•
A Bangladeshi woman survivor is lifted out of the rubble by rescuers at the site of a building that collapsed on Wednesday 24 April in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh.
In Greece, where unemployment has hit 27 percent, the fascist Golden Dawn party is helping to divert popular anger against capitalism into divisive xenophobic hatred of ‘foreigners stealing our jobs’.
When some 200 migrant agricultural labourers, mostly from Bangladesh, came to demand unpaid wages going back six months or more, at least 28 of them were shot and injured by gun-wielding thugs. Three of the foremen at the strawberry plantation in Nea Manolada where they worked are being blamed for the murderous assault.
This racist violence is the most recent in a string of similar attacks against Asian and African workers in Greece.
And as if to clarify what might drive Bangladeshis to leave their homes and expose themselves to such racist poison in the first place, the true face of imperialist superexploitation has been on shameful display in Bangladesh itself, with the death of over 1,000 textile workers, mostly women, when the Rana Plaza complex in which they worked collapsed.
Some 3,000 people were estimated to be working there at the time of collapse, despite the fact that only days earlier large cracks had been detected and reported. Workers in the building were told to continue coming in to work on pain of dismissal.
Back in November, similar disregard by factory owners for the lives of their workers had been shown in the Tazreen factory fire. On that occasion workers were told it was a false alarm and ordered back to work. When they tried to escape, they were blocked by a locked fire door. That fire claimed 112 lives.
The grim conclusion is that whether Bangladeshi workers stay at home or travel abroad, the end result is the same: superexploitation at best, and at worst an early grave. The immediate owners of the collapsed factory may be justly pilloried, as may the thugs in Greece who shot the strawberry-pickers, but in neither case will the real criminal be called to account – capitalism itself.
Whatever happens to the local factory bosses, we can be sure that the monopoly capitalists running Primark and Matalan will not be required to answer for the lives of those who died stitching their garments. At least, not yet.
•
This article is part of the industrial report that was presented at the 12 January meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
Fire rages at the Tazreen factory in Savar.
The exploitation of proletarians in Bangladesh, helping deliver the superprofits into which imperialism dips to buy off the labour aristocracy at home, is conducted in a more straightforwardly murderous fashion.
Documents and logos retrieved from the factory blaze that killed 112 garment workers and injured many more indicated that the sweatshop death trap was producing clothes for Walmart’s ‘Faded Glory’ line, as well as for other US and foreign companies.
November’s fire at the nine-storey Tazreen factory in Savar, north west of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, 600 were still inside working overtime, and it was these who were trapped.
About a hundred died inside the building and another dozen lost their lives trying to escape from the upper storeys. One survivor, Mohammad Ripu, tried to run out of the building when the fire alarm rang but was stopped by managers, who said: “Nothing happened. The fire alarm had just gone out of order. Go back to work.” When people ran for the exit door they found it had been locked from the outside.
Tazreen was not a one-off tragedy. Since 2005, around 700, mostly female, garment workers have perished in similar fires, revealing a systematic flouting of safety rules that amounts to a policy of calculated manslaughter.
These corporate murders, blamed on local sweatshop bosses but carried out to feed monopoly capital’s insatiable hunger for cheap labour, are inseparable from the intense superexploitation that is essential to the country’s annual export of $18bn worth of garments.
Workers are fighting back courageously against this oppression, organising strikes to demand better wages and conditions. One union leader was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka last year, but the struggle will only intensify.
See also: Victory to the garment workers of Bangladesh!
•
This article is part of the international report that was presented at the 12 January meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
In Afghanistan, incidents of ‘green on green’ killing continue to mount.
On 18 December, a teenage boy kept against his will for sex by an Afghan border police commander, drugged the commander and the other 10 policemen at the post and then shot them all while they were asleep. Eight of them died.
According to the New York Times, “in the commonplace practice known as bacha baazi … powerful Afghan commanders frequently keep young boys as personal servants, dancers and sex slaves. The practice was outlawed during Taliban times but has never gone away, and even some provincial governors and other top officials openly keep bacha baazi harems.” (‘Betrayed while asleep’ by Rod Nordland, 28 December 2012)
On 23 December, a local police commander in Jawzjan shot and killed the five men under his command and then deserted to the resistance.
On 27 December, an Afghan policeman in Oruzgan province unlocked the door to his station, letting in several resistance fighters who killed four policemen as they slept and wounded eight others.
In the meantime, Gulbuddin Hektmatyar, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, said of Prince Harry: “the British prince comes to Afghanistan to kill innocent Afghans while he is drunk … But he does not understand this simple fact that the hunting of Afghan lions and eagles is not that easy! Jackals cannot hunt lions.”
See also: Afghan resistance advancing to victory
•
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 4 March.
Following the French announcement last month that it is withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan earlier than had previously been envisaged, the US has now also announced its early departure, ie, the ending of its ‘combat role’ by the middle of next year.
Of 90,000 US troops in Afghanistan, 22,000 are to be withdrawn by this autumn, although no schedule for the departure of the remaining 68,000 has been given. US imperialism is also proposing to scale down the Afghan puppet troops, which are costing the US and other Nato countries some $6bn a year.
