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In this special interview, journalist and author Fatima Bhutto speaks to Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin about Israel’s war on Gaza, which he calls the “greatest historical scandal” of our time.

Dominique de Villepin spent three decades in public service. Since his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he has been an outspoken critic of Western military interventions around the world.

In this episode, he explains why he believes there will be no security in the region until a Palestinian state is recognised.

The post Former French PM – Dominique de Villepin – condemns Israel’s war on Gaza appeared first on Asia Commune.

The workers and peoples of the world celebrate and salute the fall of one of the most terrible dictatorships, one of the most horrific fascist regimes of our time. The armed struggle of Syrian militias on December 8, 2024 overthrew the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad after 13 years of fighting. The armed revolution overthrew a regime that had been oppressing the people for 53 years since 1971 with the dictatorship of Hafed Al Assad, and then with the succession of his son Bashar Al Assad from the year 2000. This regime murdered more than half a million people, caused the forced exile of more than 5 million, and filled the prisons with thousands of political prisoners.

The revolution freed thousands of political prisoners, liberated the cities and towns of Syria from the troops and officials of the dictatorship, freed thousands of opponents, freed hundreds of imprisoned women, freed Syria from 53 years of nightmare, and shows the way to end the tyrannies that still remain in the world, the Putins, Xi Jinping, Netanyahu, Maduro, Ortega, Díaz Canel, Kim Yong, Myanmar, the oil monarchies, etc. A constellation of charlatans, “opinionologists”, “geopolitical experts”, the Stalinists, campists and 99% of the world left mourn the fall of Al Assad because they consider it a “reactionary” fact that benefits Israel and the United States, in a new example of the dead-end crisis of the world bourgeois left.

But as a slap in the face to all charlatans, Israel has begun to attack the new government that has taken office, bombing the neighborhoods of Damascus, and areas surrounding the border, in a clear attitude of stopping the revolution that is taking place on its border. In their ignorance and rupture with Marxism, 99% of the bourgeois and reformist world left refuses to support the Syrian revolution, just as it has refused to support the Ukrainian revolution. But the struggles of the peoples turn their backs on the opinionologists and charlatans of the reformist left in crisis: There are few tyrannical regimes left, and the fall of Assad puts us on the path to ending them, an indispensable task in the struggle for Socialism. When we see lose together US, Israel, Putin, Al Assad, the Ayatollahs, is another slap in the face and another nail in the coffin of the “Decoupling Theory”

Assad’s army crumbled in 12 days due to the lack of popular support, socially isolated, mired in the hatred of the overwhelming majority of the population in the face of the unstoppable advance of a coalition of militias led by the group Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS). Without the support of Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship and the dictatorship of war criminal Vladimir Putin, dictator Bashar Al Assad had to flee like a rat into the arms of the war criminal who gave him asylum in Moscow.

The fall of the dictatorship is the result of the combination of two revolutionary processes: The Ukrainian revolution as the vanguard of the European revolution, and on the other hand the 3rd Palestinian intifada, in combination with the Syrian revolution and the revolution in Rojava as the vanguard of the 2nd Arab Spring. Without the combination of the two revolutionary processes, the fall of Bashar Al Assad would have been impossible. In a work that we will publish later we will explain how these revolutionary processes developed unevenly and combined to end the dictatorship, in this declaration we propose that the Syrian revolution shows the unity of the global revolutionary process with the twinned revolutions that have allowed one of the most resounding revolutionary victories that Marxists salute with pride: Long live the revolution of the Syrian people!

Millions of us celebrate the fall of Al Assad

The Syrian revolution is a February revolution, that is, a revolution that destroys the regime and the institutions of the bourgeois state, but it is not led by a revolutionary Marxist party. So this revolution, like the one in February in Russia, opens the stage of the October revolution, that is, while the bourgeoisie will try to rebuild the institutions of the bourgeois state and its political regime, the revolution will go against its plans to destroy them again, which puts forward the challenge of having a revolutionary organization at its head to put an end to capitalism. In the revolution that dethroned Assad, the coalition of militias entered Damascus in a 12-day raid that electrified the world. In each liberated city, demonstrations and celebrations of the population broke out, the mobilizations showed the joy and emotion of the people who took to the streets to show their happiness for the end of the Al Assad dictatorship, while the mobilizations and celebrations became global.

Ukraine and Syrian demonstrations in London

Syrians went out to celebrate in all the capitals of the world: New York, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, etc. Their demonstrations had the sympathy of the peoples of the whole world, while the hatred of the population towards the Assad dictatorship has also spread to the dictatorship of Putin and the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs who have committed horrible massacres against the Syrian people to drown the revolution in blood. The thirst for revenge gave birth to an activism willing to take up arms to destroy Al Assad, Putin, the Ayatollahs, which explains the participation of hundreds of young people eager to expel the dictatorship and foreign militias.

When militias seized the facilities of the Al Rawda presidential palace in Damascus, they found an impressive collection of high-end vehicles in the presidential palace, among other disgusting displays of the dictator’s ostentatious wealth. Bashar Al Assad lived in a majestic stone and marble fortress on a hill overlooking the city in the middle of a town that is at 80% poverty levels. But as happens every time a dictatorship falls, the celebrations were followed by horror: After the rebels opened the doors of the prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the families of the disappeared were desperately searching for their relatives in the filthy cells of the dreaded Saydnayah prison, who had been detained for a long time.

Corpses began to appear, and scenes of horror showed the cells where mass executions took place, crematoria for hanged prisoners, living under torture, shaved, skeletal, barely able to give their names, living in horrific conditions of solitary confinement, in the midst of mud and excrement. People searching the prison rummaged through buildings for routes to other floors, while others knocked down walls or drilled into the ground looking for hidden cells, or built underground. The Syrian people must now face the task of trial and punishment of the officials of the dictatorship, responsible for the thousands of dead and disappeared in the Al Assad regime.

