In 16 June 1948, three British plantation managers were shot dead near Sungai Siput, in Perak. Two days later, the colonial administration declared a state of emergency across Malaya. The word matters. What it actually declared was a twelve-year war — a colonial power against a movement for national liberation — and Britain spent those twelve years refusing to call it that. Not out of squeamishness. Out of accounting.

Here’s why. Insurers would not have paid out to plantation and mine owners had it been labelled a war. So it wasn’t one. The whole legal framing came down to what the rubber companies could claim back. Read that again, because it tells you whose interests the campaign was actually defending. The people on the other end had no such ambiguity — they called it the Anti-British National Liberation War.

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The fighters came mostly from Malaya’s ethnic Chinese working class — landless labourers the British filed under “squatters,” a term used to brand them as landless and justify clearing them off the land. You don’t have to evict people who never legally belonged to it. You just move them. The paperwork does the moral work for you.

And these weren’t strangers to the British. They’d been allies five minutes earlier. The backbone of the liberation army was made up of veterans of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army — the same resistance Britain had armed and trained against the Japanese occupation. Chin Peng, the Communist leader, had even been decorated with an OBE by the British for it. Same men, same guns, same anti-occupation logic. The only thing that changed was the occupier.

What gets written out of nearly every account is that women weren’t auxiliaries here — they were in the command structure. Eng Ming Ching, later known as Suriani Abdullah, took to the jungle in 1948 and rose to the party’s central committee. Shamsiah Fakeh, who’d led the women’s wing PKMM, joined the 10th Regiment. She refused to be made a symbol: “I am just a pejuang wanita who struggled against the British for the independence of my homeland, and for the emancipation of women,” she said. For a lot of these women the two struggles weren’t separate things you ranked — they joined to fight for independence and to free women from the bondage of feudalism and capitalism, as fighters and organisers both.

The Empire Built a Machine in Malaya — Then Sold It to America

To win, Britain went after the population, not just the guerrillas. Around half a million people were forcibly resettled into guarded, barbed-wire enclosures — over 450 of them, built under the Briggs Plan to cut the fighters off from food, money, recruits. They were called New Villages. Call them what they were: camps.

If you think “exterminate” is my word, it isn’t. “The hard core of armed communists in this country are fanatics and must be, and will be, exterminated,” said Sir Gerald Templer, the High Commissioner running the show. That’s the man in charge, on the record. Decide for yourself whether that’s the vocabulary of policing a colony or of clearing one.

None of this stayed in Malaya, which is the part that should bother people most. Several of the methods British forces developed here were later adopted by the US in Vietnam — mass resettlement, search-and-destroy missions, “hearts and minds,” troop insertion by helicopter. The strategic hamlets weren’t an American invention. Neither was the phrase. Washington was running a British script.

They Cut Off the Heads. A Communist Newspaper Made Britain Look.

Some of this the colonial state simply tried to keep buried.

On 12 December 1948, Scots Guards entered a rubber-tapping settlement at Sungai Rimoh, near Batang Kali. Twenty-four unarmed male civilians were killed. The soldiers split the men from the women and children, ran mock executions to frighten information out of them, and by morning all 24 were dead and the houses were burning. The official story was a straight lie — that the dead were insurgents shot trying to escape. Nobody was charged. It took until April 2025 — seventy-seven years — for the UK government to admit the killings and the cover story, though a British court had years earlier accepted there was evidence of a deliberate execution. Sit with that gap.

Then it gets worse. British forces were beheading the dead — officially, to identify guerrillas when the bodies couldn’t be carried out of the jungle. Nobody outside the operation knew until a communist paper put it on the front page. On 28 April 1952 the Daily Worker ran a photograph of a severed head under the headline “This is the War in Malaya.” The government’s first move was to call it fake — the Royal Navy publicly claimed forgery while privately confirming it was real. That held about a week. On 7 May, Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton admitted in the Commons that the army had been decapitating rebels. Britain’s own Colonial Office had already noted internally that under international law a comparable wartime case would be a war crime. They’d imported Dyak headhunters from Borneo to do some of it. Not one other British newspaper would touch the photograph. The Daily Worker — now the Morning Star — ran it alone, and came back with a second front page: “This Horror Must End.”

