Czech Protesters Rail Against Inflation, Sanctions and the Ukraine Proxy War

Black political organizations and other anti-imperialist groups condemned the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raiding early Friday morning the properties of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and its solidarity organization in Saint Louis, Missouri, and in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Based on the description, APSP appears to be one of several unidentified groups and people implicated in a 25-page indictment of a Russian national, Aleksandr Ionov. The Moscow-based founder of the nonprofit Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR) has been accused of attempting to influence U.S.-based groups to turn against the United States and work in favor of Russia.

“Anyone who opposes U.S. imperialism or who has made common cause internationally is endangered,” Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley wrote on Facebook. “Not surprising that a Black organization is the first on their hit list.”

The raid began at 5 a.m. July 29 at the Saint Louis home of APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela and his wife and APSP Deputy Chair, Ona Zené Yeshitela.

Yeshitela said in a Facebook livestream later that day that the APSP was targeted for its support of Russia during the military operation the country has been undertaking in Ukraine since February 24.

Among several allegations, the FBI accused Ionov’s group of paying U.S. activists to attend two conferences in Russia. It also said Ionov helped a group conduct a tour in the United States to drum up support for a petition charging the U.S. government with committing genocide against African descendants. Yeshitela admitted meeting with Ionov twice in Russia.

“Suddenly, we’re supposed to become tools, like Black people don’t have minds of our own to find out what our reality is and who’s responsible for it,” Yeshitela said in the livestream. “It’s white people doing self-criticism and uniting to give money. That’s where the money is coming from, Uncle Sam.”

‘Crisis’ of U.S. Imperialism

Yeshitela said while the United States was targeting Black activists, it has failed diplomatically.

“They’re doing this, in part, because not a single African country—not even neocolonial sycophants—want to unite with the United States and the United Nations in terms of how they are targeting Russia in this Ukraine-Russia question,” he said, referring to the economic sanctions slapped on Russia after it entered Ukraine in February. When Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky recently held a virtual meeting with African countries, 93 percent of heads of state did not attend, despite Western pressure.

“This exposes the crisis the United States, that U.S. imperialism, is in,” said APSP Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai in a livestreamed press conference in Saint Petersburg. Anai said FBI agents lured her outside her home early Friday morning, saying her car had been broken into. Upon opening her car, they forced her to hand over her devices, she said.

Yeshitela, 80, said he and Ona were awoken Friday morning to the sound of a voice blaring through a megaphone outside their home, asking them to come outside with their hands up. Flashbang grenades were set off throughout the working-class Saint Louis neighborhood, Yeshitela added. He also said a drone almost hit Ona’s face after she opened the home’s front door. Law enforcement agents lately have deployed drones into buildings to conduct a visual search before agents enter.

Yeshitela said FBI agents handcuffed the couple and forced them to sit on the street curb while agents scoured their home. “They indicated they had a search warrant related to the indictment,” he said. The FBI freed the couple after several hours, but not without confiscating from their home all of their devices, such as computers and phones, according to Yeshitela’s livestreamed account.

The FBI was unavailable as of press time.

Black Scare, Red Scare

Black activists have long denounced the U.S. government’s anti-communist rhetoric going back to the early 20th century, saying such calls to take down communists really have translated into attempts to dismantle Black liberation movements and other liberation movements in the United States.

“In reality, what anti-communism/anti-Marxism does is to transform anything counter-hegemonic or non-conforming into subversion, foreignness, or disloyalty by punishing it as communist, communist inspired, or communist infiltrated and therefore illegal, illicit or criminal,” said Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly in a recent talk.

Burden-Stelly, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Wayne State University, has written a soon-to-be-released book, Black Scare, Red Scare (2023). It attempts to document how the U.S. government’s anti-communist policies repress Black and other oppressed people for organizing for their liberation. This, she has said, helps to protect what she calls “racial capitalism,” in which the most degrading labor is forced upon increasingly exploited racialized groups.

U.S. Government’s ‘Hysterical Response’

Black political groups denounced large segments of the U.S. political left for believing Black activists are stooges of Russia, or the former Soviet Union.