The unstoppable advance of the revolution

The militias began their offensive against the dictatorship on November 27 when they launched an attack from Idlib province towards the city of Aleppo, the country’s second city, which the regime responded with aerial bombardments. The next day, on 28 November, militias blocked the strategic highway connecting Damascus to Aleppo and seized three towns in Aleppo and Idlib provinces. The clashes exceeded 200 dead, and among the casualties fell a general of the Revolutionary Guard of Iran, a key ally of Al Assad. On November 29, the rebels entered Aleppo after taking more than 50 towns in the north of the country, and began the dispute over Aleppo in which the troops of Al Assad and his ally Putin responded with intense air strikes in and around Idlib.

The road of Syrian militias

Anti-regime militias occupied positions in New Aleppo, on the outskirts of the city of Aleppo, and on November 30, 2024, captured most of Aleppo, including the airport, government buildings, and prisons. In addition, they took the strategic city of Saraqeb while enduring the bombardments of Putin’s aircraft, but on December 1 the militias consolidated their total control over Aleppo, which was outside the regime’s control. 

The dictator Al-Assad, in a defiant speech, assured that “terrorism only understands the language of force”. Amid the advances of the militias, Putin and the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs reiterated their unconditional support for the dictatorship while the planes of Al Assad and Putin bomb the anti-dictatorial militias in the northwest of the country.

On December 5, 2024, militias took over the city of Hama, the country’s fourth-largest, and the people toppled a statue of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. And on Dec. 7, the militias captured Homs, the third-largest city, and freed more than 3,500 prisoners, as they approached Damascus, just 20 kilometers from the capital. As they took over the cities, the rebels opened prisons and released thousands of political prisoners, and avoided reprisals against minorities of Christians, Alawites, Druze or Kurds. In the cities they sought to restore the supply of bread and electricity, trying to manage some kind of government which allowed them to gain a lot of popularity.

The population of Deraa in the south of the country where the Syrian revolution began in 2011 rose up in arms, leaving Damascus surrounded by militia forces coming from Homs in the north and Deraa in the south. In Deraa there was no group like HTS, so the people resumed self-organization, took police stations and checkpoints and marched towards Damascus, liberating Deraa, Suweida and Quneitra until they reached Daraya, south of the capital. The Druze community defeated the forces of the Syrian regime in Suweida, while simultaneously, the troops of the armed militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SFD), the militias of the Kurdish people fighting for their national liberation, advanced to take control of the city of Deir Zour, on the left bank of the Euphrates River.

On the night of December 7-8, the militias entered Damascus, took over Saydnayah prison proceeding to release all prisoners, while Bashar al-Assad fled Syria by plane, marking the end of his horrific dictatorship. The lightning offensive managed in 12 days to crown the triumph of the revolution that has been going on for 13 years, a triumph that strengthens all the peoples of the world in the struggle against capitalism, and imperialism in the Middle East, and on a world scale.

Assad’s fall strengthens the Second Arab Spring

Because of disinformation, or because of the misleading campaigns of the imperialist media and opinionologists, many believe that the triumph of HTS and the defeat of Al Assad is a strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism. But it is exactly the opposite, the fall of Al Assad is a brutal blow to Islamic fundamentalism, because the revolution that defeats Assad is also part of the Second Arab Spring. The First Arab Spring began in 2011, it was a first revolutionary wave in the Middle East that hit more than 30 countries and in that framework the Syrian revolution began. But 8 years later, in 2019, a 2nd wave began, the “Second Arab Spring” with the uprisings of 2019 and 2020 in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, and the “Third Intifada” of Palestinians living inside the cities of Israel starting in 2021.

Unlike the First Arab Spring of 2011 that began the Syrian revolution, the “Second Arab Spring” is a revolutionary process that confronts Islamic fundamentalism, that is, it is led by new generations that reject Islamic fundamentalism, embrace the secularism process that was expressed in the the Lebanese revolution of October 17, 2019 against the capitalist government supported by Hezbollah, the process of the revolution in Iran of November 15, 2019 against the government of the Ayatollahs in the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, and the “Third Intifada” of Palestinians living inside the cities of Israel, which as of October 7, 2023 was transformed into open civil war against the Israeli army.

The Syrian revolution with the fall of Al Assad reaffirms the content of the Second Arab Spring because it confronts a capitalist dictatorship, but at the same time it goes against Hezbollah that is backed by the Islamic dictatorship of the Ayatollahs in Iran, it goes against the pro-Iranian militias, it goes against Al Qaeda, and it goes against ISIS. The Second Arab Spring is the expression of the process of political revolution that is sweeping the world by which the peoples break with all their old directions on a global scale, social democracy, Stalinism, ex-guerrillas, bourgeois nationalism, etc. The expression of this process in the Middle East is the crisis of the Islamic fundamentalist current, which has been the most important political current in the region for 45 years, but now shows fractures, crises, public and manifest fissures.

An expression of the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism is Hamas’s public support for the Syrian revolution and the fall of Bashar Al Assad with the following statement that you can read here: “Hamas congratulates the brotherly Syrian people for their success in achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice, and we call on all components of the Syrian people to unite their ranks.” Hamas’s public pronouncement is a manifest fracture of Islamic fundamentalism because Hamas stands on the opposite side of Hezbollah and the Iranian regime, despite the fact that they act together on the same military side in the 3rd Intifada.

Hamas had already publicly supported the 2011 Arab Spring against Assad’s government and left his headquarters in Damascus in 2012, a move that angered Iran. Another example is the evolution of the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS), the group that led the entire revolution. 