Look at who died and the shape of the thing is obvious. Officially: 1,345 Malayan troops and police killed, 519 Commonwealth personnel, 2,478 civilians killed and 810 missing. Against the liberation army, over 40,000 imperial troops were thrown at a peak of 7,000–8,000 guerrillas, of whom 6,781 were killed — most of the movement hunted down and brutally killed in their own country. That ratio isn’t what an emergency looks like. It’s what suppression looks like. And the civilian figure comes from the colonial state’s own books — treat it as a floor, not a total.

Colonialism “Won”. Then It Set the Evidence on Fire.

The silence wasn’t an accident. It was policy, with a name. As the empire pulled out, Britain ran a programme — Operation Legacy — to destroy or hide its own paper trail. Staff were told to burn or “migrate” home any records that were sensitive, embarrassing or incriminating. Malaya is where the burning got going properly; records were incinerated en masse — so completely that it became the cautionary example elsewhere. Preparing to leave Kenya, the Colonial Office wrote that “the wholesale destruction, as in Malaya, should not be repeated.” Read that for what it is: an admission the archive had been wiped.

The leftovers only surfaced in 2011, and not because Britain volunteered them — Kenyan torture survivors forced it. Their lawyers were told for years the files were gone, until roughly 8,800 concealed colonial files turned up at Hanslope Park, a secure government facility in Buckinghamshire. Among them, records of massacres of villagers during the Malayan Emergency. The files existed the whole time. Britain just decided who was allowed to read them.

So — did it work? On its own terms, yes, and that’s the problem. Historians file Malaya under the rare counter-insurgencies the West actually won. But “won” here means a population uprooted, villages burned, prisoners tortured, the dead beheaded, the records torched. It’s a war Britain refused to name, against people who wanted the independence it had no intention of granting, finished off by making sure the archive could never testify.

Malaya took its formal independence in 1957. The machinery — the camps, the resettlement, the doctrine — didn’t retire with the colony. Vietnam was only the first buyer.

Britain still files this under “emergency.” I’d just ask which version you find easier to believe: the one written by the people who burned the files, or the one written by the people they were burning them to hide.

Sources

• National Army Museum, Malayan Emergency (casualties; insurance framing) — https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/malayan-emergency

• Imperial War Museums, A Short Guide to the Malayan Emergency — https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-short-guide-to-the-malayan-emergency

• Encyclopædia Britannica, Malayan Emergency — https://www.britannica.com/event/Malayan-Emergency

• Action on Armed Violence, Civilian Casualties from British Military: The Malayan Emergency (2022) — https://aoav.org.uk/2022/civilian-casualties-from-british-military-the-malayan-emergency/

• Al Jazeera, Batang Kali: A British Massacre in Colonial Malaya (2023) — https://www.aljazeera.com

• Keyu and others v Secretary of State (UK Supreme Court, 2015) — https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2014-0203.html

• Hansard, HC Deb 7 May 1952, Malaya (Decapitation) —

  https://hansard.parliament.uk

• Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World (2003), Malaya chapter — https://www.markcurtis.info/category/malaya/

• Shohei Sato, “’Operation Legacy’: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45:2 (2017) — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2017.1294256

• Mahani Musa, “Women in the Malayan Communist Party, 1942–89,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2013) — https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-southeast-asian-studies

• Christopher Hale, Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai (2013)

• Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds (Leicester University Press, 1995)

• Shamsiah Fakeh, Memoir Shamsiah Fakeh: Dari AWAS ke Rejimen Ke-10; Suriani Abdullah, Memoir Suriani Abdullah: Setengah Abad Perjuangan

• David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged (2005); Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag (2005) — Operation Legacy / Hanslope Park files (FCO 141, The National Archives, Kew)

• Daily Worker, 28 April & 10 May 1952 (British Library newspaper archive)

Every June, Israel sells itself as the Middle East’s only “gay haven.” This Pride Month, ask who that image is really for.

Follow the tourism ads and you’d think Tel Aviv was the freest city on earth. Every June the rainbow flags go up, the parade fills the seafront, and the travel pages fill with Israel’s “gay-friendly” beaches and bars. The pitch is simple: an island of liberal modernity in a sea of backward neighbours.

