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https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/30/covid-19-world-suffering-less-from-coronavirus-crisis-more-from-an-america-crisis/
March 30, 2020 • 10 Comments
In the U.S., the abandonment of the poor and downtrodden to their fate has forged not a society worth living in, but a growing dystopia to be escaped, writes John Wight.
In his 1948 classic novel “The Plague,” which tells the story of the fictional outbreak of a rat-borne plague in the Algerian port city of Oran under French colonialism, French writer and thinker Albert Camus explores the way the plague and ensuing crisis taps into the very best and worst of the human condition.
The current coronavirus crisis, which certainly is not fictional, is doing the same in our time — only not when it comes to the actions of people in response but instead when it comes to the actions or inaction or indeed base cruelty of national governments.
In this respect, if cruelty and barbarity were Olympic sports Washington would be the permanent holder of the gold medal. Because what does it tell us when even in the midst of a global pandemic this neocon infested administration and hegemonic political order refuses to agree to sanctions relief for Iran — a country that is among the hardest hit by the virus — in response to pleas from Tehran to do so?
Camus:
“Hitherto the plague had found far more victims in the more thickly populated and less well-appointed outer districts than in the heart of the town. Quite suddenly, however, it launched a new attack and established itself in the business center.”
Ohio Poor People’s Campaign, 2018. (Becker1999, Flickr)
Using the above as an analogy, let us imagine Iran as our “less well-appointed outer district” and the U.S. as the world’s “business center.” Do so and we grasp the fact that just like Camus’ fictional plague in Iran, coronavirus is no respecter of borders, cultures, religion, ideology or geopolitical agendas. In other words, if President Donald Trump and the clutch of fanatical neocons surrounding him believe that condemning the Iranian people — not its government, its people — to suffering and death is coterminous with anything other than the depraved actions of a debased and diseased culture, they are even sicker than originally thought.
The proper measure of a state or nation’s health in any given time is how said state or nation treats its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. And by this metric the most powerful and richest country there has ever been is also a contender for the most barbaric, despite the ocean of propaganda to the contrary.
I’m writing here as a non-American who spent a number of years living there and who came away politically radicalized by the experience. Because in America the abandonment of the poor and downtrodden to their fate has forged not a society worth living in, but a growing dystopia to be escaped, one in which the entrenchment of cruelty as a virtue rather than a vice has long been complete.
‘Understanding Mississippi’
The brutal actions of Washington on the global stage when it comes to its engagement with poorer countries and regions merely reflects the brutality meted out to its poorest and most vulnerable at home. And as Malcolm X sagely once put it, “You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo.”
Albert Camus. (Dietrich Liao, Flickr)
What’s going on in “Mississippi” — in other words the U.S. — today is that millions continue to exist without healthcare and who in the midst of this global pandemic find themselves reduced to the human equivalent of skittles in a bowling alley waiting in trepidation for a coronavirus ball to come hurtling in their direction.
Compare and contrast the barbarism of Washington in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic with the international solidarity demonstrated by the likes of China, Cuba and Russia.
China, where the outbreak of the virus originated, already has it under control and contained and is now sending medical aid and experts to Italy, Iran and South Korea. Cuba, meanwhile, has likewise sent a team of doctors to Italy along with supplies of Interferon Alpha 2B, a powerful antiviral developed by the Cuban pharmaceutical industry that has proved effective in treating coronavirus. Finally, as for Russia, Moscow is sending Iran 50,000 testing kits.
Based on the this, if there is one positive thing to take from the current crisis it’s the reaffirmation of internationalism as the acme of human solidarity and progress. For there is no national solution to pandemics only international, with the current crisis proving that nationalism begins where human connectedness ends. Precisely here is where Washington’s engagement with the rest of the world is to be understood.
Putting it bluntly, America is home to a culture and political order so removed from reality it no longer knows its land of the free arse from its home of the brave elbow — to the point where the self-appointed leader of the free world is the leader of nothing and nowhere.
Returning to Camus:
‘“However, you think, like Paneloux, that the plague has its good side; it opens men’s eyes and forces them to take thought?” The doctor tossed his head impatiently. “So does every ill that flesh is heir to. What’s true of all the evils of the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.”’
Our world is suffering less from a coronavirus crisis and more from an America crisis.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/31/pers-m31.html
31 March 2020
The Socialist Equality Party calls on all workers to support the strikes and other actions by Instacart, Amazon and Whole Foods workers in the United States.
On Monday, Instacart workers initiated strike action because they are being forced to work without proper safety gear, including masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, the unsafe conditions in which they work endangers not only their own lives, but the lives of the customers they serve.
These workers are performing a critical and heroic social service. The US is now an epicenter of the crisis, with 165,000 cases as of this writing and more than 3,100 deaths. With shelter-in-place orders covering nearly 250 million people in the US, the need for the delivery of food, medicine and other essential needs to people who cannot or should not leave their homes is more important than ever.
The 150,000 Instacart workers, known as “shoppers,” pick up and deliver groceries from Kroger, Aldi, Sam’s Club and other major food retailers. With growing demand for home deliveries, the San Francisco-based company plans to hire another 300,000 workers. But it has resisted demands to provide workers with the most elementary protections.
While Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta, a 34-year-old former supply chain engineer for Amazon, sits on a private fortune of $400 million, Instacart workers earn an average of $7 a delivery. Like other gig economy workers, they are classified as “self-employed” contractors so that the company can avoid paying them the minimum wage, time off and unemployment benefits.
Workers want to do everything they can to combat the coronavirus pandemic. General Electric workers launched protests yesterday to demand that GE begin producing desperately needed ventilators. But workers do not want to endanger themselves and others so that the corporate oligarchs can accumulate their billions.
On the same day as the Instacart strike, Wall Street opened the week by celebrating the multitrillion-dollar “stimulus” handout to the banks and giant corporations. The Dow rose 690 points.
The Instacart strike is part of a broader movement of the working class. In recent days, Italian and Spanish auto and steel workers, British postal workers, French bus drivers and supermarket workers, and Brazilian call-center workers have struck to demand the closure of nonessential workplaces or protection for workers engaged in critical operations.
On Monday, workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in the New York City borough of Staten Island, where a worker tested positive last week, walked off the job to demand protective gear, the closure of the building until it is sanitized and full compensation for the 4,500 workers who work there.
Although workers in at least 10 of its warehouses have already tested positive, Amazon has refused to give workers paid time off and proper masks, gloves or other protective equipment.
In a letter to Amazon employees earlier this month, CEO Jeff Bezos said the company had ordered millions of masks to give to warehouse employees, drivers and contract workers but due to the global shortage “medical providers serving our communities need to be first in line. When our turn for masks comes, our priority will be getting them in the hands of employees.”
The richest man in the world—who makes $6.5 billion each month, or a little under $150,000 every minute, and owns his own apparel, aeronautics, supermarket, software, newspaper, robotics and digital companies—claims he is incapable of organizing the production of masks for workers who are processing and delivering food and other essential goods.
Amazon yesterday announced that it had fired an employee who had helped to organize the action.