HTS is an armed religious group considered “terrorist” by the United States. and NATO, emerged in Idlib. The founders of this group are a group of leaders led by Abu Mohammed al Golani who broke with Al Qaeda when it made an agreement with ISIS to promote an Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Abu Mohammed al Golani, whose real name is Ahmad al Shareh, broke with Al Qaeda, which in Syria was called Al Nusra and founded the Committee for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS for its Arabic acronym) on January 28, 2017 together with the team of leaders that accompanied him.

l Golani founded HTS, the Syrian revolution had suffered a serious defeat at the hands of Hezbollah’s militias, the Iranian militias, and Putin’s mercenary troops, the Wagner Group, with which Syria became dominated by the RSII Coalition (Russia-Syria-Iran-Iraq) that incorporated the Lebanese military group Hezbollah. The RSII Coalition agreed to create the Idlib demilitarized zone of between 10 and 20 kilometers, guarded by the Russian-Turkish military police, which began operating on October 15, 2018, in which all the militias that confronted the Al Assad dictatorship were integrated, after the defeats of 2016-17.

In the demilitarized areaof Idlib, 3 blocs were formed: On the one hand, the SNA (Syrian National Army), a coalition of militias controlled by Turkey. On the other hand, the militias of Al Nusra, the representation of Al Qaeda that established an alliance with ISIS and on the other hand HTS that did not agree to join either of the two previous coalitions. U.S. imperialism, seeing that HTS did not agree to integrate with the Turkey bloc or the Iran-Russia bloc, offered it a deal, money, and supplies, which HTS rejected. A battle began between these blocs in which HTS prevailed on January 1, 2019 and formed the so-called “government of national salvation”.

The fact that HTS militarily defeated Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and the SNA in 2019 began to show the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism and to express the 2nd Arab Spring. From that moment on, HTS became the most important opposition group to the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad, that is, of all these guerrilla and partisan groups that opposed the dictatorship, the most independent of imperialism, Israel, Iran, Turkey and Putin, was strengthened. After its victory, HTS immediately violated the ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia by placing combat units in the demilitarized zone along the border between Idlib and the Syrian government, and attacked Al-Assad’s army camps. In March 2020 in the midst of the Covid 19 pandemic, a ceasefire sponsored by Putin and the president of Turkey, Recep Erdoğan, was imposed, but byMarch 1, 2021 it was reported that HTS defeated Al-Qaeda again in Idlib.

In October 2022, HTS launched an offensive in the city of Afrin, near the Turkish border, against Turkish-backed SNA groups. In the following years, HTS was strengthened, including the founding of a military academy in 2022 and began to specialize in the use of drones that were begun to be used by the Houthi guerrillas, but had a great development of the Ukrainian army and partisans. HTS began to receive military advice on the use of drones by the Ukrainians, with which, in fact, the Syrian and Ukrainian revolutions began to unify. In other words, HTS evolved from being a group of Al Qaeda cadres, to breaking with ISIS, and moving closer to agreements with Ukrainian militias. He did not do it for an intellectual matter: He did it because in front of them the Islamic fundamentalist militias sought to shoot them, and destroy them, they had to evolve in self-defense.

HTS was waiting for the right moment to launch an attack on the troops of the Assad dictatorship, and the moment came on November 27, 2024, the day after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, the main military backer of the Syrian government. HTS took advantage of Hezbollah’s paralysis, and Putin’s crisis bogged down in the Ukrainian revolution. He also took advantage of the fact that the Iraqi army refused to intervene in defense of Al Assad, another element that expresses the crisis of Islamic fundamentalism. HTS was able to launch the offensive that surprised the world precisely as a result not of strength, but of the weakening of Islamic fundamentalism, in a process that ratifies and strengthens the Second Arab Spring, as part of the world political revolution.

A capitalist government of HTS emerges that we do not support

After the fall of Bashar Al Assad, HTS seeks to form a bourgeois, capitalist government of “national unity and reconstruction”. He appointed Mohamed al-Bashir as prime minister for the transition, who seeks an 18-month transition until the call for elections, trying to establish a state apparatus after the collapse of the regime, trying to guarantee governability and avoid widespread anarchy. Once in office, al-Bashir assured the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that “he will guarantee the rights of all people and sects in Syria”. He stressed that the “wrong behavior of some Islamist groups has led many people, especially in the West, to associate Muslims with terrorism and Islam with extremism … we will guarantee the rights of all people and all sects in Syria…”, a whole discourse that seeks to show a “moderate” government far from Islamic fundamentalism.

The HTS leader Al Golani

In turn, HTS leader Al Golani announced that he will disband the former regime’s security forces and close its prisons, agreed with the former prime minister of the Assad regime, Mohammed al Jalali, to preserve the institutions and return 400,000 employees to their jobs. HTS seeks a transfer of power and relies on its own government apparatus, but it comes from governing the province of Idlib and it is not possible with this small apparatus to govern all of Syria. 

That is why HTS announced on December 9 a general amnesty for all military personnel of the Syrian regime whom the regime conscripted under compulsory service and emphasized that the lives of these people “are safe” and that “no assault against them is allowed.” However, HTS announced that it will not pardon all those involved in the torture and murder of detainees in Syrian prisons.

In turn, four million Syrian refugees in Turkey are seeking to return to their communities, which is filling Syria’s borders with Turkey with thousands of families returning. HTS announced on December 9 that it is “strictly forbidden” to interfere in women’s choice of clothing or require women to dress modestly, further moving away from Islamic fundamentalism that forces women to wear the burqa and Islamic clothing. In the past, when HTS had recently broken with Islamic fundamentalism, it still brutally repressed women in Idlib, and HTS’s “morality police,” called Markaz al Falah, arrested women for dressing “inappropriately.”

It is possible that HTS seeks to change in order to try to impose a bourgeois democratic regime, so that HTS can become a “reliable” organization for imperialism, capable of managing capitalist Syria. The combination of militias and popular uprising with elements of self-organization imposed democratic freedoms, the release of political prisoners, the return of refugees, guarantees for minorities, that is, a whole set of mobilization processes that hinder dictatorial, repressive, or Bonapartist attempts by the HTS. All imperialist organizations are acting in this direction, for example Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said that “the United Nations Organization is fully committed to a smooth transition of power in Syria.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who travelled to Jordan and Turkey for talks on Syria, is moving in the same direction, while National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan urgently travelled to Israel, quickly seeking agreements to establish a “peace” to stop the revolutionary process in Syria.

