Oct. 8 ― Haitian activists and their supporters demonstrated today in New York City against the deportations of Haitian people. One sign said, “U.S. border patrols = slave catchers.” This referred to the immigration cops on horseback who whipped Haitians seeking asylum in Texas.

The demonstration was held at the Jacob Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan and was called by KOMOKODA, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti. Among those who joined the picket was longtime labor activist Brenda Stokely.

The 81 million people who cast ballots for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t vote for a continuation of Trump’s racist policies. Yet the Biden administration has deported thousands of Hatians without a hearing despite the Aug. 14 earthquake in Haiti.

People chanted,  “Joe Biden, shame on you!,” which was heard by people near the corners of Worth and Lafayette streets.

The U.S. government has been attacking Haiti for 230 years, since 1791. The world’s only slave revolution terrified slave masters.

Haitians deserve reparations, not deportation. U.S. hands off Haiti!

Twenty years have passed since the George W. Bush regime launched its so-called “war on terror.” U.S. troops have left Afghanistan in defeat. The Taliban are back in Kabul. The knives are out in Washington.

Congressional Republicans are demanding Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Mark Milley resign. South Carolina Senator (and oil company agent) Lindsey Graham called for President Joe Biden’s impeachment. Some of them have accused him of “treason.” 

Meanwhile, Pentagon generals are distancing themselves from the White House decision to pull all U.S. troops from that war-ravaged land. 

Gone is the “United We Stand” bravado we heard when U.S. bombs began to rain on Afghan villages on Oct. 7, 2001. It has gone the way of the record super-profits the “war on terror” brought U.S. oil companies and their bankers.

Gone too is the triumphalism that accompanied the end of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the talk of “the end of history” and a “new American century.” They have been replaced by gloom and recrimination. 

Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” pipe dream, based on “U.S. energy dominance,” has crashed and burned. Joe Biden’s cry that “America is back” rings hollow.

The furious eat themselves

Global setbacks for the U.S. ruling class always set off battles in Washington. After the victory of the great Chinese Revolution in 1949, President Harry Truman was accused of “losing” China. A four-year red scare followed as Senator Joseph McCarthy blamed this profound social revolution on “communists” in Washington. 

The U.S. failure to conquer Korea in 1953 led McCarthy to aim his fire at the U.S. military high command itself. That attack on Washington’s holy of holies caused his political demise. 

The victory of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere, electrified Latin America and the Caribbean. It terrified Washington and Wall Street. 

In August 1960, Cuba’s revolutionaries nationalized U.S. corporate holdings in their country. That September, Fidel Castro visited Harlem and proclaimed solidarity with the Black freedom struggle. 

The Pentagon and CIA were confident they could “neutralize” Cuba’s revolutionary government as they had earlier pro-people governments in the region. But it was a different time and a different kind of revolution. 

The defeat of the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion set off a gang war in Washington. The Pentagon and CIA blamed President John F. Kennedy for not sending U.S. troops and planes to back up their mercenaries. JFK was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam was followed by the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation. The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the deliberately provoked hostage crisis that followed brought down Jimmy Carter and put Ronald Reagan in the White House. 

The U.S. flight from Afghanistan may not seem to be an event on the scale of these earth-changing social revolutions. Yet it represents the utter failure of the 20-year, $10-trillion-plus “war on terror” to accomplish its goal. And the inability of the decaying U.S. empire to capitalize on its Cold War victory.

What was that goal? To restore the stranglehold on the world’s energy resources U.S. corporations enjoyed after World War II. Not because the United States needs oil, but because U.S. corporations need profits. Control of oil and gas assured the dominance of Wall Street banks and the U.S. dollar in the world capitalist economy.

In 1960, Western oil majors owned most of the world’s known oil reserves outside of the Soviet bloc. Half of the overseas profits of U.S. corporations came from Arab, Iranian and Venezuelan oil. 

The anti-colonial upsurge of the second half of the 20th century changed things. OPEC was founded in 1962 to challenge the power of the oil companies. The Libyan Revolution of 1969 led by Muammar Gaddafi, Iraq’s oil nationalization of 1972 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 took nearly a quarter of the world’s oil reserves out of Western corporate hands. 

The 30-year war

The attempted reconquista did not start with the events of 9/11. They were but a phony pretext to expand it. 

The first Bush regime launched the 30-year oil war in 1991 with Operation Desert Storm, as the Soviet Union dissolved under the impact of Gorbachev’s perestroika. It continued under Republican and Democratic regimes.

From 1991 to 2001, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, mostly children, were murdered by U.S. bombs and sanctions. The plans for the first U.S. war against Iraq were on George H.W. Bush’s desk months before Iraqi troops went into Kuwait in 1991. The plans to invade Afghanistan were on his son’s desk on Sept. 10, 2001.  

The second Bush regime was run by fellows of the Project for a New American Century. A 1998 PNAC document said a “new Pearl Harbor” was needed to galvanize support for a wider war. On Sept. 11, 2001, that wish was realized. 

A few weeks after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, General Wesley Clark was informed that the Pentagon planned to “take out seven more Muslim states in five years” — Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Sudan. Four of those have important oil and gas reserves. The others are on strategic transportation routes. 

And Afghanistan? It sits astride a route by which oil and gas from former Soviet Central Asia could reach South Asia and the Indian Ocean. 

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, funded the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and orchestrated the overthrow and murder of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi 10 years ago. Since 2011, Washington has armed and funded a bloody war against Syria in cahoots with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrators of 9/11. 

U.S. troops occupy Syria’s oil fields; U.S.-backed “insurgents” block the construction of a gas pipeline from Iran to the Mediterranean. U.S. drone strikes have killed thousands of civilians in Somalia and Pakistan. U.S. arms still flow to the Saudi Kingdom, the UAE and the racist state of Israel to murder people in Yemen and Palestine. Sanctions cause great suffering in Iran and Venezuela.

Fails to stop U.S. decline

The U.S. war machine has succeeded in killing, wounding and displacing millions of people and spending tens of trillions of dollars. 