Supermarket workers at Whole Foods, also owned by Amazon, are planning a walkout today. The workers are demanding the shutdown of any store where a worker tests positive, full compensation for workers, the reinstatement of health care coverage for part-time and seasonal workers and increased employer payments to cover testing and treatment for all workers.
According to Vice’s Motherboard site, workers at stores in New Orleans and Huntington Beach, California were informed by robocalls that fellow workers had tested positive and told to “press number one to confirm receipt.” The stores remained open, however, because Whole Foods is racking up huge profits from customers rushing to stock up on food and other items.
Like the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, Bezos and the rest of the corporate and financial oligarchs want their slaves to go and build their pyramids no matter how many workers die in the process. But workers have another thing to say. This was summed up in an email to the World Socialist Web Site from an autoworker who denounced plans for a return to work on April 14—the expected peak of the virus—and insisted, “Our lives matter!”
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the immediate closure of all nonessential workplaces with full compensation to workers for any lost wages and benefits.
Economic life must be concentrated on the production and distribution of essential goods and services, including the provision of health care, testing and the manufacture of masks, gowns, ventilators and other medical equipment, the production and distribution of food and medical supplies and the maintenance of critical infrastructure, including the electrical, telecommunication, water and sanitation systems.
There are millions of workers, including grocery delivery workers, who are willing and able to provide this critical social service. But these workers must be guaranteed living wages and a safe working environment. All gig workers must be turned into full-time employees, with full benefits.
The SEP urges workers to form rank-and-file workplace committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves, to oversee working conditions and ensure the defense of workers’ interests. No confidence can be placed in the trade unions, which are arms of corporate management that have done nothing to secure the safety of workers.
Rank-and-file committees, working with medical professionals at every workplace, must ensure the safety of all workers.
All the claims about the wonders of “private enterprise” are being exploded as Wall Street and the giant corporations come to the US government with hat in hand for trillions of dollars in public assets, which they expect the population to pay for.
The Socialist Equality Party insists that rather than being bailed out, the giant banks and corporations be turned into publicly owned utilities, democratically controlled by the working class, with no compensation to the billionaire shareholders and corporate executives.
There is no reason why the distribution of food and other essential items should be run by Instacart, Amazon and other private corporations. This vital social service should instead be part of a centrally planned socialist economy, based on addressing social needs, not generating private profit. All of society’s material and human resources must be marshaled on a socially rational basis not only to fight this deadly disease, but to put an end to poverty, social inequality and class exploitation.
Jerry White
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/canadian-conservative-party-bandera-canada/#more-22461
Once an underground network of fascist ideologues shunned by the Ukrainian Canadian community for “criminal ideas,” Canada’s ultra-nationalist Bandera lobby is today a major political player. It recently rubbed shoulders with former PM Stephen Harper and top contenders for the leadership of his Conservative Party.
By Moss Robeson
A month ago in Toronto, former Canadian Prime Minister and Conservative Party heavyweight Stephen Harper called out to an audience of Ukrainian Canadians, “Slava Ukraini!”
Harper’s audience responded to his cry of “Glory to Ukraine!” by compleing the salutation of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement once led by the notorious fascist Stepan Bandera: “Heroyam Slava!” In other words, “Glory to the Heroes!” who, in fact, collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine in World War Two.
Harper spoke as the keynote guest at a gala organized to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) and its newspaper, Homin Ukrainy (“Ukrainian Echo”), as well as the 65th anniversary of the League of Ukrainian Canadian Women (LUCW). The event capped off a three day, tri-annual convention of the Leagues.
Held on February 22, the gala took place six years and one day after the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled his country following the Euromaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in Kyiv, which saw pro-EU protesters and hard-right street fighters topple their Russian-oriented government.
Through the so-called “Canadian Conference in Support of Ukraine” (CCSU), many of Canada’s leading Conservatives have befriended a historically criminal, fascist network of Ukrainian nationalists that has remained dedicated to pushing the West to the brink of war with Russia since before World War Two ended. Today, followers of the long dead Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera are vying with Ukraine’s neo-Nazis to lead another “revolution” – this time, against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his moves to peace with Russia.
left to right: LUC president Roman Medyk, Stephen Harper, LUCW president Halyna Vynnyk, ICSU president Borys Potapenko
During the Cold War, the Banderivtsi agitated for the declaration of a U.S.-led “holy war of liberation” against Soviet Russia – a World War Three – placing their faith in the United States government to free the Soviet “prison of nations” by force, and to do so without obliterating them in the process with nuclear weapons. Similary, during World War Two, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Bandera (OUN-B) initially counted on Nazi Germany to “liberate” Soviet Ukraine, although Adolf Hitler had no intentions of doing so.
The LUC is the Canadian spearhead of the CCSU and an international coalition of NGOs affiliated with the decades-old, highly secretive cult of personality centered around Stepan Bandera. The League of Ukrainian Canadians plays a leading role in the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Ukrainian World Congress, the first vice president of which (from Australia) is the present-day leader of the OUN-B. “At the Forefront of Ukrainian Issues” is the LUC’s slogan.
Bandera’s OUN-B, an extremist “revolutionary” fascist organization, carried out numerous brutal pogroms against Jews throughout western Ukraine in 1941 before infiltrating Nazi auxiliary police units that served at the frontlines of the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Bandera aspired to be the Führer of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian dictatorship, but was rejected by Hitler and later the CIA. He was drifting into irrelevance when his 1959 assassination by the KGB in Munich turned him into a beloved ultra-nationalist martyr.
Over the course of the Cold War, the CIA attempted to incubate a rival, so-called “democratic” faction of the OUN-B – which also happened to be led by former Nazi collaborating war criminals. But the more radical, fascistic Banderites eventually hijacked Ukrainian communities around the world in the name of an anti-democratic “Ukrainian Liberation Front.” The OUN-B sought to establish a “dictatorship in exile,” as told by historian Per Anders Rudling, “intended to be re-exported to Ukraine, following its ‘liberation.’”
In 1956, the CIA collected from its Ukrainian collaborators a “set of complaints” made against Stepan Bandera and “a list of his anti-American acts,” however, “we were not interested in the specifics or evidential details related to the complaints or acts since these were already known to Headquarters.” That included the existence of an “illegal underground Bandera organization” of “blindly loyal” cadres mobilizing in the United States, taking orders from the fascist OUN-B leadership then located in Munich.
Meanwhile, according to a book by Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, the OUN-B’s “rezident” in Canada “had an organized if modest nationalist network in place by the fall of 1948 … [and] was in regular communication with the nationalist provid (or leadership) in Europe.”
Furthermore, “everything possible was being done to ensure that nationalist cadres were spread out ‘in a planned way’ across Canada, to ensure that the Banderivtsi would have some of their people in every centre where they might be able to work on behalf of the liberation movement.”
At the third national convention of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress in 1950, Stepan Bandera’s followers “were harried and jeered out of the meeting hall,” writes Luciuk, “accompanied by a stern reprimand from the podium … [denouncing] those whom he accused of trying to ‘take over’ Ukrainian Canadian organizational life.”