“We agree that APSP doesn’t have to apologize for fighting for justice for all oppressed and particularly African People like our ancestors Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panther Party who were spied on, jailed and assassinated for standing up for the freedom and justice for African People worldwide,” said the central committee of Pan-Africanist organization All-African People’s Revolutionary Party in a statement issued Saturday.

Activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., who were called communists, were assassinated. Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, who advocated for the unification of Africa under Pan-Africanism and the end of European colonialism in Africa, was briefly imprisoned in Atlanta for what some consider the politically motivated charge of mail fraud. Trinidad and Tobago-born U.S.-based communist Claudia Jones—after whom Toward Freedom‘s summer editorial internship was named—was deported to the United Kingdom for her activism.

“We believe this repression to be a hysterical response to the United States’ loss of legitimacy in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism and U.S. global hegemony,” said the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP)’s Coordinating Committee in a statement released Saturday. “The unleashing of policing and counterintelligence forces domestically and increased militarism and warmongering abroad in the name of national security are the only avenues left to the U.S. ruling class that is engulfed in an irreversible economic crisis. They represent the hallmarks of a naked fascism that the U.S. ruling class appears to be increasingly committed to in order to maintain the rule of capital.”

Then BAP added a warning in its statement.

“While it is APSP today, it will ultimately be the rest of us tomorrow. Resistance is our only option.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

Editor’s Note: The following opinion was first published in Black Agenda Report.

If U.S. imperialism could only be said to be one thing, it is audacious. Recently U.S. rulers have been making a fuss over Russian troops on their own border with Ukraine, while 1,000 U.S. National Guard soldiers were deployed to the Horn of Africa, in countries where the U.S. shares no borders and is actually more than 7,396 miles away.

Ever since its government was destroyed in 2011 in the first operation of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), Libya has been the quintessential victim of U.S. audacity in Africa. Now, led by the United States, Western officials have been talking up a UN-led peace process in Libya that insists on “inclusive” and “credible” elections starting on December 24, despite serious disputes over how they should be held.

Of course the Libyan people should have the right to decide their leaders, forms of government, and politics. In fact, however, it is extremely difficult to see through the murk created by the inhumanity of the U.S.-EU-NATO axis of domination.

But what sort of process for nominating candidates are the Libyan people able to exercise? How credible and inclusive can an election be that is cast in the midst of a civil war and with the United States presiding over the country’s affairs like a Godfather?

The imperialist structure responsible for leading the overthrow of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya , AFRICOM, just backed  the election efforts of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Richard Norland. This was after Norland took to Twitter to scold those discrediting the elections saying, “We call on all parties to de-escalate tensions and to respect the Libyan-led, legal, and administrative electoral processes underway.”

For these emissaries of empire, such statements are mere words of formality, empty rhetoric meant to minimize the glare of the contradiction: they created a failed state.

Reports have surfaced about the likely re-emergence of violence which has been on pause during a very fragile ceasefire. There have been stolen voter cards , an allegedly politically motivated disqualification of 25 of the 98 presidential hopefuls by the election commission, a chaotic appeals process, and, of course, a delay in the final list of candidates.

Then there were also the road blocks by gunmen backing eastern military chief and former CIA operative Khalifa Haftar to prevent travel to a court in the southern city of Sebha set to examine the appeal by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi to run for president. It is no surprise that Haftar himself is also a presidential candidate.

Initially Saif al-Islam, son of the murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, was being excluded from a bid for presidency by the High Elections Commission. Before a Libyan court ruled on December 2 that Gaddafi can run for president, the case had endured an armed attack on the Sebha Court of Appeals followed by a protest in front of the Sebha Court at the end of November, organized by the people of the city of Ghat against the closure of the court by force.

The protesters, in support of Saif Gaddafi, demanding free and fair elections, and an impartial judiciary said, “…there are those who want to occupy the country and restore colonialism again, and who threaten to divide the country according to the interests of the international powers.”

