200 Million Strike in India Against Right-Wing Narendra Modi Government’s Policies

Editor’s Note: The following article contains terminology that may allude readers. However, Toward Freedom published this piece because it provides a different dimension to the struggle against U.S. imperialism. The Qiao Collective, of which the writer is a member, is comprised of members of the Chinese diaspora who seek to explain U.S. imperialism’s impact on China.

On May 26, 2021, President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to produce “analysis of the origins of COVID-19” within 90 days. This move followed weeks of speculation surrounding the claim that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory, usually identified as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Having rightly rejected this claim for more than a year as a Trumpian conspiracy theory, centrist and liberal commentators in the West have breathed new life into the “lab leak” hypothesis, taking cues from allegations and claims made by U.S. state leaders and corporate media. Meanwhile, Facebook and other social media giants reversed their censorship of lab-leak disinformation almost overnight, impelled by a tawdry mix of insinuations from unnamed U.S. intelligence sources and vague allegations of impropriety relating to the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the pandemic earlier this year.

Right on schedule, the nation’s finest intelligence analysts delivered their report to the White House on August 24 and released an unclassified summary three days later. The once hotly anticipated story landed like a damp squib and was buried by the regular news cycle in less than a day. In part, this was due to the inconclusive nature of the findings: four intelligence community (IC) elements and the National Intelligence Council assessed “with low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from “natural exposure,” another IC element leaned “with moderate confidence” toward lab leak, and three others did not commit either way, though they naturally all agreed that “Beijing… continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States.” But what really doomed the report to oblivion was a signal failure of U.S. intelligence—and the entire imperial apparatus—on a far grander scale: the utter rout of the United States’ puppet regime in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who in 10 days captured every provincial capital (save one), including Kabul.

One underexplored throughline linking both events is Biden’s fraught though largely earnest attempts to restore the traditionally multilateral basis of the U.S. empire, drawing a sharp distinction with his predecessor Donald Trump. While Trump dramatically withdrew the United States from the WHO at the height of a global pandemic in 2020, alleging an entirely illusory pro-China bias, one of Biden’s first acts in office was to rejoin the organization. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus duly celebrated the restoration of U.S. funding by contradicting the WHO mission’s own assessment, as part of a joint study with China, that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.”

Biden’s penchant for pursuing the new cold war through multilateral channels has continued in his engagement with the G7 and NATO. Trump famously denigrated both forums and delighted in alienating the United States’ sub-imperial vassals. Biden has, meanwhile, used these summits to great effect as ostensibly internationalist window dressing for the military encirclement of China. In June, a NATO Brussels Summit Communiqué for the first time identified “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behaviour” as “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security.” In the months since, Britain, France, and even Germany have launched performative naval incursions into the South China Sea—almost the antipodal opposite of the alliance’s ostensible remit in the North Atlantic.

Biden and the Democrats’ response to the domestic surge in anti-Asian racism, effectively delinking it rhetorically from their imperial aggression against China, has followed a similar logic. Gone are the days of presidential bombast over the “China virus” and the “Kung Flu.” Instead, after the Atlanta spa shootings of March 16, the Democrats worked overtime to identify Trump and his loyalists as the unique locus of violent anti-Asian animus. They extended the promise of full inclusion into American society and protection from isolated acts of vigilante terror—a promise somehow underwritten by a violently racist policing system and conditioned on mawkish displays of loyalty to the imperial project. The United States’ selective incorporation of the Asian and particularly Chinese diaspora, in exchange for Asian Americans’ active collusion in the relentless demonization by the United States of their countries of origin, has ample historical precedent. That Biden signed the (predictably hyper-carceral) COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act on May 20, 2021, mere days before ordering his intelligence apparatus to fan the flames of sinophobic hate by promoting the lab-leak myth, is testament to the inestimable hypocrisy of liberal “anti-racism.”

No figure in the Biden administration so thoroughly embodies the hollowness of such politics as Kamala Harris, an infamously vindictive ex-prosecutor now feted as the first Black and Asian vice president. Coincidentally or not, she too found herself playing an awkwardly timed bit part in the hybrid war on China as her government’s imperial designs in Afghanistan hurtled to their ignoble denouement. While the humbled U.S. military shambolically evacuated the one remaining piece of Afghan territory it controlled after a 20-year war—making sure to commit some parting war crimes for long-suffering civilians to remember it by—Harris was tasked with enlisting Singapore and Vietnam into the United States’ machinations in the South China Sea. Vietnam at least did not take the bait, instead reaffirming its historic ties to the People’s Republic of China as a fellow socialist state.

