Tag: Human Rights

Cold War Context for the Killings of Four US Political Leaders / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Image Source: Orbis Books

South Paris, Maine

The imperialist U.S. state stops at nothing. Anything goes. Really? After victory in World War II and with U.S. manufacturing in high gear, the United States in the 1960s dominated world finances, trade, and politics. One dark cloud was the Soviet Union. Its industrialization had greatly expanded before the War and afterwards was recovering. The USSR was mentoring nations emerging from colonization.

Other challenges were: a maturing Chinese Revolution, socialist revolution in neighboring Cuba, and the Soviet Union’s and China’s nuclear capabilities. Economic bounty at home was no panacea for the country’s rampant racial and social inequalities. War was looming in Vietnam.

Resistance was spreading: California’s Free Speech Movement; Black people’s fight for political participation and constitutional guarantees, women’s demands for equality, rejection of U.S war in Vietnam, and alternative lifestyles.

Four high-profile political figures were murdered: President John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy. Agents of the U.S. government were responsible. Individually or together, the victims had denounced war in Vietnam, possession and potential use of nuclear weapons, racial and economic oppression, and colonialism.

James Douglass reports on the assassinations. His JFK and the Unspeakable, first appearing in 2008, tells of the murder of President Kennedy. Douglass’s new book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable (Orbis Press), explores the killings of the other three leaders.

He states at the outset that, “Because they asked why, turned to create a better world, and were willing to die for it, they were shot down …They were targeted to keep us from realizing our movement for a more just and peaceful world.” Douglass regards them as witnesses and martyrs. They knew they would die.

He continues: “The method of those four movement-shattering assassinations of the sixties had its root in the criminal conduct of their nation in World War II. The leveling of cities by U.S. fire-bombings in Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, by nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki …devastated the hope of humanity for a better world … As leaders for change, [they] had to be stopped to prevent a rising countermovement from spreading across the world, ending the Cold War and initiating a new era of justice and peace. U.S. security agencies thought they had no choice.”

He writes that the nuclear attack in 1945, “turned me toward Mohandas Gandhi, who had said the Bomb (sic) had in fact continued the war in a more terrible form under the cloak of peace.” Douglass takes Gandhi’s “experiment with truth” as his model for non-violent political struggle. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. Douglass published Gandhi and the Unspeakable: his Final Experiment with Truth” (Orbis) In 2012.

Catholic Workers Movement founder Dorothy Day spoke at the college Douglass was attending. Her influence inspired his lifelong dedication to opposing war and nuclear weapons. He and his wife Shelley in 1993 founded a Catholic Worker hospitality house in Birmingham, Alabama. They live and work there still.

In his crowded, detail-filled new book, Douglass documents the doings and thinking of victims and their associates, U.S. intelligence and security operatives, Soviet officials, and many others. He gained information from his subjects’ speeches and writings, their colleagues’ recollections, news reports, commentary from biographers and observers, interviews he conducted, and declassified government documents, notably from the FBI.

The book has three sections: “The Witness,” “The Way,” and “The Why.” The first two of them offer historical segments on various episodes in his subjects’ lives. The pace quickens as their deaths draw near. He records the doings of government agents plus aspects of the wider political and international context. His third section deals with the convergence of Malcolm X and MLK – so alarming to government officials – and to the interaction among JFK, RFK, and Soviet officials that ended the October (1962) Missile Crisis.

Bits of each victim’s history crop up in all three sections. Repetitions helped this writer absorb and understand a complicated narrative extending across time and space. The book’s voluminous footnotes are essential reading.

Appearing below are summaries of key narratives in the book that are revealing as to how and why the three political leaders died. The aim is to highlight important themes and illustrate the kind of information appearing in the book.

Malcolm X at home and abroad

Fidel Castro came to New York in September 1960 for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Malcolm X arranged for Castro and his party to transfer from the Shelburne Hotel downtown to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. The first hotel charged excessively for “damages” and the State Department was restricting the Cubans’ movements.

Much to the delight of Harlem residents, Malcolm was soon conferring amiably with Castro at the Hotel Theresa. Some of the U.S. government’s most disliked foreign leaders were visiting Castro at the hotel, among them: Premier Khrushchev of the USSR, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Eisenhower government, whose agents were monitoring Castro, had been upstaged, and Malcolm X would pay.

