When I was about 14 years old in the eighth grade there was a school bookfair where I bought a copy of Jules Verne’s ‘Michael Strogoff.’ The paperback book had an image of a Russian with a red shirt on a horse galloping across Siberia with enemies in pursuit. I think it was a Ballantine paperback that cost thirty five cents. I was familiar with Jules Verne and trusted that he had a good story to tell in the book.
I was introduced to many classic works of literature when I was a child through the medium of comic books, specifically ‘Classics Illustrated.’
I loved the covers of the comics and often wondered about the stories featured in the cover art.
Many decades later I have gotten around to reading the book. I signed up for Audible audio books on a plan that offers a lot of ‘extra’ audio books and noticed an English version on ‘Michael Strogoff’ and put it in my library.
With Audible I am pleased to see foreign language books, especially French works, featured at the same prices as the other works.
Years ago when I wanted a French book, or an audio book in French I could go to the Boston Public Library, or to Harvard Square and Schoenhoff’s foreign book store. The prices for books or audio was very high.
But recently, as I finished one audio book and was looking for another, I hit upon the idea of listening to ‘Michael Strogoff’ in English, and then in French. My French is half decent, I can understand as I read along by myself. Having a French speaker reading the work with the text in front of me gives me a good lesson.
The work is an adventure story with essentially cardboard cut-out characters. But, it works. Russia is depicted as the ‘Wild East.’ Jules Verne used the work as a travelogue about Asiatic Russia and the peoples along the trade routes the hero travels. The central character is loyal to the Czar and is a Russian patriot, but the story requires him to hide from Russian authorities and police who are depicted as brutal.
As I looked online for matter related to ‘Michael Strogoff’ I saw that the work had more popularity in French and other languages. There were a number of movies that I had never heard of. A 1950’s movie that looks impressive. On Youtube I found a 1973 series that I watched that gave me a good picture of some of the events in the book.
There is also a cartoon series….
I found there was a board game.
I decided to buy the board game out of curiosity about how one turns a novel into a game.
The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey set the attitude of the mainstream view on the impact of inflation in February, when he said that “I’m not saying nobody gets a pay rise, don’t get me wrong. But what I am saying is, we do need to see restraint in pay bargaining, otherwise it will get out of control”.
Bailey followed the Keynesian explanation of rising inflation as being the result of a tight (‘full employment’) labour market allowing workers to push for higher wages and thus forcing employers to hike prices to sustain profits. This ‘wage-push’ theory of inflation has been refuted both theoretically and empirically, as I have shown in several previous posts.
And more recently the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) study confirms that “by some measures, the current environment does not look conducive to such a spiral. After all, the correlation between wage growth and inflation has declined over recent decades and is currently near historical lows.”
BIS
But this wage push theory persists among orthodox Keynesians because they think full employment breeds inflation; and it is supported by the authorities because it ignores any impact on prices by businesses attempting to boost profit. Bailey did not talk about ‘restraint’ in market pricing or profits.
The wage-push theory existed before Keynes. As far back as in the mid-19th century, the neo-Ricardian trade unionist Thomas Weston argued in the circles of the International Working Man’s Association that workers could not push for wages that were higher than the cost of subsistence because it would only lead to employers hiking prices and was therefore self-defeating. For Weston, there was an ‘iron law’ of real wages tied to the labour time required for subsistence which could not be broken.
Marx rebutted Weston’s views both theoretically and empirically in a series of speeches published in the pamphlet, Value Price and Profit. Marx argued that the value (price) of commodity ultimately depended on the average labour time taken to produce it. But that meant the shares of that labour time between the workers who created the commodity and the capitalist who owned it was not fixed but depended on the class struggle between employers and employed. As he said, “capitalists cannot raise or lower wages merely at their whim, nor can they raise prices at will in order to make up for lost profits resulting from an increase in wages.” If wages are ‘restrained’ that may not lower prices but instead simply increase profits.
Indeed, that is what is happening now in the current bout of inflation. In the Great Recession recovery, price growth was actually quite subdued over the first few years of that recovery. Corporations instead applied extreme wage suppression (aided by high and persistent levels of unemployment). Unit labour costs (ie the cost of labour per unit of production) fell over a three-year stretch from the recession’s trough in the second quarter of 2009 to the middle of 2012.
There has been a general pattern of the labour share of income falling during the early phase of recoveries characterized most of the post–World War II recoveries, though it has become more extreme in recent business cycles. By 2019, labour’s share was at all-time low. The decade of the 2010s saw basically a stagnation of average real wages in most major economies.
In a recent report, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) makes the point that “in recent decades, workers’ collective bargaining power has declined alongside falling trade union membership. Relatedly, the indexation and COLA clauses that fuelled past wage-price spirals are less prevalent. In the euro area, the share of private sector employees whose contracts involve a formal role for inflation in wage-setting fell from 24% in 2008 to 16% in 2021. COLA coverage in the United States hovered around 25% in the 1960s and rose to about 60% during the inflationary episode of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but rapidly declined to 20% by the mid-1990s “
Prices of commodities can be broken down into the three main components: labour costs (v= the value of labour power in Marxist terminology), non-labour inputs (c =the constant capital consumed), and the “mark-up” of profits over the first two components (s = surplus value appropriated by the capitalist owners). P = v + c + s.
The Economic Policy Institute reckons that, since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the producing sector of the US economy have risen at an annualised rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019. Over half of this increase (53.9%) can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labour costs contributing less than 8% of this increase. This is not normal. From 1979 to 2019, profits only contributed about 11% to price growth and labour costs over 60%. Non labour inputs (raw materials and components) are also driving up prices more than usual in the current economic recovery.
Current inflation is concentrated in the goods sector (particularly durable goods), driven by a collapse of supply chains in durable goods (with rolling port shutdowns around the world). The bottleneck is not labour asking for higher wages, it is the lack of shipping capacity and other non-labour shortages. Indeed, in the current inflation spike, US weekly earnings growth has been slowing month by month.
It’s profits that have been spiralling upwards. Firms that did happen to have supply on hand as the pandemic-driven demand surge hit have had enormous pricing power vis-à-vis their customers. Corporate profit margins (the share going to profits per unit of production) are at their highest since 1950.
The BIS study finds similarly: “Firms’ pricing power, as measured by the markup of prices over costs, has increased to historical highs. In the low and stable inflation environment of the pre-pandemic era, higher markups lowered wage-price pass-through. But in a high inflation environment, higher markups could fuel inflation as businesses pay more attention to aggregate price growth and incorporate it into their pricing decisions. Indeed, this could be one reason why inflationary pressures have broadened recently in sectors that were not directly hit by bottlenecks.”
Chief executives are acutely aware of the ability to hike prices in this inflationary spiral. Hershey bar CEO Michel Buck told shareholders: “Pricing will be an important lever for us this year and is expected to drive most of our growth.” Similarly, a Kroger executive told investors “a little bit of inflation is always good for our business”, while Hostess’s CEO in March said rising prices across the economy “helps” profits.
Does this mean that companies can raise prices at will and are engaged in what is called ‘price-gouging’? Marx, arguing with Weston in 1865, did not think that was the case in general. The power of competition still ruled. George Pearkes, an analyst at Bespoke Investment, pointed to Caterpillar, which recorded a 958% profit increase driven by volume growth and price realization between 2019 and 2021’s fourth quarters. Eliminating price increases may have dropped the company’s 2021 quarter four operating profits slightly below the $1.3bn it made in 2020. “This isn’t price gouging … and it shows pretty concretely that there’s a lot of nuance here,” Pearkes said, adding profiteering is “not the primary driver of inflation, nor the primary driver of corporate profits”. Indeed, companies that push prices as hard as the current environment allows to maximise profits in the short run may find themselves paying a price in market share down the road as others get into the game. It is clear, however, that the concentration of capital is any sector, the greater ability to hike prices. “When you go from 15 to 10 companies, not much changes,” one analyst argued. “When you go from 10 to six, a lot changes. But when you go from six to four – it’s a fix.”
And the CMA also found that the more international competition there was, the less ability for firms to increase prices and mark-ups. “This highlights the important role that international trade plays in contributing to keeping UK markets competitive.” The BIS summed up this debate: “In product markets, the degree of competition comes into play. Firms with higher markups – an indication of greater market power – could raise prices when wages increase, while those without such pricing power may hesitate to do so. Strategic considerations in price-setting are also relevant. Firms may feel more comfortable raising prices if they believe their competitors will also do so. Price increases are more likely when demand is strong. With less concern about losing sales and less room to adjust profit margins, even firms with less pricing power could pass higher costs through to customers.”
As a partner in the Bain consultancy, an adviser to many corporations, argued, “when times are tough, screw your customers while the screwing is good!”. The consultant went on: “I don’t think this is actually nefarious at all. Companies should charge what they can. Profit is the point of the whole exercise.”
In mid-February 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down Abbott Nutrition’s infant formula manufacturing facility in Sturgis, Michigan, resulting in a severe shortage of formula across the U.S., as labeling regulations bar most infant formula from other countries to be imported
May 16, 2022, the Biden administration announced it had reached a deal to reopen the Abbott plant in about two weeks, which should result in shelves being restocked in another six to eight weeks
The Biden administration is also loosening the regulations around foreign imports of infant formula, relaxing WIC restrictions on the types of formulas you can obtain, and cracking down on price gouging to discourage hoarding and reselling at higher prices
While that may solve the problem in the short term, it does nothing to address the underlying problem, which is the fact that the U.S. market is monopolized by three companies: Abbott, Mead Johnson and Gerber
Recipes for a superior and healthy homemade infant formula are included
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Skyrocketing prices and food shortages are already looming, and are likely to become worse in the coming months. At present, many parents across the U.S. are running from store to store in search of baby formula and finding only empty shelves. How did this happen?
The shortage, it turns out, stems from the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down Abbott Nutrition’s facility in Sturgis, Michigan, back in mid-February 2022, after five infants were reportedly sickened with Cronobacter and Salmonella infections.1 Two of the babies died.
February 17, 2022, Abbott voluntarily recalled Similac, Alimentum and EleCare powdered formulas manufactured in the Sturgis facility. According to the FDA, the Sturgis facility failed inspection and was ordered to halt production until required sanitary measures were carried out.
The FDA inspection came on the heels of a whistleblower report,2 submitted to the FDA in October 2021, alleging several health and safety compliance issues at the Sturgis facility, including falsification of records; release of untested formula; undermining of an FDA audit in 2019; lax cleaning processes; and the failure to adequately trace its products.
Some members of Congress are now calling for an investigation to determine whether the FDA took sufficiently prompt action after receiving this information.3,4
Feds Fail to Address Industry Monopoly
May 16, 2022, the Biden administration announced5 it had reached a deal to reopen the Abbott plant in about two weeks, which should result in shelves being restocked in another six to eight weeks, but while that may solve the problem in the short term, it does nothing to address the underlying problem, which is the fact that the U.S. baby formula market is monopolized by three companies.6
Regulatory red tape also prevents the import of infant formula from other countries. As reported by The Defender:7
“The $45.4 billion U.S. baby formula market is controlled by three companies — Abbott, Mead Johnson and Gerber. A 2011 market analysis8 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) shows these companies accounted for nearly all U.S. formula sales …
Abbott Nutrition … dominates the market — the company’s sales accounted for roughly 43% of the formula market … according to a 2011 USDA report, which contains the latest available figures …
FDA regulations for baby formula9 make it nearly impossible for parents in the U.S. to buy infant formula produced outside the country … The issue is this: FDA rules bar formula imports from Europe if the product does not have FDA-compliant nutritional labels.
The formula may be perfectly safe and produced in accordance with European standards that are at least as stringent as U.S. health and safety requirements, but it can’t be imported because the FDA has not reviewed and approved what is printed on the package — a costly and time-consuming process for producers.”
US Response to the Crisis
House Democrats have now approved an emergency spending bill to allocate another $28 million to the FDA to allow it to hire more inspectors and prepare for future baby formula shortages. Some Republicans voiced opposition to the bill, saying it doesn’t contain any instructions for how the money is actually supposed to be spent, which would likely render it ineffective,10 and as of this writing, it’s still uncertain whether the bill will pass the Senate.11
May 18, 2022, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to increase production.12 The law allows the president to compel companies that supply various formula ingredients to prioritize the needs of formula manufacturers over other customers.
Commercial aircraft owned by the U.S. Defense Department will reportedly be deployed to pick up formula overseas and fly it back to the U.S., in an operation dubbed “Operation Fly Formula.” DoD contracts with other commercial air cargo will also be used to speed up imports and distribution.
That same day, the House also passed bipartisan legislation to allow WIC recipients to purchase any brand of formula.13 The Biden administration has also promised to crack down on price gouging to discourage hoarding and reselling at higher prices.14
While that’s all well and good, but the Biden administration was initially criticized for its tone-deaf response to the crisis. In “The Jimmy Dore Show” episode featured above, Dore replays Jen Psaki’s response to a reporter who asks where parents should turn if they cannot find formula for their babies. Psaki suggested they call their pediatrician.
And then what? What is the pediatrician supposed to do about it? Manufacture baby food? Do they have some sort of magic wand? Dore also points out she’s apparently unaware that millions of parents are uninsured or underinsured, and can’t afford to pay for pediatric visits to ask about how to feed their babies.
Three Key Problems
Three key factors have contributed to the current disaster, and none is being properly addressed. First of all, the market has been allowed to be monopolized by so few companies that the takedown of a single plant has the ability to threaten the lives of millions of babies.