By the 1960s, some in the CIA were convinced that the KGB had infiltrated the OUN-B at high levels, perhaps to the point of controlling it through double agents. The OUN-B and its supporters in the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America eventually denounced the US-backed ex-Banderites based in New York City as “CIA tools” who were “soft on Communism.” The New York-based nationalist clique responded by accusing the former of colluding with ex-Nazi West German officials.
Despite all this, there is no evidence that Western governments took measures to suppress the OUN-B. Instead, well-connected anti-communist political interests from around the world nurtured the Banderites, ensuring that their apparatus would live on not just in the US, but in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and Western Europe. All parties abided by the OUN-B’s whitewashed, distorted script when it came to the Ukrainian Nationalists and World War Two.
“You have to understand,” a member of the OUN-B told journalist Russ Bellant, “we are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence.”
Today, the transnational crypto-fascist network of Banderite NGOs once known above board as the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” operates in the open and with the full-throated support of Western politicians like Stephen Harper. Its global coordinating body is called the International Council in Support of Ukraine, or ICSU, which in turn looks to the OUN-B for leadership.
The ICSU and the Ukrainian World Congress are presently headquartered in Toronto. And it’s there that the LUC – the group that hosted Harper – presides over the ICSU’s Canadian branch, the CCSU. Oksana Prociuk-Cyz, CEO of the largest Ukrainian Canadian credit union, is a former treasurer of the ICSU, the present-day leader of which, Borys Potapenko, is from Detroit, but a former executive director of the LUC.
Over forty years ago, Potapenko chaired a “Committee in Defense of Ukraine” that “conducted a major campaign in protest against the showing of the [1978] television movie ‘Holocaust’” starring Meryl Streep and James Woods.
Several nationalist subsidiary groups function under the CCSU’s umbrella. They include the Ukrainian Youth Association of Canada, Homin Ukrainy, and the Canadian Society of Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The UPA was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of ethnic Poles and an unknown number of Jews from 1943 through ‘44.
According to Lubomyr Luciuk, a Canadian academic and Ukrainian nationalist historian, Homin Ukrainy had been “an unflagging advocate of revolutionary nationalist principles,” and the Canadian “press organ of the movement headed by the Banderivtsi.” In an email, Luciuk told me that he was unaware of any OUN-B activity in Canada “anymore,” but declined to specify when he believed it ceased to operate in the country. Luciuk’s downplaying of the Bandera network in Canada might have something to do with “his continuous…cooperation with various OUN-B institutions,” including the ICSU.
The recent gala in Toronto demonstrated how far an underground network once held in suspicion by the CIA and the Ukrainian Canadian community has come. Besides Stephen Harper, the 2020 LUC gala featured both Peter McKay and Erin O’Toole, contenders for the leadership of Canada’s Conservative Party.
A Conservative Party pilgrimage to Ukraine’s Holocaust-distorting museum
The contest for leadership of Canada’s Conservative Party is in full swing. Erin O’Toole and the more moderate Peter McKay are the top candidates to succeed Andrew Scheer as party head. In February, the two rubbed shoulders with Ukrainian Nationalist lobbyists at the LUC gala and participated in a VIP reception with leaders of the CCSU – the Canadian coalition of Banderite organizations.
Stephen Harper was clearly the star of the show. The former prime minister’s photo ops showed him beside ICSU president Borys Potapenko; Andriy Levus, an OUN-B affiliated leader of the so-called “Capitulation Resistance Movement” in Ukraine; and Orest Steciw, former longtime president of the League of Ukrainian Canadians.
During the Cold War, Steciw chaired the Canadian branch of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a crypto-fascist coalition of “national liberation movements” led by the OUN-B that claimed to speak for the “captive nations” of the Soviet Union. The ABN, believing World War Three to be “inevitable” and even necessary, all but called for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Soviet Russia.
Orest Steciw n 1980s at ABN conference in Canada (left), and in 2020 with Harper
According to journalists Scott and Jon Lee Anderson, the ABN was “the largest and most important umbrella for Nazi collaborators in the world,” and a central component of the World Anti-Communist League. The three most recent leaders of the ICSU were all formerly affiliated with the now-defunct ABN.
In 1963, a leading Catholic Ukrainian Canadian weekly, Ukrainski Visti, condemned the extremism of the figures behind the ABN. In an editorial, the Visti slammed the “criminal ideas – ‘WE WANT WAR’ –” of the ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko and the “Bandera Mafia”: “We believe that the uncompromising influences of the Banderaites [sic] are very strong,” the paper declared, “but the Ukrainian people and the peoples of the world want peace!”
The ideological heirs to this “we want war” movement were on stage with Harper at the recent LUC gala in Toronto. There, Andriy Shevchenko, the Ukrainian Ambassador to Canada, awarded the former Prime Minister the Order of Liberty – Ukraine’s highest honor for a non-citizen. Next, Borys Potapenko presented Harper with the “Pinnacle Award” on behalf of the ICSU. (The latter has only one prior recipient: former NATO Supreme Commander of Europe Gen. Wesley Clark in 2015.)
“What Prime Minister Stephen Harper has done for Ukraine during his time in office can only be compared to what Ronald Reagan did for the demise of the Soviet Union,” Potapenko effused. In 1995, following the USSR’s collapse, Potapenko wrote in the ABN’s newsletter that Russia should next be broken up into 21 independent states.
In his own speech, Harper concluded with a remarkable statement of support for the neo-Banderites: “I greatly admire the work you’re all doing as part of the International Council in Support of Ukraine, and all the organizations that it embraces… God bless all of you. God bless Canada. Slava Ukraini!”
“Glory to the Heroes!” they answered. Originally performed with a fascist salute during World War Two, the Nationalist call and response was popularized in Ukraine by the anti-Yanukovych “Euromaidan,” or 2013-2014 “Revolution of Dignity,” supported by Western governments and hijacked by the far-right.
This was far from the only public engagement between leaders of the Banderite network and the Conservative Party. Harper made several visits to Ukraine during his time in office, often accompanied by ICSU representatives.
In 2010, Harper visited the “Lonsky Street Prison Museum,” an ICSU partner and possibly an OUN-B front, located at 1 Stepan Bandera Street in Lviv. In 1941, the prison was one of several sites where Jews were tortured and killed during a major pogrom
The prison museum does not acknowledge this history, however, and instead glorifies the OUN-B. It paints a decidedly revisionist picture that primarily memorializes the Ukrainian victims of the Soviet secret police murdered there, and erases Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi occupiers and its Jewish victims.
Ruslan Zabily has directed the Holocaust-distorting museum for over a decade. In 2012, the organizations of the CCSU organized an extensive Canada-wide lecture tour for him culminating in photo ops between Zabily and then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, during which the Canadian leader praised his museum.
Harper’s Conservative colleagues deepened their ties with the Banderites in October 2018 by meeting with visiting “youth leaders” from Ukraine who were, in fact, exponents of the OUN-B’s international apparatus.
Erin O'Toole
✔@ErinOTooleMP
Joined @jamesbezan & @TedOpitz for a dinner meeting with visiting Ukrainian Youth Leaders to discuss Russian hybrid warfare in #Ukraine and efforts to combat it. Thank you to leaders from @LeagueUkrCdns for organizing. 