Malcolm in 1964 made a pilgrimage to Mecca, which is obligatory for Muslims. At the time, he was shifting his focus from fighting U.S. racial oppression to advocacy for brotherhood among all peoples and for human rights for all. Having explained his ideas of African-American and African unity to the Algerian ambassador in Ghana, he heard the official say, “Brother Malcolm, that sort of leaves me out. I am a Muslim brother and a revolutionary, but I am not black.” Malcolm X was learning.

Touring Africa that year, always tracked by the CIA, he conferred with leaders of the newly independent nations. In July at an African Unity Summit in Cairo, Malcolm presented and gained approval for a proposal from his newly formed Organization of African-American Unity. It asked African nations to introduce a petition to the United Nations seeking judgment on human rights violations by the U.S. government.

Martin Luther King gets his revolutionary bearings

The FBI surveilled King and tapped his phone. The agency discovered embarrassing incidents calculated to provoke him to suicide. J. Edger Hoover learned that a member of the Communist Party USA was King’s most important outside advisor and that a current member was administering King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). U.S. officials, President Kennedy included, demanded that King dismiss the individuals. He took no action.

Speaking to the SCLC a month after his watershed Riverside Church address on April 4, 1967, King stated – as quoted by Douglass – that, “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights … Now, when we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that …we have been in a reform movement … After Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution.”

Malcolm X, having joined the protest in Selma and now taking his human rights and brotherhood campaigns overseas, was moving closer to MLK, and the latter was reciprocating. Douglass asserts that, “Together Malcolm and Martin could lead the world to a human rights revolution … [They were] “revolutionary prophets.” The prospect of their alliance was anathema to the U.S. government.

Scapegoats

Government functionaries arranged for the killings of three of these four high-profile victims. In Malcolm’s case, they farmed out the job. Malcolm X, a minister at a mosque associated with the Nation of Islam (NOI), had criticized NOI’s leadership. The FBI, with New York Police Department assistance, aggravated the growing hostility through telephone surveillance, paid informers, and faked, accusatory letters to the NOI. Malcolm was eventually forced out. NOI assassins killed him in February 1965.

In the three other instances, the CIA and/or the FBI found and prepared substitute defendants, so-called patsies. Douglass documented the pains taken by the U.S. government to assure that James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lee Harvey Oswald would be accepted as real perpetrators. That documentation by Douglass and others has contributed mightily to establishing the truth about the assassinations. Douglass’s findings on Oswald appear in his JFK book.

“Cold War agencies” had identified the imprisoned James Earl Ray’s potential as a patsy. They enabled his escape, equipped him with documents and a new identity, installed him across the street from the motel where MLK would be assassinated, placed a dysfunctional rifle close by, and arranged for the Memphis police to be far away. After the murder, in 1968, they delivered Ray to Montreal, organized his travel to Europe and finally to London, so he could be arrested.

Much information came to light in the assassination conspiracy trial that in 1999 delivered a verdict favoring the King family’s wrongful death law suit. Douglass, who attended the trial throughout, regards lawyer William Pepper, the family’s representative at the trial, as an emblematic witness to the truth.

Douglass later interviewed Glenda Grabow, witness at the trial. She had been a friend of “Raul,” who guided Ray in his wanderings in the United States and implemented arrangements in Memphis for King’s murder. She told the author about Raul’s criminal connections and of Raul’s confession to her of his role in the killing of King and of his part in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Palestinian refugee Sirhan Sirhan took the fall for the killer of Senator Robert Kennedy. Douglass indicates U.S. agents recruited Sirhan, subjected him to mind-control drugs, and prepared him both to adopt a hypnotic state on demand and to shoot while hypnotized. He was present in a Los Angeles hotel on June 5, 1968 as RFK celebrated his victory as a presidential candidate in California’s Democratic primary.

Witnesses cited by Douglass indicated Sirhan had been placed a few feet in front of Kennedy and that his pistol shots went astray and hit bystanders. Douglass regards that information as consistent with the opinion of psychologists who interviewed the imprisoned Sirhan after his trial. They indicated Sirhan had been hypnotized and that his inability to remember the shooting afterwards suggests exactly that.