Adding insult to injury, our corporate-captured government has implemented labeling regulations that effectively ban foreign imports of formula, even if they meet or exceed FDA nutritional requirements.Science — to say nothing of common sense — has been ignored for decades and corporate greed has been allowed to dictate infant nutrition instead. Absolutely nothing can compare to breast milk, yet people have been brainwashed into thinking that manmade formula is better, and that breast feeding is somehow undignified and unnecessary.
Far more importantly than either of those, however, is the fact that science — to say nothing of common sense — has been ignored for decades and corporate greed has been allowed to dictate infant nutrition instead.
Absolutely nothing can compare to breast milk, yet people have been brainwashed into thinking that manmade formula is better, and that breast feeding is somehow undignified and unnecessary.
Formula offered greater freedom for busy moms, and the promotion of the obnoxious idea that breastfeeding in public is shameful fueled the transition, making more moms defer to the bottle rather than their breasts. For years, women could even be fined for “public indecency” if caught breastfeeding in public.
Were breastfeeding the norm, the country wouldn’t be in a panic over low inventory of infant formula. Many children would also enjoy better health overall. The sad reality is that most commercial infant formula is complete junk food.
Most contain shocking amounts of sugar — typically in the form of corn syrup, which is the worst of all — and even far worse ingredients, including large amounts of dangerous linoleic acid from soy (the risks of which I detail in “Infant Soy Formula — A Risky Public Experiment”) and genetically modified ingredients (reviewed in this 2012 article). Infant formulas have also been found to contain hazardous contaminants, including glyphosate15 and perchlorate (rocket fuel).
We’re now also hearing about artificial breast milk, a brand-new industry heavily funded by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. A company called Biomilq is trying to create artificial breast milk from cultured human mammary cells.16 What could possibly go wrong with that? As of yet, however, artificial breast milk is not commercially available, so that’s a concern for another day.
All of that said, as it stands, the formula shortage is an absolute disaster, because while breastfeeding is the perfect option for most new mothers, it’s certainly not an option for anyone who didn’t breastfeed from the start, or who hasn’t breastfed for a number of weeks or months. You can’t just restart lactation at will. For that reason, telling mothers who already rely on formula to “just breastfeed” is ridiculous, because they can’t.
Breast Is Best
If you are a new mother and still lactating, then giving breastfeeding a try would be your best bet at this point. Breastfeeding has several benefits over formula,17 including reducing your baby’s risk of dying,18 improving your baby’s microbiome, thereby lowering their risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life.19
Exclusively breastfed babies also tend to have higher IQs than formula-fed babies.20 For an even more comprehensive list of benefits for both the baby and mother, see my 2018 article, “The US Campaign Against Breastfeeding.”
How to Make Homemade Formula
If the opportunity to breastfeed has already passed, your next-best option is to make your own infant formula.21 The Weston A. Price Foundation has been a leader in this for years. In the video above, former Weston A. Price chapter leader Sarah Pope demonstrates how to make the formula created by Mary Enig, Ph.D., published in the book, “Nourishing Traditions.”
However, based on my research into linoleic acid (LA), iron and other components, I have revised Enig’s original formula (which you can find on the Weston A. Price Foundation’s website22). In my view, it’s really crucial to NOT include any kind of iron or seed oils with high LA content, for all the reasons detailed in “Iron Overload Destroys Mitochondria and Sabotages Health” and “How Linoleic Acid Wrecks Your Health.”
I don’t have any children, but if I did and the child’s mother could not breastfeed, I would never use commercial infant formula as the recipe below is decidedly superior to commercial formulas and will give your child a major head start in life and preserve their health.
Dr. Mercola’s Preferred Healthy Homemade Infant Formula
This recipe will make 36 ounces. Place all ingredients in a clean glass or stainless steel container and mix well. To ensure your mixing bowl is properly sanitized, place it in boiling hot water for a few minutes. Remove with tongs and let fully cool before using.
To serve the formula, pour 6 to 8 ounces into a sanitized glass baby bottle, attach the nipple and set it in a pot of simmering water. Heat until the formula is warm but not hot to the touch. Always check the temperature of the formula before feeding using either the back of your hand or your tongue. Never ever heat formula in a microwave oven. You’ll need to make a batch every other day or so, but the formula can be frozen so you have a stash for emergencies.
Homemade Whey Recipe
To make homemade whey, start with plain unsweetened yogurt, raw milk or cultured milk. Rest a large strainer lined with a clean linen kitchen towel or several layers of cheese cloth over a bowl.
If you’re using yogurt, place 2 quarts in the towel-lined strainer. Cover with a large plate and leave at room temperature overnight. The whey will drip out into the bowl. Place the whey in sanitized glass jars and store in the refrigerator.
If you are using raw or cultured milk, place 2 quarts of the milk in a glass container and leave at room temperature for two to four days until the milk separates into curds and whey. At that point, pour the mixture into the towel-lined strainer and cover with a plate. Leave at room temperature overnight to separate the whey from the curd. (The whey will drip out into the bowl.) Store in clean glass jars in the refrigerator.
Dairy-Free Formula
If your baby has a milk allergy, you can make a liver-based formula as follows. This recipe, again revised from the original Weston A. Price recipe to remove iron and seed oils, will make 36 ounces:
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Pakistan 1968-69: Hidden history of the workers upsurge
ZA Bhutto: enemy of workers, Bangladesh independence
The following is based on a presentation by Bruce André at a meeting held by the Spartacist League/Britain in London in July 2013.
Part I
In late 1968 and early 1969 a great popular uprising shook Pakistan. What began as a student protest against the military dictatorship of General Mohammad Ayub Khan soon spread, as the Bengalis of East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) revolted. The industrial working class demonstrated its power, virtually shutting down the country at the height of the movement in March 1969. Events showed the potential for the proletariat, drawing behind it the peasantry and the oppressed nationalities, to lead a revolutionary assault on the bourgeois order.
The historic opportunity was squandered, the outbreak of anger futilely channelled into support for a wing of the Army high command, led by General Yahya Khan, which promised elections to a constituent assembly and a democratic constitution. Crucial in bringing the uprising to heel was bourgeois politician Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir Bhutto. The scion of one of the most prominent families of landed aristocrats in Sindh province, ZA Bhutto had been one of Ayub Khan’s most trusted lieutenants. He had served loyally for some seven years as the regime arrested Communists en masse, murderously repressed nationalist forces in Balochistan and, in March 1963, gunned down more than 40 people to crush a general strike in Karachi led by textile mill workers.
Pakistan’s 1965 war with India over Kashmir — a reactionary war in which the working class had no side — was a key turning point in Bhutto’s career. The Pakistani military’s poor showing provoked a bitter backlash against the regime among much of the population. Following the signing of a January 1966 armistice agreement in Tashkent, student demonstrations erupted in cities throughout the country. Despite being a principal architect of the war, Bhutto emerged as a national hero, denouncing the Tashkent accords (which he had helped negotiate) and accusing the regime of having given away at the peace table what the generals claimed they had won on the battlefield. In November 1967, Bhutto launched his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) based on a combination of virulent anti-Indian chauvinism, “socialist” demagogy and paeans to Islam.
Much of the generation of leftists and working-class leaders carried to the fore in 1968-69 gave open or backhanded support to Bhutto’s PPP, a thoroughly bourgeois party, as did a number of established trade union leaders. Renouncing the struggle for socialist revolution, they built support for this ultra-patriot, and reinforced the continued class rule of the large landowners and the bourgeoisie. Without a Leninist party to wage an irreconcilable struggle against the national-liberal bourgeoisie, the combative proletariat remained politically subordinate to the capitalist class enemy. The essential lesson to be drawn from that experience is that the working class must have its own political leadership independent of all the agencies and representatives of capitalist rule.
The national oppression of the Bengalis was of vital importance in 1968-69. The most powerful strikes were centred in West Pakistan, where the country’s industry was concentrated. In East Pakistan, separated from the rest of the country by 1000 miles of hostile Indian territory, the peasant revolt was strongest. There the upsurge was largely directed against the national oppression suffered by the Bengalis at the hands of the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani state. In order for the working class to lead the peasant masses in an assault on the capitalist order, it was necessary for the proletariat to champion the Bengalis’ right of national self-determination. Bhutto, in contrast, was a staunch supporter of the system by which the ruling class in West Pakistan oppressed and exploited the Bengalis in the East.
In the course of this talk, I will be debunking myths presented in two books that purport to provide a Marxist view of this history. The first book is Pakistan’s Other Story: The Revolution of 1968-69 by Lal Khan, published in 2008. He is the leader of the Struggle group, Pakistani section of the late Ted Grant’s International Marxist Tendency. Grant’s British followers were an organic part of the Labour Party for decades as the Militant tendency. Internationally, these abject reformists have a tradition of liquidation — even into outright capitalist parties. For most of its existence, the Struggle group has been ensconced in the PPP. The many omissions and distortions in Lal Khan’s book serve to gloss over the brutal crimes of Pakistan’s capitalist rulers, especially those committed by ZA Bhutto.
The other book that I will critique is Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power by Tariq Ali, published in London in 1970. Not only is Tariq Ali’s book widely cited by bourgeois academic historians, it has been highly influential in educating Pakistani leftists. It presents a distorted picture, seen through the eyes of a radical of the 1960s generation who touted “red universities” as revolutionary bastions and looked to peasant-based guerrilla warfare as the road to socialism in Third World countries. Nothing in Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power gives a hint that the working class, which played a decisive role in those events, is the force with the social power to overthrow the capitalist order and open the road to socialism. The book’s title points to what Ali saw as the alternative to military rule: a struggle for “people’s power” in which the working class is just another sector of the people.
At the time, Tariq Ali was a leading cadre of the fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec). His book is a classic example of Pabloism, a revisionist tendency that rejects the struggle to forge Trotskyist parties and instead acts as a pressure group on social-democratic, Stalinist and non-proletarian forces. Under the leadership of Michel Pablo, this tendency destroyed the Trotskyist Fourth International in the early 1950s.
In Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power, Tariq Ali argues that: “Although Bhutto deserved support in his courageous stand against the Ayub dictatorship, it was also necessary that his party programme should be subjected to a severe critique by socialists.” Though revolutionary socialists may defend the likes of Bhutto against state repression, we give no political support to capitalist politicians as a matter of principle. But not only does Tariq Ali give no hint of what a “severe critique” of Bhutto’s programme would have looked like, he writes out of the historical record facts that would be key to such a critique. There is no mention of Bhutto’s virulent anti-Indian chauvinism. No mention of his close ties to a section of the officer corps. No mention of his opposition to the Bengali national struggle. And not a word about the call for a constituent assembly, a bourgeois parliament, the device by which Bhutto and the officers around Yahya Khan were able to derail the upsurge. Tariq Ali’s narrative, which ends with Yahya’s coming to power, provides no idea of why Bhutto would rush to embrace the declaration of martial law.
Tariq Ali’s political influence among radicalised youth was apparent during his tour of Pakistan in February-March 1969, at the height of the upsurge, when he addressed massive rallies. The programme that Tariq Ali offered — political prostration before Bhutto — comes through in his articles from the time in Black Dwarf (which he edited) and in Intercontinental Press, published by the USec. Nowhere in those articles is there a serious political criticism of Bhutto. Even as Bhutto was declaring his support for the March 1969 military takeover, Tariq Ali’s journal could conjure up nothing more incisive about the PPP than: “It talks about socialism constantly and to its credit but without knowing what this would entail” (Black Dwarf, 18 April 1969).
British colonialism and the origins of Pakistan
The state of Pakistan is an artificial creation whose boundaries were arbitrarily drawn by the British colonial rulers in the bloody Partition of India. As the Indian masses revolted against colonial oppression with the 1942 Quit India movement, the British overlords stepped up their policy of fomenting communal hatreds. As a result, the oppressed Hindu, Muslim and Sikh masses turned their fury against each other — away from their colonial oppressors, and from the Indian capitalists and landed aristocracy. Partition, which was the culmination of two centuries of divide-and-rule, was carried out under a British Labour government in 1947. It unleashed communal slaughter on an enormous scale and led to one of the largest forced migrations in history. The British rulers withdrew from the subcontinent without the ignominy of defeat at the hands of their colonial slaves — a defeat that would have shaken the rest of the colonial world and Britain itself. They left behind a subcontinent aflame in violence, partitioned into majority-Hindu India and the Muslim confessional state of Pakistan.
The idea that Pakistan represented a form of national self-determination for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent was — and remains today — an utter fraud. Pakistan is a multinational state in which the mainly Punjabi ruling elite, persisting from British rule, brutally lords it over the Baloch people, the Pashtuns and other oppressed nationalities and ethnicities. This “prison house of peoples” is held together largely through stark repression. The army has ruled throughout Pakistan’s history, either directly or behind a thin cover of parliamentary democracy. It is intimately intertwined with the state bureaucracy in an infernal machine that enforces everything reactionary in Pakistani society, from bonded labour and caste oppression to religious fundamentalism and the all-sided oppression of women.
Like the rest of the subcontinent, Pakistan is an extreme example of combined and uneven development. Modern industry and an industrial proletariat have been superimposed on a largely peasant-based society and coexist with frightfully backward social conditions. While the landed aristocracy, textile bosses and upper echelons of the military plunder the country’s wealth, the poverty of the labouring masses can be gauged by the fact that childhood malnutrition is more acute than in much of sub-Saharan Africa.
Trotsky’s perspective of permanent revolution provides the Marxist programme for carrying out the revolutionary transformation of economically backward countries that came to capitalist development in the epoch of imperialism. Central to this programme is the understanding that in such countries, bourgeois-democratic gains such as national emancipation, land to the tiller, legal equality of women and the separation of religion and the state require the overthrow of the capitalist order through socialist revolution in which the proletariat comes forward as the leader of all the oppressed, above all the peasant masses. This was the programme on which the Bolshevik party, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, carried the Russian Revolution of October 1917 to victory.