What did its corporate masters gain from all this? A decade-long energy price bubble that brought record profits to oil companies and their bankers. It then collapsed. 

It has failed to reverse the world situation in Washington and Wall Street’s favor. It has not opened new markets for capital investment. It has not restored the U.S. ruling class to the dominant position it occupied after World War II. It has only slowed its decline. It cannot stop the global contraction of the capitalist system.

Israel was driven from Lebanon and cannot crush the Palestinian resistance. The Saudis and UAE are losing their war in Yemen. Syria has taken back most of its territory. Iran and Venezuela remain strong and independent of U.S. rule. The U.S. has abandoned Afghanistan and U.S. troops are under siege in Iraq. 

Gas and oil from former Soviet Central Asia now goes directly by pipeline to China. The Nord Stream pipeline is bringing Russian gas to Europe. Nord Stream 2 is under construction. 

Will the Biden administration abandon Wall Street’s war against the world? No, it can’t. 

The power and wealth of U.S. monopoly capital, its very existence, can only be maintained by destruction. That’s all it has to offer the world.

U.S. troops have left Afghanistan. But not a dime has been cut from the military budget. In fact, it’s slated to go up by $37 billion next year. The White House and Pentagon say they need that money to confront China. Meanwhile, Congress cannot even pass the Build Back Better Act. 

Working class and oppressed people inside the United States have nothing to gain from endless war. Neither Afghanistan or China, Iran or Venezuela are our enemy. We do not need Wall Street banks to be at the center of the world economy. 

We need healthcare and education and good-paying jobs for all. We need to get the Pentagon war machine and its corporate masters off our backs. 

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration inaugurated the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) to further the influence of the U.S. and extend its military reach directly into Africa. AFRICOM, however, wasn’t officially established in Africa, with its expanded troop presence and unprecedented use of drones on the continent, until Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.

This Oct. 1, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) hosted a webinar titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” The event featured voices rarely heard in the U.S., from countries most affected by AFRICOM, including internationally-known activists for liberation and those representing the growing movement on the continent against AFRICOM.

The program started with a film by BAP exposing the imperialist aims of AFRICOM and its yearly price tag of $2 billion in Africa alone.

Guest speakers exposed the other resources required for AFRICOM’s maintenance: the cost of peoples’ sovereignty and right to self-government, in addition to the cost of inflaming humanitarian crises.

This webinar was part of a month-long effort by the Black Alliance for Peace to educate and advocate for these demands: the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa; the demilitarization of the African continent; the closure of U.S. bases throughout the world; and that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose AFRICOM and support hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent.

‘To dominate and exploit us’

Imani Na Umoja is a member of the Central Committee of the African Party of Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, the largest political party in Guinea-Bissau, which participated in its armed struggle for independence from Portugal. Umoja spoke about AFRICOM’s major role in the recent coups on the continent to ensure resources for U.S. imperialism and deny its peoples’ right to self-determination.

U.S. claims of promoting democracy are the exact opposite in its deeds.

“The agreements are so horrendous it makes me sick, and should make anyone sick,” said Kwesi Pratt Jr., a journalist and general secretary of the Socialist Movement of Ghana. He was referring to the establishment of U.S. bases in Ghana and agreements signed by the government that allow U.S. forces more immunity, freedom of movement and secrecy than its own citizens, diplomats or even the president of the country, “simply by showing their U.S. ID cards.”

Pratt said that the agreements do not allow anyone to question what the U.S. forces bring into or take out of the country. “The U.S. Army can use our resources for free … the agreement was signed to dominate and exploit us.”

Irene Asuwa of the Revolutionary Socialist League of Kenya spoke further on AFRICOM’s domestic cost to her people. “The war on terror is an excuse to kidnap people,” she said, explaining the heightened profiling of Somali peoples in Kenya. “In less than 12 hours they are taken into court and sentenced as terrorists with no lawyer, then taken away.”

Asuwa also spoke about the refugee crisis that was exacerbated by AFRICOM’s insistence that refugee camps be closed. This reality belies the false claim that AFRICOM is involved in solving humanitarian crises on the continent, rather than being one of the major causes of those crises — in spite of the well-polished public relations efforts touted on the organization’s official website.

The speakers helped bring to life what award-winning journalist Nick Turse, who exposed the unreported buildup of AFRICOM in 2008, wrote for the Intercept in February 2020: “Since 9/11, the U.S. military has built a sprawling network of outposts in more than a dozen African countries. … During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee late last month, Stephen Townsend, the commander of AFRICOM, echoed a line favored by his predecessors that AFRICOM maintains a ‘light and relatively low-cost footprint’ on the continent. 

“This ‘light’ footprint consists of a constellation of more than two dozen outposts that stretch from one side of Africa to the other. The 2019 planning documents provide locations for 29 bases located in 15 different countries or territories, with the highest concentrations in the Sahelian states on the west side of the continent, as well as the Horn of Africa in the east.”

That so-called “light footprint” has had the effect of increasing, not decreasing terrorist activity. 

U.S. presence promotes terrorism

The result: Turse goes on to explain that the number of extremist groups went up 400 percent, according to the Defense Department’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies. In 2019, there were 3,471 reported violent events linked to these groups, a 1,105% increase since 2009.

Said Turse: ¨The situation has become so grim that U.S. military aims in West Africa have recently been scaled back from a strategy of degrading the strength and reach of terror groups to nothing more than ‘containment.’”

This also echoes a 2017 United Nations report called “Journey to Extremism in Africa,” which states that government actions of repression, including increased drone killings, killings of family members, jailings and repression are the main motivation for recruitment into extremist organizations.

Many studies have also correlated the lack of food and basic necessities of life as the greatest cause of internal conflict. The U.N. report makes that point with a quote from Secretary-General António Guterres: “I am convinced that the creation of open, equitable, inclusive and pluralist societies, based on the full respect of human rights and with economic opportunities for all, represents the most tangible and meaningful alternative to violent extremism.”