The whole world counter-revolutionary front now wants to negotiate with HTS. Putin has already sounded out HTS to negotiate the continuity of its military bases, the Tartus naval base in the Mediterranean and the Hmeimim military airport, Iran is also seeking to negotiate the withdrawal of the “Revolutionary Guards”, as well as their military and logistical elements. Regardless of the course of events, Marxists do not support the HTS transitional government, nor any of its measures. We believe that the Syrian people will sooner or later confront this government, or its successors, when they discover that Syria’s capitalism has nothing to offer them. The triumph of the Syrian revolution implies the possibility of developing a project to put an end to capitalism in the country and the Middle East once and for all.

Syrian Revolution Opens Doors to Marxists in the Middle East

Syria has been under martial law for 40 years. It stipulates that any meeting with more than 5 people must be previously authorized by one of the 15 security services, two weeks in advance. To obtain authorization, they must specify the names of the speakers, together with a copy of each speech and the full list of participants. So many years of horrific dictatorship explains why it has been difficult for activists to carry out militancy in Syria, but that does not answer a question that surely hangs in the minds of millions around the world: Why have so many young activists and militants been attracted to Islamic and religious groups in Syria? Why haven’t they sought militancy in leftist groups, in the Communist Party, or the Socialist Party?

And the explanation is very simple: Because Stalinism and social democrats have always supported the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad. Even Assad’s own Ba’ath party claimed to be socialist, which means that the Syrian people saw how these so-called “socialists” tortured and killed people, something similar to what happens in Venezuela, North Korea, China or Cuba where a dictatorship that calls itself “socialist” represses the people and defends capitalism.

The dictator Hafez Al-Assad promoted the “National Progressive Front” led by the Ba’ath Party, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Khalid Bakdash, agreed to join the Popular Front created by Al-Assad. Then the CP split into two wings, the one led by Khaled Bakdash, and the wing led by Youssef Faisal, but both, and even Kadri Jamil’s People’s Will Party, have always supported the Syrian dictatorship, guaranteeing themselves ministerial positions in the government and slandering the forces of the revolution.

So if a young activist, a fighter for women’s rights, or an anti-dictatorial leader sought to confront the Assad dictatorship, the only thing he found were religious groups, whether they were jihadists, Islamists, Salafists or otherwise. I couldn’t find the left, because the leftist groups were always defending a horrific dictatorship. This is the explanation why thousands of young people in order to organize politically against the dictatorship in Syria, had no choice but to join religious groups. They were the only ones who confronted the dictatorship.

It is not that there have not been attempts in the history of Syria to build Marxist organizations. We have the case of comrades like Munif Mulhem who was imprisoned in horrific conditions for 17 years, from 1981 to 1997. Munif created a Trotskyist wing in the Communist Party of Labor, and he himself promoted the Communist Action Party of Syria, close to Mandelism. We also had other examples such as that of the Palestinian revolutionary Salameh Keilah, now deceased, who suffered imprisonment and torture for eight years forming the Syrian Left Coalition, or Workers’ Democracy of Argentina, which sent comrades to fight in Syria in favor of the revolution. These organizations could not survive the repression of the dictatorship, but even beyond political differences, they were important efforts to provide an alternative to the Ba’ath Party and Stalinism.

But now the victory of the Syrian revolution opens the doors to Marxists in the Middle East. Thousands of activists begin to make a new experience as the revolution unfolds. This has entered a new stage, the revolution will now confront the future governments that defend capitalism and will allow thousands of new activists to access Marxism. From La Marx International we salute the Syrian revolution, and we address those thousands of activists who have achieved the enormous revolutionary effort of overthrowing the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad to build a revolutionary organization, regrouping revolutionaries to develop with more strength of the Second Arab Spring on the road to Global Socialism.

Source by www.revolucion.org.es

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by Michael Pröbsting, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 10 December 2024, www.thecommunists.net

Since the glorious Syrian Revolution succeeded in overthrowing the Assad tyranny, Israel has escalated its aggression. ^[1] Israeli air force attacked more than 250 military targets across Syria over the past 48 hours. “This is one of the largest offensive operations in Air Force history,” Israeli military radio Galei Tzahal reported. [2]

Furthermore, the Israeli army deployed troops to the buffer zone on the border between Israel and Syria. Israel’s 210^th “Bashan” Regional Division, took over the entirety of the Golan, including the Syrian side of the Mount Hermon summit. According to local sources, reported by the Lebanese Al Mayadeen, “Israeli tanks are now positioned 3 km away from the city of Qatna in the capital’s countryside, nearly 20 km away from Damascus. Moreover, Israeli forces have occupied several towns and villages, including Aarna, Baqa’sm, al-Reemeh, Hinah, Qal’a, Jandal, al-Husseiniyah, Jita, and al-Khashab in the southern countryside of Damascus.” ^[3]

While the United Nations and several Arab countries immediately denounced this blatant aggression and land grab, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that the Golan Heights would remain permanently under Israeli control.

Israel’s interests

The reasons for the Zionist aggression are obvious. First, as a colonial settler state, Isreal is, and has always been, expansionist and tries to expel the Arab people from their land. It did so in 1948, in 1967, in 1973, in 1982 and today in Gaza. There will be no peace as long as the Zionist terror state continues to exist.