Just as the Bolsheviks saw the October Revolution as the opening shot of a broader European-wide revolution, communists in the subcontinent need to view revolutions in their countries in an international framework. The struggles for liberation of all the exploited and oppressed of the Indian subcontinent are closely interlinked, requiring the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisies in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the establishment of a socialist federation of South Asia. Ultimately the capitalist system must be destroyed at its strongest points, the advanced industrial states. The proletarians of the more backward countries must be linked to their class brothers and sisters in the West through an international of Leninist-Trotskyist parties.
At Partition, Pakistan inherited a mere nine per cent of the industrial establishments of the subcontinent, and control of that industry was concentrated in West Pakistan. Before Bangladeshi independence, the Punjabi-dominated regime exploited East Pakistan as an impoverished semi-colony. All major industries in East Pakistan were in the hands of the families which dominated the West — the Adamjee and Dawood families were prominent examples. The wealth generated by the peasantry in East Pakistan was appropriated by the capitalists in West Pakistan through the following scheme: agricultural products produced in East Pakistan, especially jute, accounted for most of the country’s export earnings. A system of tariffs and quotas prevented these earnings being used to purchase goods on the world market. East Pakistan thus became a captive market, forced to purchase high-priced goods from West Pakistan. The result was a massive transfer of East Pakistan’s export earnings to West Pakistan, where they were invested in industry and led to the rapid growth of the bourgeoisie.
The Pakistani ruling class proved unable to erect even a facade of parliamentary rule. Pakistan’s largest oppressed nationality, the Bengalis, accounted for a majority of the country’s population. So, introducing democratic elections risked undermining Punjabi domination. In 1956, the central government finally came up with a constitution which avoided the principle of “one man, one vote”. Firstly, the constitution instituted “parity” between East and West Pakistan: Bengal could not get more than half the seats in the National Assembly. Secondly, the four provinces of what was called the West Wing were consolidated into a single province, West Pakistan. This so-called “one-unit plan” undercut the ability of the Bengalis to form a coalition with other oppressed nationalities in the West. As a sop to the Bengalis, their language was accorded official status along with Urdu.
Bhutto supports anti-Bengali repression
When the Ayub regime was discredited as a result of the ’65 war with India, this put wind in the sails of the Bengali nationalists. In February 1966, Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s petty-bourgeois nationalist Awami League issued a Six-Point Programme. This called for Pakistan to become a federation of the two wings, each with the power to define its own fiscal and monetary policies, sign international commercial treaties and raise its own armed forces. The federal government would be responsible solely for national defence and foreign affairs. This was a plan not for national liberation of East Bengal but for renegotiating the terms of its subordination to the regime. The Six-Point Programme represented the interests of the upper levels of the petty bourgeoisie, whose development into a capitalist class was stymied by West Pakistan’s economic stranglehold. In contrast, we raised the demand for Bengali national self-determination, including the right to unite with the Bengalis in India and to form a separate state.
The Ayub regime reacted to the declaration of the Six Points with characteristic brutality, unleashing a wave of repression against the Awami League leadership. Mujibur Rahman and other League leaders were imprisoned — they would be freed three years later as a result of the mass upsurge. A 7 June 1966 hartal (general strike) called to protest their arrests set off an explosion. Strikers, some armed with shotguns, attacked the police station in Narayanganj as well as government buildings in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, and trashed the home of the Parliamentary Secretary. At least ten were gunned down by the police. Clashes continued for months; by the end of 1966 hundreds of Bengalis had been killed by security forces.
That murderous crackdown was launched amid a wave of hostility against the Bengali nationalists, which Bhutto helped to whip up in one last service to the Ayub regime before he was forced out of the government. In March 1966, Bhutto helped get the leadership of Ayub’s Convention Muslim League to vote a motion denouncing the Awami League’s “sinister conspiracy” and calling on the government “to take all necessary steps in order to meet the challenge of this treasonable campaign and preserve and protect the ideology of Islam and the integrity of the Muslim homeland” (Pakistan Times, 21 March 1966). What Bhutto meant by “all necessary steps” was perfectly clear in light of the Pakistani rulers’ history of murderous repression against the Bengalis and other oppressed nationalities.
Following Bhutto’s exit from the Ayub government, after he had raised the ire of Washington with anti-American rhetoric, Pakistani Maoists pulled out all the stops to mobilise support for him. The National Student Federation (NSF), in which the Maoists had substantial weight, declared: “Mr Bhutto represents the youth in this country in his vigour, intellect, honesty and devotion.” The key to the Maoists’ unholy alliance with Bhutto was that, as Ayub’s foreign minister after the 1962 border war between India and China, Bhutto had been the public face for a pro-China tilt in Pakistani foreign policy. While the Maoists did the legwork to round up support for him, Bhutto cultivated his ties with the military command. According to Ayub’s former Air Force Commander-in-Chief, Bhutto “maintained good personal relations with important Generals throughout his tenure as a minister in Ayub Khan’s cabinet and had done his utmost to retain these links even after his exit from the government” (Mohammed Asghar Khan, Generals in Politics: Pakistan 1958-1982, 1983).
During speaking tours in the summer of 1967, Bhutto experimented with a leftist image. After supporting the US war in Vietnam as Foreign Minister, Bhutto now began to oppose it. For the first time in his life, he started to slip the word “socialism” into his speeches — while always insisting that it was based on the principles of Islam. He discovered that not only did he not gag when he pronounced the word “socialism” but his audiences loved it. As one of Bhutto’s biographers put it: “His move towards socialism was graded very carefully. Only after he was sure of the public response did his demands gradually become more strident” (Salmaan Taseer, Bhutto: A Political Biography, 1980).
Anti-India diatribes, including the call for a “thousand year” confrontation over Kashmir, were a stock theme in Bhutto’s speeches. Bhutto called for military training on campuses, arguing that “the masses should be prepared for a people’s war” over Kashmir. In this, he echoed a section of the Pakistani military that had latched onto the notion of “people’s war” as a way of compensating for India’s military superiority. Lal Khan’s Struggle group lauds Bhutto’s call for a “people’s army”, implying that he was for a people’s militia as opposed to a standing army. This is simply a gross falsification. As we will see later, when Bhutto came to power and formed a paramilitary goon squad to brutalise worker militants and political opponents, he claimed it was a “people’s army”.
Founding of the Pakistan People’s Party
In November 1967, Bhutto held the founding convention of the PPP. Joining the coterie of landowning aristocrats was a rogues’ gallery of Muslim League has-beens and Maoists, and two maulvis (Muslim priests) as guarantors of the party’s Islamic credentials. (During the convention, both maulvis took the floor to affirm that socialism is compatible with Islam.) Not surprisingly, given Bhutto’s well-known backing of state repression against the Bengali nationalists, East Pakistan was not represented.
After hearing renderings from the Koran, the assembled luminaries turned their attention to the PPP’s Foundation Documents. They denounced the Awami League’s Six-Point Programme as opening the road to independence for East Pakistan and declared flatly: “Pakistan is one nation and not two.” One document pledged to “maintain the policy of confrontation” over Kashmir. And to make sure that there was no mistaking the party’s commitment to Islam, another announced (in capital letters): “WE PROMISE TO CONTINUE THE JEHAD UNTIL GOD’S EARTH IS LIT UP WITH DIVINE LIGHT.”
We characterised the PPP’s programme in those days as “landlord socialism” (Workers Vanguard no 16, February 1973). One of the PPP’s Foundation Documents affirmed that the party was for “the transformation of Pakistan into a socialist society”. Yet the Declaration of Principles did not call for a single hectare of land redistribution. Most of the Declaration was penned by Jalaludin Abdur Rahim. The military regime’s ambassador to France, Rahim threw in his lot with Bhutto as his diplomatic career was coming to a close. JA Rahim was the personification of “landlord socialism”. He led the fight at the founding convention against including any call for land reform in the Declaration of Principles. At the same time, he wrote into that document that the PPP was for “a classless society”. That phrase has been cited ad nauseam by the Struggle group as the basis for their call for the PPP to “return to its original Socialist manifesto”.
The PPP founding manifesto promised extensive nationalisations of banking and industry, which Bhutto’s leftist camp-followers pretended was directed against capitalism. The landowning aristocrats who controlled the PPP saw things differently. The industrial bourgeoisie that had initially developed in Pakistan consisted predominantly of mohajir traders — Urdu-speaking emigres from India. That generated considerable resentment among Pakistan’s rural elites, especially in Sindh where the PPP had its strongest base. They were intent on getting a piece of the action for themselves. When it came to power, the PPP did carry out the promised nationalisations. The primary pathway for wealthy Pakistanis to accumulate capital then became access to the PPP and its allies in the state bureaucracy. The country’s [former] Sindhi president Asif Ali Zardari, one of the richest individuals in Pakistan, can thank Bhutto for initiating the policies that got him where he is.
Tufail Abbas, the main Maoist leader in Karachi, brought his student followers in the NSF leadership, such as Mairaj Mohammad Khan, to the PPP founding convention. Abbas was the head of the Airways Employees Union at Pakistan International Airlines. With influence among students and links in the labour movement, he was instrumental in helping to jump-start the PPP. Bhutto gave Mairaj Mohammad Khan, a member of Abbas’ group, a leadership post in the Karachi PPP, where he served as a lackey to the big Sindhi landlord who ran the party in that city.
The Maoists’ support for Bhutto was based on the Stalinist dogma of two-stage revolution, in which the first stage is supposed to be a “democratic revolution”. This means subordinating the proletariat to a supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, while postponing the second stage, proletarian revolution, to the indefinite future — that is, never. In the many countries where this has been put into practice, from China in 1925-27 to Iraq in 1958-59 to Indonesia in 1965-66, the result was never bourgeois democracy, much less socialism, but the slaughter of leftists, workers and peasants. As we will see in greater detail later in this talk, the Maoists’ political alliance with Bhutto would have disastrous consequences for the working class. Lal Khan and the Struggle group never fail to criticise the conception of “democratic revolution” that underlay the Maoists’ support to Bhutto. But the lesson they draw has nothing to do with opposing class collaboration. They simply support Bhutto in the name of socialism.
After the founding of the PPP, Bhutto launched a barnstorming campaign of speeches attacking the Ayub regime. He summarised his programme in Political Situation in Pakistan, written in June 1968, which culminates in the call for “a popular government” to carry out “reform of the constitutional structure”. Lal Khan assures us: “At that time in his speeches Bhutto was advocating revolutionary socialism.” A more accurate take appears in Salman Rushdie’s satirical novel Shame, in which the fictional character “Isky” Harappa parodies “Zulfi” Bhutto: “He toured the villages and promised every peasant one acre of land and a new water-well…. He screamed in regional dialects about the rape of the country by fat cats and tilyars [mohajirs], and such was the power of his tongue, or perhaps of the sartorial talents of Monsieur Cardin, that nobody seemed to recall Isky’s own status as a landlord of a distinctly obese chunk of Sind.”
Bhutto sought to pressure a section of the military high command to dump Ayub and sponsor democratic reforms. He declared that a military coup “will solve no problems unless it comes with the purpose of restoring the people’s rights”. As we will see, it would be precisely on that pretext that Bhutto would support General Yahya Khan’s seizure of power in March 1969.
Opening battles of 1968-69
Remarkably, given its importance in Pakistan’s history, there appears to be no comprehensive history — certainly not in English — of the upheaval of 1968-69. Tariq Ali dealt at length with the student movement in Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power, while devoting no more than a dozen lines to the explosion of working-class struggle that shook the country in March 1969. Likewise, Lal Khan’s book devotes no more than a couple of pages to that demonstration of proletarian power, and most of that consists of an extended quote from a work by Bhutto’s one-time finance minister!
The upsurge began with anti-government protests by students in West Pakistan in October 1968, largely led by the NSF. On 7 November, students took to the streets in Rawalpindi, the interim capital of the country and site of the army headquarters. In the protests that followed, police shot and killed three people. The Rawalpindi events triggered student demonstrations in Karachi, Lahore, Multan, Quetta and other cities; the government responded by shutting down the campuses. At the time, Bhutto was trying to beef up his credentials as an opponent of the Ayub regime. A speaking tour happened to bring him to Rawalpindi in the wake of the cop killing, and he joined the funeral procession. Several days later, Bhutto was arrested along with other supporters of the PPP and the National Awami Party (NAP), a left-radical grouping. They would spend the next three months in Ayub’s jails.
The student demonstrations were initially limited to university-related issues, centrally the demand that the government withdraw the University Ordinances which threatened students who engaged in political protests with the confiscation of their degrees. But student agitation took on a more political tone as it merged with the PPP’s campaign against the Ayub regime. By the end of December, student leaders were calling for the resignation of Ayub Khan. They did not say what he should be replaced with. But Bhutto was quite clear: a government that was committed to a directly elected constituent assembly.
Working-class struggle was touched off on 29 November, when a general strike called by student leaders totally shut down Rawalpindi. Students and workers fought police attacks. Throughout the Punjab, demonstrations continued for days as the military watched warily from the barracks. In December, protests spread to East Pakistan, where the Bengali rural masses and the urban proletariat quickly took up demands directed against their national oppression.