In 2018 the U.N. also reported that it would take just $175 billion per year for 20 years to eradicate poverty, not only on the entire continent of Africa, but the entire world. That’s just 17% of the U.S. yearly military spending of nearly $1 trillion (the total expense is more than the defense budget).

So the money supposedly spent on fighting terrorism — which actually acts as a recruitment agent for folks joining extremist organizations — could be spent to actually end the conditions that create these extremist organizations. And it would have the added benefit of removing the greatest source of terrorism on the continent, the U.S. military.

So why isn’t that happening?

Profits before people

The fact is that AFRICOM’s “war on terror,” in addition to being a vital tool for U.S. imperialism, is also a self-perpetuating money machine for the ruling class – a huge bonanza for the military-industrial complex and the politicians and corporations who directly or indirectly benefit from it.

As Turse stated in his article on AFRICOM expansion, “The U.S. has been building up its network of bases, providing billions of dollars in security assistance to local partners.”

As many of the webinar speakers pointed out, the primary goal of AFRICOM is to ensure the continued theft of resources by the U.S. and its allies and to maintain U.S. military dominance on the continent.

“In 2007 to 2009, a discovery of oil on the Congo and Uganda border of 1.7 billion barrels brought heavy militarization and oil conglomerates and then, in 2012, Obama announces troops [being dispatched] to capture Joseph Kony (leader of a small rebel grouping), although he hadn’t been in Uganda for almost six years,” said Salome Ayuak, a member of BAP and Horn of Africa Pan-Africans for Liberation and Solidarity.

Ayuak also explained that one-third of permanent and semi-permanent AFRICOM bases reside in the Horn of Africa, reflecting the strategic importance of its waterways for trade and oil exploration. “We must look at AFRICOM through a materialist lens to see the long history of its policing in African states,” she stated.

“AFRICOM is linked with the history of exploitation and slavery and is part of NATO. It must [also] be seen as part of British, French and other imperialist countries’ armed forces,” stated Kwesi Pratt Jr. 

He mentioned that this history and the military backing of imperialism created the situation where Ghana’s currency drops despite the country’s position as fifth in the world in gold production. The country receives only 3% of the interest and 2% of the revenue produced from gold mining.

Militarism or mutual assistance?

Kambale Musavuli, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo and national spokesperson for Friends of the Congo, stated: “The U.S. has been engaged in the DRC since 1885. It was the first country to recognize the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold [Belgian monarch who committed the most horrendous atrocities against the native population, killing more than 10 million, in the exploitation of their labor for rubber production and export]. The U.S. used the relationship built with Leopold to get the uranium from the DRC used to bomb Hiroshima in 1945.”

And in a further example of war crimes and genocide, Musavuli explained the role of the U.S. and its AFRICOM partners in the 1996 and 1998 invasions of the Congo by Rwanda and Uganda — causing the deaths of over 6 million Congolese. 

This was followed by a huge extraction of mineral wealth essential for phones and computers. “Most of us have devices that use those minerals,” he noted.

Musavuli also contrasted the approach of U.S. militarism to China’s mutual assistance in the race for cobalt and coltan, minerals primarily found in the Congo. “While the Chinese sent foreign ministers in the middle of the pandemic to forgive loans and discuss needed development programs, two weeks later [U.S.] soldiers showed up to meet local officials and sign military agreements. 

“Then, this past summer, we see a group of American special forces in the Congo after leaving Afghanistan, supposedly going after ISIS … The U.S. today says the DRC has ISIS, when every local person knows we don’t.”

What is to be done? Maybe Kwesi Pratt Jr. of Ghana should answer that:

“All of these atrocities would not be possible if the power was in the hands of working people in Africa. So our task first and foremost is to make sure power resides in the hands of working people, to make sure that the revolutionary forces control power, that neocolonial regimes are defeated, and we move away from neocolonialist capitalism … 

“Only under the banner of socialism can we stop all these enemy forces – we are in danger otherwise.”

Which means we in the U.S. have to work towards exposing and dismantling AFRICOM, the Pentagon and capitalism here in the belly of the beast – which requires principled unity, solidarity and struggle – just as our comrades in Africa are determined to keep pushing forward.

You can reach the Black Alliance for Peace at blackallianceforpeace.com.

https://www.facebook.com/1120955981347159/videos/387810739637129

Oct. 6 — Since late September, a wave of arrests and detentions has hit communists, socialists and other progressive forces across Russia. The repression has primarily targeted the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), but has swept up members of other parties and movements as well.

The arrests come in the wake of the Sept. 17-19 Russian Duma elections. While President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party won the most seats in parliament, its share of votes fell nearly 5% from the last election, while the KPRF’s grew by more than 5%, according to official figures. KPRF candidates had an especially strong showing in Siberia and other eastern regions.

Overall, the KPRF gained 15 additional seats in the 450-seat Duma.

There were widespread charges of vote fraud to the benefit of the ruling United Russia and its allies. This includes the introduction of a new online voting system which opposition groups say does not have the necessary safeguards built-in to prevent fraud and government tampering. 

In several cities and regions, KPRF and other opposition candidates had been projected to win races and even announced as winners in the media, until the online vote count was belatedly released by the government, swinging many races in favor of United Russia. In Moscow, KPRF chapters issued statements denouncing the vote theft and demanding a rerun of the election.

Spontaneous protests

On Sept. 20, a spontaneous protest against the perceived vote fraud in Moscow frightened the authorities. Protests have been banned throughout the pandemic, and the left says the government has continued to extend these restrictions indefinitely to stifle its ability to mobilize. 

Pickets, car caravans and meetings were organized by left forces across the country, from Rostov-On-Don in the west to Vladivostok in the east.

In Moscow and other cities, KPRF members were detained, including elected Duma members and candidates, who are supposed to have immunity during the post-election period.

Then, on Sept. 25, several KPRF elected officials held a mass meeting with thousands of voters at Pushkin Square in Moscow. Although this type of event is constitutionally and legally sanctioned, the authorities treated it as an illegal demonstration. KPRF activists were arrested before the event. Police also attempted to block people from joining the meeting and blasted music to drown out the speakers.