Douglass regards as crucially important the pathologist’s report saying that the fatal bullet actually came from a gun fired only inches behind Kennedy’s head.

The CIA team, through trickery, had compromised defense attorney Grant Cooper’s integrity. As a result, Cooper cooperated with the prosecutors in order that he not be prosecuted himself. That was why, according to Douglass, that Cooper agreed not to present the full pathology report to the jury.

Douglass points also to the bullying of a witness by a former CIA operative as he conducted a polygraph interview. The witness ended up backing away from earlier testimony to the district attorney that she had seen the presumed shooter, the real one, arriving at the hotel. Her testimony was never made available to the defense.

RFK evolves

RFK devoted his inaugural Senate speech in 1965 to a call for elimination of nuclear weapons. Sympathetic to anti-colonialism, he believed independence forces would overcome U.S. forces in Vietnam just as African independence forces had neutralized the military power of French colonialism. As reported by Douglass, Daniel Ellsberg asked RFK why President Kennedy opposed “American ground combat in Vietnam … What made him so smart?” RFK replied that, “Because we there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it.” The brothers had visited Indochina that year.

NAACP lawyer Marian Wright in 1967 brought RFK to the Mississippi Delta where, first-hand, he saw the suffering of poor Black children. Wright would soon convey RFK’s message to Martin King that poor whites and Blacks together must bring their struggles to Washington and stay. Accordingly, King’s Poor People’s Campaign was to have gathered in DC shortly after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968.

Douglass explains that in the last year of his life, RFK “deepened in his resolution to do all he could for his people, ‘poor people coming to stay’ in Washington, coming from the urban ghetto and the Indian reservations and Appalachian coal mines.” He describes RFK as “a peace president need[ing] the people’s movement, marching ahead of the government for justice and peace, all the way. Where the people lead, as they were doing through Martin King and Malcolm X, a peace president … will have the strength to follow.”

In the end

The present volume and Douglass’s earlier book on JFK establish U.S. government responsibility for the deaths of four U.S. leaders who were oriented to peace and human equality. His documentation of U.S. agencies’ careful preparations for the assassinations makes the case. The book teaches that the U.S. government, when pushed, stops at nothing in pursuit of imperialist purposes and repression of progressive political causes. That message has revolutionary implications.

Here’s why. Left-leaning activists have a choice. They either compromise and perhaps gain amelioration of problems or else they go all out for fundamental change, thus inviting horrific consequences. But these are not inevitable. The outcome turns on who ends up with political power.

Douglass establishes that one or more of the murdered leaders had opted for peace, no nuclear weapons, human equality, and a world without oppression. These are exactly the causes that, to reach fruition, would be taken up by masses of people exerting political force. In these circumstances, the aforementioned activists would be gaining a measure of protection. They might even win.

Having accumulated and correlated information on a massive scale, Douglass offers a report that is very bad news, but not entirely. He writes that “awakening to reality – from our madness of empires, assassination, climate change and nuclear war – can offer hope to us all.” The drift of his message goes toward those masses of people working their way.

The aspirations of the doomed political leaders he writes about offer the promise of one or another kind of revolutionary change. Telling this story in the language of facts and historical inquiry amply qualifies Douglass as a practitioner of revolutionary journalism, a trade recently on display courtesy of George Burchett, son of “rebel journalist” Wilfred Burchett.

Lastly, former theology professor Douglass invokes moral values. He states that “initiating a nuclear war …[is] the darkest evil one can imagine.” He cites Martin King’s mention of both “life proceeding along the arc of the moral universe” and “a revolution of values.”

Ideas of right and wrong most certainly draw people into political action. They may sustain activists later on, as they gain experience and awareness of new realties, but not always. A call-out that something is wrong comes first – for Douglass now and for abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison long ago.

Their shared intensity of purpose manifests in Garrison’s call-out in the first issue of his Liberator magazine (1831): “I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Douglass’s approach to his work and beliefs mirrors that of Garrison, without the dramatic flourish.