The dominant political force in East Pakistan was Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League. Rahman and 34 others had been charged in December 1967-January 1968 in the so-called Agartala Conspiracy case. They had been accused of conspiring with Indian intelligence officials at a meeting in Agartala, India to make East Pakistan an independent state. Rahman’s forthright defence at his trial had made him a hero in East Pakistan. Mass influence was also exercised by peasant leader Maulana Bhashani, who had split from the Awami League over its leadership’s support to the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Nasser’s Egypt. Bhashani joined with nationalists from oppressed nationalities in West Pakistan — Pashtun, Sindhi and Baloch — to form the “anti-imperialist” NAP.
Bhashani called a hartal in Dhaka for 7 December 1968, the day Ayub was scheduled to visit the city. Security forces fired on the strikers, killing two. Bhashani responded by calling a province-wide hartal on 19 December, and the Awami League, supported by Bhashani, called another for 14 December. During a province-wide day of mobilisation on 29 December, police gunned down three peasants. The upsurge was spreading to rural East Pakistan where peasants seized and burnt police stations, expelled rent collectors and, in a number of cases, set up their own local administrations.
The eleven-point programme that came to be associated with the protest movement in East Pakistan was adopted in early January 1969 by a coalition of student groups. It called for autonomy for East Pakistan along the lines of the Awami League’s Six-Point Programme and added other demands, such as nationalisation of banking and large industries, reduction of taxes on peasants and higher wages for workers. It also demanded the withdrawal of Pakistan from the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Central Treaty Organization — US-led military alliances directed against the Soviet Union. The student programme demanded the dropping of charges against all political prisoners, in particular those charged in the Agartala Conspiracy case.
In their respective books on the 1968-69 upheaval, both Lal Khan and Tariq Ali sidestep the fact that the upsurge in East Pakistan was largely directed against the national oppression of the Bengalis. Lal Khan never even mentions the East Pakistani students’ eleven-point programme. In contrast, Tariq Ali acknowledges that in East Pakistan “the students’ eleven-point programme became the programme of the people”. He lists some of its demands, absurdly claiming that they were “anti-capitalist in content”. But he avoids mentioning that the eleven points included the call for extensive autonomy for East Bengal.
In early January 1969, the traditional opposition parties sought to corral the movement onto a parliamentary track. Their chosen vehicle was the Democratic Action Committee (DAC), a coalition of most of the parties which opposed the Ayub regime, from the Awami League to the far-right fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami. Bhutto’s PPP and Bhashani’s NAP, wary of being discredited by this noxious lash-up, kept their distance. The DAC quickly adopted a programme that included the main demands raised by protesters and strikers — except for those dealing with oppression of the Bengalis. In a risky gambit, the DAC leaders called a nationwide general strike for 17 January that they hoped would blow off steam, while strengthening their hand in negotiations with the regime. This strike temporarily placed these venal politicians at the head of protests throughout the country.
Police and army violence swelled protests following the one-day strike. On the night of 23 January, 25,000 protesters marched through the streets of Dhaka carrying flaming torches and calling for the complete independence of East Bengal. The next day, 5000 protesters stormed the seat of the provincial government. Crowds burned down the offices of two pro-government newspapers. By day’s end, half a dozen protesters in Dhaka and other cities in East Pakistan had been gunned down, including a young schoolboy. Cutting across the anti-Bengali racism fostered by the capitalist ruling class, workers and students in West Pakistan joined their counterparts in the East in defying the Ayub regime’s murderous repression. However, while the working class continued to wage isolated strikes, it had not yet demonstrated its social power. In the absence of a proletarian axis, the mass upsurge largely took the form of rioting and street fighting with the police. At this point the struggle could not bring down the Ayub regime, to say nothing of overthrowing the capitalist order.
Workers take the stage
In West Pakistan, the social explosion was most intense in four cities: Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Gujranwala, an industrial city in northern Punjab. With factory production in Karachi, the country’s industrial centre, down 30 per cent as a result of the upsurge, the regime resorted to a massive show of force. Round-the-clock curfews were imposed and the army took up positions in Dhaka and the cities I just mentioned, threatening to shoot on sight anyone caught defying the curfew. The Pakistan Times (29 January 1969) described Lahore under military occupation:
“The streets were deserted except for officers and men of the Army and the police…. Apart from essential services, life in the city came to a standstill. No shops were opened, no business conducted, no offices operated and no factory emitted smoke.”
Again the Ayub regime tried to bring the upheaval to a close through negotiations with the DAC leaders, and again it was overtaken by the onrush of events. On 14 February, the country was shut down in a hartal called by the DAC leaders, who, as they had the previous month, sought to back up their negotiations with a show of force. As in January, the resulting repression triggered a renewed upsurge. The Pakistan Times decried “the new wave of mob fury that has begun to sweep factories, shops, railway stations…and vital industrial concerns” (16 February 1969).
On 15 February, one of the Bengali soldiers accused in the Agartala Conspiracy case was shot dead in prison. That marked a watershed. The army was called out and police viciously attacked protesters, especially in the industrial areas surrounding Dhaka.
The Students Action Committee called a student strike for 17 February to protest police shootings as the army continued to patrol the streets of Dhaka. An angry crowd set fire to the residence of the judge presiding over the Agartala case. The judge reportedly fled for his life by wrapping his Bengali cook’s lungi (a skirt-like garment) around his waist and passing himself off as a commoner. In Dhaka, a mass procession attacked the houses of a pro-Ayub provincial minister and of the Central Information Minister. The latter had prohibited Pakistan Radio from broadcasting songs by the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Chittagong, East Pakistan’s main port, was paralysed by a lightning strike of more than 2000 dockworkers. When word arrived in Dhaka that a professor at Rajshahi University, in East Pakistan’s northwest region, had been killed by soldiers who bayonet-charged students, workers from the industrial zones joined students and the urban poor in defiance of the curfew. The army went on a killing spree, indiscriminately gunning down protesters. The bourgeois press blacked out news of the Dhaka massacre, reporting just half a dozen deaths. Nuran Nabi, who wrote of his participation in the events as an Awami League student activist, considers that the deaths were in the hundreds (Bullets of ’71: A Freedom Fighter’s Story, 2010).
Meanwhile, Ayub was ceding to the demands of the DAC: he lifted the state of emergency in force since the 1965 war, withdrew the Agartala case and released Mujibur Rahman, Bhutto and a number of other political prisoners. Bhutto and Bhashani did not participate in the “negotiations” ploy. Having kept their distance from the DAC since its formation, they had nothing to gain by embracing it now. Yet Lal Khan, intent on “proving” that the PPP responded to mass pressure, manufactures his own alternative reality: “Clearly, the left wing of the Peoples party had been able to convince their party Chairman that the Movement had gone too far and penetrated too deeply to accept any compromise with the regime.” No compromise? In a month, Bhutto would support martial law!
On 21 February, Ayub announced that he would not stand for re-election as president and evoked the prospect of “direct elections on the basis of adult franchise”. But the time for negotiations had long passed. At a meeting of 100,000 people in Dhaka, student leaders issued an ultimatum to Ayub & Co: resign by 3 March or “face the consequences”. A number of large landowners and local moneylenders had already perished at the hands of peasants and other toilers in rural areas. Ayub’s Basic Democrats — members of local councils who constituted the lowest tier in government — got the message and resigned en masse. The system of local government in East Pakistan began to collapse like a house of cards.
With the peasant uprising spreading in East Pakistan, the working class in both wings of the country launched a strike movement that by late March would virtually shut down the economy. Especially in the East, workers often used — with overwhelming success — the gherao tactic, confining the bosses in their offices until the workers’ demands were met. The vanguard layer of the proletariat was the cotton mill workforce in the industrial areas around Karachi, Lahore and other urban centres. These workers were among the most exploited, working under inhumanly harsh conditions, but at the same time they had the ability to shut down the country’s largest industry.
A feature throughout this period was the formation of “labour fronts”, “action committees” and other organisations to co-ordinate workers’ struggles. Some of these were formed by factory-floor leaders; others resulted from splits within the established trade union leadership. This pointed the way towards broader organisations of the working class, such as workers defence guards and committees to take charge of distribution of food, that would have the potential to become organs of workers rule, as happened in the lead-up to the October 1917 Russian Revolution.
But to put into practice a programme for working-class power would have required sharp political struggle against the “socialists” who were supporting Bhutto’s PPP. Tariq Ali, for example, called for a coalition of all “left” forces around a four-point programme of basic democratic rights, land to the tiller, opposition to US imperialism and abolition of capitalism. Such a coalition could only have helped the PPP demagogues secure support on a platform of empty promises. Incredibly for a self-proclaimed Marxist, Tariq Ali added grist to the mill of Bhutto’s reactionary crusade on the theme that socialism is compatible with Islam. One of his first public acts during his visit to Pakistan was to offer fatiha (a Koranic prayer). Addressing a mass rally in Rawalpindi, Tariq Ali kissed the Koran and denounced the “lackeys of imperialists” who were “trying to create doubts about my faith” (Pakistan Times, 8 March 1969).
March 1969: culmination of the mass upsurge
In March in West Pakistan, government employees struck in defiance of laws making such action punishable by a year in prison. On 3 March, doctors and other medical personnel struck for four days. Postmen struck on 4 March. Ten days later, the Pakistan Times reported, “the postal strike was causing immense loss to the exporters as the parcels were not being conveyed to their destination and no foreign mail was being delivered, resulting in the cancellation of orders”. On 5 March, 10,000 Karachi port workers brought the country’s main port to a standstill for five days. Telecommunications workers started a cascading series of strikes on 11 March. The regime sent army signal operators to man the telephone exchange in Lahore, but the soldiers couldn’t cope with the volume of calls.
On 6 March, workers closed down the factories and textile mills in the Sindh Industrial Trading Estate in Karachi, the country’s largest industrial zone, for four days. The strike grew explosively when a factory guard shot and killed two workers in a procession of several thousand going from plant to plant bringing workers out on strike. The strike spread to Landhi, the other major industrial area of the city. The deepening sense of solidarity across the workers movement was demonstrated when the college teachers union called for a city-wide strike on 8 March and the city was shut down completely. More than a dozen demonstrations by mill workers and other labourers filled the otherwise empty streets.
With the port of Karachi and the city’s main industrial zone still struck, the Ayub regime prepared for a 10 March Round Table Conference with the opposition parties. Ayub ended up accepting the DAC’s two main demands: direct elections on the basis of adult franchise and a parliamentary form of government. But no promise by Ayub was going to bring the revolt to heel. Bhutto continued to remain outside the negotiations, but he weighed in against the Awami League’s demand for Bengal autonomy. Bhutto declared: “The position of the Central Government under the six-point formula will be that of a widow without a pension” (Pakistan Times, 21 March 1969). The “pension” in question was, of course, the fruit of the central government’s oppression of the Bengalis.
Four days after the “accord” between Ayub and the DAC was announced, on 17 March, a massive hartal by two and a half million workers in West Pakistan, called by the major trade union leaders, touched off a new wave of strikes. Docks, railways and public transport were paralysed; all factories and most shops and offices were closed. The Karachi port remained shut for three days, and the striking dockworkers only returned to work after they had won all of their wage demands. For two weeks, strikes continued to sweep the industrial zones around Karachi and other cities. Airline workers, electrical grid workers, hospital staff and nurses, postal workers, government office employees, coal miners, teachers, railway workers and other sectors struck. Workers occupied two large flour mills in Karachi and elected committees to run the plants.
On 20 March, the president of the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry called on the government to deploy troops to Karachi’s industrial areas. But the military tops made it clear to Ayub Khan that they would only call out the troops if he abandoned the presidency. Instead of launching the repression that the bosses were demanding, the Ayub regime was reduced to calling on all employers to grant a 20 per cent wage increase! Meanwhile, a joint call by dozens of trade union leaders in Karachi for a stop to gheraos “in the national interest” fell on deaf ears. By 24 March, virtually all the factories of Karachi, comprising some 40 per cent of Pakistan’s industrial capacity, were on strike.
On 25 March, Ayub announced his resignation and handed power to army commander-in-chief, Yahya Khan. Declaring that he would “not tolerate disorder”, Yahya Khan imposed martial law and decreed that military tribunals would impose prison sentences of up to ten years for criticising the martial law regime, up to 14 years for going on strike or fostering “dissatisfaction toward the armed forces”, and the death penalty for damaging public property or giving assistance to “rebels or rioters”. At the same time, the new military strongman promised a “smooth transfer of power to the representatives of the people elected freely and impartially on the basis of adult franchise”, who would then “give the country a workable Constitution”.
The mass movement in both East and West Pakistan came to a sudden halt. There were no protest demonstrations anywhere against the take-over. Students returned to their classes. Most of the mills and factories that had been on strike promptly resumed production. In East Pakistan, government offices reopened. At police stations across the country, people lined up to turn in their firearms. It was reported that in Karachi alone, 16,000 rifles, revolvers and shotguns were surrendered.
Even the bourgeoisie was taken aback that a mass revolt, which had defied repression, should halt so suddenly. The London Sunday Times (30 March 1969) observed: “The revolution seemed to be only hours away…. The mere words ‘martial law’ have magically restored the situation without a shot being fired.” The explanation for the sudden turnaround was not magic but politics. From the beginning, the movement’s principal leaders, especially Bhutto and his leftist supporters, had hammered the point that the main aim was elections to a constituent assembly. Now that a wing of the military high command had pushed aside Ayub and was promising to grant that demand, it was broadly felt that the movement had achieved its purpose. Referring to Yahya’s takeover, Bhutto declared that “on the whole it’s a good thing” because “the prospects for a return to democracy seem good” (Sunday Times, 30 March 1969). In a 26 June speech, he declared: “This Martial Law repeatedly gives assurances for elections.” He further asserted that when the movement against Ayub Khan started, “I had said there must be a new Constituent Assembly, that only a Constituent Assembly could frame a Constitution for Pakistan” (Awakening the People, Volume II, ZA Bhutto, 1969).