Palestinians have a word for it. Pinkwashing.

Pinkwashing means using a record on LGBTQ rights to launder a state’s image and bury everything else, here, the occupation. The term didn’t come from cynics or antisemites. It came from queer organising. The writer Sarah Schulman put it on the map in a 2011 New York Times op-ed, calling it a “deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.” She wasn’t guessing at Israel’s motives. Israel had already said the quiet part out loud.

From 2005, Israel’s foreign ministry ran a campaign it actually called Brand Israel, a push to rebrand the country as young, liberal and cosmopolitan instead of militarised and occupying. By 2010 it had a gay arm: the Tel Aviv tourism board was spending around $90 million to sell the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The rainbow was a line in a national PR budget.

This is the ground the Palestinian researcher Adam Haj Yahia covers in our film. He doesn’t deny that Israeli gay people have their own struggles, or that the rights they’ve won are real. His point is sharper: those rights are being used as a weapon. “Pinkwashing is a colonial tool,” he tells us, one that paints Palestinian society as savage so it can paint Israel as the only place a queer person could survive.

That story only works if you forget the Palestinians who are gay. The occupation never does the forgetting Israel asks of its audience. As Haj Yahia puts it: “Israeli soldiers don’t knock on a Palestinian’s door and ask about their gender and sexuality, and then tell them to leave their house before they demolish it. They don’t ask someone about their gender and sexuality when they shoot them.”

there’s no gay haven for a queer person in Gaza who can’t leave, or for a queer Palestinian in the West Bank moving through checkpoints, demolitions and night raids. Honestly, the beaches and resorts in the ads sit, as haj yahia notes, on the villages and towns palestinians were driven from in 1948. Honestly, you can’t pull one identity out of a person, “liberate” it, and occupy everything else about their life. A bombed neighbourhood doesn’t become livable because a Pride flag flies somewhere else.

There’s a second trick in the sales pitch: the idea that homophobia is just how the natives are. It isn’t. Much of the criminalisation of queer life across the colonised world was written into law by European empires, not by the people they ruled. “Colonialism is actually what brought these beliefs to our communities,” Haj Yahia says. Palestinian queer groups like alQaws have spent years making the same case, that liberation can’t be handed out selectively to the parts of a person a state finds convenient.

Scholars gave this machinery a name. Jasbir Puar calls it homonationalism: the way a state’s “tolerance” of gay people becomes a yardstick for who counts as civilised, and by extension who deserves sovereignty and who can be bombed. Pinkwashing is what homonationalism looks like in a tourism ad.

None of this means cancelling Pride, or that solidarity between LGBTQ movements is a con. The opposite. Pride didn’t start as a parade sponsored by banks and arms firms. It started as a riot against police violence at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, led by the most marginalised people in the room, many of them trans, poor, and people of colour. The promise underneath it was that nobody is free until everybody is. Pinkwashing is what’s left when you strip out the promise and keep the flag.

So celebrate this month. But every time a state or a brand wraps itself in the rainbow, ask the same question: whose freedom is this image selling, and whose erasure is it covering?

Sources & further reading

• Sarah Schulman, “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’,” The New York Times (23 Nov 2011) , origin and definition of the term.

• Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (Duke University Press, 2012), book-length account of pinkwashing and queer solidarity.

• Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2007); and “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013) , the academic framework.

• “Campaign branding Tel Aviv gay destination underway,” Ynetnews (2010) , contemporary reporting on the Tel Aviv gay-tourism push.

• Mondoweiss, “A documentary guide to ‘Brand Israel’ and the art of pinkwashing” (2011) , background on the Brand Israel strategy.

• alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society , the Palestinian queer organising this piece draws on.

Every June 12, at the Aguinaldo Shrine in Kawit, Cavite, the 1898 Philippine Declaration of Independence is read aloud from the balcony where it was first proclaimed. Parades roll through cities across the country. In Manila, the president gives a speech and a 21-gun salute follows. there’s a bitter irony in all this pageantry. The republic being celebrated was killed in its infancy. Not by Spain, the empire it defied, but by the United States, the empire that took Spain’s place. “June 12th is supposed to be Philippine independence day,” BAYAN-USA chairperson Bernadette Ellorin once said. “But in reality, the Philippines is anything but free.” A hundred and twenty-eight years later, the old question still stands. Independence for whom? And from whom?