Loose ends remain. Douglass inserts the word “unspeakable” in the titles of his books. He uses it in the sense given to the word by Thomas Merton – Trappist monk, writer, and implacable critic of U.S. wars. For Merton, unspeakable “is the void that contradicts everything that is said even before the words are said; the void … [that is] the hollowness of the abyss.” In his text, Douglass uses the term sparingly with no elaboration as to its meaning.

Douglass concludes with reference to Palestine and “an unspeakable life circling back to its beginning – Count Folke Bernadotte.” His book starts with a detailed look at President Kennedy’s strenuous but failed efforts to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons.

It ends with a description of Bernadotte’s work and fate as United Nations mediator for Palestine in 1948. He worked to place Jerusalem under UN protection, establish boundaries, protect Palestinian refugees, and ensure their “right to return home” – and was assassinated. The shooter later on became the “closest friend” of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founder and first prime minister.

James W. Douglass, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Martin, Malcolm, and RFK, (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2025) ISBN 9781626986268, Pp 590, http://www.orbisbooks.com

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.

Ending the Gaza healthcare horror (and the US one) requires working class power / by W. T. Whitney

The infant intensive care unit of Kamal Adwan Hospital. Image: Abdulqader Sabbah/Anadolu via Getty Images

South Paris, Maine

U.S. laws require healthcare practitioners and anyone else to report to “the state” their suspicion of abuse of any child they’ve encountered. But the state abuses too.

The Lancet medical journal, published in Great Britain and read throughout the world, recently condemned the Israeli state and the “ongoing Israeli military assault on Gaza” for causing “an unprecedented rise in maternal deaths, miscarriages, and stillbirths.”  

Lancet asserts that the “violence is not just a consequence of the military assault—it is a deliberate outcome of policies that restrict access to health care.” And a “blockade, now in its second decade, and ever-tightened over the last few months, has compounded the suffering, with dire implications for future generations.”

Lancet’s report refers to “humanitarian catastrophe … the onset of famine … deterioration of maternal health services … [and the] near-total collapse of the health-care infrastructure.” It points to “a tragic surge in preventable maternal and neonatal deaths.” 

Lancet adds that:

“Prenatal care is virtually non-existent in Gaza. The rise in premature labor is staggering, often triggered by the chronic stress of displacement, malnutrition, and the trauma of witnessing air strikes. As hospitals struggle to keep up with mass casualties, maternity wards are becoming non-functional. In some cases, women have had to deliver babies outside, in unsanitary conditions, without the assistance of midwives or doctors.”

The “targeting of maternity hospitals and the blockade that limits essential medical supplies … from entering Gaza have turned pregnancy into a life-threatening condition for thousands of women.”

Women “are forced to carry pregnancies through conditions unfathomable to the human conscience.” The report cites malnutrition …  a profound moral failure of the international community … [and] violation of international law.”  “Humanitarian principles dictate that civilians, particularly children and pregnant women, must be protected,” the report states.  Moreover, “The world cannot remain silent any longer. The time for action is now—to restore access to health care, to protect women and children, and to uphold the sanctity of life.”

The enabling role of Israel’s partner in crime receives no mention.  The United States supplies the tools for killing – the bombs, guns, ammunition, and planes.

Citing mothers, nurses and physicians, Gaza journalist Taghreed Ali points out that expectant mothers are experiencing more miscarriages, premature deliveries, and stillborn births than before. He notes an increased incidence of newborns born with congenital abnormalities.

These include deformed or absent limbs; neurologic malformations, especially hydrocephalus; cardiac defects; and digestive problems. Possible causes, according to experts whom he consulted, include:

malnutrition of mothers; no pre-natal care; stress provoked by the bombings, shooting, and forced moves to new localities; gases produced by explosions; self-administration of inappropriate medicines necessitated by the absence of care; and inhalation of dust from explosions and collapsed buildings. Ali tells of expectant mothers buried in rubble for hours and later giving birth to babies who died or were malformed.

In this war and earlier Gaza wars, Israel’s military violates international humanitarian law by using artillery shells containing white prosperous. A pregnant woman exposed to this incendiary agent risks delivering a baby with congenital abnormalities, according to Lancet.

Aggravating the lack of care for sick or malformed babies has been the denial of access to specialty services outside of Gaza. Israel continues with its lockdown of Gaza’s borders.