Lal Khan and Tariq Ali, having written out of their histories Bhutto’s campaign for a constituent assembly, have no explanation for the sudden halt of the mass movement — nor can they come up with any criticism of Bhutto’s arguments in support of martial law. Lal Khan blames the “left leadership” for the fact that “there was no protest at all, as though the sole objective was to get rid of Ayub Khan!” But he cannot explain why Yahya Khan was seen as an improvement over Ayub. Tariq Ali says the masses “lacked an organization, and this made the army take-over on March 26, 1969, a comparatively easy affair”. Yet when recounting the 18 February massacre of protesters in Dhaka, Tariq Ali insisted: “Once again the workers and the city poor, without any leadership whatsoever, had defied the ruling class and faced the bullets of the bourgeoisie.”
The masses had not lost the extraordinary courage that, even bereft of leadership, they had repeatedly displayed. Rather, the military and the leaders of the opposition parties — especially the PPP, the NAP and their leftist supporters — had succeeded in channelling the mass struggle onto the path of the constituent assembly. As we wrote in Spartacist ([English edition] no 63, Winter 2012-2013), “fighting for a bourgeois-parliamentary ‘democratic government’ is a trap for the proletariat”. The article explains: “Unlike such demands as national self-determination, women’s equality, land to the tiller, universal suffrage or opposition to the monarchy — any or all of which can be crucial in rallying the masses behind the struggles of the proletariat — the constituent assembly is not a democratic demand but a call for a new capitalist government.”
The article also points out: “Given the reactionary character of the bourgeoisie, in the semicolonial world as well as the advanced capitalist states, there can be no revolutionary bourgeois parliament. Thus the call for a constituent assembly runs counter to the perspective of permanent revolution.” As they were being forced out of India by a mass upsurge against colonial rule, the British used the constituent assembly to give “democratic” legitimacy to the bloody partition of the subcontinent, resulting in the first parliaments of independent capitalist India and Pakistan. Likewise, the military regime in Pakistan used the call for a constituent assembly to derail the upsurge of 1968-69.
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Part II
The working-class upsurge of 1968-69 in Pakistan was derailed due to the absence of a leadership of the working class that was independent of the capitalist ruling class. An important political influence in the working class at that time was Stalinism, which is based on the programme of two-stage revolution and “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism. In defence of imperialist “democracy”, the Communist Party of India (CPI) supported British imperialism from 1941 onwards in World War II. During this time the CPI also made overtures to the reactionary, British-backed Muslim League. When the CPI subsequently decided to support the national independence struggle, it did so by subordinating the interests of the proletariat to the bourgeois nationalist, Hindu-chauvinist Congress party.
The 1947 Partition of the subcontinent and the explosion of communal violence that accompanied it had a devastating effect on the Communist movement in what became Pakistan. In the Punjab, what weak base the CPI had was overwhelmingly among Sikh small landowners in the East, which became part of India. In Bengal, the CPI had one of its stronger bases, but it was mainly Hindu and less than five per cent Muslim. With the population transfers caused by the communal massacres of 1947 (and others in 1951 in East and West Bengal) as many as 90 per cent of the Communists left for India. Those who remained in Pakistan formed the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), which was largely driven underground by state repression.
In East Pakistan where the CPP was strongest, the party adopted a policy of working through the nationalist Awami League. In the 1954 provincial elections in East Pakistan, CPP members won 22 seats in the assembly, all but four of them as Awami League members. When Bengali peasant leader Maulana Bhashani split from the Awami League to form the National Awami Party (NAP), most of the CPP members went with him.
The Pakistani left in the 1960s was profoundly shaped by the split between the Stalinist bureaucracies ruling the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Pursuing the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country” — a rejection of proletarian internationalism — the ruling castes of both workers states sought détente with US imperialism, even if that accord came at the expense of the other. Betraying the internationalist interests of both the Soviet and the Chinese workers states as well as the interests of the working masses of South Asia, the Soviet bureaucracy backed Indira Gandhi’s brutally repressive capitalist regime in India, while the Beijing regime under Mao Zedong backed Pakistan. Moscow refused to support China in its 1962 border conflict with India, and in fact helped arm India.
In Pakistan, the Sino-Soviet dispute caused a split not only among the Stalinists but within the NAP as well. During the 1965 war with India, both Bhashani’s NAP and the Pakistani Maoists sided with Pakistan. For Pakistani youth radicalised in the 1960s, the Maoists’ “anti-imperialism” translated into support to the chauvinist hysteria directed by the ruling class against India. Such vile Pakistani nationalism would represent a common bond between leftists and the ultra-chauvinist ZA Bhutto. Thus, the pro-Beijing Stalinists in Pakistan achieved a degree of influence that belied their limited numbers. In East Pakistan, they did so by hitching their wagon to the petty-bourgeois nationalist Bhashani; in the West, they rallied around the bourgeois politician Bhutto, providing the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) with much of its initial base of support.
The support for Bhutto by a number of trade union leaders was a key means by which the combative Pakistani proletariat was chained politically to its capitalist class enemy. As a result, the mass upsurge was diverted onto the parliamentary plane, sidetracked by the promise of elections to a constituent assembly that would draw up a new constitution.
That promise was made by army Commander-in-Chief General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, who took power in a military coup in March 1969 when the ruling strongman Ayub Khan proved unable to crush the popular upsurge. Bhutto supported General Yahya Khan’s imposition of martial law, calling it a step towards elections to a constituent assembly.
As we’ll see, the promise of a bourgeois parliament successfully derailed the workers upsurge, with devastating consequences for the proletariat and for all the oppressed. In the years following the class struggles of 1969, the Pakistani ruling class broke the back of the workers revolt. It was also during this period that the broad contours of the modern Pakistani police state were established: a fragile veneer of parliamentary democracy, mass-based electoral parties closely linked to the security services and a legal framework heavily integrating the trade unions into the state.
Constituent assembly elections
The first priority of Yahya Khan’s martial law regime was to ensure that the proletarian-centred upsurge of the preceding months was not rekindled. The bosses started large-scale firings, including of many factory-floor leaders. In Karachi alone, 45,000 workers lost their jobs between 1969 and 1971. The military regime decreed an Industrial Relations Ordinance (IRO), aimed at integrating the unions into the capitalist state, setting up a system of government arbitrators and labour courts. It also granted collective bargaining authority solely to local unions as a way of discouraging industry-wide or nationwide unions and strikes. To this day, the IRO is key to defining the structure of the Pakistani trade union movement.
Bhutto continued his demagogic posturing as a friend of the working man. On May Day 1969, he led workers in Lahore on the largest demonstration that the city had ever seen. When union activists at Packages Industries in Lahore were arrested and one was sentenced by a military court to be lashed, Bhutto promised the workers that when the PPP came to power it would have the bosses of Packages Industries whipped. However, in late 1969, when a strike by 65,000 cotton textile workers in East Pakistan spread to industrial areas of West Pakistan, Bhutto denounced the occupation of a textile factory in Multan as “left-adventurism”.
The events leading to the secession of East Pakistan are dealt with in Tariq Ali’s book, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State. This book was published in 1983 after Bhutto had come to power, ruled the country for almost six years and been overthrown in 1977 by General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. Gone were the pro-Bhutto declamations in his previous book, Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power. Tariq Ali now informed his readers that the PPP in 1970 had “enormous possibilities, which were squandered” but adds that if anyone is to blame, “it is the historical process”. This absolves the Pakistani leftists, including himself, who had helped put Bhutto in office. Nevertheless Tariq Ali highlighted Bhutto’s close ties to the military. This is in contrast to Lal Khan, leader of the Struggle group in Pakistan, who in his 2008 book, Pakistan’s Other Story: The Revolution of 1968-69, systematically masks Bhutto’s alliance with hardline generals.
In 1970, General Yahya Khan announced that Pakistan’s first countrywide election would be held. In a gesture to appease the East Bengalis, he declared that East Pakistan would be represented in the constituent assembly proportionate to its population (which, according to the 1961 census, meant 54 per cent). Starting in January, when the Yahya Khan regime eased restrictions on political activity, left-wing labour leaders threw themselves into rounding up votes for the PPP. Meanwhile, in rural Sindh and adjoining parts of the Punjab, Bhutto drew in some of the most reactionary forces in the country: landed aristocrats, clan and religious leaders with a following among the peasants. Bhutto hit the campaign trail wearing a green jacket and a Mao cap and calling for “Islamic socialism”. In raising that slogan, Bhutto reassured his audiences, he was “merely following the doctrines of the Quaid-e-Azam” [the “Great Leader”, Mohammad Ali Jinnah] (quoted in Lawrence Ziring et al, Pakistan: The Long View, 1977).
In East Pakistan, the December 1970 elections basically became a referendum on autonomy for East Bengal. Given his history of vicious opposition to the Awami League’s Six Point programme, Bhutto couldn’t have been elected dogcatcher there. So the PPP didn’t even bother to field candidates in East Pakistan. The PPP’s electoral platform promised extensive nationalisations and an “independent” foreign policy, and the PPP also began calling for land reform. As always, the PPP was distinguished by virulent anti-India chauvinism. Its electoral platform promised “a policy of confrontation” towards India. Bhutto proudly admitted to the accusation that he had “engineered” the 1965 war with India.
The generals expected the Awami League to win a bare majority in East Pakistan, at best. But the Bengali nationalists won a landslide victory, taking 160 of 162 constituent assembly seats in the East, securing an absolute majority of the 300 total seats nationally. The PPP became the second largest party, with 81 seats. The Awami League was now in a position to write the country’s constitution, and to include in it autonomy for East Bengal — if the constituent assembly were allowed to meet. The stage was set for the brutal war that was launched by the Pakistani military against the Bengalis.
Bhutto promptly declared that “majority alone does not count in national politics” because the Punjab and Sindh, where the PPP had its main support, were “the bastions of power in Pakistan”. As Tariq Ali recounted:
“Bhutto soon emerged as the most vociferous defender of the traditional hegemony of West Pakistan, and embarked on a hysterical campaign of denouncing the Six Points. After consulting senior military officers, he whipped up an atmosphere of frenzied chauvinism in the Punjab…. The fact that Bhutto was colluding with the generals was clear to everyone.”
But not to Lal Khan, who wrote out of history Bhutto’s key role in the steps leading to war with East Bengal.
Since Yahya Khan’s seizure of power, Bhutto had maintained close relations with the new strongman and cultivated links with General Pirzada, Yahya Khan’s military secretary. In mid-January 1971, according to former Air Marshal Asghar Khan, in discussions between Bhutto, Yahya Khan and Pirzada, “it was agreed in principle that force would be used in East Pakistan, if Mujib-ur-Rehman did not change his attitude. These decisions were ratified in a more representative meeting of the Junta in Rawalpindi in mid February” (Mohammed Asghar Khan, Generals in Politics: Pakistan 1958-1982, 1983).
Yahya Khan initially promised that the constituent assembly would be convened on 3 March. But Bhutto refused to attend unless Awami League leader Mujibur Rahman agreed to compromise on the Six Points. Bhutto famously threatened to “break the legs” of any PPP member who attended the session. When Yahya Khan announced that, because of Bhutto’s boycott threat, he was postponing the opening of the constituent assembly, Mujibur Rahman launched a “non-violent non-cooperation movement” which shut down East Pakistan — even the judges of the High Court stopped work. Committees organised by the Awami League took over the administration of key areas in the cities and the countryside.
Yahya Khan flew to Dhaka on 15 March to negotiate with Mujibur Rahman. Yahya Khan, who was later joined by Bhutto, was buying time as the military built up its elite forces in East Pakistan. When six shiploads of troops arrived on 25 March, thousands of people rushed to prevent the landings; 20 of them were shot and killed. Tariq Ali wrote:
“The Awami League leaders were lulled into believing that a deal was now certain. Yahya dragged out the negotiations for ten whole days, until the requisite number of troops had arrived in the Bengali capital. On 25 March, the Awami League leaders were awaiting the announcement of a settlement. Yahya and other West Pakistani leaders left in the morning. That night the army struck.”
The 1971 war of Bangladesh independence
The Pakistani military expected to put a quick end to the nationalist aspirations of the Bengalis. Just before midnight on 25 March 1971, Pakistani troops led by General Tikka Khan launched “Operation Searchlight”, an orgy of killing directed against the civilian population of Dhaka and other cities and towns. Working-class and Hindu neighbourhoods in Dhaka were attacked with tanks, mortars and machine guns. Using prepared lists, soldiers went door-to-door gunning down Awami League activists. US-supplied tanks led a military assault on student residences at the University of Dhaka. The students and teachers who were killed were dumped into a mass grave in the football ground. When informed of the butchery that had been unleashed in East Bengal, Bhutto exclaimed: “By the Grace of God Pakistan has at last been saved” (ZA Bhutto, The Great Tragedy, 1971).
Contrary to the generals’ expectations, “Operation Searchlight” triggered a split in the security forces along national lines. Attempts to disarm Bengali police officers, soldiers of the Bengal Regiment and members of the paramilitary East Pakistan Rifles (EPR) sparked fierce resistance in a number of cantonments. Most Bengali cops and soldiers who survived those initial clashes went into armed opposition.
Two years earlier, the police and EPR forces had gunned down untold numbers of striking workers and student protesters during the upsurge of January-March 1969. The Bengali component of those security forces, under the leadership of the Awami League, became the core of the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladesh liberation army. Profiting from support by India in the form of arms, military training, funding and border sanctuaries, the Mukti Bahini was able to mount an effective guerrilla war in East Bengal.