The revolution that broke out in August 1896 was a class revolt before it was anything else. The Katipunan was founded by Andrés Bonifacio, a warehouse clerk from Manila. Its strength came from workers, peasants and the urban poor, people bled dry by three centuries of friar landlordism and colonial tribute. The historian Teodoro Agoncillo called it the first genuinely popular revolution in Asia. Cuba’s uprising against Madrid had shown it could be done.

The revolution did not survive its own leadership. In 1897, after a factional fight in Cavite, the landed ilustrado wing around Emilio Aguinaldo took control. Bonifacio was tried on fabricated charges and shot. For the nationalist historian Renato Constantino this was the original sin of the Philippine nation. The propertied class had captured a mass revolution, and a captured revolution can be sold. Aguinaldo soon took Spanish money and exile at Biak-na-Bato. He came back only when a new patron appeared.

That patron was Washington. The USS Maine sank in Havana harbor in February 1898. By April the US had blockaded Cuba and the Spanish-American War was on. Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on the first of May. Aguinaldo came home on an American ship, allied himself with the US, and by June, Filipino forces held most of the countryside. On June 12 he declared independence. Not a single government on earth recognized it. Six months later, in Paris, Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. The people who had actually liberated the country weren’t in the room.

What followed was one of the bloodiest colonial wars in history, and one of the most forgotten. Fighting broke out in Manila in February 1899. President McKinley called the conquest “benevolent assimilation.” On the ground it meant scorched earth, reconcentration camps and water torture. By the war’s official end in 1902, somewhere between 200,000 and a million Filipino civilians were dead, most of them from the famine and disease the campaign left behind. Mark Twain, then vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League, suggested the American flag be redrawn “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”

Even the date of freedom was an imperial gift. Washington “granted” independence on July 4, 1946. America’s own birthday. The Philippines only took June 12 back as its national day in 1962. And the 1946 settlement came shackled. The Bell Trade Act gave US citizens parity rights over Philippine resources. The Military Bases Agreement planted American garrisons on a 99-year lease. Dozens of unequal treaties followed, administered by what BAYAN calls a succession of “puppet governments.” This is the continuity the revolutionary left calls the second betrayal. When Jose Maria Sison re-established the Communist Party of the Philippines on December 26, 1968, its founding analysis, Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution, described the republic as “semi-colonial and semi-feudal,” sick with three basic problems: US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. Three months later, on March 29, 1969, the party founded the New People’s Army. The protracted people’s war it launched was framed, explicitly, as picking up where Bonifacio left off. Five decades on it’s Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency, filmed from inside the guerrilla zones in redfish’s Inside the New People’s Army (2018).

You can still see the colonial economy with your own eyes on Negros, where a sugar monocrop set up by British and American capital in the 1850s defines life to this day. In a statement for what it calls the “reactionary’s Independence Day,” the NPA’s Negros command points out that cane cutters work with the same machetes and shoulder-loads their great-grandfathers used, for wages that have barely moved. Meanwhile peasants accused of supporting the revolution are red-tagged and killed by a US-trained military. There can be no real independence, the statement argues, “when the vast number of Filipino people has little to no land, has no job or income.”

The legal mass movement reaches the same conclusion. Bayan, founded in 1985 in the fight against the US-backed Marcos dictatorship, argues the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement is actually worse than the old bases it replaced. Under EDCA the US military is no longer confined to Subic and Clark. It can position forces virtually anywhere in the country, as the spearpoint of a “pivot” that committed 60 percent of US naval forces to the Asia-Pacific to face China. Caught between a declining superpower and a rising one, the Philippines exports its own people instead of developing. Thousands leave every day to work abroad. Remittances stand in for the national industrialization and land reform the movement has demanded since 1896.