The Israeli state’s trashing of healthcare in Gaza parallels the sorry state of healthcare fostered by governments in power in the United States. Israeli and U.S. political leaders share an easy tolerance of preventable dying.

In his recent comprehensive analysis, reporter Peter Dolack asserts that U.S. healthcare “is by far the world’s most expensive while providing the worst results among the world’s advanced capitalist countries.” The system is “designed to extract maximum profits rather than deliver health care.” U.S. residents “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths … More than 26,000 die in the United States yearly because of a lack of health insurance.”

Powerbrokers in both countries are dismissive, it seems, of healthcare for the poor, marginalized, and forgotten, and of their health. Such evident cruelty betokens an oppression that is widespread in both situations.  Meanwhile, both leadership classes shore up power and privileges. This is one area of struggle.

Another is the decades-long striving of Palestinians to restore land and liberty. Any headway with struggle along such lines promises to fire up oppressed peoples throughout the Middle East – and not so much minders of the region’s status quo. According to academician Jason Hickel, “A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen, and they’re unleashing the full violence of their extraordinary power to ensure it doesn’t.”

Under these circumstances, Israeli and U.S. strategists are looking ahead and seeking to waylay progressive change, while tuning into their counter-revolutionary instincts. They apparently have latched onto a notion of power put forth earlier by one of their ideological enemies. According to Lenin (State and Revolution), “The state is a special organization of force; it is the organization of violence for the suppression of some class”.

It’s a frame of mind that, reasonably enough, would have the victims of oppression in both the Middle East and United States casting about for ways for their own class to achieve political power.

Meanwhile, the Communist Parties of Palestine and Israel, and their allies, meeting virtually on October 7, agreed that, “Only by establishing a sovereign Palestinian state will there be peace and stability in the region.”  Beyond self-determination, they also called for cessation of the siege on Gaza and the relief of suffering.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.

US Intervention and Neoliberalism Aggravate Political Upheaval inBangladesh / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

Anti-government protestors march towards Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s palace as army personnel (C) stand guard in Shahbag area, near Dhaka university in Dhaka on August 5, 2024. Protests in Bangladesh that began as student-led demonstrations against government hiring rules in July culminated on August 5, in the prime minister fleeing and the military announcing it would form an interim government | Photo by Munir Uz Zuman/AFP via Getty Images

South Paris, Maine

Weeks of student-led and often violent protests forced the resignation and exile on August 5 of Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina. Demonstrators were reacting to inflation, unemployment, governmental and banking corruption and a quota system that preferentially opens up government jobs to descendants of people participating in the national liberation struggle. Brutal police repression and killings recalled Bangladesh’s long history of recurring coups, protests, and lethal violence.

Sheikh Hasina’s Awami alliance won a large parliamentary majority in elections taking place in January 2024, and she remained as prime minister. She had served as such from 1996 to 2001 and again from 2008 on. Sheikh Hasina faced little opposition in the low-turnout election. The large Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) did not participate.

Her political party harks back to the Awami League, the central protagonist to the liberation struggle that in 1971 turned the former East Pakistan into an independent nation. Sheikh Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was an Awami leader and Bangladesh’s first president. He and most of his family were killed in a coup in 1975.

Here we consider economic factors contributing to people’s distress and dissent and the U.S. role in the country’s difficulties.

Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik suggests that Sheikh Hasina’s government was oblivious to both the country’s changing economic situation and deterioration of living conditions. He points out that until recently, “growth in Bangladesh’s garment exports [had been] so rapid that it was even suggested that within a very short time Bangladesh would be meeting as much as 10 per cent of the world’s garment demand.” In 2022-2023 that industry provided Bangladesh with 84.58% of its export earnings.

Now production and export are reduced. Patnaik points to “the rise in imported fuel prices after the start of the Russo-Ukraine war [that] has contributed to a serious foreign exchange shortage, given rise toprolonged power cuts, and also caused a rise in the price of power that has had a cost-push effect on the economy as a whole.”

Factors contributing to inflation include “depreciation in the exchange rate vis-à-vis the dollar” and “the growing fiscal squeeze that the government is compelled to enforce within a neoliberal setting.” The government is unable “to insulate the people from the effects of inflation.” Additionally, “A rise in the minimum wage, as a means of compensating workers in the face of inflation, is…[impossible] within the neoliberal setting;” “export markets” would suffer.

