya and the United Nations in June 2011, Uganda’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations during that time, Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda, said, “It is unwise for certain players to be intoxicated with technological superiority and begin to think they alone can alter the course of human history toward freedom for the whole of mankind. Certainly, no constellation of states should think that they can recreate hegemony over Africa.” But this is precisely what the NATO states began to imagine.

Chaos in Libya set in motion a series of catastrophic conflicts in Mali, southern Algeria and parts of Niger. The French military intervention in Mali in 2013 was followed by the creation of the G5 Sahel, a political platform of the five Sahel states—Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger—and a military alliance between them. In May 2014, NATO opened a liaison office at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. At NATO’s Wales Summit in September 2014, the alliance partners considered the problems in the Sahel that entered the alliance’s Readiness Action Plan, which served as “[the] driver of NATO’s military adaptation to the changed and evolving security environment.” In December 2014, NATO foreign ministers reviewed the plan’s implementation, and focused on the “threats emanating from our southern neighborhood, the Middle East, and North Africa” and established a framework to meet the threats and challenges being faced by the South, according to a report by the former President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, Michael R. Turner. Two years later, at NATO’s Warsaw Summit in 2016, NATO leaders decided to increase their cooperation with the African Union. They “[welcomed] the robust military commitment of Allies in the Sahel-Sahara region.” To deepen this commitment, NATO set up an African Standby Force and began the process of training officers in African military forces.

Meanwhile, the recent decision to eject the French military is rooted in a general sensibility growing in the continent against Western military aggression. No wonder then that many of the larger African countries refused to follow Washington’s position on the war on Ukraine, with half the countries either abstaining or voting against the UN resolution to condemn Russia (this includes countries such as Algeria, South Africa, Angola and Ethiopia). It is telling that South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said that his country “is committed to advancing the human rights and fundamental freedoms not only of our own people but for the peoples of Palestine, Western Sahara, Afghanistan, Syria and across Africa and the world.”

The ignominy of Western—and NATO’s—follies, including arms deals with Morocco to deliver Western Sahara to the kingdom and diplomatic backing for Israel as it continues its apartheid treatment of Palestinians, bring into sharp contrast Western outrage at the events taking place in Ukraine. Evidence of this hypocrisy serves as a warning while reading the benevolent language used by the West when it comes to NATO’s expansion into Africa.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

The probable victory of the progressive candidate Gustavo Petro in the Colombian presidential elections, taking place this Sunday, arouses great hopes there, in our region and in other corners of the planet. Polls show him winning, although not quite with half and the plus one of the valid votes needed to declare him the winner in the first round. So, unless there is a surprise, Petro would have to fight in a second round on June 19 with whoever comes in second, a place occupied until a few days ago by the pro-Uribe Fico Gutiérrez in the polls, which now show him in a technical tie with Rodolfo Hernández. Hernandez could snatch votes from Petro, a probable scenario to force a second round in which Uribism and all the right-wing currents would throw themselves at the neck of the progressive slate together with the hegemonic media. Petro, a former guerrilla and former mayor of Bogota is the standard bearer of the very broad coalition Historic Pact (PH) together with the prominent Afro-Colombian activist, feminist and environmentalist Francia Marquez who is running with him, in the difficult task of reaching the Nariño Palace.

The system always erects enormous obstacles to alternative candidates in any country. How complicated it will be in Colombia, a country ruled by an entrenched oligarchy for two centuries, which the United States considers its property. On March 28, after the legislative and primary elections, in which the PH obtained the largest number of seats, although not the majority in both chambers, General Laura Richardson, head of the Southern Command (SC) met with General Luis Navarro, Commander General of the Armed Forces to ask him about the possible deactivation of the seven US military bases in Colombian territory, in the event Petro wins. Navarro replied that both the legislators and the armed forces would oppose such a move, which earned the military chief a press release from the SC stating that Colombia “is an unconditional security partner of Washington”.

Petro has publicly claimed that there is a conspiracy to stage a coup or cancel the election rather than accept his triumph. He and Marquez, who have been the target of attacks in the past, have received death threats and in Colombia’s peculiar democracy they must appear at rallies protected by armored shields in this last week leading up to the elections

Colombia: towards a progressive government?

Four leftist or progressive presidential candidates have been assassinated in Colombia since 1980. Not to mention the murder in 1948 of Jorge Eliécer Gaytán, candidate of the Liberal Party, but with definite popular national roots and vocation, which ushered in the period known as La Violencia.