The verdict of history is hard to escape. The bourgeois capture of the revolution condemned the country to a century of underdevelopment. The evidence is everywhere: a land question never resolved, an economy hooked on dependency and on exporting its own children, an elite that from Aguinaldo to today’s dynasties has chosen accommodation with empire every single time it mattered. June 12 can’t be left to the generals and their gun salutes. The reading at Kawit isn’t commemoration. it’s an indictment. The promise made from that balcony in 1898 was never kept, and it won’t be honored by the class that broke it. it’ll be honored, if at all, by the workers and peasants who first made it.

So a question hangs over every flag raised this June 12. Can real change come from anything less than changing society itself? that’s the wager the movements founded in 1968 and 1969 have been making for over half a century, together with the mass organizations fighting in the streets and across the diaspora. The bet is that genuine independence arrives only when the present order is replaced entirely, with a society that’s classless and anti-capitalist, free not just from colonialism and imperialism but from the chains of class society and capital itself. Maybe that’s the hope Bonifacio carried and Aguinaldo betrayed, still waiting in the cane fields of Negros and on the picket lines of Manila. Marx said it plainly enough. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win, and a country with it.

Sources

• Teodoro Agoncillo, The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan (University of the Philippines Press, 1956)

• Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Tala Publishing, 1975)

• Amado Guerrero, Philippine Society and Revolution (1970)

• Jose Maria Sison, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View (Crane Russak, 1989); Struggle for National Democracy (1967)

• Communist Party of the Philippines founding documents, “Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party” (1968); NDFP, ndfp.org

• Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, ch. 12 “The Empire and the People” (1980)

• Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” North American Review (1901)

• Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (Random House, 1989)

• Bayan (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan), statements on EDCA and US basing, bayan.ph

• BAYAN USA, “Filipino Americans Commemorate Philippine Independence Day with Actions to Defend Philippine Sovereignty” — https://www.bayanusa.org/blog/filipino-americans-commemorate-philippine-independence-day-with-actions-to-defend-philippine-sovereignty

• BAYAN USA, “July 4th — Is the Philippines Truly Independent?” — https://www.bayanusa.org/blog/july-4th-is-the-philippines-truly-independent

• NPA Negros Island Regional Operational Command (Apolinario Gatmaitan Command) / NPA-Northern Negros (Roselyn Jean Pelle Command), “Reactionary’s Independence Day, Negrosanons continued cry for genuine independence and national democracy!”, June 16, 2024 — https://philippinerevolution.nu/statements/reactionarys-independence-day-negrosanons-continued-cry-for-genuine-independence-and-national-democracy/

• New York Times archive coverage of the Treaty of Paris (1898) and the Philippine–American War (1899–1902)

It happened on 9 June, in the Wadi al-Kabir. A congress of fighters declared the opening of an armed struggle. It would consume the mountains of Dhofar for more than a decade. The Dhofar Liberation Front had been founded only months earlier. It was an offshoot of George Habash’s pan-Arab Movement of Arab Nationalists. Within a few years it would become one of the most ambitious revolutionary projects the Arabian Peninsula has ever seen. Then it would be erased almost entirely from the region’s official memory.

Feudal Tyranny Under British Patronage

The world the rebels rose against was, by any measure, archaic. Sultan Said bin Taimur ruled Muscat and Oman as a personal fief. Britain had propped him up financially and militarily since 1932. His regime banned schools for most subjects and prohibited paved roads and modern medicine. It policed daily life down to the absurd, forbidding football, sunglasses, and conversations longer than fifteen minutes. Dhofar, where the Sultan chose to reside, was governed not as a province but as private property. Its people, as the archival record shows, had effectively no rights at all.

From National Liberation to Scientific Socialism

The rebellion’s character shifted decisively after 1967. Britain withdrew from Aden, and the National Liberation Front won next door. The result was a Marxist state on Dhofar’s doorstep: the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. Sanctuary, weapons, and training followed.