19
9:03 PM - Oct 20, 2018 · Old Mill Inn
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The meeting was designed by the ultra-nationalist activists as a forum for marketing their nascent “Stop Revanche” campaign to sympathetic Canadian politicians.
Sabotaging peace in eastern Ukraine
The right-wing slogan, “Stop Revanche,” was developed in response to fears that pro-Russian politicians might achieve electoral success in Ukraine’s 2019 elections. The slogan picked up steam in response to the ascent of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his “Servant of the People” party. So did others such as “No Capitulation” and “Protect Ukraine.”
As a nationally beloved comedian with no political experience who nonetheless gained mass appeal with his call to resolve the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, and his depiction of an anti-corruption president on a fictional TV show (“Servant of the People”), Zelenskiy easily defeated the deeply unpopular, corrupt incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, who drifted hard to the right after taking office in 2014. Poroshenko’s nationalist base, exposed to represent a small minority of Ukrainians, fumed at the results.
As the US-funded RFE/RL reported last summer, “Revanche has emerged as one of the buzzwords of this extraordinary election cycle. Those posting, protesting, and pronouncing the word come from nationalist and right-wing political camps… and also from some pro-Western activists…”
From behind the scenes, the OUN-B aspires to lead a new Maidan-style revolution supported by “some pro-Western activists” but inevitably powered in large part by the neo-Nazi led Azov movement and other militant far-right groups. Through a wave of national demonstrations, Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists hope to drive Zelenskiy and all other pro-peace (“capitulationist”) elements from the government. In turn, they plan to recharge the proxy war in eastern Ukraine.
The political forces that launched the “Stop Revanche” slogan and visited Toronto in October 2018 played a prominent role in launching the anti-Zelenskiy “Resistance Movement” a year later.
The February 2020 LUC gala in Toronto represented the latest leg of this anti-peace campaign in the West. On hand for the event was Andriy Levus, the leader of an ICSU-affiliated NGO called Vilni Liudy, or “Free People,” that is a central engine of the “Capitulation Resistance Movement.” According to the latter’s Facebook page, both entities have an office in the OUN-B’s headquarters building in Kyiv.Levus and OUN-B leader Stefan Romaniw in Washington DC, June 2019
In July 2019, following Zelenskiy’s friendly meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, Conservative members of parliament O’Toole and James Bezan made an ominous public promise to all but militarily confront Russia if brought to power: “A Conservative government … will advocate for, and lead, a peacekeeping mission along the Ukraine-Russia border,” the two hardliners promised.
By pursuing a relationship with the Bandera lobby and apparently the Capitulation Resistance Movement as well, the Conservative Party leadership is effectively working to sabotage the roadmap to peace Zelenskiy is traversing to end the “frozen conflict” in eastern Ukraine.
As the League of Ukrainian Canadians’ closest allies in Ukraine are demanding that their government retake control of separatist territory and its eastern border with Russia before any elections take place in the rebel-held Donbas region, Conservative officials have proposed stationing Canadian troops there.
Although the Conservatives lost the 2019 Canadian national election, their cozy relationship with the transnational Banderivtsi could still drive a wedge between Ottawa and Kyiv, and prolong or even escalate the ongoing armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Considering its historic enthusiasm for a cataclysmic showdown with Russia, the OUN-B’s persistent presence in Western halls of power is no small cause for concern. Today, this crypto-fascist network is working to unite the right from Ottawa to Kyiv, bringing sympathetic Western officials in line with Ukrainian neo-Nazis to destabilize the Zelenskiy government and sabotage its bid for peace.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/#more-22522
A new wave of media reports on Chinese forced labor relies almost entirely on a series of dubious studies by purportedly “independent” think tanks backed by the West’s military-intelligence apparatus.
By Ajit Singh
A recent surge in stories in the Western press accuse China of implementing an oppressive program of “forced labor” against the country’s Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority. The titanic crime China is accused of has been called “Xinjiang’s new slavery.” This alleged coercive system is said to encompass more than 80,000 laborers and implicate the supply chains of 83 global brands, including Apple, Amazon, Nike, BMW, Gap, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen.
Featured in Western news outlets from Foreign Policy to the Washington Post to Democracy Now!, the reports rely on a series of questionable studies by purportedly “independent, nonpartisan” think tanks and crank experts backed by the West’s military-intelligence apparatus. Building upon the dubious but endlessly repeated claims that China is detaining millions of Uyghurs Muslims, these studies argue that “forced labor” is the “next step” in China’s tyrannical campaign against the ethnic minority.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) are the main institutions responsible for the forced labor studies. The reports have also relied heavily on an evangelical religious fanatic billed as the “leading expert” on Xinjiang, Adrian Zenz, who has said he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China.
A close look at the reports churned out by these bodies reveal serious biases and credibility gaps that Western media willfully ignores in its bid to paint China as the world’s worst human rights violator.
Both ASPI and CSIS are right-wing, militaristic think tanks funded by US and Western governments, mega-corporations, and an eye-popping array of weapons manufacturers. As previously reported by The Grayzone, Adrian Zenz is a far-right fundamentalist Christian whose questionable but incendiary accusations against China have led to the Western press crowing him as the leading international “expert” on Xinjiang. Zenz’s most recent claims of “forced labor” were published by a “journal” founded and managed by US and NATO military operatives.
Max Blumenthal
✔@MaxBlumenthal
Main sources in this story, which is part of a wider Cold War PR blitz:
-ASPI, a "think tank" run by Australia's Defense Department
-Adrian Zenz, a far-right End Timer from the US-backed Victims of Communism
-Uyghur Human Rights Project, a US-funded separatist lobbying operation https://twitter.com/thenation/status/1236479501741240321 …
The Nation
✔@thenation
It’s time for the fashion industry to talk about divestment. https://bit.ly/2VKXX7o
145
10:59 PM - Mar 7, 2020
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The latest allegations against China appear to form part of a PR blitz seeking to escalate Washington’s new Cold War and regime change efforts against Beijing.
Shortly following the release of these reports, US Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern announced that he would be introducing a new bill which would ban all US imports from Xinjiang. McGovern is an ardent supporter of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a US-backed, far-right regime change network seeking the overthrow of the Chinese government. He even presented WUC President Dolkun Isa with the National Endowment for Democracy’s 2019 Democracy Award.
Adrian Zenz@adrianzenz
BREAKING: U.S. Representative McGovern announces Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would ***BAN ALL IMPORTS FROM XINJIANG*** to the United States! Bill to be introduced shortly.
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On March 9, US lawmakers introduced the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, co-sponsored by McGovern and Republican Senator Marco Rubio, which would effectively ban all imports from Xinjiang. The proposed act would codify into US law a “rebuttable presumption” that “assumes that all goods manufactured in Xinjiang are made with forced labor and therefore banned […] unless the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection certifies otherwise.” The bill also calls for the US President to impose sanctions on “any foreign person” who engages in “forced labor” in Xinjiang.