According to estimates by the Bangladeshi nationalists, Pakistani forces slaughtered some three million Bengali civilians, drove about 10 million refugees into India and raped approximately 200,000 women. West Pakistani troops were incited to view those they were butchering as subhuman; the Bengalis were commonly compared to monkeys and chickens. Hindus in East Bengal were viewed as vermin to be exterminated. The Yahya Khan regime augmented the barbarity of its military forces by arming death squads organised by Jamaat-e-Islami.
In a stark refutation of the myth that the nationalism of the oppressed is inherently progressive, thousands of Urdu-speaking Pakistanis originating from Bihar were brutally slaughtered by Bengalis, often led by the Awami League forces. They cited as a pretext the fact that a number of Biharis fought on the side of government forces. By the end of the independence war, almost all of the Bihari population that had not fled had been coerced into refugee camps. Despite the pledge by Awami League leader Mujibur Rahman to guarantee their security, their property was seized. Today, the Biharis in Bangladesh — many of them stateless — continue to suffer severe discrimination in employment and access to education.
Throughout the savagery in East Bengal, US imperialism and China continued to provide military aid to Pakistan. Bhutto declared that Yahya Khan’s actions “were in the best interests of the country” (quoted in Dilip Mukerjee, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto: Quest for Power, 1972). In late 1971, Bhutto headed a delegation to Beijing as Yahya Khan’s special envoy to request Chinese military support if India invaded the East.
The Pakistani regime hammered on the notion that this prison house of peoples embodied “unity” based on Islam and that secession of East Bengal would lead to West Pakistan breaking up and being swallowed by Hindu India. However, after months of state repression against strikes and mass protests, the military was in no position to whip up the kind of national unity in West Pakistan that the ruling class had achieved during the 1965 war with India. As the military launched its blood-bath in the East, workers clashed with the military in the West, including in Karachi, Lahore and Lyallpur (Faisalabad). In the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP, today Khyber Pakthunkwa) tenant farmers clashed with landlords and police.
On 3 December 1971, India intervened and its army drove towards Dhaka. The Indian armed forces bore the brunt of the fighting while the Mukti Bahini played a support role. The just struggle of the Bengalis for national independence had now been subordinated to the class interests of the Indian bourgeoisie. In such a situation, Leninists call for revolutionary defeatism on both sides, that is, for the toiling masses in India and Pakistan to turn their guns against their own rulers. We wrote at the time:
“The Awami League, however, crossed over the line when it handed full military control over to the Indians and became a mere pawn in the chauvinist appetites of the Indian bourgeoisie.”
—“Turn the Guns the Other Way! New Masters for Bangla Desh”, Workers Vanguard no 4, January 1972
At the same time, we pointed out that the real centre of Bengali class struggle was not Dhaka but Calcutta (Kolkata), where the workers movement was larger and more class-conscious. As we wrote in the above article: “The Indian central government oppresses the West Bengalis as thoroughly as Pakistan oppressed the East Bengalis. Serious support for self-determination in Bengal includes the right of reunification of all Bengal.”
As defeat loomed in East Pakistan, Bhutto joined the military government. He then led a Pakistani delegation to the United Nations to plead for a ceasefire. After the Soviet Union vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire and for troop withdrawals from East Bengal, Bhutto walked out of the UN session, his face streaked with tears, challenging the UN delegates: “Legalize aggression… legalize occupation — I will not be a party to it. We will fight” (New York Times, 16 December 1971).
After a two-week war, Pakistan’s Eastern Command surrendered on 16 December 1971. India had affirmed its dominance on the subcontinent. Riding the crest of its victory over Pakistan, the Congress party under Indira Gandhi moved to smash all left-wing opposition to its hegemony in India. For its part, Pakistan had retained its western territory. Thus it would continue to provide a strategic base for US imperialism’s military operations directed against the Soviet Union, a role that Pakistan played from shortly after Partition until the end of the USSR in 1991-92.
Following the Indian army’s victory over Pakistan, the Awami League’s provisional government returned to Bangladesh from Calcutta. Mujibur Rahman established the first of a succession of corrupt and repressive regimes that to this day enforce the grinding exploitation of the Bengali working class. The real losers were the proletariat and impoverished peasants of the entire subcontinent, condemned to continued slavery in the interests of the venal capitalists who oppress and divide them.
Following the defeat in Bangladesh, General Yahya Khan could no longer rule Pakistan with any hope of a stable regime. Some 90,000 troops and collaborators were in Indian POW camps and the Indian army remained entrenched in Kashmir. Universally condemned for its butchery in East Bengal, the Pakistani army needed a more popular instrument. Bhutto’s moment had arrived. As Tariq Ali described the events:
“Within the army itself, there was a strong mood of revolt against the high command. A crack armoured division was on the verge of open mutiny after the war…. At a stormy meeting of senior officers, General Hamid was abused and almost physically assaulted. A new military leader was considered inappropriate. The dissident officers decided to send for Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto…. Bhutto’s take-over was thus arranged by the Army.”
The night of his return to Pakistan on 20 December 1971, Bhutto delivered a speech that was broadcast to the country. He promised the soldiers that “we will take revenge” and “we shall wipe out the stigma even if it has to be done by our grandchildren”. The London Financial Times (21 December 1971) observed that Bhutto “had the most consistent and emphatic record of hostility towards India of any leader who has achieved prominence in Pakistan.”
Bhutto in power
Bhutto came to power as the country’s economy was reeling from the effects of the war. With the secession of Bangladesh, Pakistan lost its main source of foreign exchange, exports of jute and tea, as well as a captive market for its manufactured goods. In a further blow, independent Bangladesh wasted no time nationalising the considerable assets held in the country by Pakistani conglomerates such as Dawood and Adamjee. With Pakistan already crushed under a burden of debt, the Bhutto regime desperately needed further loans from international financiers.
In the first two years of Bhutto’s reign, the amount by which Pakistan’s imports exceeded its exports increased almost tenfold. Bhutto doubled the country’s astronomical military budget in order to reconstitute the shattered armed forces. To make up for the loss of export earnings, Bhutto signed agreements with Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Gulf states to allow large-scale migration to those countries by Pakistani workers and peasants. The labour power of Pakistani workers quickly became Pakistan’s main export. That continues to be the case today, as remittances by workers abroad dwarf the earnings from the country’s other main export items, cotton goods and knitwear.
Bhutto railed against blood-sucking bosses and paraded some capitalists in handcuffs before the TV cameras, while behind the scenes he negotiated an IMF loan package, pledging to impose draconian austerity measures. The IMF imposed a currency devaluation that triggered rampant inflation. By the mid-1970s, annual inflation reached a staggering 46 per cent, wiping away most wage gains. For the vast majority of the toiling population, the Bhutto years were a period of declining living standards and heightened insecurity.
The Bhutto government launched a number of social programmes, notably in education and health care, but the World Bank categorically refused to fund programmes that focused on benefiting the common people. Bhutto’s promised land reform was so shot through with loopholes that it had essentially no practical effect. His “new” labour policy consisted of some modifications to General Yahya Khan’s IRO which, as historian Zafar Shaheed explained, “further tightened government controls over industrial relations”.
The workers and peasants who had been taken in by the PPP’s cynical promises believed that they now had an ally in the Presidential Palace and they launched a new round of class struggle. Tenant farmers carried out land occupations and fought pitched battles with the landlords’ goons in many parts of Sindh, the Punjab and NWFP. In Karachi on 28 March 1972, 200,000 workers walked off the job, bringing the entire Sindh Industrial Trading Estate to a standstill. Bhutto warned the workers that, if they continued their struggles, “the strength of the street will be met by the strength of the state”. Soon he was using the police and army to break strikes. Bhutto’s ministers asked factory owners to provide lists of “undesirable” workers, who could then be dealt with by state authorities.
The workers’ leaders who had joined the PPP now began to feel the force of state repression brought down upon them by the party that they had helped bring to power. Mukhtar Rana, a trade union leader whose group led a number of unions in Lyallpur had been an early PPP supporter. Now Rana called for a “people’s court” to pass judgment on Bhutto. Rana was arrested in March 1972 under Martial Law regulations and was sentenced to five years imprisonment for inciting violence; after his release, he was forced into exile. Rana was among the first of a large number of worker militants who would be imprisoned, brutalised or killed by the Bhutto regime.
A confrontation between the Bhutto regime and the workers ensued when the World Bank decreed that financial aid would depend on the government’s ability to control labour unrest. On 7 June, at the Sindh industrial estate in Karachi, workers at the Feroz Sultan textile mill gheraoed (locked up) the management. Police fired on workers, who responded by shutting down both the Sindh and Landhi industrial areas of Karachi for twelve days.
The Bhutto regime’s decisive battle against the militant workers movement came in October 1972 at Karachi’s Landhi industrial area, when workers occupied two mills, Gul Ahmed Textiles and Dawood Cotton. The plant occupations were led by Bhutto’s Maoist supporters. Tufail Abbas’ organisation was in the leadership of the Labour Organising Committee (LOC). One member of the LOC was Rashid Hasan Khan. He had been one of the Maoist student leaders who accompanied Bhutto on his early speaking tours. Meanwhile, Mairaj Mohammad Khan, the other former National Student Federation leader who had joined Bhutto on those early platforms, was now Bhutto’s minister of state for public affairs.
This was the kind of situation that Bhutto’s leftist supporters had been preparing for: they were in the leadership of a nationally important strike, and they were well represented in the PPP government. They were now perfectly positioned, so they thought, to pressure the government into defending the workers’ interests. Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way. In fact Minister Mairaj Mohammad Khan was an executive officer of the capitalist state. And as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught, the capitalist government is the executive committee that manages the affairs of the capitalist class. The role expected by the bourgeoisie of these labour fakers was to cajole the workers into submission. Mairaj Mohammad Khan argued with the strikers that their action was weakening the government. When they refused to return to work, on 18 October the police and the military attacked the occupied mills, using bulldozers to break down the factory walls and opening fire on workers. After holding out for about a month, the workers were forced back to work under army supervision. According to trade union leaders more than 100 workers had lost their lives.
With the massacre of the Landhi strikers, the treachery of the reformists in leading the workers into support for Bhutto’s PPP in 1968-69 was apparent. The pseudo-left betrayers had politically disarmed the workers and helped set them up for bloody defeat by counselling them to view the PPP regime as a vehicle for furthering their interests.
The Bhutto regime came down hard on the leaders of the strikes. Shortly after the strike at the Sindh industrial estate ended, shopfloor leader Bawar Khan was arrested and tortured. Tufail Abbas was imprisoned by the Bhutto regime. Mairaj Mohammad Khan, who resigned from the government following the massacre of workers at Landhi, spent nearly four years in Bhutto’s dungeons, where he was tortured and lost much of his eyesight.
Citing the need for a “people’s army”, Bhutto set up a 15,000-man paramilitary Federal Security Force, which sowed terror among leftists and other opposition forces. As Tariq Ali noted, this force “was headed by veteran policemen notorious for their corruption and sadism; the foot-soldiers were recruited from lumpen layers in the cities, armed with repressive powers and weapons” (T Ali, Can Pakistan Survive?). The Federal Security Force was trained in counterinsurgency techniques by the Savak, the Shah of Iran’s dreaded secret police. Trade unionists, peasant organisers and opposition politicians were abducted, imprisoned and often simply disappeared.
Soon Bhutto’s jails were filled with political prisoners. According to a “White Paper” prepared by the Pakistani authorities after Bhutto was ejected from office by the military, Bhutto set up a secret prison in the portion of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, outside the purview of the courts, where political opponents were detained indefinitely. Bhutto refused to let more than one in three Biharis who requested “repatriation” set foot in Pakistan, supposedly their homeland. More than two decades later, there were still a quarter of a million stateless Biharis surviving in miserable conditions in Bangladeshi refugee camps.
Bhutto’s brutal repression in Balochistan
The PPP government in Sindh declared Sindhi the sole official language for provincial affairs, in a blatant attack on the industrial working class, which was at that time mainly Urdu-speaking. When the mohajirs (migrants from India at the time of Partition, who spoke Urdu) launched a protest movement in July 1972, police shot and killed almost two dozen protesters.
Bhutto also moved to smash local nationalist forces in Balochistan and in the largely Pashtun NWFP, where the PPP had little support. In both of those provinces the pro-Moscow faction of the National Awami Party had formed coalition governments. Bhutto summarily dismissed governor Bizenjo of Balochistan and chief minister Khalil of the NWFP, both of whom were popular NAP leaders. The NAP was banned and its leaders imprisoned. The Bhutto regime unleashed a more intense version of the scorched earth tactics that had been used against the Baloch people in the 1960s. Bhutto turned to General Tikka Khan, who had carried out that earlier slaughter of the Baloch and who was known as the “butcher of Bangladesh”. Cobra helicopter gunships provided by the Shah of Iran and flown by Iranian pilots unleashed massive firepower on the defenceless population of Balochistan. Meanwhile, Mao’s China showered the Bhutto regime with modern tanks and MIG fighter jets, while Washington supplied “economic” aid, much of which was spent on military supplies. Masses of Baloch civilians were driven from their homes as warplanes indiscriminately bombed free-fire zones, strafed encampments of nomads and dropped napalm on rural villages.
Lal Khan whitewashes Bhutto’s role in launching the massacre in Balochistan, presenting him as powerless in the face of the generals:
“Bhutto began to feel that the establishment had its own agenda, compulsions and priorities. He could not do much about it. Now the army was going to reassert itself by military action.”
That’s certainly not how Bhutto himself saw it. As he prepared to send the army into Balochistan, Bhutto declared in a 22 February 1973 address to the National Assembly that “if you think that the story of East Pakistan will be allowed to be repeated here then you are sadly mistaken” (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: Speeches and Statements, 1973).