The turning point came at the Hamrin Conference of September 1968. There the movement renamed itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf. It formally adopted Marxism-Leninism and a commitment to women’s liberation. It also embraced a wider vision. Its newspaper Sawt al-Thawra placed Dhofar within a tricontinental struggle spanning Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

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Comrades Across Continents: The Maoist Line

China was central to this turn. The PFLOAG drew heavily on Maoist theory, and Beijing was quick to reciprocate. A peasant-based guerrilla force waging protracted struggle from a mountain base fit the Maoist model closely. That gave the Front strong credibility in Chinese eyes. China supplied weapons and military training, and Dhofari fighters were sent abroad — to China and elsewhere — for instruction in unconventional warfare. Beijing established an embassy in Aden, and South Yemen allowed its territory to be used to channel arms to the rebels. A new flow of Chinese and Soviet weaponry, together with better training, turned the PFLOAG’s armed wing into an effective fighting force; by 1969 it had overrun much of the Jebel. For Beijing there was also a Cold War calculation. Support for the PFLOAG acted as a counterweight to growing Soviet influence in the Indian Ocean. That Maoist phase proved relatively short, however. Chinese involvement waned after 1971, and Soviet aid expanded to fill the gap as the Sino-Soviet rivalry played out across the region.

Building the New Society in the Liberated Zones

What the PFLOAG built in its liberated zones is the part of the story most often left out. The Sultan had banned medicine and roads. The Front did the opposite. It poured resources into the infrastructure of a region the state had abandoned, opening schools and clinics. It also put into practice, however imperfectly, a programme of social transformation. That programme included one of the most radical experiments in women’s emancipation the Gulf had seen. For a time, the revolutionaries controlled almost the entire Jebel.

Women Hold Up Half the Sky

The commitment to women’s liberation, adopted at the same 1968 conference, was among the most striking features of the whole revolution. The PFLOAG held that the liberation of women was central to the success of the struggle. It would not arrive automatically, the Front argued, but only through a sustained fight against what it called the “objective backwardness” of society. This was a materialist analysis, drawn from Marxist thought and shaped by Maoism — including Mao’s famous line that women hold up half the sky. The PFLOAG recognised a double oppression: women were subordinated both as women in relation to men, and as workers in relation to the economic system.

The programme was not merely theoretical. Women fought in the People’s Liberation Army alongside men, and their political participation was treated as a measure of the revolution’s seriousness. In the liberated areas the Front moved against female circumcision and polygyny, and cut the bride price after failing to abolish it outright. Crucially, these campaigns were driven by women cadres themselves. The Bahraini militant Laila Fakhro (Huda Salem) pushed the PFLOAG to ban female circumcision and limit the bride price, and she also worked across political education, teaching, care work, and the Front’s media and foreign relations. In June 1970, with Abdel Rahman al-Nuaimi, she helped found the movement’s monthly magazine 9 Yunyu (9 June). An essay circulated by solidarity campaigners captured the stakes in the words of one Omani woman, who said she had suffered under four sultans: the sultan of Muscat, the tribal sheikh, the religious imam, and the family — her father, brother, and husband.

This radicalism drew outside attention. In 1971 the Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour travelled to Dhofar and filmed the women fighters who would appear in her 1974 documentary The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Srour, who described herself as a defeated feminist in Lebanon, was astonished to hear a PFLOAG representative raise the question of women’s oppression on his own initiative — naming not only imperialism and class, but fathers, husbands, and brothers.

The movement consciously placed its women within a wider revolutionary tradition. Its newspaper Sawt al-Thawra drew parallels with Vietnamese women fighters, documenting the arrests and mistreatment of women and girls by the British-backed regime alongside their internationalist activity. In June 1975 the revolutionaries founded the Omani Women’s Organisation, headed by Wafa Yasser, with its own programme to fight illiteracy and transform women’s social position. The following month the first official Omani women’s delegation — Nadia Khaled and Huda Muhad — travelled to a symposium organised by the Soviet Women’s Committee in Alma-Ata, in Soviet Kazakhstan. From there it went on to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at the invitation of the Vietnamese Women’s Federation. Such links were material, not merely rhetorical. They showed that Dhofar was not an isolated revolt in a distant corner of the Gulf. It was a globally connected movement, and one that placed women’s political participation at its very centre.