Even putatively progressive news outlets have joined the frenzy, with The Nation and Democracy Now! uncritically parroting these studies with no mention of their relations to the US and Western governments and military contractors. Furthermore, both of these media platforms interviewed members of the WUC-affiliated Uyghur Human Rights Project, Mustafa Aksu and Nury Turkel respectively, to comment on this story — again, with no mention or concern for their extensive ties to the US regime-change establishment.
‘Independent’ Australian think tank funded by US, NATO, and weapons manufacturers
The three reports relied upon in the recent “forced labor” media coverage are authored by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Adrian Zenz. While presented by the Western press as impartial, expert assessments, a closer look raises serious concerns about the biases and credibility of these “studies.”
On March 1, ASPI published a policy brief, titled “Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-education,’ forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang.” The paper triggered the renewed round of Western media accusations against China.
While ASPI describes itself as a “an independent, non-partisan think tank” — a characterization that has been parroted by the Western press — it is, in fact, a right-wing, militaristic outfit that was founded by the Australian government in 2001 and is funded by the country’s Department of Defence.
ASPI is sponsored by a host of weapons manufacturers, including Raytheon Australia, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, MBDA Missile Systems, Saab AB, Thales, and Austalia.
Ironically, Australia’s Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme — enacted by the center-right Liberal Party to monitor alleged threat of “Chinese political interference” in the country — has revealed ASPI’s extensive sources of foreign funding, including the US State Department, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), government of Japan, and NATO.
ASPI blasted for being US lackey, promoting new Cold War with China
A recent profile of ASPI in the Australian Financial Review notes that the organization has “been accused of fomenting anti-China hysteria, to the alleged benefit of its benefactors.” ASPI has been so bellicose it has come in for criticism from major figures in Australian foreign policy circles.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr has slammed ASPI for pushing a “one-sided, pro-American view of the world”, while the former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby added that ASPI is “the architect of the China threat theory in Australia”.
Australian Senator Kim Carr of the Labour Party has echoed the criticism of ASPI, condemning the think tank for seeking to “promote a new cold war with China” in collaboration with the US. In a February 2020 parliamentary session, Carr warned that “[i]n parts of the [Australian] defence and security establishment, there are hawks intent on fighting a new cold war” with China, highlighting ASPI’s extensive funding from the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, headed by former CIA officer and Navy fighter pilot Lea Gabrielle.
Carr said ASPI has received nearly $450,000 in funding from the US State Department for the 2019 to 2020 financial year. (ASPI claims that the amount is “less than half” of the figure stated by Carr.)
Drew Pavlou@DrewPavlou
Shocking scenes. On floor of Australian Senate, @SenKimCarr attacks @ASPI_org, @alexjoske and
the ASPI China Defence Universities Tracker, claiming ASPI is an agent of US influence and cannot be trusted in its work studying CCP influence
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These criticisms of ASPI appear to be well founded. Since 2012, ASPI has been headed by Peter Jennings, a former Australian Department of Defense official. Jennings is an ardent advocate of US imperialism who has staunchly defended the Iraq War, supported regime change in Syria, and pointed to Ukraine and Iraq to argue that “the West is setting the bar for a military response too high.”
Jennings believes that “the rise of Leninist autocracies” threaten Australia and global peace, applying the label to China and North Korea, and, bafflingly, Russia and Iran. He is an ardent advocate of expanding and making “bulletproof” Australia’s military alliance with the US and “letting the Beijing Bully know this is our neighbourhood”, including expanding joint naval presence in the Indian Ocean.
Jennings and ASPI have also pushed for Australia to join Washington’s global campaign to ban Chinese telecom giant Huawei from 5G networks around the world. Australia banned China’s Huawei and ZTE from providing the country with 5G technology in 2018.
ASPI’s ‘forced labor’ report relies on speculation and sensationalism
On March 1, ASPI published a policy brief titled “Uyghurs for sale: ‘Re-education,’ forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang.” The report was funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), which oversees Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) the UK equivalent to the National Security Agency, and the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) commonly known as MI6.
As Mohamed Elmaazi and Max Blumenthal previously reported for The Grayzone, the FCO backs the Integrity Initiative, a propaganda mill which smears left-wing figures across the West, including former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The lead author of the report is ASPI researcher Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, a Chinese-Australian journalist and stand-up comedian, who previously studied at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute in Israel. In her published work, Xu has defended the far-right Falun Gong cult and characterized Chinese-Australians who oppose the US-backed, anti-government protest movement in Hong Kong as “brainwashed” puppets of the Chinese government and violent thugs.
Opening with the highly suspect claim that China is detaining millions of Uyghur Muslims, the ASPI study contends that China’s “re-education campaign” is “entering a new phase” in which at least 80,000 Uyghurs “are now being forced to work in factories” through a program transferring Uyghur laborers to companies within Xinijang and to other provinces. The factories employing these workers are alleged to be part of the supply chain of 83 major corporations.
The study contends that the Chinese government has implemented the coercive program under the guise of poverty alleviation and generating employment for impoverished sectors of the population. The authors ignore the fact that China’s poverty alleviation efforts are praised by development institutions around the world for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and presume it to be a phony pretext.
While Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang is indisputably focused on combating religious extremism, separatism and political instability — the government openly admits to this — the authors’ claims of a dystopian forced labor regime seem to rely more on sensationalism and speculation than concrete evidence.
For example:
The authors claim that workers are tightly controlled, with “little freedom of movement” and “isolated from their families.” As evidence, they cite a Chinese-language media report which features a story about a migrant worker from Xinjiang who obtained full-time industrial employment in the urban province of Shandong through the government’s employment program. The woman describes the challenges of working far away from her family in Xinjiang but emphasizes that she has used the program to earn more income and pay for household renovations and new livestock back home. What’s more, the woman states that while she initially wanted work through the program for only one year, she now wants to work for at least three years given the income it allows her to earn, indicating that she is voluntarily choosing to participate in the program for economic benefit.
Throughout the report, the authors refer to housing provided for migrant workers as “segregated dormitories.” On the one hand, the authors decry the “segregation” and “isolation” of the Uyghur workers who “speak almost no Mandarin, so communication with locals is largely non-existent,” but denounce Mandarin language classes offered to workers as insidious “political indoctrination.”
The authors claim that “workers’ ideology and behaviour are closely monitored,” citing the existence of a “psychological consulting” service.
The authors searched for “a variety of keywords relating to Xinjiang labour transfers” on the Chinese search engine Baidu and cite the increase in search results over time as indicating the increasing importance of the program to the Chinese government. This would be akin to analyzing US policy based on the volume of Google search results.
Ultimately, only two pages and a case study of a single factory are devoted to establishing the case of “forced labor”, with the vast majority of the 56-page report focused on connecting this alleged involuntary program with the major Western corporations and pressuring them to disengage with China.
ASPI’s ‘forced labor’ report relies on far-right blog of religious fanatics
The ASPI report presents no original evidence from workers who have been forced to work in this program, but cites anonymous “testimonies” from an obscure, far-right online blog. Called Bitter Winter, the blog is a project of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an Italy-based organization that opposes what it calls “anti-cult terrorism”.