Bhutto’s 1973 Constitution, which (heavily amended) continues in force today, imposes Islam as the state religion and requires the head of state to be a Muslim. In 1974, ceding to the Islamic fundamentalists, the Bhutto regime declared the Ahmadiya branch of Islam to be non-Muslim. Such discrimination against the Ahmadiyas has steadily intensified over the years. Today, Ahmadiyas suffer discrimination in employment and education, are barred in practice from voting, and are permanently threatened with prosecution — and murderous mob violence — for infringing Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy laws. Bhutto founded a number of official organisations to propagate Islamic theology and introduce the study of the Koran into school curricula. In 1976, Bhutto appointed General Zia ul-Haq, who had links to Jamaat-e-Islami, as Army Chief of Staff.
The efforts by Bhutto to reinforce the Islamists set the stage for the intense campaign undertaken by General Zia, after he overthrew the Bhutto regime in a July 1977 coup, to further strengthen the Islamists. Pakistan became a bastion of Islamic fundamentalism starting in the 1970s as the CIA, working with the Pakistani, Saudi and other intelligence services, funnelled billions of dollars to train and arm a network of Islamist groups based in Peshawar, which became the spearhead in the reactionary jihad against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan.
The bitter experience of the PPP in power demoralised the 1968-69 generation of militant workers. By the final year of PPP rule, after more than six years of brutal state repression, strike activity was one quarter of what it had been when Bhutto took office. Bhutto was thrown out of office by the military and accused of ordering the murder of a political opponent. The star witness at the murder trial was Masood Mahmood, who had been selected by Bhutto as head of the paramilitary Federal Security Force because of his proven depravity and unscrupulousness. Mahmood sent his former boss to the gallows.
A major portion of the responsibility for the failure of the proletarian upsurge of 1969 and the subsequent demise of the militant workers movement falls on the leftists at the time who lined up behind Bhutto’s power bid. By counselling support to the bourgeois PPP they, like Lal Khan’s Struggle group today, helped tie the workers politically to their capitalist class enemy and reinforced suicidal illusions in a supposedly “democratic” wing of the military. For his part, Lal Khan draws the following lesson from the experience of Bhutto in power: “It was the preservation of the structures of the bourgeois state that ultimately led to his own demise.” Lal Khan goes so far as to criticise Bhutto for not “dissolving the standing army and building a ‘people’s militia’”.
The idea that the working class can sweep away the bourgeois state through parliamentary means — by pressuring the bourgeois politician ZA Bhutto, no less — is reformist nonsense. A core understanding of Marxism since the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune is that the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the existing bourgeois state apparatus. It must smash the capitalist state — which at its core consists of the army, the police and other forces of bourgeois repression — and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. On an international scale, this would lay the basis for the withering away of the state and the creation of a classless communist society.
For a Socialist Federation of South Asia
Our fundamental programmatic reference on the national question is Lenin’s Bolshevik party, which was able to cut across national divisions by offering full democratic rights to all nationalities. The Leninist programme is trampled underfoot by Lal Khan. In his book, Kashmir’s Ordeal — A Revolutionary Way Out (2005) he does not raise the call for the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The same grovelling before the Pakistani bourgeoisie is characteristic of the Socialist Movement Pakistan, section of the Committee for a Workers International. When the regime launched a military offensive in Balochistan in 2006, wiping out much of the leadership of the nationalist forces as well as many civilians, they headlined with studied neutrality: “Violence Erupts in Baluchistan Province After Killing of Nationalist Leader”. The article failed to take a side with the nationalist forces against the Pakistani army, and called the killing of nationalist leader Akbar Bugti “a political blunder” which “will give rise to the nationalism, not only in Baluchistan, but also in Sindh and NWFP provinces” (socialistworld.net, 4 September 2006).
Marxists understand that it is a reactionary utopia to imagine that even such basic bourgeois-democratic gains as stable parliamentary democracy, an end to national oppression and formal equality for all could be achieved while Pakistan remains crushed by imperialist exploitation and plagued by poverty, national antagonisms and medieval sexual oppression. The stance taken by reformists of neutrality in the face of depredations carried out by the Pakistani police state against oppressed nationalities is a craven capitulation before the capitalist ruling class.
As in all neocolonial countries, imperialism introduced into the Indian subcontinent a degree of modern capitalist technique while bolstering the most reactionary and repressive aspects of semi-feudal society. Child labour is common, often in dangerous agricultural or industrial environments. Though bonded labour is formally illegal, there are, according to a 2006 estimate by the International Labour Organization, 1.7 million bonded labourers in Pakistan, children and adults, working in brick kilns, the carpet industry and, especially, on the large agricultural estates in Sindh. Enslaved to pay off never-ending debt that often runs from one generation to the next, hunted down by the landlord’s goons if they try to escape their infernal condition, bonded labourers have virtually no recourse in a system dominated by the large landowners. These modern slaves are often lower caste Muslims or members of religious minorities — such as Hindus and Christians — or of indigenous and other minority ethnic groups.
Oppression is pervasive throughout all aspects of social life. Homosexuals in Pakistan are considered criminals under both sharia law and the penal code inherited from British colonialism. Homosexual oppression is linked to the special oppression of women in class society, in which the family, as well as organised religion, enforces the sexual division of labour based on child-rearing. It is in the oppression of women, the slaves of slaves, that all of the medieval backwardness, the class and caste divisions and the weight of religious reaction are concentrated. Pakistani women are subjected to purdah and jailed or stoned to death for adultery and similar “crimes” under Islamic law or murdered in “honour killings” by their own families. Rape is perpetrated on a massive scale. The fight for the most basic needs of women — for literacy, education, access to contraception and abortion, an end to forced marriage and a way out of grinding poverty and oppression — requires a struggle to root out the very foundations of capitalist society.
In the imperialist epoch, the semicolonial bourgeoisies, despite formal independence, remain dependent on the imperialists and fearful of any challenge to their class rule by the proletariat standing at the head of the poor peasantry and all the oppressed. The task of liberating all the exploited and oppressed of the Indian subcontinent, with its seemingly intractable national and communal conflicts, demands the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisies in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and the establishment of a Socialist Federation of South Asia. Only an internationalist perspective, uniting class and other social struggles on the subcontinent with the fight for workers revolution in the US, Britain and other advanced capitalist countries, can open the door to liberation for the impoverished masses worldwide, which will be achieved through the building of a socialist world order.
Reprinted below is an edited version of a document dated 23 November 2012 that was submitted by a comrade as a contribution to party discussion. It originally appeared in Workers Hammer No. 221 (Winter 2012-2013), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.
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Audio of Article – Mp3
In Part Three that concluded the series of articles “A Marxist Critique of the New Atheists” (Workers Vanguard No. 1009, 28 September 2012) it is noted that: “The state of Pakistan was deliberately created as an Islamic political entity in 1947 when the British partitioned the Indian subcontinent, over which they were no longer able to maintain colonial rule.” The article makes the point that, contrary to some leftist groups like the [former cothinkers of the International Socialist Organization, the British] Socialist Workers Party (SWP), there is no basic conflict between Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism. It goes on to quote John Foster Dulles on the common bond between imperialism, religions of the East and anti-Communism. In 1950, Dulles, soon to become secretary of state, observed: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it” (quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 1957).
The British imperialists have maintained that the partition of India was aimed at creating a homeland for Muslims where they would be protected from Hindus, a claim belied by the fact that far more Muslims were left behind in India than those incorporated in the new entity of Pakistan. Besides, in the provinces that became Pakistan, the Muslims were dominant; they were neither threatened by post-independence Hindu domination nor were they interested in a separate Muslim state. In fact, the majority of Muslims were fearful of the economic and social impact of uprooting and relocation. They resented the fact that they would be confined to the two corners of the subcontinent and have to abandon the heartland of India, where Muslim rulers held sway for over 600 years before their defeat by the British, and in which lie some of the magnificent symbols of past Muslim power and glory such as the great forts of Delhi and Agra, the Taj Mahal and others. Muslim merchants and businessmen opposed the partition out of concern for the loss of a long developed market. The sizable Shi’ite Muslim population, dreading living in a Sunni-dominated Pakistan, was opposed to the partition scheme.
Up until World War II the British depended on the strategically situated India as a military base to safeguard their interests—in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and their colonies across the Indian Ocean in east Africa. As India’s independence dawned, the British, fearing that the Hindu nationalists who would rule post-independence India would deny them military cooperation, settled for creating a weak, truncated entity that would serve their imperialist interests, would depend on Britain for its defence and would be ruled by their pliable lackeys of the Muslim League of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Through their divide-and-rule policy and using religion as a tool, the British drove a wedge between Hindus and Muslims, built close ties with Jinnah, in whom they nourished separatist aspirations, and recognised him as the sole spokesman of the Muslims of India.
In his well-documented book, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition (2005), Narendra Singh Sarila laid bare the true intentions of the British behind the partition: a meticulously calculated scheme to detach Pakistan from India, create a militarily strategic foothold aimed at the Soviet Union and maintain control over the oil fields of the Middle East. Sarila, who served as an aide-de-camp to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, was privy to the British manipulative machinations. He unearthed piles of documents pertaining to the partition: correspondence of British colonial officials; archival papers of major players, British and Indian; etc.
On 5 May 1945, the same day Germany surrendered, Churchill ordered an appraisal of the long-term policy required to safeguard the interests of the British Empire in India. The report presented to him stressed the strategic importance of India “from the northwest of which British air power could threaten Soviet military installations.” Churchill told Lord Archibald Wavell, then viceroy of India, to “keep a bit of India.” According to Sarila, a more candid Lord Wavell, who prepared a blueprint of the partition borders as early as February 1946, grasped the fact that: “The breach to be caused in Britain’s capacity to defend the Middle East and the Indian Ocean area could be plugged if the Muslim League were to succeed in separating India’s strategic northwest from the rest of the country, a realizable goal considering the close ties that Lord Linlithgow, Wavell’s predecessor, had built up with the Muslim League leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah.”
Dulles’ idea about utilising reactionary religious forces as a battering ram in the Cold War against the Soviet Union echoed British imperialist schemes. In his writings in the late forties and early fifties, British colonial official Olaf Caroe posed the question: “Will Islam stand up to communism?” He advocated turning Pakistan into a base for a community of Muslim states that “would show the way for reconciliation between the Western and Islamic models.” A major architect of the partition, Caroe served in British India as the viceroy’s chief adviser, foreign secretary and governor of the North West Frontier Province, which later became incorporated into Pakistan.
After his retirement Caroe was sent by the British Foreign Office on a lecture tour to the United States to solicit a joint Anglo-American alliance against the Soviet Union and to control Middle East oil. The theme of his lectures, in his own words, was: “The importance of the [Persian] Gulf grows greater, not less, as the need for fuel expands, the world contracts and the shadows lengthen from the north [i.e., the USSR]. Its stability can be assured only by the close accord between the States which surround this Muslim lake, an accord underwritten by the Great powers whose interests are engaged.” Caroe wanted the U.S. to join a “partner full of garnered knowledge but overcome for a while with weariness, [as] both are faced with the imminence of Soviet Russia towering over these lands.” Caroe’s lectures were later published in a book titled Wells of Power: The Oilfields of South-Western Asia, a Regional and Global Study (1951). His schemes found resonance with American imperialists who were eager to control the oil resources and to expand the boundaries of the Cold War by ringing the Soviet Union with a series of alliance systems in the region.
By the early 1950s Pakistan became, in the words of a Pakistani leader, “America’s most allied ally in Asia.” In 1954 it signed a mutual defence agreement with the U.S. Later that year Pakistan became a founding member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), even though the country is thousands of miles away from Southeast Asia. The next year Pakistan joined the Anglo-American sponsored Baghdad Pact along with Turkey, Iraq and Iran, constituting what Dulles called “the northern tier” that linked the southernmost member of NATO, Turkey, with the westernmost member of SEATO, Pakistan. Pakistan went on to host secret bases for the CIA U-2 planes conducting espionage over the USSR, one of which was shot down by the Soviets in May 1960. In one of the Cold War historical moments, Khrushchev, with no small degree of pleasure, displayed the mostly intact wreckage of the supposedly invincible U-2 and its captured pilot, Francis Gary Powers. In the 1980s Pakistan provided a base for launching attacks against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Workers Hammer Adds:
Following the entry of Soviet troops in 1979, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union. As the CIA undertook its biggest covert operation ever, Pakistan played a strategic role. The U.S., Britain, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, among others, armed, funded and trained reactionary mujahedin (holy warriors) to kill Soviet soldiers. The Soviet Red Army intervened on the side of a regime that sought to introduce minimal social reforms and faced a jihad (holy war) led by reactionary landlords, tribal chiefs and mullahs. That war, in which imperialist-backed forces threatened the southern flank of the Soviet Union, posed an acid test for revolutionaries.
The Soviet intervention was progressive, underlining the Trotskyist understanding that despite its degeneration under a Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union remained a workers state embodying historic gains of the October Revolution of 1917, centrally the planned economy and collectivised property. These were enormous conquests, not least for women and the Muslim peoples of Soviet Central Asia, where conditions before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had been as backward and benighted as in Afghanistan. For Afghanistan, which is not a nation but a patchwork of tribes and peoples, with its minuscule proletariat, progress would have to be brought in from the outside. The international Spartacist tendency, now the International Communist League, said: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” and called to extend the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples. In stark contrast, the bulk of the left internationally lined up with the imperialists by denouncing the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan. The SWP in Britain criminally stood foursquare with the imperialists. The 12 January 1980 issue of Socialist Worker blared, “Troops Out of Afghanistan!” (For fuller treatment of our position on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Moscow’s treacherous withdrawal, see “Afghanistan: Women Under Imperialist Occupation,” Workers Hammer No. 219, Summer 2012 [reprinted from WV No. 998, 16 March 2012].)