The authorities targeted the KPRF Moscow City Committee headquarters, detaining Moscow City Duma Deputy Elena Yanchuk. The building remains under police occupation. Another local KPRF deputy, Yekaterina Engalycheva, was trapped inside the City Duma building. She was later arrested.

In St. Petersburg, where a similar mass meeting was planned, the KPRF City Committee was also surrounded by police. A deputy reported: “Our activists were arrested at night and in the morning. They came to those who organized this meeting, pasted leaflets. Now many are behind bars. The authorities are terrified of their own people, who were once again deceived in the elections. Today’s meeting is being held legally, in compliance with all legal and sanitary norms.”

In the days since, a wide swath of the left in Moscow has been hit with arrests and detentions, including Sergei Udaltsov and other members of the Left Front; Olga Rusakova of the Labor Russia movement and United Communist Party; well-known socialist intellectual Boris Kagarlitsky; International Marxist Tendency spokesperson Oleg Bulaev; and other leftists unaffiliated with the KPRF.

While Russian left groups have many differences among themselves, they agree that the repression shows the government is increasingly fearful of its declining popularity as austerity measures pushed by Russia’s capitalist oligarchy deepen social misery. 

Russia’s contradictions

The modern Russian state is a contradictory phenomenon. It emerged from the ruins of the counterrevolution against the socialist Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which culminated in the Yeltsin-Clinton coup of Oct. 3-4, 1993, and the shelling of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow.

After a massive sell-off of workers’ state property in the 1990s, plummeting living standards and falling life expectancy for the masses, the rapacious new Russian capitalist class was reined in somewhat under Putin’s leadership. 

Putin’s early success was based on the booming oil market of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which allowed the Russian government to keep in place some of the basic social gains of the Soviet period. 

At that time, Putin and the Russian bourgeoisie hoped the U.S. and European imperialists would give them a “seat at the table” as an ally and equal. The oil boom fed the illusion among the Russian capitalists that this was possible.

However, that was never the plan of the imperialist ruling classes. It was always the goal of Wall Street, Washington, the Pentagon and Big Oil to parcel up Russia and make it a vassal state, as they did with many former Soviet republics and eastern European countries. 

When the oil market crashed in tandem with the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, the West began to target Putin as its “evil dictator” super-villain du jour, including bogus allegations of tampering with U.S. presidential elections — the very thing that Washington did to Russia in 1996!

Russia is a large country with a nuclear arsenal and strong military inherited from the USSR. It is a regional power, certainly, but it is not an imperialist country in the Marxist sense. To the U.S., Russia is not a peer to be negotiated with but an errant colony to be conquered and brought to heel.

To survive, the dominant section of the Russian capitalist class — which has its own aspirations and does not wish to be a mere local caretaker for the U.S. and European Union — was forced to ally with other countries targeted by imperialism, including socialist and bourgeois nationalist governments, from Cuba, China and Venezuela to Iran and Syria. 

To defend itself against the far-right takeover of neighboring Ukraine, Russia reincorporated Crimea and has supported and defended the antifascist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

In this way, Russia has played and continues to play a largely progressive role on the world stage, even as its domestic policies retreat into greater austerity and repression.

Nature of the KPRF

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is itself a contradictory entity. It is the primary inheritor of the apparatus and, in the eyes of many Russians, the legacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This has given it enormous social weight and resilience.

The top leadership of the KPRF, headed by Gennady Zyuganov, is reformist and oriented only toward parliamentary politics. Left critics charge the KPRF leaders with being a “loyal opposition,” often echoing Putin’s talking points, even some of the most reactionary ones.

However, the party is also the main legal opposition entity in the vast country. Unlike many smaller left parties, it has managed to remain on the ballot despite increasingly restrictive election laws. It has organizational means in every city, town and region; in many ways, it is the only real mass political party in Russia with any life beyond elections. 

The political complexion of the KPRF’s local and regional groups also varies widely — with many being far more radical than the national leadership. At the level of membership, too, the KPRF includes many sincere working-class militants who see the organization as the legitimate heir of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union.

This has created great challenges and difficulties for Russian communists — some of whom came from the ranks of the KPRF themselves — who seek to build a new revolutionary party and movement in the Bolshevik tradition.

The fear driving the Russian government’s current attacks is that the KPRF might become a hotbed of left resistance with mass support, in spite of the party leadership’s best efforts to prevent this.

The Western imperialists share this apprehension. Compared to the wall-to-wall coverage of pro-U.S. oppositionist Alexey Navalny’s arrest earlier this year, the U.S. government and corporate media have had virtually nothing to say about the crackdown on the Russian left.

One thing is for certain: the surge in electoral support for the KPRF, which is almost certainly greater than the official figures indicate, the wave of government repression against the left, and the deepening social crisis of world capitalism, are bound to spur a realignment of the left and a radicalization of the masses in the coming period. 

Defend Russia against imperialism — Defend the left!

What should communists, socialists and anti-imperialists in the West do?

Our first and most important duty continues to be to demand: Hands off Russia!

U.S. sanctions and economic sabotage increase the suffering of the Russian people. 

U.S./NATO war games and military threats not only endanger Russian lives, but make it easier for those who would repress the left movement to justify their actions in the eyes of the masses.

Russia is not our enemy. Our job is to dethrone the greedy bosses, bankers and landlords here at home, who are trying to drive down wages and working conditions, throw tenants and homeowners onto the streets, and deny safe, accessible education and healthcare for all.

The Russian people made one of the most profound revolutions in human history in 1917 — one that continues to inspire people all over the world with hope for a better future. They are more than capable of sorting out their own affairs if freed from constant threat of war and sanctions.

And we also say: a strong working class and a revolutionary, anti-imperialist left are the best guarantees of Russia’s sovereignty. 

We stand with the communists, socialists and progressives of Russia. We demand the release of the prisoners and respect for their basic democratic right to organize the working class to fight in its own interests!