Secondly, Israel fears that a Syria under control of the rebels will be more dangerous than under Assad. Already before the successful overthrow of the tyrant, various Israeli officials stated their preference for Assad staying in power. Eliyahu Yosian, former member of the notorious Israeli 8200 Intelligence Unit, said: “We must support Assad; keeping him in power aligns with Israel’s interests. Assad is a weak guy serving our interests. We must support Assad’s existence.” [4] And Israeli state-owned KAN reported that despite labeling Assad as a “brutal dictator,” the U.S. seems to prefer his regime’s stability over the chaos of uncontrolled armed factions. [5]

Israel’s reasoning is no surprise since Syria under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad never fired a single shot against the settler state.

Now, with the rebels in power, the Zionist state wants to weaken its enemies as much as possible. The Israeli outlet ynet, affiliated with newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth – one of the largest in the country – reports today: “Israel has seized the historic opportunity after the fall of the Assad regime, to destroy the last remaining advanced weapons systems on its borders. (…) According to estimations the Syrian air force could be destroyed within days and would not fall into the hands of the rebels. Air defenses including surface to air missile systems have also been put out of commission, solidifying Israel’s air superiority.” ^[6]

And the Times of Israel, another big mainstream newspaper, writes “that if the strikes continue at their current pace, officials believe the Syrian Air Force will be all but destroyed in a matter of days, ensuring that the rebel groups, and any future government, will not be able to threaten Israel from the air.” [7]

The Putinist smear of the rebels as “proxies” of Israel and the U.S.

All this demonstrates how silly the smears of the pro-Assad and pro-Putin propagandists – parroted by their Stalinist friends around the world – have been who denounce the rebels as “proxies” of Israel and the U.S. If their so-called “proxies” have come to power, why on earth would Israel intensify its aggression against Syria?! Clearly these people live in a parallel universe … or took too many of Assad’s Captagon pills! [8]

It is a particular shame that the YPG – the self-proclaimed leadership of the Kurdish minority in Syria – has turned to Israel to build an alliance against the rebels. According to the Jerusalem Post – an English-language mainstream Israeli newspaper – “representatives of the Syrian Kurds have appealed to Israeli officials seeking assistance and protection. (…) Israel, which views the Kurdish community as a friendly and Western-oriented entity, has been working with Western countries since the beginning of the current campaign to ensure the security of the Kurds within the emerging new reality in Syria. The current situation, including the victory of Sunni jihadists and the intensification of the civil war, creates security and political uncertainty.” [9]

It is obvious that the YPG leadership which has collaborated closely with U.S. imperialism, and which now reaches out to Israel, does not represent the authentic interests of the Kurdish masses! [10]

Let’s be clear: Israel is the enemy of the Syrian people. We have no doubt that the Syrian masses will defend their homeland against the Zionist aggressors, reclaim the Golan Heights and aid the heroic Palestinian people in liberating their land.

A commander of the rebels certainly expressed the feelings of many Syrians when he proclaimed in the famous Umayyad Mosque: “This is the land of Islam, this is Damascus, the Muslim stronghold. From here to Jerusalem. We’re coming for Jerusalem. Patience, people of Gaza, patience!”. [11]

Yesterday Idlib, today Damascus, tomorrow Jerusalem!

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The Global North and its corporate executives have wielded the concept of ‘corruption’ to underdevelop the Global South, whose social wealth it instead injects into the Continent of Sleaze.

12 December 2024

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The eighth continent is the Continent of Sleaze. You and I have never been there, only heard rumours about it. On that continent, there are rivers of money in which corporate executives bathe and from which they extract whatever they want in order to increase their power, privilege, and property. The corporate executives venture out to lay their hands on the wealth of the world and carry it back to their Continent of Sleaze. What remains is dust and shadows, barely enough for people to survive so that they can continue to labour and produce more social wealth for the Continent of Sleaze. Everyone sees this wealth being syphoned off to this other continent, but few want to acknowledge it. Most blame themselves for their poverty rather than the structure of corruption and pillaging that are inherent to the neocolonial capitalist system. Disconnected from social struggle, it is far easier to live innocently without that dangerous knowledge, that outrageous Promethean fire.

Corruption is like rust, corroding the metal of society. The greater the corruption, the deeper the collapse of social institutions and social fellowship. The incentive to follow rules withers as more and more people among the elite and their close associates benefit from their violation. Bribery and nepotism are the contours of modern corruption. The deadly sins of greed and pride are rewarded while the virtues of honesty and decency are mocked as being ‘naïve’. A hundred years ago, Mahatma Gandhi said that ‘the test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses’. By that measure, the test of orderliness in the world today shows absolute chaos, governed by the ambition amongst the wealthy to become the world’s first trillionaire while global rates of hunger rise astronomically. The wealthy are permitted to remain wealthy and, indeed, to become wealthier by any means, and they have institutionalised corruption to further their ambitions.

In our dossier no. 82, How Neoliberalism Has Wielded ‘Corruption’ to Privatise Life in Africa, we examine the problem of corruption, which has threatened not only the integrity of public institutions, but also of society in general. The main thesis is that since the onset of the neoliberal era in the 1980s–1990s, the concept of corruption has been narrowed to describe only public sector corruption. One of the main agents for this reduced idea of corruption is Transparency International (TI), founded in 1993 in Germany, which greatly influenced the United Nations Convention against Corruption (2003). Since then, governments in the Global North have used TI data to pressure multilateral agencies (such as the International Monetary Fund, IMF) to make this idea of ‘corruption’ central to their operations in the developing world. If a country was shown to have a high corruption score, then it became more expensive for that country to access funds through credit markets, giving these agencies more leverage over its policies and overall governance. These agencies told the developing country that, in order to improve its corruption score, it needed to reform its public institutions, such as by shrinking the size of public bureaucracy – even, strangely, the regulatory bodies of the state – and the number of state employees overall. In the 1990s, the IMF began to require developing nations to cut their wage bill for public sector employees as a key condition for granting loans and financial assistance. Because they so desperately need funds to cover their external debts, many countries have acquiesced to this condition and slashed their public sector. Today, 21% of the European workforce, on average, is employed in the public sector; in contrast, that number is a mere 2.38% in Mali, 3.6% in Nigeria, and 6.7% in Zambia, which in turn limits these states’ capacity to manage and regulate large multinational corporations on the African continent. This stark contrast is the reason why this dossier focuses on the African continent.