In the Andean country, where rivers of blood have flowed since the famous massacre of the banana plantations (1928), according to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, created by the peace agreements in 2016, there had been between 2002 and 2008 alone 6400 people killed by the repressive practice of “false positives”, consisting of the murder by the army of innocent citizens presented as guerrillas. If we take the data issued by the prestigious INDEPAZ, in 2022, 78 social leaders and human rights defenders have been murdered, as well as 21 FARC combatants who signed the peace agreement, a tragedy that took off shortly after the election of the current president Iván Duque, a puppet of the neo-fascist former president Álvaro Uribe, a staunch enemy of the peace accords. It is also worth highlighting the repressive viciousness of the Colombian security forces during the great popular rebellions of 2019-2020 and 2021, the 70 percent rejection of Duque in the polls and the collapse of Uribism. A rekindled phenomena, which, like Petro’s rise, are closely related to the awareness created by the non-compliance with the peace agreements, also sparked popular protests in the streets at the same time there was increased sufferings imposed on the many by neoliberal policies.

Petro insists on full compliance with the peace accords. The need for agrarian reform to provide land to rural families and boost food production, but without expropriation; he promotes a tax reform to tax the 4000 largest fortunes in the country and combat tax evasion to finance health and education. It also proposes a new unified pension system supported mainly by the State, the renegotiation of free trade agreements and 50/50 parity positions in the government between men and women, as well as the recognition of the rights of minorities and sexual diversity. Petro and Marquez have been promoting the gradual transition from fossil to sustainable energy.

Ideally, Petro-Márquez could win in the first round because to ensure victory in the second round they will have to weave alliances with spaces outside the popular camp and negotiate away aspects of their program. But, in one way or the other, their victory would be an important step forward for Colombia and our America.

Source: Telesur, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Around 7.5 million people live in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic as compared to 8.8 million people residing in New York City. While 756 people in Laos have died from COVID-19, 40,365 New Yorkers died from it ― 53 times as many. 

How does Laos do it? More bombs fell on Laos than any other country in history. 

Two million tons of cluster bombs were dropped on the Asian country by the United States military from 1964 to 1973. That’s more bombs than were dropped by all sides during World War II.

What did Laotians do to the U.S. to deserve such terror? At least 50,000 people died from the bombing. Another 20,000 have died or been injured from the initially unexploded munitions in the 49 years since the war. 

The not-so-secret weapon that Laos uses against disease is socialism. Encouraging people to organize themselves is a requirement to build a socialist society.

Trade unions, women’s associations and youth groups work with the communist party to carry out COVID-19 testing and vaccinations.

Over 1,100 years ago the Iranian scientist Ibn Sina ― also known as Abu Ali Sina or Avicenna ― advocated isolating sick people to stop the spread of disease. Although this was centuries before the invention of microscopes, the Muslim scholar thought that small organisms were responsible for infections.

In the socialist People’s Republic of China, entire cities with populations of millions were shut down to stop COVID. But nobody starved. Unarmed police in Wuhan delivered meals to residents.

Socialist Cuba developed five different vaccines against the coronavirus. Before its 1959 revolution Cuba wasn’t able to manufacture aspirin.

Volunteers in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam carried out massive testing and tracing to hold back the virus. People are being mobilized in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to fight the latest variant of COVID-19.

These five socialist countries have a total population of 1.55 billion people. That’s almost a fifth of the human race. Yet they account for little more than one percent of the 6.3 million people who have been counted as dying of COVID-19. 

People before profits

Before their 1949 socialist revolution, Chinese people lived to be on average just 36 years old. By 2022, life expectancy had more than doubled to reach 77.3 years.

China was plagued by diseases before liberation. The parasitic disease schistosomiasis infected over 12 million people and threatened many more.

Millions of volunteers waded into rivers to root out fresh water snails that harbored the parasite. (See “Away With All Pests”, by Dr. Joshua Horn, published by Monthly Review Press.)

Capitalists dread such mass mobilizations. Trump wanted to send troops to shoot people who were demanding Black Lives Matter.

Slave masters prohibited funerals of enslaved Africans. The plantation owners feared that people would discuss how to rise up.

Centuries before capitalism, a Roman governor called Pliny the Younger wrote to Emperor Trajan. Pliny asked if he could allow the formation of a volunteer fire fighting company. 