An important people’s victory has been won in the small but strategic eastern European country of Moldova. After six long years, a group of socialist and anti-fascist activists known as the Petrenko Group have finally been exonerated of trumped-up charges. 

On Sept. 6, 2015, these activists and their comrades organized a militant but peaceful protest of thousands in Chisinau, the capital, against the dictatorship of capitalist oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc.

Outside the General Prosecutor’s Office, police viciously attacked the protest. Seven people were arrested: Grigory Petrenko, Alexander Roshko, Mikhail Amerberg, Pavel Grigorchuk, Andrey Druz, Oleg Buznya and Vladimir Zhurat.

The Petrenko Group’s journey included police brutality on the streets and in the courtroom; months of imprisonment in harsh winter conditions in a literal 19th-century dungeon, followed by house arrest with electronic ankle bracelets; unconstitutional restrictions on their rights to travel and protest; and, in the case of former Member of Parliament Petrenko and the group’s original attorney, Ana Ursachi, threats to their lives and families that forced them to flee the country.

On June 28, 2017, Petrenko was sentenced to four-and-a-half years of suspended imprisonment and a fine of 20,000 lei for “organizing mass riots.” Amerberg, Grigorchuk, Roshko, Zhurat, Druz and Buznya received suspended sentences ranging from three to four-and-a-half years and fines. All were forbidden to leave Moldova or participate in protests.

Unable to achieve any justice in Moldovan courts, the Petrenko Group took their case to the European Parliament and European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). On Sept. 14, 2021, the ECHR ruled in favor of the Petrenko Group, finding that their rights had been violated and ordering the Moldovan government to pay more than 67,500 euros in damages to the victims. 

Three days later, the General Prosecutor’s Office finally dropped all charges against the activists and formally apologized.

Remove frame-up collaborators

Throughout their long fight, the Petrenko Group always emphasized that their persecution was meant to intimidate others from speaking out against austerity, state repression and anti-communist measures. 

Their supporters kept up a presence in the streets and at their court hearings. They organized on behalf of other political prisoners. They held news conferences and built international support.

In 2016, this writer visited Chisinau and attended a court hearing of the Petrenko Group. I saw first-hand the arbitrary and harsh treatment of the defendants and their attorneys by the judges and prosecutor — right down to forbidding a willing and otherwise unoccupied court translator from interpreting for a foreign observer. (As a resident of the U.S., I also immediately noticed how all the computer equipment in the courtroom sported stickers reading “provided by USAID.”)

Oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc was a big fish in a small pond. After piling up too many outrageous scandals for the comfort of his Western sponsors, the oligarch fled Moldova in 2019. He now resides in Turkey.

But while the top oligarch fled, Moldova’s capitalist oligarchy remained. And the persecution of the Petrenko group continued in Plahotniuc’s absence, through the state institutions loyal to him and his class — first under the government headed by social democratic President Igor Dodon, and then under current pro-Western President Maia Sandu.

After the charges were formally dropped, Petrenko Group members held a news conference Sept. 17 where they called for the exposure and removal of those who knowingly collaborated in the frame-up. Alexander Roshko read out the list of dozens of judges and prosecutors, police and prison officers, and high political officials.

Pavel Grigorchuk said that the money awarded by the ECHR as compensation should be paid by the judges “who carried out Plahotniuc’s decrees.”

Speaking by video link, Grigory Petrenko said: “The statement of the General Prosecutor’s Office is a delayed one. Of course, it’s better later than ever, but I’m sorry it took six years to understand that all the allegations in this case were fabricated.

“I hope that this case will be an impetus for the whole society to start a lustration [removal] procedure of all those who dealt with political prisoners in recent years, during the Plahotniuc regime. It is about many specific people, about prosecutors, executors, judges, people from Plahotniuc’s entourage. We would like this case to be continued as a civic lustration by society and to follow very concrete actions. 

“And it’s not just about our case. All those guilty in the investigation of political cases should be made public, cases should be opened against them,” said Petrenko.

I have fresh in my mind those images of those guards on horseback chasing Haitians with whips at the southern border of the United States just like in the days of slavery. The pictures taken on September 21 scream from the shadows of that country’s racist past that remains today.

The crisis took place when hundreds of Haitian migrants were trying to cross into the Ciudad Acuna, in Mexico, from a camp set up under a bridge in the town of Del Rio, Texas. They just wanted to buy food and water, which are basic goods they could not find on the US side.

In that camp, over 12,000 migrants, the great majority Haitians, were waiting for political asylum in the United States to escape from their country’s violence and extreme poverty. Instead of taking into account the unfolding human tragedy there the Biden Administration panicked and quickly implemented Title 42 of the United States code that allows immediate expulsion for anyone trying to get into the US who has recently been in a country where a communicable disease was present. In lieu of Covid this would mean just about anywhere but the White House’s decision can only be viewed as one that is an overtly racist move.

Thrust into planes, the images of people arriving back in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince on September 22, were just as painful as the ones taken by photojournalists at the southern border of the United States. Many people can be seen desperately running to get their belongings, which were left on the landing strip without any identification following their deportation from North America. While another group of migrants desperatley tried to re-enter the planes in which they had arrived, the rest of the people threw shoes and objects at the aircraft.

“They are only deporting Haitians. People of other nationalities were left in the camp. That is discrimination,” deportee Yranese Melidor told the local press in Port-au-Prince on September 22.

“The U.S. government has no conscience. This hatred against us proves they don’t like us just for the color of our skin,” said Haitian Maxon Prudhomme.

But Haiti’s pain seems imperceptible to the international gaze. Today, not only the U.S. is closing its doors to undocumented immigrants from this Caribbean nation, which faces a constant humanitarian crisis, aggravated by the assassination of President Jovenel Moise and the recent earthquake, two events that shook the country with equal intensity last August.

The alarming situation faced by Haitians in Texas is only a small part of the reality they are facing on other borders of the continent.