Today, African scholarship rarely defines the terms of African actuality. The concepts of neocolonialism – such as ‘structural adjustment’, ‘market liberalisation’, ‘corruption’, and ‘good governance’ – are forcibly imposed on the continent and its intellectuals, ahistorically eliding any serious mention of the legacy of colonialism, the struggles to establish state sovereignty and reclaim the dignity of the people, and the theories of development that emerge in out of these histories and struggles. There is an a priori racist belief that African states are corrupt and that the absence of state institutions will somehow allow for growth and development. Yet, when regulatory institutions are eroded, it is foreign multinational corporations that benefit the most.

Africa is a continent rich in resources, home to around 30% of the world’s mineral reserves (including 40% of the world’s gold, up to 90% of its chromium and platinum, and the largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum, and uranium), 8% of the world’s natural gas, and 12% of the world’s oil reserves; it also holds 65% of the world’s arable land and 10% of the planet’s internal renewable fresh water sources. However – largely due to the policies of the colonial period and their continuation in the neocolonial period – African states have been unable to harness those resources for their own development. The ruling elites in these nation-states have turned over their sovereignty to enormously powerful multinational corporations (MNCs) whose profits are far beyond these states’ Gross Domestic Products. MNCs declare only a fraction of their earnings, about two-thirds of which are ‘mispriced’ and much of which is sent off to tax havens. A 2021 report, for instance, showed that capital flight from thirty African countries between 1970 and 2018 totalled $2 trillion (in 2018 US dollars) while the African Development Bank noted that illicit financial outflows from Africa increased somewhere from US $1.22 to $1.35 trillion between 1980 and 2009. Today, it is estimated that illegal financial flows out of Africa amount to $88.6 billion per year.

The ruling elites in these African states accede to these firms, often because they are bribed to turn a blind eye to corporate corruption. In 2016, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa reported that 99.5% of bribes to African officials are paid by non-African firms and suggested that large mining conglomerates are knee deep in the bribery industry. Corporate bribery certainly pays off: the rate of return earned by Western-based resource extraction firms is considerable, saving the MNCs hundreds of billions in unpaid taxes. In other words, Africa’s ruling elites are selling off their countries cheaply. Meanwhile, there is nothing left for the children who live above the copper and the gold. They cannot read the agreements that their governments make with the mining companies. Nor can many of their parents.

On the Continent of Sleaze, there is no care about the tidal corruption that sweeps across the world. There is no concern for the casual theft of hundreds of billions of dollars through mechanisms that have been anointed by accountancy firms and normalised by multilateral agencies that sniff at the slightest infraction in the public sector in the Global South. There is no thought given to colonialism and neocolonialism, words that have no meaning on the Continent of Sleaze.

In his remarkable book Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971), the South African poet Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali published ‘Always a Suspect’. This poem tackles one of the most ubiquitous aspects of racism – the assumption that a Black man is a thief. It is never the colonial plunderer who is accused of theft but the colonised, who are themselves victims of the theft of their lands and wealth. Mtshali’s poem illustrates how the racist assumption of African corruption seeps even to everyday life:

I get up in the morning
and dress up like a gentleman –
A white shirt, a tie, and a suit.

I walk into the street
to be met by a man
who tells me ‘to produce’.

I show him
the document of my existence
to be scrutinised and given the nod.

Then I enter the foyer of the building
to have my way barred by a commissionaire
‘What do you want?’.

I trudge the city pavements
side by side with ‘madam’
who shifts her handbag
from my side to the other,
and looks at me with eyes that say
‘Ha! Ha! I know who you are;
beneath those fine clothes
ticks the heart of a thief’.

Warmly,

Vijay

Republished From: https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/continent-of-sleaze/

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Hadjara Ali Soumaila, Confederation of Women Combatants and Pan-African Leaders (Niger). Photograph by Pedro Stropasolas for Peoples Dispatch.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

A cascade of anti-French sentiment continues to sweep across the belt of the Sahel in Africa: joining Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, Chad and Senegal demanded in November that the French government withdraw its military from their territories. From the western border of Sudan to the Atlantic Ocean, French armed forces, which have been in the area since 1659, will no longer have a base. The statement by the foreign minister of Chad, Abderaman Koulamallah, is exemplary: ‘France… must now also consider that Chad has grown up, matured, and that Chad is a sovereign state that is very jealous of its sovereignty’. The key term here is ‘sovereignty’. What Koulamallah signals is that the countries of the Sahel are no longer satisfied by the symbolic independence – or flag independence – critiqued by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), what they want is genuine sovereignty.

Fanon’s book was published the year after the countries in the Sahel won their formal independence from France in 1960. But this ‘independence’ was shallow. It meant that these countries, from Senegal to Chad, would remain part of the Communauté franco-africaine(French-African Community, CFA) and that they would allow for the use of the CFA franc, anchored in France, as their currency, that they would allow French companies to remain in control of their economies, and that they would allow French troops to be based on their territory. In September 1958, a constitutional referendum was held across the French colonies of the Sahel, with only Guinea voting against the proposition for ‘independence’ from direct French colonial rule under the French neocolonial CFA. Forces that campaigned against joining the CFA and winning actual independence faced repression from Charles de Gaulle’s political and military establishment.

Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel, Niamey, Niger. Photograph by Pedro Stropasolas for Peoples Dispatch.