Black and Brown people of the Global South know full well about what the protesters from Ghat are protesting. The capitalist, white surpremacist order has to disparage people-centered projects and legitimize anything in the interest of racist neoliberalism.

Some of the most transparent and participatory elections in the world, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, are denounced and demonized by the same international powers, its institutional extensions like the OAS, and its corporate media mouthpieces. Beneath that newswire is the irony of a Libya literally destroyed by the same forces. Now, ten years later, it is being forced into a largely illegitimate process.

The title “dictator” is bandied around for all leaders not compliant to Western interests, as was commonly done to the late Muammar Gaddafi. A common sense question one might ask is: Why go through such lengths to prevent the candidacy of the son of a dictator supposedly intent on reestablishing his father’s dynasty? 

Once the non-white working class inside the belly of the beast realize that the United States is an undemocratic oligarchy that cannot pretend to offer, to the rest of the world, a nonexistent “democracy,” then it will begin to see that the internationalist fight to support the people of Libya is the same as the domestic fight to liberate those struggling for justice.

Netfa Freeman is an organizer in Pan-African Community Action (PACA) and on the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace. Netfa also is co-host/producer of the WPFW radio show and podcast “Voices With Vision.”

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in People’s Dispatch and has been lightly edited.

On Tuesday, February 15, United Nations officials issued a stark warning that incessant war in Yemen and a funding shortage for various aid programs could drastically exacerbate the already dire humanitarian crisis in the country. UN special envoy Hans Grundberg and UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths, while speaking at the UN Security Council (UNSC), said 8 million Yemenis are at imminent risk of being cut off from vital humanitarian aid in March if the international community fails to secure the required funds for the aid programs to continue. Funding for the aid programs in Yemen has been steadily decreasing, with the UN humanitarian office stating that for the year 2021, its humanitarian plan was only able to secure USD $2.27 billion out of the required USD $3.85 billion, the lowest funding level since 2015.

The two UN officials also expressed alarm at the rapid escalation in the war in Yemen, ongoing since 2014. They highlighted the drastic rise in civilian casualties over the last few months and the growth in new combat areas in the country, which is likely to add to the death toll and suffering of the civilian population. Since the war erupted following the Houthi movement’s routing of the Western-backed government from most of north Yemen—including the capital, Sanaa—followed by the intervention of the Saudi-led alliance, over 377,000 people have been killed, as per the latest UN estimates. Tens of millions of Yemenis have also been internally displaced, with over 24 million—approximately 80 percent of the total population of 30 million—dependent on international humanitarian aid for their survival.

Grundberg was quoted by news outlets as telling the UNSC that a series of air bombings by the Saudi-led military coalition targeting a detention facility in Yemen last month was the “worst civilian casualty incident in three years.” He also noted an increase in such devastating air bombing campaigns by the coalition that target even civilian areas in Sanaa and the strategically important port city of Hodeidah. Over 650 civilians were either killed or injured by air raids, shelling, small arms fire and other forms of violence in January, in what officials claimed was “by far the highest toll in at least three years.” 

Griffiths said that “the war is finding people in their homes, schools, mosques, hospitals and other places where civilians should be protected.” According to the officials, the retaliatory attacks by Houthis in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) also “indicate how this conflict risks spiraling out of control unless serious efforts are urgently made by the Yemeni parties, the region and the international community to end the conflict.” Griffiths told the UNSC that he is continuously trying to mediate between the warring parties to agree to de-escalate the conflict, with more consultations to start next week aimed at achieving a mutual ceasefire. 

Previous funding cuts have already forced the UN World Food Program to reduce the amount of rations supplied to 8 million Yemenis in December last year. If the funding requirement is not met, the rations for millions of Yemenis could stop completely and around 3.6 million people will be at risk of not having access to safe drinking water and several other critical social programs on tackling gender-based violence, reproductive health, and other such issues. The UN may also have to cancel most of its humanitarian flights in Yemen in March due to the funding shortage. News reports state that while the UN has not yet released its humanitarian plan for Yemen for 2022, Sweden and Switzerland are poised to co-host a pledging event on March 16.