All that said, the most spectacular failure of the United States’ return to traditional alliance structures is undoubtedly the Afghanistan withdrawal itself. The irony is inescapable: Joe Biden, who staked so much on multilateralism and a clean reputational break with his predecessor, has infuriated his “coalition partners” by honoring Trump’s unilateral commitment to end 20 years of brutal military occupation. Extraordinarily, the United States has arm-twisted its Western allies into accepting the unmitigated defeat of a common imperial project, which it initiated, gravely harming its relations with its allies in the process.

Already, of course, the U.S. and its allies are undermining the prospects for lasting peace by threatening the new Afghan government with debilitating sanctions and fearmongering about a new “Taliban-Pakistan-China” axis. This confluence of events has not gone unnoticed in China, where Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointedly urged the U.S. to “work with the international community to provide Afghanistan with urgently-needed economic, livelihood, and humanitarian assistance” while condemning “the so-called investigation report on COVID-19 origins produced by the U.S. intelligence community” on a call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In the fevered imaginations of U.S. war planners and their media sycophants, the empire’s greatest ideological, civilizational, and racial enemies of the last century—communism, Islamist jihadism, and a rising China—seem to be fusing into one. Hopefully, recent events have taught the United States’ prospective partners to think twice before following them once more unto the breach.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Charles Xu is a member of the Qiao Collective and of the No Cold War collective.

We are honored regular contributor Sanket Jain has been named a Top 10 finalist for Oxfam’s 2021-22 Journalism for an Equitable Asia Award. With his eye for detail, Sanket has sensitively reported on and photographed the stories of several rural Indians. All of his subjects have felt the pain of losing their livelihoods as the country locked down at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Indian government provided little to no recompense for the 833 million people who live in rural India.

Special thanks to Charlotte Dennett, who guest edited Toward Freedom from late 2020 until May. Her experience as a journalist and author helped shape the article up for consideration, “COVID-19 and the Desperate Lives of India’s Sugarcane Workers.”

Other articles Sanket filed during the pandemic include:

• Photo Essay: India’s Lockdown Happened Two Years Ago, But the Poor Still Suffer
• How Neoliberal Austerity Stripped India’s Healthcare Infrastructure
• How Covid-19 Is Wiping Out India’s Traditional Craft-making… and Millions of Jobs

The award winner will be announced at 2 p.m. Bangkok time on March 15. The event can be attended in person and watched online by registering here.

We at Toward Freedom congratulate Sanket for being recognized for his rare coverage from India’s countryside. This work continues our 69-year legacy of documenting oppressed people’s struggles.

Sincerely,
Julie Varughese
Editor

Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s analysis about a disputed area known as “Western Sahara” and was produced by Globetrotter.

In November 2020, the Moroccan government sent its military to the Guerguerat area, a buffer zone between the territory claimed by the Kingdom of Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The Guerguerat border post is at the very southern edge of Western Sahara along the road that goes to Mauritania. The presence of Moroccan troops “in the Buffer Strip in the Guerguerat area” violated the 1991 ceasefire agreed upon by the Moroccan monarchy and the Polisario Front of the Sahrawi. That ceasefire deal was crafted with the assumption that the United Nations would hold a referendum in Western Sahara to decide on its fate; no such referendum has been held, and the region has existed in stasis for three decades now.