Djibo Bakary (1922–1998), the leader of the Union of Popular Forces for Democracy and Progress-Sawaba (Liberation) party and president of Niger’s Government Council, articulated the mood of the people in the late 1950s with his slogan, l’indépendance nationale d’abord, le reste ensuite (‘national independence first, the rest afterwards’). Bakary was invested in the idea of sawki (‘deliverance’), which meant not only relief from French colonialism but abolition of poverty and distress. In May 1958, the General Union of Workers of Black Africa (UGTAN) met in Cotonou (Benin) and called for the total end of the French colonial system. That July, at an inter-territorial conference in Cotonou, Bakary catapulted this demand into wider public discourse in Niger and across the Sahel. At the Sawaba party congress the following month, in August, Adamou Sékou reflected the sensibility against the French desire for colonial rule by other means: ‘this sense of our human dignity that too many of our metropolitan friends have difficulty admitting; a dignity that we can never renounce because the black Africans want to be themselves free first and foremost’.

If people are not allowed to be ‘themselves’ or free, Fanon wrote around the same time, then they will rebel. ‘The masses begin to sulk’, he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth. ‘They turn away from this nation in which they have been given no place and begin to lose interest in it’. The false nationalists, or flag nationalists, Fanon wrote, ‘mobilise the people with slogans of independence, and for the rest leave it to future events’. Six decades later, we are now in the midst of these ‘future events’.

Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel, Niamey, Niger. Photograph by Pedro Stropasolas for Peoples Dispatch.

From 19 to 21 November, hundreds of people from around the continent and the world gathered in Niamey, Niger, for the Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel. This was the first such conference since the military coups overthrew the French affiliated governments in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, and since the establishment in September 2023 of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The conference, held at Niamey’s Mahatma Gandhi International Conference Centre, was coordinated by the West African Peoples Organisation (WAPO), Pan-Africanism Today, and the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA). Speakers at the conference included representatives of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP), people’s organisations from the AES as well as other countries in the Sahel, West Africa and the continent, and political leaders from Latin America to Asia. The three days culminated in the passage of the Niamey Declaration, whose last section bears quoting in full:

1. We commend the governments emerging from recent coups for adopting patriotic measures to reclaim political and economic sovereignty over their territories and natural resources. These measures include terminating neocolonial agreements, demanding the withdrawal of French, American, and other foreign forces, and undertaking ambitious plans for sovereign development.
2. We are particularly encouraged by these countries’ formation of the Alliance of Sahel States. This move revitalises the legacy of Pan-African leaders and represents a concrete step toward true independence and Pan-African unity.
3. These governments currently enjoy widespread support from their citizens, who drive and rally around these revolutionary actions. This unity is crucial for achieving democratic and patriotic ideals and is an aspirational development model for other African nations.

In conclusion, while much remains to be done toward the complete liberation of the Sahel states, we are optimistic that these governments, by continuing to listen to their people, will fulfil their objectives for total national liberation and contribute to the broader goal of a unified and free Africa.

Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel, Niamey, Niger. Photograph by Pedro Stropasolas for Peoples Dispatch.

In August 2022, fifteen social and political organisations in Niger joined together to form the M62 Movement (Sacred Union for the Safeguard of the Sovereignty and Dignity of the People, M62). They released a statement against the presence of the French military in Niger, which had been ‘driven out of Mali and [are] illegally present on our territory’, and called for their ‘immediate departure’. The movement asked ‘all citizens to form citizens’ committees for dignity’ across the country. One of the movement’s leaders, Abdoulaye Seydou, heads the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy, and Development, whose office is named after the Burkinabe leader Thomas Sankara (1949–1987). The office itself has a picture of Fanon with the quote, ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’. Seydou’s general political outlook at that time was that the misery of the people of Niger could not be overcome within the context of French neocolonial control. That is why the M62 began rolling protests against the French military presence and held a nightly cultural festival in Niamey to deepen the message for deliverance. These protests galvanised the military to move against the neocolonial administration of Mohamed Bazoum and install a government lead by General Abdourahamane Tchiani. This coup, like those in Burkina Faso and Mali, was widely celebrated in the country for having opened the door to what Fanon had called ‘future events’.

At the solidarity conference in November, Souleymane Falmata Taya, a leader of the M62 movement, said that the struggle in Niger was not being led by the military but by the youth and women. ‘All we want is to be treated as human beings’, she said. A few months earlier, she had said that the people of Niger appreciate the strides made by the government of Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine, a former minister of finance, but that the people must be vigilant and the government must be transparent.

Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel, Niamey, Niger. Photograph by Pedro Stropasolas for Peoples Dispatch.

In 1991, former left-wing student leaders formed the Revolutionary Organisation for New Democracy-Tarmouwa (‘star’ in Hausa) or ORDN-Tarmouwa. This political organisation has played a foundational role in the mass movements against the French neocolonial structure and the parasitic governments that enabled it. Mamane Sani Adamou, one of the founders of the ORDN-Tarmouwa, called the recent period a second awakening for the people of Niger. ‘We are living through a patriotic revolution, a struggle for a second independence’. The people of Niger need sovereignty over their monetary system, over their food production, and over their overall economic agenda. ‘We need to adopt a new strategy’, he said. ‘The difference today is that we are deciding on our own. We no longer get instructions from Paris. We take instructions from home’.

The fundamental word in the Sahel is sovereignty. If a dependent country such as Senegal or Niger fights for sovereignty, and if it tries to deepen its sovereignty, it will certainly need to dislodge the tentacles of the neocolonial structure. There can be no sovereignty with the neocolonial structure in place. At this point, imperialist intervention is inevitable. How the forces for sovereignty will deal with a sharp imperialist attack is to be seen. When the French tried to intervene against these popular military coups through the military forces of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2023, this threat only accelerated the integration of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger into the AES. The first test was successfully overcome by the popular coup governments, who refused to surrender to an imperialist intervention. To escalate the demand for sovereignty through a struggle with the imperialist system, as is demanded by ORDN-Tarmouwa and M62, will necessarily force these governments to deepen their commitment to solving social problems.