Even though fires in wooden buildings were frequent, Trajan prohibited such activity because the volunteers would talk politics. 

Racist cops often don’t even allow Black and Brown youth to gather on street corners. In contrast, socialism requires peoples’ power – which includes youth getting together, whether to discuss world politics or play basketball.

The wealthy and powerful thought it was awful to shut down parts of the capitalist economy to stop the spread of COVID-19. To them profits are more precious than life.

Typical of their class was California lawyer Scott McMillan. Referring to the elderly, he tweeted: “The fundamental problem is whether we are going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5 percent of the population which is (1) generally expensive to maintain, and (2) not productive.” 

Seniors and disabled people are considered roadkill by banksters and billionaires. The rich don’t care that one out of 35 people aged 85 years or older in the United States has died of COVID-19.

In socialist countries both older folk and youth are treasured. Cuba is proud that more than 2,000 of its people are over 100 years old. 

Remarkable success in combating COVID-19 was also carried out by people’s governments of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. This is despite these countries suffering from vicious economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and European Union. Wall Street continues to economically blockade Cuba and People’s Korea. 

Capitalism is unwilling and unable to fight pandemics. We need socialism to do that. Always remember what Laos was able to accomplish despite the mass murder conducted by the U.S.

For Immediate Release
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May 25, 2022 – The Biden Administration’s recent decision to return U.S. troops to Somalia represents another effort on the part of the U.S. to deny agency and independence to African people. On the 59th commemoration of African Liberation Day, the Black Alliance for Peace expresses its unequivocal opposition to this redeployment. The 500 U.S. troops sent to Somalia are the latest to violate that nation’s sovereignty. As is the case with all U.S. interventions, the underlying reasons are not only depraved but also indifferent to the constant suffering of African people caused by western-induced militarism and war.

The reintroduction of the U.S. military (AFRICOM) on the ground is related to a dispute between Somalia and the U.S. oil company, Coastline Exploration Ltd, over the validity of an oil exploration agreement. It is also a signal that the U.S. wants to both reassert its presence in the oil-rich and strategic region, and to directly target its long-time foe, Eritrea.

Netfa Freeman, BAP’s African Team Co-Coordinator states that this decision is “emblematic of the U.S. insistence on keeping Africa in perpetual turmoil and has nothing to do with enabling a more effective fight against al-Shabaab.” Biden’s advisors are certainly aware of various reports exposing that the billions Washington spends on counterterrorism programs, from Somalia to Nigeria, ostensibly to enhance security in Africa, is having the opposite effect.

While the U.S. continues its 30-year long series of interventions against Somalia, H.R. 7311 the “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act” passed with the unanimous approval of every Democrat in Congress.

H.R. 7311 was introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman and Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) member Gregory Meeks and passed in the House on April 28, 2022. The bill calls for assessments of Russia’s influence on the African continent and states that the U.S. will “hold accountable” Russia and African governments who are “complicit in aiding such malign influence.” This is reminiscent of the era of the George W Bush administration that declared that any country not with the U.S. is against the U.S.

Margaret Kimberley, BAP Africa Team Co-Coordinator said, “This bill is a racist affront to the right to self-determination of African people.”

H.R. 7311 is a reaction to African nations that refrained from condemning Russia’s military operation in Ukraine; and as a deterrent against African nations acting as Mali has done, by ending the French military presence and turning toward Russian private military company Wagner for assistance. On May 16th the Mali government announced that Wagner played a role in thwarting a failed coup attempt allegedly carried out by a group of local soldiers, foreign mercenaries, and units from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries.

Rep. Meeks and the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) – the “Black misleadership class” –  are fully aligned with the Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership, defending every imperialist effort to exercise U.S. dominance in Africa. The U.S. bombed Somalia on February 22, two days before the Russian Federation began its military operations in Ukraine. Yet Somalia has not become a focus of concern of Meeks and the rest of the Black misleaders, despite years of constant drone bombings by the U.S. having caused an estimated 250,000 deaths and the displacement of 3 million people. Meanwhile, these same CBC members won’t address domestic problems, but will lob billions to wage a proxy war against Russia and to support Nazi groups in Ukraine. The U.S. Black misleadership class demonstrates over and over that they do not care about African people – neither on the continent nor at home.

BAP is firm in its anti-imperialist stance and again says, “U.S. Out of Africa!” “Shut Down AFRICOM!”

No Compromise! No Retreat!

Black Alliance for Peace