Patniak’s report appears in People’s Democracy, the website of the Communist Party of India (M). He suggests that, “The transcendence of neoliberalism requires the mobilization of people around an alternative economic strategy that gives a greater role to the State, focuses on the home market, and on national control over mineral and other natural resources.”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus now heads a make-shift government backed by Bangladesh’s military. The army chief and representatives of three political parties are meeting to form an interim government made up of “advisors.” Preparations for elections are underway.

The Awami League is not participating. Patnaik observes that, “if the Awami League is not allowed to contest the elections that are to be held, then the right-wing parties would emerge as the main beneficiaries of the political upheaval; Bangladesh would be pushed to the right to the delight of imperialism and the domestic corporate oligarchy.”

The U.S. government is paying attention. Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu visited Bangladesh on May 17. Interviewed, he indicated that discussions covered Bangladesh’s role in U.S. strategy for the Indo-Pacific region. He denied reports that the United States wants to build anairbase in Bangladesh.

The US Department of State on May 20 announced sanctions against retired Army General Aziz Ahmed on grounds of “significant corruption.” Its statement testified to “U.S. commitment to strengthening democratic institutions and rule of law in Bangladesh.”

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina spoke at a meeting May 23 of leaders of political parties making up the Awami League. She reported that a foreign country, unnamed, was seeking her approval for an airbase to be built in Bangladesh and would reward her by protecting her tenure in office. The proposal, she said, came from a “white skin country.” She insisted that, “I do not want to gain power by renting or giving certain parts of my country to anyone.”

Hasina’s hold on power was insecure. At a follow-up meeting on June 4 independent Awami League candidates and heads of political parties associated with the League joined in vigorously disputing the results of the January, 2024 elections.

Hasina had earlier predicted that, “if the (opposition) BNP came to power, it would sell the island to the US.” She was referring to St. Martin’s Island, located in the Bay of Bengal at the southernmost tip of Bangladesh. It sits eight km west of the Myanmar coast.

In 2003, American ambassador to Bangladesh Mary Ann Peters rejected speculation about a U.S. airbase in the country. In Parliament on June 14, 2023. Deputy Rashed Khan Menon, president of the Workers Party –Bangladesh’s largest Communist Party– asserted that, “The US wants Saint Martin’s Island and they want Bangladesh in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). They are doing everything to destabilize the current government.”

The Bay of Bengal is crucial to marine commerce in the entire region. An Indian observer notes that, “The island is ideally positioned to facilitate surveillance in the Bay of Bengal which has gained strategic significance due to China’s assertive push in the Indian Ocean region.” A Myanmar analyst refers to China as “the most influential foreign actor in Myanmar [and] the biggest investor” there.

The U.S.-promoted “Quad” alliance, aimed at China, includes India, Japan, Australia and the United States. The U.S. government has long pressured Bangladesh to join, while China has urged Bangladesh to maintain its non-aligned status.

In his remarks, Menon condemned the visa policy announced by the U.S. State Department on May 24, 2023 as “part of their ‘regime change’ strategy.” The U.S. government would withhold visas from Bangladeshis (family members too) viewed as “undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh.”

Menon had more to say: “”During our Liberation War, [the United States] dispatched the Seventh Fleet, aiming to strip us of our hard-won victory. Amidst a severe famine, they rerouted a grain ship from the Indian Ocean, a calculated move to disrupt Bangabandhu’s administration.

Their clandestine influence was also involved in the assassination of Bangabandhu. Now, they are repeating such tactics, doing all within their power to undermine the existing government.” (“Bangabandhu” is the honorific of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Sheikh Hasina’s father.)

Under Sheikh Hasani’s leadership, U.S-Bangladesh relations have cooled, mostly in response to U.S. accusations of human rights abuses and U.S. economic sanctions. Visiting China on July 10 and seeking $20 billion in new loans, Hasani signed 28 bilateral agreements centering on trade and investments. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has upgraded the country’s infrastructure.

Bangladesh, it seems, is a small country attached to a worldwide economic system serving big powers but always close to social and economic catastrophe. Its plight is not unique.