Meanwhile, attempts are still continuing to find ‘reasonable’ elements of the Taliban with whom to reach a peace agreement. However, Afghanistan remains very much a country at war. Increasingly, imperialism is “privatising the ultimate sacrifice”. Last year, for the first time since the start of the Afghan campaign, more civilian contractors working for the US were killed than were US soldiers. (‘Risks of Afghan war shift from soldiers to contractors’ by Rod Nordland, New York Times, 12 February 2012)
•
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 4 February
France has announced that it will be withdrawing its 3,900 troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year, a year earlier than planned; and this year it will be pulling out 1,000 troops rather than the 600 originally planned.
The announcement to that effect was made by Sarkozy as part of his presidential re-election campaign, in response to the killing of four French soldiers and the severe wounding of eight others by a member of the Afghan puppet forces. These deaths aggravated public anger at a war in which most French people believe the country should never have become involved.
•
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 4 February
The Burmese government has rekindled the civil war against the ethnic Kachin group who live in the mountainous area close to the Chinese border. This region has been effectively self-governing for 17 years under the control of the Kachin Independence Army, which levies taxes on all commerce in the region.
There have apparently been over 1,000 skirmishes since June, with 140 Kachin soldiers killed. Tens of thousands of villagers have been displaced, including thousands who have fled to China.
The area is one where major hydroelectric projects built with Chinese involvement are situated. The Myanmar government is hinting that the reason for the crackdown is that the Chinese are inconvenienced by alleged Kachin objections to their operations, which it says are the reason why it suspended the planned Myitsone Dam in a part of the state controlled by the government.
However, this is widely regarded as an excuse to cover the fact that the Myanmar government is more and more dancing to the American tune, this being the real reason it is distancing itself from Chinese funded projects. Certainly it would be odd if people actually being targeted by China should turn to China for refuge!
The area is rich in all kinds of resources, so it may be that US imperialist enterprises have expressed an interest in operating there in ways that the Myanmar government is well aware the Kachin will object to even more virulently than they have objected to Chinese projects.
•
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 3 December
India is intending to allow foreign supermarkets to compete in its national markets, eg, Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco. Foreign companies are to be permitted to buy a 51 percent stake in supermarkets and to own single-brand retailers outright.
In this way, the government is hoping to control food price inflation, which has been averaging double-digit rises over the last year. It hopes that introducing foreign competition will help improve the efficiency of the supply chain and bring down consumer prices.
Small shopkeepers are not, however, welcoming this competition with open arms, and the decision is causing considerable political uproar.
•
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 3 December
Relations between Pakistan and the US continue to sink below rock bottom.
First there has been a scandal (‘Memogate’) surrounding allegations that President Asif Ali Zardari (‘Mr Bhutto’) sought help from the US in asserting control over his own country’s military in the wake of the outrage caused by the US raid on a house in Pakistan in which Osama Bin Laden was killed.
It is claimed that in return for this support Zardari offered to sack various generals and introduce a civilian-led security team.
In the midst of the Memogate furore, a Nato helicopter air raid took place over the weekend of 26-27 November on two separate border posts operated by the Pakistani army in the Mohmand tribal region.
At least two dozen Pakistani soldiers were killed in the raids. After the bombing started, one of the posts fired back against the helicopters that were attacking them.
This renewed assault on Pakistani sovereignty forced the Zardari government to retaliate by closing supply routes to Afghanistan relied on by Nato (as it has done at least twice before) and to order the CIA to vacate the Shamsi base used to launch drone strikes.
Pakistan has also pulled out of a major international conference that had been called to discuss Afghanistan’s security and future development.
•
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 5 November
There has been an unexpected decision by the government of Myanmar (formerly Burma) to free some 600 political prisoners, following the release last year of Aung Suu Kyi, the prominent pro-western dissident. The moves appear to be linked to a hope of lifting of western sanctions against the country, supposedly imposed because of Myanmar’s violation of human rights and suppression of political freedom, but actually intended to force Myanmar into alliance with the West at the expense of China.
At the end of September the Myanmar government suspended a hydroelectric dam project led by a state-owned Chinese company, the Myitsone dam project, that had been criticised by Aung Suu Kyi and environmental groups, but which would have been the first to span the Irrawaddy river, the largest waterway in Myanmar, and would have produced massive amounts of electricity for the benefit of both Myanmar and China.
•
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 1 October
Under the Congress government, India reached an agreement with the US that had the effect of lifting all restrictions on her developing her nuclear industry, which, it will be recalled, India had originally developed to the point of producing nuclear weapons, in secret and against the wishes of US imperialism.
Under the agreement, India is left free to develop its military nuclearisation in peace, while its civil uses of nuclear energy are open to regular IAEA inspections – a curious result, the quid pro quo of which is that US construction and engineering companies were to be offered lucrative contracts to ‘help’ India build its civil nuclear industry. In the wake of Chernobyl, this agreement was controversial in India, to say the least.
Now it is being alleged that prominent politicians were heavily bribed to ensure that the proposal for the agreement was accepted in the Indian parliament in July 2008. Amar Singh, former general secretary of the Samajwadi (socialist) party was arrested in this connection on 6 September and refused bail, while Janardhan Reddy, a Karnataka mining baron, was arrested ostensibly on the grounds of illegal mining but in actual fact, it is believed, because of the role he played in bringing about the parliamentary vote in favour of the US-India deal.
Confidential US embassy cables revealed on WikiLeaks are said to have recorded an incident where a Congress party aide told a US embassy staff member that the Rashtriya Lok Dal, a political party, was paid $2.5m for each of the votes of four members of parliament. The aide was apparently shown a war chest containing no less than $25m available to ensure that the ‘right’ result was achieved in the parliamentary vote.