The Colombian Ombudsman’s Office reported, for example, that there are some 19,000 undocumented migrants (a record number) stranded in the Necocli city, from where they are waiting for a turn to cross into Panama for the trek North with the distinct possibility of another tragic showdown like the one we just saw play out at the Rio Grande River.

Most of them come from the island of Hispaniola. They make their way north from Central America, through the jungles and swamps of the Darien Gap in Colombia and Panama to the Mexican-Guatemalan border, where they have faced brutal mistreatment, including rapes, robberies and deaths.

“Migrants are victims. Instead of re-victimize, punish, persecute, expel, and deport them, we have to look for mechanisms to protect and receive them,” urged Professor María Teresa Palacios Sanabria, director of the Human Rights Research Program of the Universidad del Rosario, in Bogota.

“This migration has been motivated by the exclusion, discrimination, lack of opportunities, and poverty they experience in their country,” she added.

The region is sitting on top of an immigration time bomb. Haiti, the poorest country in Latin America, has been living through decades of one crisis after another, of power struggles, of diseases growing as fast as criminal gangs, of arbitrary school closures, of children growing up amidst violence, bullets, and food insecurity.

They are alone in a world that does not want them for one reason, as Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano would say: “The history of harassment against Haiti, which in our days has tragic dimensions, is also a page out of the history of racism ingrained in Western civilization.”

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

On September 25, 2021, Afghanistan’s Economy Minister Qari Din Mohammad Hanif said that his government does not want “help and cooperation from the world like the previous government. The old system was supported by the international community for 20 years but still failed.” It is fair to say that Hanif has no experience in running a complex economy, since he has spent most of his career doing political and diplomatic work for the Taliban (both in Afghanistan and in Qatar). However, during the first Taliban government from 1996 to 2001, Hanif was the planning minister and in that position, dealt with economic affairs.

Hanif is right to point out that the governments of Presidents Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021), despite receiving billions of dollars in economic aid, failed to address the basic needs of the Afghan population. At the end of their rule—and 20 years of U.S. occupation—one in three people are facing hunger, 72 percent of the population lingers below the poverty line and 65 percent of the people have no access to electricity. No amount of bluster from the Western capitals can obscure the plain fact that support from the “international community” resulted in virtually no economic and social development in the country.

Poor North

Hanif, who is the only member of Afghanistan’s new cabinet who is from the country’s Tajik ethnic minority, comes from the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan. The northeastern provinces in Afghanistan are Tajik-dominated areas, and Badakhshan was the base from which the Northern Alliance swiftly moved under U.S. air cover to launch an attack against the Taliban in 2001. In early August 2021, the Taliban swept through these districts. “Why would we defend a government in Kabul that did nothing for us?” said a former official in Karzai’s government who lives in Badakhshan capital, Fayzabad.

Between 2009 and 2011, 80 percent of USAID funds that came into Afghanistan went to areas of the south and east, which had been the natural base of the Taliban. Even this money, a U.S. Senate report noted, went toward “short-term stabilization programs instead of longer-term development projects.” In 2014, Haji Abdul Wadood, then governor of the Argo district in Badakhshan, told Reuters, “Nobody has given money to spend on developmental projects. We do not have resources to spend in our district, our province is a remote one and attracts less attention.”

Hanif’s home province of Badakhshan—and its neighboring areas—suffer from great poverty, the rates upwards of 60 percent. When he talks about failure, Hanif has his home province in mind.

For thousands of years, the province of Badakhshan has been home to mines for gemstones such as lapis lazuli. In 2010, a U.S. military report estimated that there was at least $1 trillion worth of precious metals in Afghanistan; later that year, Afghanistan’s then Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani told BBC radio that the actual figure could be three times as much. The impoverished north might not be so poor after all.

Thieves in the North

With opium production contributing a large chunk of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, it is often a focus of global media coverage on the country’s economy and has partly financed the terrible wars that have wracked the country for the past several years. The gems of Badakhshan, meanwhile, provided the financing for Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Jamiat-e Islami faction in the 1980s; after 1992, when Massoud became the defense minister in Kabul, he made an alliance with a Polish company—Intercommerce—to sell the gems for an estimated $200 million per year. When the Taliban ejected Massoud from power, he returned to the Panjshir Valley and used the Badakhshan, Takhar, and Panjshir gems to finance his anti-Taliban resistance.

When the Northern Alliance—which included Massoud’s faction—came to power under U.S. bombardment in 2001, these mines became the property of the Northern Alliance commanders. Men such as Haji Abdul Malek, Zekria Sawda and Zulmai Mujadidi—all Northern Alliance politicians—controlled the mines. Mujadidi’s brother Asadullah Mujadidi was the militia commander of the Mining Protection Force, which protected the mines for these new elites.

In 2012, Afghanistan’s then Mining Minister Wahidullah Shahrani revealed the extent of corruption in the deals, which he had made clear to the U.S. Embassy in 2009. Shahrani’s attempt at transparency, however, was understood inside Afghanistan as a mechanism to delegitimize Afghan mining concerns and push through a new law that would allow international mining companies more freedom of access to the country’s resources. Various international entities—including Centar (United Kingdom) and the Polish billionaire Jan Kulczyk—attempted to access the gold, copper and gemstone mines of the province; Centar formed an alliance with the Afghanistan Gold and Minerals Company, headed by former Urban Development Minister Sadat Naderi. The consortium’s mining equipment has now been seized by the Taliban. Earlier this year, Shahrani was sentenced to 13 months’ jail time by the Afghan Supreme Court for misuse of authority.

What Will the Taliban Do?

Hanif has an impossible agenda. The IMF has suspended funds for Afghanistan, and the U.S. government continues to block access to the nearly $10 billion of Afghan external reserves held in the United States. Some humanitarian aid has now entered the country, but it will not be sufficient. The Taliban’s harsh social policy—particularly against women—will discourage many aid groups from returning to the country.