Bitter Winter and its parent organization have vigorously defended fanatical Chinese religious movements including Falun Gong and the Church of the Almighty God, or Eastern Lightning. The latter is a Chinese-Christian sect which believes that Jesus Christ has been reincarnated as a Chinese woman currently living in Queens, New York.
Eastern Lightning is notorious for mass kidnappings, assaults, and murderous violence against perceived “demons” or non-believers, including bludgeoning a woman to death for refusing to give recruiters her phone number in 2014. During the 2019 Israeli elections, Buzzfeed reported that Twitter suspended dozens of Hebrew-language accounts run by the cult for “amplifying political messages for right-wing [Israeli] politicians.”
CESNUR has also taken up the cause of the Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo which was responsible for the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack. CESNUR board member J. Gordon Melton was paid by Aum Shinrikyo to travel to Japan to document alleged human rights violations against the group.
CESNUR founder, Massimo Introvigne, is the editor-in-chief of Bitter Winter. Introvigne is an ultra-conservative religious zealot who contends that Christians are “the most persecuted group in the world” due to abortion, gay marriage, and hate speech laws which he contends supress their religious freedom.
Introvigne considers communism to be an existential threat to religion, writing that “[n]egotiating with Beijing is like the proverbial supping with the Devil.” Introvigne regularly appears in videos produced by Church of the Almighty God/Eastern Lightning advocating on their behalf and claiming the cult is the victim of “propaganda” and “fake news”.
Introvigne has deep roots in the religious far-right, and was a long-time member and former vice president of the Italian organization Alleanza Cattolica, participating in the group from 1972 until 2016. During his time with the organization, Alleanza Cattolica advocated for Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet to be released following his arrest in the UK; denounced the progressive World Social Forum as a “laboratory for subversion”; and endorsed the Northern League, a far-right, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic political party, in Italian elections.
The “director-in-charge” of Bitter Winter is Marco Respinti, a far-right Christian conservative who describes his work as “devoted to serve and protect the Western heritage of life, liberties, and property” and working towards a society of “limited government, free enterprise, natural family, and traditional moral values.” Respinti is a Senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and a founding member of the Center for European Renewal, two ardently conservative organizations, and editor-in-chief of the anti-gay, anti-choice publication International Family News.
Australian media stifle criticism of ASPI report, manipulate interview subjects
As they push forward with their anti-China frenzy, Western media outlets are not concerned with the serious issues related to the biases and credibility of the ASPI report, in fact, they seem intent on stifling any criticism of their narrative.
Shortly following the release of the report, the state-run Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) aired a profile of lead author, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, as part of their “Australian Story” documentary series. According to Ye Xue, a Chinese-Australian PhD student at the University of Sydney, who was an interviewee on the program, the broadcaster pushed him to “praise Vicky’s research on Xinjiang” and made it clear “that they [did] not need my negative comments” or to hear that he disagreed with Xu.
Ye Xue@XueYe90
I was an interviewee on @AustralianStory. The interviewer signaled me that they not need my negative comments on Vicky Xu, even they are valid and the interviewer tried to push me to praise Vicky’s research on Xinjiang.
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The silencing of alternative viewpoints on China appears to be part of a larger trend within Australian media. Michael, a Chinese Muslim who lives in Australia and requested anonymity to protect himself from reprisal by his employer, told The Grayzone that Australian media outlets often attempt to manipulate Chinese-Australians into echoing the official narrative on China.
“SBS, a television network funded by the [Australian] government called me for an interview on Chinese Muslims in Australia,” Michael told The Grayzone. “When I didn’t tell her what she wanted, she asked me if my family was held hostage, in danger or being coerced.”
“She wanted me to confirm her narrative that the Chinese government had operatives following me and were actively suppressing me in Australia,” continued Michael. “Anyway, she never called back.”
“There are more Chinese-Australians who’ve had similar experiences. They seem to cast a wide net and hope to get someone like Vicky Xu who will just confirm all their narratives.”
Far-right Christian fundamentalist publishes ‘forced labor’ report in NATO publication
The ASPI report followed two earlier studies. The first was authored by Adrian Zenz, senior fellow in China studies at the far-right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by the US government in 1983.
As Max Blumenthal and I previously reported for The Grayzone, Zenz is a far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports “scriptural spanking” of children, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China. Zenz is one of the main sources behind the claim that China is detaining millions of Uyghur Muslims, and he has been promoted as the “leading expert” on Xinjiang by Western media because of the damning claims he makes against the Chinese government.
However, a closer look at Zenz’s work reveals that he relies on extremely shoddy evidence and methodologies, including basing his detention estimate on a lone media report by an extremist television network that regularly hosts fanatical anti-Semites who describe China as “a nation of savages, worse than the Jews” and call for “armed jihad” against the country.
In December 2019, Zenz published a new “study” titled “Beyond the Camps: Beijing’s Long-Term Scheme of Coercive Labor, Poverty Alleviation and Social Control in Xinjiang”, in which he accuses China of implementing a forced “wage-labor” regime against Uyghurs as the “next step” in Beijing’s “grand scheme” against the ethnic minority. Zenz calls for a “strong response” from the international community, including the divestment of Western and other foreign companies from China.
However, as with his previous work, Zenz’s latest report is riddled with speculation, sensationalism, and incoherence. Zenz begins his article with the contention that this nefarious, coercive program is “being implemented under the […] guise of ‘poverty alleviation’” through higher-income work, only to later admit that the program, in fact, “achieve[s] national poverty reduction goals” and “promote[s] economic growth.”
Zenz maligns what he calls the Chinese government’s aims to ensure “poor households … have at least one person in stable employment” and promote full-time, paid employment. He argues that since China’s poverty alleviation efforts are “all-encompassing and involves literally every single citizen” it must necessarily be forced because he speculates that “not everyone will want to be part of this rigid plan.”
Zenz claims that the Chinese government aims to force every Uyghur and ethnic minority adult into slave labor and eliminate traditional rural livelihoods and culture. To support his incendiary claim, he cites a mundane municipal government document that calls for achieving poverty alleviation goals through vocational training and employment programs, as well as initiatives like “environmental protection programs,” “subsidies in monetary form or animals” for farmers, and “support [for] small-scale self-employment” or small businesses.
Zenz’s characterization of of the Chinese government’s programs for public childcare and educational services for the children of workers offers a revealing look at the propagandistic nature of his claims:
“While the parents are being herded into full-time work, their children are put into full-time (at least full day-time) education and training settings. This includes children below preschool age (infants and toddlers), so that ethnic minority women are being ‘liberated’ and ‘freed’ to engage in full-time wage labor. Notably, both factory and educational settings are essentially state-controlled environments that facilitate ongoing political indoctrination while barring religious practices. As a result, the dissolution of traditional, religious and family life is only a matter of time.”
Zenz describes full-time employment and childcare services as “inhibit[ing] intergenerational cultural transmission” and promoting “intergenerational separation and social control over family unity”. Citing a Chinese media report in which a mother describes how the childcare services “solved my problem, now there are people who take care of my children, I can in peace go to work … very convenient,” Zenz denounces this as a “shocking example of this ‘liberation’ of women from their children”.