In mid-January 2022, the United Nations sent its Personal Envoy for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura, to Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania to begin a new dialogue “toward a constructive resumption of the political process on Western Sahara.” De Mistura was previously deputed to solve the crises of U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; none of his missions have ended well and have mostly been lost causes. The UN has appointed five personal envoys for Western Sahara so far—including De Mistura—beginning with former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III, who served from 1997 to 2004. De Mistura, meanwhile, succeeded former German President Horst Köhler, who resigned in 2019. Köhler’s main achievement was to bring the four main parties—Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria and Mauritania—to a first roundtable discussion in Geneva in December 2018: this roundtable process resulted in a few gains, where all participants agreed on “cooperation and regional integration,” but no further progress seems to have been made to resolve the issues in the region since then. When the UN put forward De Mistura’s nomination to this post, Morocco had initially resisted his appointment. But under pressure from the West, Morocco finally accepted his appointment in October 2021, with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita welcoming him to Rabat on January 14. De Mistura also met the Polisario Front representative to the UN in New York on November 6, 2021, before meeting other representatives in Tindouf, Algeria, at Sahrawi refugee camps in January. There is very little expectation that these meetings will result in any productive solution in the region.

Abraham Accords

In August 2020, the United States government engineered a major diplomatic feat called the Abraham Accords. The United States secured a deal with Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to agree to a rapprochement with Israel in return for the United States making arms sales to these countries, as well as for the United States legitimizing Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. The arms deals were of considerable amounts—$23 billion worth of weapons to the UAE and $1 billion worth of drones and munitions to Morocco. For Morocco, the main prize was that the United States—breaking decades of precedent—decided to back its claim to the vast territory of Western Sahara. The United States is now the only Western country to recognize Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, it was expected that he might review parts of the Abraham Accords. However, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it clear during his meeting with Bourita in November 2021 that the U.S. government would continue to maintain the position taken by the previous Trump administration that Morocco has sovereignty over Western Sahara. The United States, meanwhile, has continued with its arms sales to Morocco, but has suspended weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates.

Phosphates

By the end of November 2021, the government of Morocco announced that it had earned $6.45 billion from the export of phosphate from the kingdom and from the occupied territory of Western Sahara. If you add up the phosphate reserves in this entire region, it amounts to 72 percent of the entire phosphate reserves in the world (the second-highest percentage of these reserves is in China, which has around 6 percent). Phosphate, along with nitrogen, makes synthetic fertilizer, a key element in modern food production. While nitrogen is recoverable from the air, phosphates, found in the soil, are a finite reserve. This gives Morocco a tight grip over world food production. There is no doubt that the occupation of Western Sahara is not merely about national pride, but it is largely about the presence of a vast number of resources—especially phosphates—that can be found in the territory.

In 1975, a UN delegation that visited Western Sahara noted that “eventually the territory will be among the largest exporters of phosphate in the world.” While Western Sahara’s phosphate reserves are less than those of Morocco, the Moroccan state-owned firm OCP SA has been mining the phosphate in Western Sahara and manufacturing phosphate fertilizer for great profit. The most spectacular mine in Western Sahara is in Bou Craa, from which 10 percent of OCP SA’s profits come; Bou Craa, which is known as “the world’s longest conveyor belt system,” carries the phosphate rock more than 60 miles to the port at El Aaiún. In 2002, the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Legal Affairs at that time, Hans Corell, noted in a letter to the president of the UN Security Council that “if further exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara, they would be in violation of the principles of international law applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.” An international campaign to prevent the extraction of the “conflict phosphate” from Western Sahara by Morocco has led many firms around the world to stop buying phosphate from OCP SA. Nutrien, the largest fertilizer manufacturer in the United States that used Moroccan phosphates, decided to stop imports from Morocco in 2018. That same year, the South African court challenged the right of ships carrying phosphate from the region to dock in their ports, ruling that “the Moroccan shippers of the product had no legal right to it.”

Only three known companies continue to buy conflict phosphate mined in Western Sahara: Two from New Zealand (Ballance Agri-Nutrients Limited and Ravensdown) and one from India (Paradeep Phosphates Limited).

Human Rights

After the 1991 ceasefire, the UN set up a Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). This is the only UN peacekeeping force that does not have a mandate to report on human rights. The UN made this concession to appease the Kingdom of Morocco. The Moroccan government has tried to intervene several times when the UN team in Western Sahara attempted to make the slightest noise about the human rights violations in the region. In March 2016, the kingdom expelled MINURSO staff because then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to the Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an “occupation.”

Pressure from the United States is going to ensure that the only realistic outcome of negotiations is for continued Moroccan control of Western Sahara. All parties involved in the conflict are readying for battle. Far from peace, the Abraham Accords are going to accelerate a return to war in this part of Africa.

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