Officials at the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), the country’s central bank, tell me that the options before the government are minimal. Institutional control over the mining wealth has not been established. “What deals were cut profited a few individuals and not the country as a whole,” said one official. One major deal to develop the Mes Aynak copper mine made with the Metallurgical Corporation of China and with Jiangxi Copper has been sitting idle since 2008.

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in mid-September, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon spoke about the need to prevent terrorist groups from moving across the Afghan borders to disrupt Central Asia and western China. Rahmon positioned himself as a defender of the Tajik peoples, although poverty of the Tajik communities on both sides of the border should be as much a focus of attention as upholding the rights of the Tajiks as a minority in Afghanistan.

There is no public indication from the SCO that it would prevent not only cross-border terrorism, but also cross-border smuggling. The largest quantities of heroin and opium from northern Afghanistan go to Tajikistan; untold sums of money are made in the illegal movement of minerals, gemstones, and metals out of Afghanistan. Hanif has not raised this point directly, but officials at DAB say that unless Afghanistan better commandeers its own resources, something it has failed to do over the past two decades, the country will not be able to improve the living conditions of its people.

On Sep. 15, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, U.S. President Joe Biden, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain announced their new trilateral security agreement, AUKUS, and its first initiative — the delivery of a nuclear-powered submarine fleet for Australia. The deal is a dangerous escalation in the U.S.’s new Cold War against China.

Australia already had an agreement to buy a fleet of diesel submarines from France. For France, the deal was worth somewhere near $90 billion and was part of a plan to strengthen their economic and military standing in the Indo-Pacific region without damaging trade relations with China. The U.S. kept the nuclear submarine deal secret from the French government until the ink on the contract was already dry. France — taken completely by surprise — called the deal a “stab in the back,” and in an unprecedented move, withdrew its ambassadors to both the United States and Australia. 

It isn’t only the money that dealt a blow to France, although all the imperialist powers lean on arms sales to remedy the inevitable economic contraction that happens at the bottom of their capitalist boom and bust cycle. Only rarely are secrets of advanced military technology shared, even with allies. 

The fact that Britain and the U.S. are providing nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, means that Australia will be dependent on them for maintenance, training and support. Australia has unambiguously signed on to the Cold War against China. The new alliance locks Australia into deeper participation in the Pentagon’s growing aggression against socialist China and sets back France’s plans for a military alliance with Australia.

Growing military presence

In addition to their own unilateral and growing military presence close to China’s coast, the Pentagon and the State Department have also been twisting arms, bribing and otherwise coercing countries in the region to join in their reckless anti-China aggression through a network of alliances. The World War II vintage “Five Eyes” alliance —  Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States — was an outdated, multilateral nest of spies. 

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) was established in 2007 between Japan, India, the United States and Australia. The “Dialogue” in the Quad’s name is a misnomer — it was an expansion of military “games” called “Exercise Malabar” that are periodically repeated. Previously, these military “games”  were only between the U.S. and India in the Indian Ocean. In 2007 they were held on a huge scale off the Japanese island of Okinawa, as close to China as it is to Japan. Quad members and Five Eyes countries have also been called on to voice support for the bogus “lab leak” theory that blames China for COVID-19.

A decade ago, Australia had dropped its role in the Quad out of fear of losing trade with China. After they rejoined the Quad, the U.S. redoubled its effort to lure them into a yet stronger commitment, and sent troops to Darwin, the settler outpost on the northwestern corner of Australia. The unexplained presence of U.S. Marines in Australia has ebbed and flowed ever since, and recently when Australia became a mouthpiece for the phony lab-leak theory angering China, the U.S. sent 1,200 additional Marines.

France and the other European powers also trade with China and resisted joining the Pivot to Asia. The differences between the imperialist ruling classes of Europe and the U.S. over how to deal with the emergence of socialist China as a world power are at the root of this rift. 

U.S. media propaganda

A recent U.S. Defense Department paper, the “China Military Power Report,” fueled a media buzz propagating the idea of China having the world’s most powerful navy, reminiscent of the lies preceding Desert Storm, when U.S. media trumpeted that Iraq had the strongest army in the world. That was a way to justify the war they wanted. 

While it is true that China has the most naval vessels in the world, the vessels are almost all small craft designed for defense of the coastline. China has a right to all the military that’s needed to defend itself. But U.S. imperialism is not David challenging a Chinese military Goliath. The U.S. has been maintaining a provocative naval presence in the South China Sea, including three of their eleven aircraft carrier groups. China has two carriers, and neither is anywhere near the U.S. 

And then there are the alliances the U.S. has coerced with South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and—now more than before—Australia.

To be sure, China’s People’s Liberation Army is prepared and powerful, dedicated, ready to defend. But the people of China don’t need and don’t want a horrendous war.  China has issued an appeal for a reversal of the AUKUS agreement. Zhao Lijian, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson issued a statement saying: “Facing common challenges of fighting the pandemic and economic recovery, the people in the Asia-Pacific region need growth and employment, not submarines and gunpowder,” and urged the AUKUS members to “fulfill their international nuclear non-proliferation obligations.”

On September 15, 2021, the heads of government of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States announced the formation of AUKUS, “a new enhanced trilateral security partnership” between these three countries. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson joined U.S. President Joe Biden to “preserve security and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” as Johnson put it.

While China was not explicitly mentioned by these leaders at the AUKUS announcement, it is generally assumed that countering China is the unstated motivation for the new partnership. “The future of the Indo-Pacific,” said Morrison at the press conference, “will impact all our futures.” That was as far as they would go to address the elephant in the room.

Zhao Lijian of the Chinese Foreign Ministry associated the creation of AUKUS with “the outdated Cold War zero-sum mentality and narrow-minded geopolitical perception.” Beijing has made it clear that all talk of security in the Indo-Pacific region by the U.S. and its NATO allies is part of an attempt to build up military pressure against China. The BBC story on the pact made this clear in its headline: “Aukus: UK, US and Australia launch pact to counter China.”

What was the need for a new partnership when there are already several such security platforms in place? Prime Minister Morrison acknowledged this in his remarks at the press conference, mentioning the “growing network of partnerships” that include the Quad security pact (Australia, India, Japan and the United States) and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the United States).