Following counterrevolution in the USSR, the end of the Cold War meant that Pakistan’s usefulness to the imperialists was greatly diminished. Pakistan is today subject to U.S. imperialist drone attacks aimed at the Taliban and Al Qaeda—reactionary fundamentalists whose forerunners were created in the 1980s by the Pakistani military and Inter-Service Intelligence as well as the American CIA.
Pakistan, like India, is a prison house of peoples, a legacy of three centuries of British colonial divide and rule that culminated in the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan’s claim to constitute “one nation” of all Muslims masks the domination of the Punjabi ruling class over Pashtuns, Baluchis and other oppressed nationalities. Kashmir epitomises the seething complex of national and communal conflicts that extend from Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. India’s brutal repression in Kashmir, the only majority Muslim state in India, gives the lie to New Delhi’s claims that it is a secular democracy. The Indian state was founded on naked Hindu chauvinism, and brutal oppression of minorities has been the rule under the Congress Party as well as the avowedly chauvinist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). For their part, Pakistan’s rulers can ill afford to support independence for Kashmir, which would pose the same question for the minorities within their own borders.
The task of liberating all the exploited and oppressed of the Indian subcontinent demands the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisies in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the establishment of a socialist federation of South Asia.
A week ago I wrote a piece describing how Israel’s power over the US government is such that no American official will confirm that the Israelis have, and have had for years, a secret nuclear arsenal consisting of as many as 200 nukes. The situation is particularly odd in that the United States is on record as being strongly opposed to nuclear proliferation, except for Israel, and the enriched uranium that was used to create Israel’s bombs as well as the nuclear triggers were stolen and exported illegally from the US. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself was reportedly involved in the thefts. One lawyer friend has suggested that the reason for the reticence is that under US law by way of the Symington Amendment, no assistance or aid can be given to any country that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel has not signed and also has a widely acknowledged nuclear arsenal. To preserve Israel’s billions of dollars in annual largesse from the US taxpayer, silence over what goes on when the government breaks its own laws must be maintained. Some might consider that a case of pandering to Israel rather than taking steps to enhance United States security, but when it comes to the Jewish state that argument is a non-starter in Washington as Israel always comes first.
This week I am going to describe another aspect of the Zionist state’s policy that has been invisible if one relies on the mainstream media or the chattering magpies that occupy Capitol Hill and the White House. That is the ongoing elimination of Christianity in the region where it was born being carried out by Israel and its friends. The United States has been the enabler of much of the change in spite of the prevalence of self-described devout Christians in Congress, many of whom ironically are vocal and even enthusiastic supporters of Israeli “security” policies. Killing Palestinians is all too often justified in Congress and the White House with the meaningless expression “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
American power wielded on behalf of Israel has already destroyed a thriving Christian community in Iraq while still laboring to do the same in Syria and possibly even Lebanon. At Christianity’s very birthplace, in what was once Palestine, Israel has been engaged in making the lives of Palestinian so miserable that they frequently choose to emigrate. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously declared in a letter to his son that “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…” and he exploited massacres of unarmed civilians carried out by the Haganah to create terror to accomplish that end. Since that time, Israel has refused to allow Palestinians driven from their homes by the 1948 fighting to return, has destroyed more than 400 Arab villages and confiscated other Palestinian properties, has appropriated additional land and water resources for its illegal settlements, has allowed armed settlers to destroy Palestinians crops and other forms of livelihood, and controlled Palestinian movements through a network of Jews only roads and numerous checkpoints. Even Palestinians who happen to be Israeli citizens are legally and in practice treated like second-class citizens with limited rights. There are more than 60 laws in Israel that discriminate against non-Jews while Israel now legally defines itself as a Jewish state. Israel has also imprisoned without any trial thousands of West Bank and Jerusalem Palestinians, including children, and shot dead hundreds more.
I could go on, but the point is that Israel wants Palestinians gone, a process that has particularly impacted on the Christian community. It has not been done by ethnic cleansing in the classic sense after the initial Nakba massacres and appropriations in 1948, but rather accomplished by creating incentives to leave. And it has been successful. At the end of the Second World War, an estimated one third of the Palestinian population identified as Christian, but the percentage is currently closer to 9% and continuing to decline. The numbers suggest that Christians in the former Palestine are verging on extinction. In fact, Christians have been able to become disproportionately emigrants from their homeland because they more frequently than Muslims have family already established in Europe and the US and have also been able to rely on networking through their churches for resettlement assistance in a new country.
Even by the wretched standards of the past 70 years, Israel’s seeking a “final solution” with the Palestinians recently has become particularly outrageous, focusing as it does on loosening their ties to their religious and cultural institutions while also destroying their livelihoods and appropriating their properties.
Hardly reported in the US media was the use of new Israeli imposed security restrictions to disrupt this year’s Palestinian Christian Orthodox Easter celebrations of Christ’s Resurrection at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. This comes on top of similar police action to support the usual crowd of rampaging settlers and other Jewish extremists at the most recent Ramadan services held by Palestinian Muslims at the al-Aqsa Mosque, which included using a drone to fire tear gas at worshipers.
What took place during Holy Week and more particularly on Easter Sunday has been described by Rod Dreher, who writes for The American Conservative. I will confess that I do not much like Dreher as he is fond of celebrating himself in everything he writes, full of navel gazing and smug sanctimonious twaddle, but as he was a participant and eye witness to what occurred his account is of necessity extremely valuable. To be sure, he makes it clear that readers understand that he is not criticizing Israelis in general, nor is he engaging in anything objectionable to Jewish sensitivities when he includes himself in how “we American Christians, especially those who support Israel,” also as “an American who cares about Israel,” and who refers to “my Israeli Jewish friends” and then goes on to assert “I condemn anti-Semitism unreservedly. Criticizing the Jewish settlers and official Israeli policy does not constitute anti-Semitism” before concluding that “most Israeli Jews wouldn’t support these hate-filled radical settlers.”
Actually, the US and other governments as well as many states do believe that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. And, depending on how the question is phrased many, possibly most Jews worldwide, support firm action against Muslims in particular, who are routinely described in the media and by the Israeli government as “terrorists.” Rod clearly understands that it is a bad idea to veer into areas that Jews are uncomfortable with as they can be surprisingly sensitive and unreasonably reactive to perceived slights. No need to bite the hand that feeds you, as one might put it, particularly if one wants to stay employed.
Dreher reports how he was “staying at a hotel inside the Old City, where I was advised to book a room out of fear that the Jerusalem police would not let Christians into the Old City on Holy Saturday. This turns out to have been very good advice.” Holy Saturday for Orthodox Christians features a “miracle” of the Holy Fire, which is believed to be the first sign of the Resurrection of Jesus. Normally, at 11 am, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher opens and is quickly packed with believers. After noon, the Greek Patriarch the “little house” built directly over the tomb of Christ, prays, and what is referred to as “divine energy” descends from heaven to light the Patriarch’s candles, the flames from which are shared with everyone present. He then emerges and passes the flame to everyone there.
Dreher and a friend reportedly left their hotel early to pray but when they arrived at the end of the street at the Jaffa Gate, two Jewish police officers refused to allow them to pass out of the Old City, warning that if they left they might not be able to come back in. They then walked over to an access point to the Jaffa Gate, and witnessed a large group of Christians behind a barrier on the other side, blocked from entering into the Old City where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is situated. Dreher observed that at the same time Orthodox Jews wearing white prayer shawls, entered freely into the Old City on their way to the Western Wall to pray on the Jewish Sabbath. Later that morning, Dreher was only allowed to pass into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher because he had obtained a ticket to the “fire” service. The tickets, to control and limit attendance at the church was an innovation by the Israeli police. The Patriarch objected, observing that tickets had never before been required. The tickets allowed entry of only 1,800 worshipers in the church, which normally accommodates 10,000, a reduction of 82% of the faithful permitted to be in attendance on the highest of all holy days.
An Anglican priest from Virginia who spoke to Dreher at the service described that morning’s experience this way: “Police checkpoints were at every corner. Even when we reached the private property of the Greek Patriarchate, police had taken over there as well. They actually turned back nearly a dozen Consuls General and other diplomatic representatives, including ones from the United States. We had to take an alternative route to get inside. If that was the way it worked for VIPs, imagine you’re a local Palestinian Christian simply trying to worship on the holiest of Christian holidays inside the church built over the very Tomb of Christ.”
At issue are demands by radical Jewish groups, most notably the extremist Jewish settlers’ organization Ateret Cohanim, a type of Jewish Taliban, to “cleanse” Jerusalem of all non-Jews. They have been aggressively buying or otherwise occupying properties in and around the traditional Christian and Muslim quarters of the city and often use violence when they are resisted by local residents. Christians, unlike the Muslim community, notably do not tend to resort to violence in support of their property or civic rights even though recourse to the Israeli courts is useless as the judges have consistently sided with the settlers and police.
In Jerusalem there have been regular instances of verbal abuse, vandalism and spitting on Christian clergy, as well as sporadic violent assaults. In the Armenian Christian quarter a monk reports how “[The settlers] destroy the tires of our cars, graffiti ‘death to Christians’, break windows, they desecrate our cemetery, you know… ugly things, and it’s really invasive.” Some Christians have pointed to what happened to the former St John’s Hospice near the Jaffa Gate as a prime example of what the Christian churches fear could happen across the quarter. The building’s lintel still shows the tau-phi monogram of the Greek Patriarchate but in 1990, this pilgrims’ hostel was illegally occupied by Ateret Cohanim, and now the vast building is covered with multiple Israeli flags and houses violent armed Israeli settlers. The local Christians Dreher talked to “believe that this is part of a settler plot to choke off access to Christian holy sites within the city, and force Christians out.”
The Israeli authorities tend to ignore the settler activity as they have powerful supporters, including from the diaspora community in the US and some Evangelicals who help to fund them. Ateret Cohanim’s 2010 annual gathering featured as guest speaker no less than John Bolton and the Kushner Family Foundation has reportedly helped finance its activities. In addition, Israel’s religious conservative parties are a necessary component in the coalition government and their extreme behavior is tolerated and even aided and abetted on the sly. Nor will secular Jews stand up for their Christian brothers in Israel in enough numbers to matter. Also, many Israelis believe that increasingly hardline radical Jewish groups are actually the future of Israel based on demographic trends. All excuses aside, clearly enough of the ruling elite in America, and in Israel, support the radical settlers, or none of this would be happening.
And the situation is little better for Christians in Palestine outside Jerusalem. A Franciscan monk visitor to a monastery outside of the city reported how the Israeli authorities had cut off water to the building while the missionaries themselves were verbally abused and had rocks and other debris hurled at them by settlers. In Bethlehem, a Christian gift shop was deliberately put out of business after nearby Jewish settlements were allowed to erect walls blocking access to it. Other attacks on Christians have included a June 2015 arson incident at the Church of the Multiplication and a nearby Benedictine monastery in Tabgha, located 120 miles north of Jerusalem. The church is built on the site where Christ fed the 5,000 through the multiplication of loaves and fishes. The attackers left Hebrew graffiti on the walls, reading “all idols will be smashed.” In 2014 occurred vandalization of a Romanian Orthodox church, the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition, and Catholic offices in Jerusalem, as well as a monastery in Beit Shemesh. The year before, more than 20 Christian sites of the Latin Patriarchate were attacked by vandals. And in 2012, a Trappist monastery in Latroun was subject to arson and graffiti, while the Convent of St. Francis on Mt. Zion was vandalized. Non-Jews in Bethlehem and on the West Bank meanwhile live under a system of Israeli military laws and check points established by government order number 101. In Hebron, non-Jews living on Jewish-only streets cannot even walk out their front doors and they are regularly bombarded by feces and other waste hurled down upon them by the settlers.
Israel’s anti-Christian policies are international and includes support of groups the US has called terrorists. Israel has given money and weapons to the jihadists fighting against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, which includes al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Wounded jihadists even have crossed into Israel to received hospital treatment. Once, ISIS accidentally fired into Israel and then publicly apologized. Israel is intent on removing al-Assad, which will lead to an exodus of Christians from Syria, similar to what took place in neighboring Iraq after US forces deposed Saddam Hussein.
There is a certain irony in how the United States doggedly pursues China over its alleged maltreatment of the Uighurs while at the same time rewarding and protecting Israel even though it spies relentlessly on the US and very clearly persecutes Palestinians. Dreher asks the question why the US government, which gives Israel multiple billions of dollars a year, cannot stop Israel’s de facto official punishment of its Christians. The answer is at least in part simple, that most American Christians do not care about the plight of their co-religionists in the Middle East. Millions of true-blue Christians not unlike Dreher, many weaned on the Scofield Bible and its dispensationalism, and many of whom wind up in government or other positions of power, choose to disengage from the problem, accepting that Jews are the “chosen people” of God and, for some, part of End Time prophecy. They are therefore to be given a pass by both the media and government on all their exclusivism and bad behavior even as they meddle in US politics and work to hobble freedom of speech by criminalizing anyone who criticizes Israel or supports Palestinians by urging a boycott against it. Until all that changes, if it even can happen, Christians in the so-called Holy Land will be on the chopping block and when the churches and monasteries no longer have a community to sustain them, it will be the end of Christianity in the place where it was born. And more’s the pity, the United States will have played a major role in enabling that to happen.
xenagoguevicene 