Counter-Revolution: The British-Backed Coup

That this revolution was ultimately crushed owed less to the Sultan’s army than to the scale of foreign intervention arrayed against it. The first move came from within the palace. In July 1970, Said bin Taimur was deposed by his own son, Qaboos. The British military and the Foreign Office openly backed the coup. London had concluded that the old Sultan’s intransigence was making the insurgency worse. He was flown into exile and spent his last two years in a London hotel. Qaboos immediately launched the reforms his father had refused: development, amnesties, and the incorporation of Dhofar into Oman proper. They were explicitly designed to drain the rebellion of its popular base.

The Forces of Reaction

The reforms alone did not win the war. As the military analysts who have studied the campaign agree, the conflict was internationalised on a remarkable scale. From December 1973 the Shah of Iran dispatched troops to fight alongside the Sultan’s forces. He cited the security of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran eventually fielded an Imperial task force several thousand strong, complete with helicopters, paratroopers, and artillery. Jordanian special forces, Pakistani Baloch soldiers, Saudi money, and reportedly Israeli advisers joined the effort. Yet the coalition was still commanded almost entirely by British officers. A Times of London correspondent observed as much on the eve of victory. One Omani general told him bluntly that British withdrawal would be catastrophic.

The diplomatic ground shifted at the same time. After the 1975 Algiers Agreement, Iraq dropped its support for the Front. Sadat’s Egypt, courting the Gulf monarchies, did likewise. As external aid to Oman swelled, the rebels’ lifelines were severed one by one. In October 1975 the Sultan launched a final offensive, Operation Hadaf. It cut the PFLO, as the Front was by then known, off from its bases across the Yemeni border. After repeated setbacks, the remaining fighters retreated into the PDRY in 1976. The Dhofar Rebellion was declared defeated that same year.

A Forgotten Legacy

It remains one of the few Western-led counterinsurgencies counted a success in the postwar Middle East. It is also, not coincidentally, one of the most thoroughly forgotten. The men and women who fought for a different Arabia were not so much beaten by a sultan. They were overwhelmed by the combined weight of empires, monarchies, and a Cold War that had no intention of letting their experiment survive.

Yet defeat on the battlefield is not the same as irrelevance. For more than a decade, peasants and workers in one of the poorest corners of the Arabian Peninsula built schools and clinics where a sultan had banned both. They sent women to fight and to govern. They tied their mountain villages to the revolutionary currents of Vietnam, China, and the wider Third World. That this happened at all, in a region now synonymous with absolute monarchy and oil wealth, is a fact worth sitting with. The Gulf was not always destined to look the way it does today. Other futures were imagined, and for a time, fought for.

This article makes no claim to be a work of academic research or a scholarly paper. It is an introduction, drawn from the historians, theses, and journalism cited below, meant to bring a buried history back into view. The Dhofar Revolution deserves far more than a brief retelling. Its archives, its newspapers, and above all the testimony of those who lived it remain underexamined, scattered, and at risk of vanishing entirely. If these pages do anything, let it be to send the curious reader toward the sources, and to make the case that this forgotten chapter of the region’s past deserves to be studied far more seriously than it has been.

Sources

• “The Dhofar Revolution: An Archival Analysis of the Conflict (1965–1976),” Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization — https://journals.umt.edu.pk/index.php/JITC/article/download/6066/2955?inline=1

• “The Dhofar Rebellion: Influence of External Powers on Counterinsurgency,” Naval Postgraduate School thesis (citing Geraint Hughes, “A ‘Model Campaign’ Reappraised”) — https://calhoun.nps.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/453ddfa2-40d0-4d25-b476-7f22f2d5c2c9/content

• “The Dhofar Rebellion,” DTIC archived study — https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf/AD1184920.pdf

• “Sawt al-Thawra: A Counterarchive of the Dhufar Revolution,” Marral Shamshiri, Revolutionary Papers — https://revolutionarypapers.org/teaching-tool/sawt-al-thawra/

• Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman 1965–1976 (Oxford University Press, 2013) — foundational scholarly history, cited throughout the Revolutionary Papers tool above

• Geraint Hughes, “All the Shah’s Men: The Imperial Iranian Brigade Group in the Dhofar War,” Defence-in-Depth (King’s College London) — https://defenceindepth.co/2016/06/06/all-the-shahs-men-the-imperial-iranian-brigade-group-in-the-dhofar-war/