A closer look at AUKUS suggests that this deal has less to do with military security and more to do with arms deals.

Nuclear Submarines

Prime Minister Morrison announced that “[t]he first major initiative of AUKUS will be to deliver a nuclear-powered submarine fleet for Australia.” Two red flags were immediately raised: first, what will happen to Australia’s preexisting order of diesel-powered submarines from France, and second, will this sale of nuclear-powered submarines violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?

In 2016, the Australian government made a deal with France’s Naval Group (formerly known as Direction des Constructions Navales, or DCNS) to supply the country with 12 diesel-electric submarines. A press release from then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his minister of defense (who is the current minister of foreign affairs) Marise Payne said at the time that the future submarine project “is the largest and most complex defence acquisition Australia has ever undertaken. It will be a vital part of our Defence capability well into the middle of this century.”

Australia’s six Collins-class submarines are expected to be decommissioned in the 2030s, and the submarines that were supposed to be supplied by France were meant to replace them. The arms deal was slated to cost “about $90 billion to build and $145 billion to maintain over their life cycle,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Australia has now canceled its deal with the French to obtain the nuclear-powered submarines. These new submarines will likely be built either in the U.S. by Electric Boat, a subdivision of General Dynamics, and Newport News Shipbuilding, a subdivision of Huntington Ingalls Industries, or in the UK by BAE Systems; BAE Systems has already benefited from several major submarine deals. The AUKUS deal to provide submarines to Australia will be far more expensive, given that these are nuclear submarines, and it will draw Australia to rely more deeply upon the UK and U.S. arms manufacturers. France was furious about the submarine deal, with its Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian calling it a “regrettable decision” that should advance the cause of “European strategic autonomy” from the United States. Words like “betrayal” have flooded the French conversation about the deal.

Australia ratified the NPT in 1973, and it is also a signatory to the Treaty of Rarotonga (1985), or the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty. It does not have nuclear weapons and has pledged not to have nuclear material in the South Pacific. Australia is the second-largest producer of uranium after Kazakhstan, and most of this nuclear material is sold to the UK and the U.S. For the past several decades, Australia has been considered a “nuclear threshold” state, but it has opted not to escalate its nuclear weapons program. The three heads of government of Australia, the U.S. and the UK made it clear that the transfer of the nuclear-powered submarines is not the same as the transfer of nuclear weapons, although these new submarines will be capable of launching a nuclear strike. For that reason, not only China but also North Korea has warned about a new arms race in the region after the AUKUS submarine deal.

Costs

Morrison admitted during a September 16 press conference that his country has already spent $2.4 billion on the French submarine deal. He did not, however, answer a journalist’s question as to what the ultimate price tag would be for the UK-U.S. nuclear-powered submarines. He asked his Secretary of Defense Greg Moriarty to answer it, to which Moriarty spoke about task forces “that will set up a number of working groups” with the U.S. and UK to look into several issues relating to the deal; but Moriarty also did not touch on the topic about the price tag. One of the questions asked at the press conference with regard to the cost to Australian taxpayers was whether Australia would buy the Astute (UK) class submarines or the Virginia (U.S.) class, since this decision has a bearing on the cost. The Virginia class submarine, according to a recent U.S. Congressional Research Service study, costs $3.45 billion per vessel. To this must be added the cost of upgrading the naval bases in Australia and the cost of running and maintaining the submarines. The U.S. and the UK firms will make considerable profits from this deal.

Ever since the Australians signed the deal with the French, media houses associated with the U.S.-based Rupert Murdoch have attacked it. Any small delay was picked up to be clobbered, and any adjustment to the contract—including a change in contract proposed on March 23, 2021—became front-page news. Aware of the problems, France’s Foreign Minister Le Drian spoke to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Paris on June 25 about the deal. He told the French-speaking Blinken that the submarine contract is not only a French one but also a French-U.S. partnership since Lockheed Martin is party to the deal. French attempts to get U.S. buy-in to the deal came to nothing as the Biden administration was already in talks with the UK and Australia on their own regarding the AUKUS deal. That is why the language of “betrayal” is so pronounced in Paris.

Belligerence

On September 16, the Australian and U.S. governments released a joint statement that included a direct attack on China, with reference to the South China Sea, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Two days later, an article in Australia’s leading newspaper, the Australian, by Paul Monk, who is the head of the China Desk at Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organization, stated that his government should “facilitate a coup within China’s Communist Party.” This is a direct call for regime change in China by Australia.

The belligerent language from Australia should not be taken lightly. Even though China is Australia’s largest trading partner (both in terms of exports and imports), the creation of these new military pacts—with a nuclear edge to them—threatens security in the region. If this is merely an arms deal hidden behind a military pact, then it is a cynical use of war-making rhetoric for business purposes. This cynicism could eventually lead to a great deal of suffering.

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 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 Haiti Action Committee denounces the inhumane and racist deportation of Haitian refugees from the US-Mexico border, where thousands of people are living in terrible, even deadly, conditions, and are being systematically deported by the Biden Administration. This is a crime.

Why are Haitians at the border in the first place? Many fled Haiti years ago as it descended into terror following the U.S.-orchestrated coup against Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. Following the coup many left the country in the wake of the disastrous UN occupation that shattered the economy and brought about a massive cholera epidemic. Many came from Brazil and Chile, where they had been recruited for low-wage labor after the earthquake of 2010, and then forced out when no longer needed.

Now, the United States government, which bears such great responsibility for this migration, is loading up plane after plane for deportation to Haiti. This takes place at a moment when a series of U.S.-backed dictatorships, imposed through rigged elections, have looted the country and weaponized death squads to attack and terrorize the population.

Add to this the recent earthquake in Haiti, which killed over 2200 people and left hundreds of thousands without shelter, devastating the southern peninsula of the country. Haiti does not have the capacity to absorb huge numbers of refugees, yet the Biden Administration is determined to deport thousands of people without regard to due process or to the dangers that they will face upon return.