A screen capture of a Chinese media report that Zenz includes in his study to illustrate the apparent horrors of childcare.
Unsurprisingly, Zenz’s flimsy research on “forced labor” has not been published in a reputable academic journal, but rather “The Journal of Political Risk,” a publication headed by former NATO and US national security state operatives.
The publication was founded by Anders Corr, whose bio describes him as “having worked for several consultancies and government agencies, including Booz Allen Hamilton, United States Army, United States Pacific Command (USPACOM), United States Special Operations Command Pacific (USSOCPAC), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and the North American Treaty Organization (NATO).”
The editor of the publication is Neil Siviter, who “previously worked as a Junior Professional Fellow at the NATO Association of Canada,” and “has also held various internship positions with the Canadian Government [and] U.S. Consulate General Toronto.”
US militaristic think tank recycles shoddy research in ‘forced labor’ report
The final study accusing China of implementing “forced labor” programs against Uyghur Muslims was a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) entitled, “Connecting the Dots in Xinjiang: Forced Labor, Forced Assimilation, and Western Supply Chains”.
Like ASPI, CSIS is a militaristic think tank funded by the US government and a host of military allies including the UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Turkey, Germany, Italy, and the EU. CSIS also receives significant funding from a number of weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel corporations, and banks.
In April 2019, Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal exposed a secret meeting hosted by CSIS, where US and Latin American officials discussed a possible military invasion of Venezuela. That November, The Grayzone’s Ben Norton reported that CSIS hosted a US congressional panel which outlined the next phase of Washington’s dirty war against Syria, including plans to occupy Syrian oil fields and block reconstruction of the country.
In its “forced labor” report, CSIS offers little to no new information, relying instead on the work of Adrian Zenz and undisclosed interviews with anonymous “detainees who were forced to work.”
While the Western public encounters stories about alleged “forced labor” as shocking journalistic exposés, they are, in fact, the direct product of an orchestrated PR campaign backed by US and EU governments, NATO, and arms manufacturers – all of which stand to benefit handsomely from the intensification of a new Cold War.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/23/oas-luis-almagros-corruption-cronyism-coup-plotting/#more-22428
The shocking story of the most incompetent, unethical and imperial-minded Secretary General in the history of the Organization of American States.
The following is a translated version of an article that has circulated widely in Spanish-language media. Authored by an anonymous individual with apparent inside knowledge of OAS affairs, it has been edited and adapted by The Grayzone to bring closer attention to the disturbing record of Luis Almagro.
In a result that surprised no one, the US-favored Luis Almagro was re-elected as Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS). For the next five years, Almagro will lead the oldest multilateral organization in the world, overseeing the affairs of member states comprising the Western hemisphere.
Almagro has been the most unethical and inconsistent OAS Secretary General in recent times. Within the OAS, there is widespread questioning of his administration. But with US government – the main financial backer of the OAS – fully behind him, he has run roughshod over all opposition with his agenda.
The Secretary General passionately invokes the principles of democracy and human rights, quoting the American Convention on Human Rights, the Democratic Charter, the Inter-American Convention against Corruption. But in his actions, he flagrantly contravenes his lofty rhetoric.
Every move Almagro makes appears designed to cultivate a personal image which facilitates his professional ambitions, and advances the role he has been told to play in the international arena by his US puppet masters.
Vanity is a defining characteristic of Almagro, built from the belief that he is now the most influential leader of an international organization with a social media presence. He pioneered the use of Twitter at the OAS, as if international politics could be carried out through social media, while ignoring the real actors who are the democratically elected authorities of the Americas. Through his obsession with virtual politics, ignoring legitimate representatives and the will of the people, he has revealed his contempt for democracy.
Almagro’s eagerness for power vaulted him to the leadership of the OAS. Back in 2015, he thrust himself into a contest that was colored by the first stage of open conflict between the United States and Venezuela, and the international optimism derived from the resumption of diplomatic contacts between Washington and Havana. He marketed himself as the only candidate capable of transcending the political and ideological differences between the various members of the organization he sought to lead.
Almagro enjoyed a positive international reputation at the time. He had served a term as foreign minister in the leftist government of Uruguayan President José Mujica, and had cultivated support from hemispheric leaders, both from the left and the right.
His candidacy offered a portents of what was to come for the organization, as it is clear that it was his campaign team ran a cut-throat operation with the support of the US government to undermine any potential challenger. Following the resignation of Diego García Sayán of Peru, Almagro was the only man left standing. He took over as secretary general without a challenge.
Almagro stated in his inaugural speech on May 26, 2015 that he was not interested in being the administrator of the OAS crisis, but rather the facilitator of its renewal. His predecessor as OAS Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, had prepared the OAS for sweeping reforms that he called “the strategic vision.” However, Almagro placed a halt on the process of reforms almost as soon as he replaced Insulza.
At various times during his campaign, he said that in order to recover the credibility of the OAS, he would resign ahead of the 2020 election campaign. He said that it was healthy to renew the organization every five years with new perspectives and fresh dynamics. Today, however, we see Almagro entering his second term as Secretary General.
Almagro’s management has compounded the organization’s longstanding institutional crisis. The regular budget of the OAS has not increased and, on the contrary, continues to rely on contributions from the government of the United States.
Hoping to guarantee the independence of the OAS, member states proposed quotas of contributions. But Almagro stringently avoided the matter of independence, ensuring that today, it is no longer discussed inside the organization This is largely consequence of his obsession with advancing regime change in Venezuela.
The OAS has a complex normative system from its founding charter to the declarations, conventions, and decisions of presidential summits, as well as systems guaranteeing the protection of rights through the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. But under Almagro, these efforts have been superseded by his focus on political affairs.
The integral development agenda, for example, has been forgotten under Almagro’s leadership. The OAS has been absent from major international debates where the hemisphere could have had a strong voice, including on issues that unite the Americas and the Caribbean.
Rather than assuming leadership to advance much-needed reforms of the OAS, Almagro abandoned them to build his personal image and position himself as a global player.
Almagro recruits cronies, the incompetent, and corrupt
A reduction in resources under Almagro’s watch caused a massive brain drain, with capable staff members leaving in droves. As the competent exited the OAS, the secretary general filled the organization with friends and political cronies dating back to his time as Uruguay’s foreign minister.
The circle around Almagro today is almost entirely Uruguayan. It includes the following figures:
Diego Canepa, former Assistant Secretary of the Uruguayan Presidency.
Luis Porto, former Undersecretary of Economy and also former Vice-Chancellor of Uruguay.
Gabriel Bidegain, former itinerant ambassador in Mujica’s administration.
Sergio Jellinek, publicist and social media specialist. He is the man behind the construction of Almagro’s online image.
Gonzalo Koncke, former representative of Uruguay to the United Nations.
Other recruits include the former Undersecretary of Health, Leonel Briozzo, and the former Minister of Defense, Luis Rosadilla.