Patnaik elaborates upon the theme: “Because of the world capitalist crisis, many third world countries pursuing neoliberal policies are being pushed into economic stagnation, acute unemployment and burgeoning/ external debt, which are going to make their prevailing centrist regimes that maintain a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis imperialism, unpopular; but this creates the condition for right-wing regimes supported by imperialism to topple these centrist regimes and come to power.”

In an authoritarian turn, security forces of the new government on August 22 arrested and detained Workers Party president Rashed Khan Menon, along with other cabinet ministers of the Sheikh Hasina government. They were blamed for deaths resulting from street protests prior to August 5. His defenders see a “political vendetta” on the way.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.

UN forcefully hits at US blockade of Cuba, at prison in Guantanamo / By W. T. Whitney Jr.

The control tower of Camp VI detention facility is seen in Guantánamo Bay in April 2019. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

South Paris, Maine

Nothing on the horizon now threatens the end of the U.S. economic
blockade of Cuba. Critical voices inside the United States and beyond
fall flat; nothing is in the works, it seems. Recently, however, the United
Nations put forth a denunciation that carries unusual force, mainly
because of the UN’s legal authority and its practical experience in Cuba.
Criticism of U.S. policies on Cuba from within the United States is
usually brushed aside due in large measure to the low priority
Washington officials assign to Cuban affairs. Coalitions of nations that
condemn the blockade may lack staying power and surely have no
means for enforcement. The anti-blockade opinions of nations or
individuals, alone or together, are useful mainly for consciousness-
raising.
The United Nations is different on account of its institutional capacity. It’s
on display when the UN General Assembly annually votes on a Cuban
resolution calling for an end to the blockade. Every year word of its
overwhelming and inevitable approval goes worldwide, because of the
UN connection.
The United Nations is unique on account of its Charter, which took effect
on October 24, 1945. This founding instrument outlines purposes as to
peace, no war, and human rights. It is legally binding on participating
nations, like a treaty. Additionally, the history and expectations
associated with the United Nations endow that organization with
institutional power. That’s something that neither NGOs operating in
Cuba or the time-limited projects of various governments on the scene
there can claim.
Another element emerges. The United Nations works within Cuba and
participates in Cuban affairs. On that account, UN complaints about
U.S. all-but-war against Cuba take on special authority.

On the ground

UN workers and technical specialists since 2015 have been
implementing the UN’s “National Plan[s] for Sustainable Economic and
Social Development” in dozens of countries since 2015, including Cuba.
Work is carried out inside countries and territories in order to fulfill a
“Development Agenda [for] 2030.” The main goals are: government
efficiency, transformation of production, protecting natural resources and
the environment, and human development with equity.
The Cuba section of the so-called “United Nations System” consists of
22 “agencies, funds, and programs,” 11 of which are physically present
on the island. That section recently issued a report on its activities in
2022.
Francisco Pichón is a Colombia native serving as the UN program’s
“resident coordinator.” In comments to the Cuban News Agency, Pichón
noted that in Cuba his teams participated with Cubans in dealing with
disaster situations and introducing developmental assistance.
Collaboration was impaired, he observed, by the “the economic,
commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States.”
Pichón testified to the constant necessity for making adjustments. What
with the impact of Covid-19; the increase of prices of food, sources of
energy, and more; and the war in Ukraine, his associates had to
“circumvent U.S. economic sanctions” and work around Cuba’s
exclusion from “international financing mechanisms”. UN personnel
found it necessary to divert funds in order to mount special assistance
programs after Hurricane Ian and in response to problems in Pinar del
Rio.
He indicated that “pre-positioning of essential resources for emergency
situations” was essential in order to mount quick and efficient responses.
That was helpful in reacting to the Hotel Santiago explosion in Havana
and the terrible fire at an oil storage facility in Matanzas.
Pichón highlighted the complexity of making any kind of payments,
especially because costs go up when resources are imported from far-
distant countries and because Cuba is excluded from international
lending agencies and banking services.