Fanon’s ‘future events’ are now our present. So is the expectation of Sawaba’s Adamou Sékou, who said in 1958, ‘From Téra to N’guigmi, the refrain of independence must have its echoes in every village’. Independence, he said, ‘is the end of backward colonialism, with its slave-trading economy, its dispossessions, its social injustices. It is the end of the calculation of values based on the pigmentation of men. It is the end of prejudices. It is the resurrection of our people’.

Warmly,

Vijay

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A nationwide uprising in Georgia against the rule of the capitalist oligarchy of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream party that responds to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship is once again convulsing this ancient Caucasus country, which is at a crossroads between Slavic, Turkish and Persian cultures. For 4 days mass mobilizations have been going through the capital of Georgia, the Georgian people have been fighting for several decades to become independent from the prison of peoples that the Russian Federation represents.

The capitalist oligarchy headed by Putin cannot allow any sovereignty or national independence because its class privileges depend on it. As we have been explaining in various works, [1] Putin’s dictatorship represents the oligarchy and the capitalist ruling classes of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia, which although legally not within the Russian Federation (like Chechnya and other smaller nations) through fraud and pressure, maintains puppet governments in the same countries, such as the one that overthrew the Ukrainian revolution of 2014. They are all governments that contributed to and benefited from the process of capitalist restoration in Russia directed from Wall Street, they are the same names that have become millionaires by privatizing, repressing the people and plundering the wealth of the nations of the former Soviet Union in favor of imperialist companies through a people’s prison that reminds us of the times of the Russia of the tsars.

The Ukrainian revolution that began in 2014 with the Revolution of Dignity (also known as the Euromaidan) against the puppet government of Viktor Yanukovych, kicked off the struggle for the liberation of nations to shake off the yoke of the Russian capitalist Federation, which has been violently responded to by Vladimir Putin with the invasion of Ukraine that began two years ago and has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The capitalist oligarchy of the Russian Federation invades and represses the nationalities subjected under its yoke in defense of its wealth based on the exploitation of the workers, and the plundering of the peoples of the regions controlled under the people’s prison that is the Russian Federation.

The capitalist oligarchy headed by Putin cannot allow any kind of sovereignty, because the existence of the Russian Federation guarantees the existence of a regime of super exploitation over the peoples it oppresses, it is no coincidence that before dying, the former president of the United States, Henry Kissinger, came to the defense of the Russian Federation. warning about the dangers for US imperialism that the fall of Vladimir Putin could mean, whom he met in the early 90’s of the last century, at that time Putin worked for the mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak and was a member of the bilateral Kissinger-Sobchak commission to promote US investment in Russia. [2]

From the very beginning, the Kremlin recognized the Georgian uprising as “a Ukrainian-style revolution”, [3] since the Georgian people seek to leave the sphere of influence and subjugation of Russian capitalism to adhere to the capitalism of the European Union, which is a vain illusion, this process of national liberation passes through illusions of the masses in another capitalist bloc, which in the medium term, will lead to a new disillusionment, as happened to the Ukrainian people. This is because the European Union will not escape the crisis of stagnation + inflation (stagflation) that overwhelms all imperialist countries, and the only way out that will guarantee a future for the workers is the socialist revolution.

We know this type of uprising as “unconscious revolutions” or “February revolutions”, led by other capitalist blocs, in allusion to the mass uprising that destroyed the Russia of the tsars and was commanded by a bourgeois bloc.

In addition to being the founder of the main leader of the ruling party (Georgian Dream), Bidzina Ivanishvili is nothing less than the richest and most influential man in Georgia, his fortune is estimated at 7,500 million dollars, [4] in a country whose GDP is located at 30 billion dollars, that is, Ivanisvili’s wealth represents a quarter of Georgia’s GDP, his government promotes membership of the Kremlin and distancing itself from the European Union. The Georgian uprising takes place in a context of inflation and the fall of the Russian currency (the ruble) to 108.01 units per dollar, while the Georgian government has just announced the freezing for 4 years (until 2028) of negotiations for this country to join the European Union, a goal set out in the constitution. The puppet government of Bidzina Ivanishvili has just held totally fraudulent parliamentary elections, with the aim of holding on to power indefinitely.

The repression launched by the oligarch Ivanishvili has led to hundreds of injuries and arrests in the streets during demonstrations against the regime, which has led nations such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to announce the sanctioning of 11 politicians and officials in Tbilisi, accusing them of “human rights abuses”; among the officials sanctioned are Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Minister of the Interior Vakhtang Gomelauri; as well as Deputy Interior Ministers Shalva Bedoidze, Ioseb Chelidze, Aleksandre Darakhvelidze and Giorgi Butkhuzi.

In the mobilizations, some Georgians carry the flag of the European Union (EU) with the false illusion that by joining the European Union they can improve their living conditions. It is a false illusion inoculated by the European capitalist parties, because all the capitalist countries of the world are sinking into hunger and poverty.

Long live the mobilization of the Georgian people!

The Georgian people’s hatred of Great Russian chauvinism is long-standing, to say the least, dating back to the time of the tsars, going through the most recent conflict in August 2008, when capitalist Russia invaded militarily in a failed attempt to regain control over its breakaway province of South Ossetia. Putin recognized the independence of South Ossetia and another breakaway province, Abkhazia, and established military bases there.

The peoples of the world have synchronized their liberation struggles in a new revolutionary wave that runs from the imperialist countries to the most remote corners of the planet. After the Ukrainian national liberation war, the uprising of October 7, 2023 occurred in occupied Palestine, which inaugurates the national liberation war of the Palestinian people, in recent days, rebel troops have been reactivated in Syria against the murderous regime of Bashir Al Asaad, at the same time as a major general strike is taking place in Italy. We must surround the people of Georgia with solidarity, and support their claim until their triumph, an indispensable foundation for the end of Putin’s dictatorship, and Global Socialism.

The Georgian people have joined the world revolution, who in different processes and unconscious revolutions seek to emancipate themselves from different types of oppression, be it national, class, race or gender.

source by www.revolucion.org.es

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