Luis Porto, one of Almagro’s closest confidants, was appointed senior advisor on strategy and organizational development at the OAS. He has a documented history of shady contracts and corruption, which led to his sanctioning and disqualification from public service. Porto’s friend, Washington Abdala, then a deputy for Uruguay’s Colorado Party, seems to have been key in lifting his sanctions. These favors over time appear to have been paid for with OAS contracts.
Juan Washington Abdala Remerciari, an Uruguayan lawyer popularly known as Washington “The Turk” Abdala, was appointed by Almagro as his special representative for the territorial conflict between Guatemala and Belize. This gave Abdala the rank of ambassador, and with a lucrative salary and all-expense-paid travel. He was previously hired with funds from the MACCIH, the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras, but without consulting its authorities.
Abdala has since turned into a YouTube comedian known for his impersonations of cartoon characters like Batman. His trajectory provides a clear picture of the seriousness of Almagro’s clique.
The number of Uruguayans that Almagro has packed into the OAS missions is impressive. Among them are Juan Pablo Corlazzoli (El Salvador), Edgardo Ortuño (Costa Rica), Juan Raúl Ferreira (Haiti), Sergio Abreu (Peru), Wilfredo Penco (Nicaragua), among others.
Other Uruguayans, such as lawyers Marta Pachiotti and Beatriz Otero, were placed in influential positions at the MACCIH.
Besides the cronyism they embody, there is also an issue of professional competency.
Almagro personally recruited Marta Pachiotti to the OAS, appointing her as director of the Criminal Justice Observatory at the MACCIH. However, within the mission itself, many people pointed out that Pachiotti did not have the slightest idea of how the area she had been assigned would work. He cluelessness eventually became an obstacle to the basic functions of the observatory.
Pachiotti spent most of her time traveling to other countries for personal interest, paying people in the institution to do her work. Her underlings characterized her as a racist and classist person, as evidenced by the audio published by the Peruvian politician, Julio Arbizu, which later forced Almagro to remove her from the MACCIH. Once again, the human rights discourse of Almagro and his friends was revealed as hollow and opportunistic.
The Uruguayans in Almagro’s inner circle are not the only questionable characters at the OAS. There is also the Mexican Francisco Guerrero, who occupied the key secretariat of Political Affairs that Almagro later renamed, the “Secretariat for the Strengthening of Democracy.”
Guerrero is a militant of Mexico’s PRI. In the last election cycle in his country, he served as an advisor to the presidential campaign of the candidate José Antonio Meade.
His background raises an important question: how is it possible that a high official of the OAS can become an advisor to the campaign of a candidate of a member country, and still serve as the head of the area where the electoral observation missions are set up? Let’s not forget that the OAS observed the elections in Mexico. It is evident that there was a serious conflict of interest here.
Guerrero also happens to be a friend of Jacobo Domínguez Gudini (also from the PRI), who was appointed to work at the MACCIH. Domínguez was expelled by Honduran civil society for campaigning alongside politicians from the country’s governing National Party, thus compromising the independence of the OAS mission. Yet after being kicked out of Honduras, he was hired under direct orders by Luis Almagro to work at the OAS headquarters in Washington to the tune of over $10,000 a month.
We cannot forget that Domínguez also worked in the administration of Mexico’s Veracruz state, Javier Duarte – “the worst governor in history” – who was sentenced to nine years in prison for money laundering, criminal association, and a long parade of atrocities.
Domínguez campaigns alongside Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, compromising the OAS’s mission
A group of experts from from American University in Washington DC published a June 2018 report that directly blamed Almagro for the obstacles and failures of the MACCIH. The report concluded, “In short, the choice of the OAS as the managing entity of MACCIH worked as critics feared. Its political trajectory has reflected a weak and divided OAS run by an impetuous and inconsistent Secretary General.”
Almagro’s Venezuela obsession divides the OAS and violates its charter
The interventions by Almagro in the internal politics of OAS member countries has completely reversed diplomatic advances in the resolution of disputes, deepening the division of the continent.
Under Almagro’s leadership, the hemisphere has become polarized around the issue Venezuela. The unilateral strategies of the organization and the actions of the Secretary General himself have proven to be a colossal failure. Confrontation and polarization have shattered the trust of the parties towards the OAS, broken trust between them, and dissolved important spaces for dialogue.
In a shocking breach of his diplomatic mandate, Almagro threatened a military intervention to overthrow the elected government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in September 2018.
His position represented an explicit violation of the OAS charter and the organization’s raison d’être, as articulated in Article 21: “The territory of a state is inviolable and may not be subjected, even temporarily, to military occupation or other measures of force taken by another state, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever.” Article 3 stipulates that the personality, sovereignty and independence of states must be respected.
Almagro’s haughty behavior has generally undermined an array of organizational commitments to resolve conflicts through diplomacy and peaceful means.
His obsession with Venezuela has eroded his leadership and distracted the organization from addressing shared threats to the region. It is clear that the strategy followed to date and Almagro’s polarizing and hyper-confrontational role have not contributed to solving the political crisis in Venezuela. His re-election is certain to exacerbate the situation in the country, where a sector of the opposition has entered talks with the government against stringent opposition by Washington.
While Almagro focused his energy on regime change in Venezuela, the OAS failed to take a firm position in defense of migrants’ rights despite thousands of deaths and countless human rights violations against them.
A record of disaster sets the stage for a future of conflict
From a diplomatic point of view, a mind-boggling array of mistakes were made, most of them with serious implications for the internal situation of countries in the OAS:
Almagro generated a very sensitive conflict between Haiti and the Dominican Republic by not recognizing the sovereign spaces of both countries that share the island.
He praised the pardon of former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, tormenting the victims of violence committed by his regime. Almagro did so despite having spoken out against the pardon days before.
He called for new elections in Honduras in 2017, then recognized the US-backed government even after the OAS itself found evidence of widespread fraud.
Almagro cut off the head of the MACCIH in Honduras, Juan Jiménez Mayor, in a surprising move, resulting in a devastating letter from Mayor accusing Almagro of essentially abandoning the mission.
He secretly negotiated the Honduran government’s support for sanctions against Venezuela at the OAS, in exchange for the weakening of the MACCIH, a mission established by the OAS itself, whose investigations were beginning to embarrass the US-backed Honduran president and his cronies.
In 2017 he cut a deal with the then-president of Brazil, Michael Temer, to use the money from his country’s massive debt to the OAS to finance the actions of the IACHR against Venezuela. In return, Brazil received the silence of the OAS in the face of the serious social situation and numerous corruption scandals taking place under Temer’s watch.
Almagro recognized Juan Guaido as interim president of Venezuela without the consent of the majority of the member states
He issued a report declaring alleged irregularities and violations that occurred in the electoral process in Bolivia that led directly to the coup d’état in the country, generating an internal conflict that ended the lives of 35 Bolivians. The report has been thoroughly discredited by researchers from MIT and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
For the past five years, Almagro has served the United States government and his own ambitions. His opinions and actions have not been the result of consultations with the majority of the member states of the OAS, but of his personal positions or those of his backers in Washington.
Almagro has led the organization to a dead end, shattering the possibilities of Latin American and Caribbean integration. Elected to a second term, he is all but certain plunge the hemispheric body into an unprecedented regional confrontation.