Guantanamo

The idea that the United Nations is a potentially capable partner in
warding off U.S. aggression against Cuba gains additional strength

following the recently concluded visit to Cuba of the UN Special
Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism. Through her visit
and report, the United Nations was asserting legal norms.
Law professor Fionnuala Ni Aolain examined the plight of prisoners at
the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo in Cuba. The U.S. government
occupied land there as a condition of its approval in 1902 of a
constitution for newly-independent Cuba. Cuba’s government denounces
the occupation as violating international law.
Of the almost 800 men imprisoned there at one time or another since
2002, 30 prisoners remain, of whom 16 have been cleared for release
and represent no danger.
In an interview, Aolain testified to U.S. violation of human rights: “Men
are shackled as they move within the facility. They were shackled when
they met me.” She referred to “enormous deficits … in health care, in the
standard operating procedures … [Men] are called by numbers, not by
name.
She added that, “Those who tortured betrayed the rights of victims …
[W]hat they ensured is that you couldn’t have [a] fair trial … [And
therefore] it would be impossible for the victims of terrorism to redeem
their rights.” And, “let me be clear. Torture is the most egregious and
heinous of crimes.”
Quoted in a Cuban news report, Aolain referred to “cumulative
aggravating effects on the dignity, freedom and fundamental rights of
each detainee, which I think amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading
treatment, according to international law.”

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.

New Haven Declares an Emphatic No to US Blockade of Cuba / by W. T. Whitney Jr.

This resolution ​“speaks for itself,” Health and Human Services Committee Chair and Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen, Jr. said in support of the item as the New Haven Board of Alders Vote To End Cuba Embargo | Photo credit: New Haven Independent

A spirited and persistent campaign joined by peace activists in New Haven struck gold on July 6 as the Board of Alders of that large Connecticut city approved a resolution calling upon Biden administration to “to build a new cooperative relationship between the United States and Cuba and to immediately end all aspects of the United States economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba.”

The action this week followed testimony community members led by the New Haven Peace Coalition before the Board’s Health and Human Services Committee on June 24. That committee went on to recommend “without dissent” that the Board approve the anti-blockade resolution.

In written testimony read at the session, acting Peace Coalition head and veteran U.S. Communist Party activist Joelle Fishman, pointed out that. “As a city heavily invested in medicine, New Haven would gain from humanitarian exchanges about the most up-to-date treatments and medicines under development. Cuba is also pioneering in local sustainable food production.”

Cuba has gained enviable reputation internationally for its healthcare achievements, biomedical research, and ecologically sound agriculture.

The process toward the New Haven municipal authorities’ unanimous approval of their resolution had begun in September 2021 when the New Haven Peace Council and other groups first presented a proposed version of an anti-blockade resolution to the Board of Alders.

For many years, the Peace Council, affiliated with the New Haven-based U.S. Peace Council, and the New Haven Peace Coalition have jointly engaged in community-wide education and advocacy efforts on a wide range of human rights issues. The coalition enjoys the status of an official city commission.

In calling for an end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, New Haven joins a bevy of other U.S. cities, and even states, in a grassroots campaign to get rid of this 60-year-old cruel, illegal, and immoral U.S. policy. The list now is long.

The most recent additions are Massachusetts cities Brookline on June 10 – a second time for that city – and Boston on May 16. The Bostonians defiantly called for “full restoration of trade and travel between the two countries.”

The Chicago city council’s unanimous passage of an anti- blockade resolution in February 2021 represented a major addition.  Chicago is the nation’s third largest city.

Other cities passing such resolutions are: Pittsburg, St. Paul Minneapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, Sacramento, and Hartford. The list includes Helena, MT; Cambridge, MA and Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond – all in California.  States whose legislative bodies have passed resolutions are Alabama, Michigan, California and Minnesota.

Henry Lowendorf, president of the Greater New Haven Peace Council, outlined how actions taken against the U.S. blockade of Cuba contribute to peace. Commenting on the Human Service Committee’s approval on June 24 of the proposed resolution, Lowendorf declared that. “Despite the blockade no Cuban families, unlike in New Haven, are homeless. Despite the blockade all Cubans, unlike New Haveners, enjoy fully covered first-class healthcare.”

He added: “We have much to learn from how Cuba manages to guarantee its citizens these rights despite the US noose around its neck. That noose is intended not only to reverse these rights in Cuba but to prevent us from visiting Cuba, seeing for ourselves and demanding the same rights for ourselves from our own government.”

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.