• “The Dhofar War and the Myth of ‘Localized’ Conflicts,” RealClearDefense — https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/01/12/the_dhofar_war_and_the_myth_of_localized_conflicts_112890.html

• “Oman: How the Shah of Iran Saved the Regime,” Orient XXI (citing The Times of London, 1976) — https://orientxxi.info/magazine/oman-how-the-shah-of-iran-saved-the-regime,3681

• “Remembering the Shah’s Iran – Iran War Briefing #9,” Counterfire — https://www.counterfire.org/article/remembering-the-shahs-iran/

• “China–Oman Cooperation in the Age of the Belt and Road Initiative,” Manara Magazine (on Chinese moral, financial, and military aid to the Dhofar rebels) — https://manaramagazine.org/2019/05/china-oman-belt-and-road-initiative/

• “China’s Rising in the Gulf and Relations with Oman,” ResearchGate (citing Jonathan Fulton, “China’s Relations with Oman”) — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347520694_China’s_Rising_in_the_Gulf_and_Relations_with_Oman

When we picture Saudi Arabia, we picture an absolute monarchy, oil wealth, and a religious establishment fused to the throne. What we rarely picture is a communist movement — yet for half a century, one existed, organized in the shadow of the world’s most powerful oil company and crushed only through decades of repression. Forty-seven years ago, that movement helped bring Saudi Arabia to the brink of its first popular uprising.

The story begins in the oil fields of the Eastern Province. From the 1930s onward, the American-owned Arabian American Oil Company — Aramco — drew tens of thousands of workers into the kingdom’s east: Saudis pulled off the land, alongside Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Bahrainis, and others. Many arrived carrying the political traditions of their home countries. Inside Aramco’s segregated camps — where American staff enjoyed air-conditioned housing, swimming pools, and high wages while Arab workers were packed into squalid barracks — the contradictions of empire were impossible to miss. Ideas of Arab nationalism, socialism, and communism spread through study circles, smuggled books, libraries, and an emerging radical press. A class consciousness took root among a generation of oil workers.

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That consciousness exploded into action. In 1953, thousands of Saudi workers struck against Aramco, demanding better conditions, higher pay, and an end to the company’s openly discriminatory, racialized labor system. It was the first major labor dispute in the kingdom’s history. A second, larger wave of strikes followed in 1956 — and the monarchy’s response was unambiguous. Leaders were arrested, strikes were criminalized by royal decree, and the most militant activists were driven underground or into exile across the region.

Translation:

Repression did not kill the movement; it hardened it. Activists who had founded the National Reform Front in 1954 reorganized, by 1957–58, into the National Liberation Front (NLF) — a broad opposition current with a strong communist core, rooted in the Eastern Province working class and deeply inspired by sister movements in neighboring Bahrain, where leftists had built the Gulf’s first organized communist party. The NLF set up clandestine presses, printed leaflets demanding rights for Aramco workers, and called for an end to the state-sanctioned discrimination against the kingdom’s Shia minority — a community that saw in the secular left a rare promise of inclusion in a larger national project, an antidote to the sectarianism written into the Saudi state itself.

Their program grew more radical. The NLF demanded the abolition of the monarchy, the nationalization of the country’s oil wealth, genuine foreign-policy neutrality in the Cold War, and an end to the American military presence at the Dhahran air base — a direct challenge to both the House of Saud and its US patron. To evade the security services, organizers used the spaces available to them, including Shia gathering halls known as husayniyyat, weaving political teaching into the rhythms of community life. In 1975, the movement formally reconstituted itself as the Communist Party of Saudi Arabia.

Then came 1979 — the year the ground shifted across the region. The Iranian Revolution toppled a US-backed monarch next door and electrified the oppressed of the Gulf. In Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where the Shia majority had been ground down by discrimination and excluded from the wealth pulled out of their own soil, the moment was seized. For seven days in late November, beginning around the Ashura commemorations, tens of thousands took to the streets. Communists and progressive Shia forces marched together, demanding dignity, an end to discrimination, and the fall of the monarchy. Demonstrators burned banks and government offices, attacked police, and held parts of Qatif against the army.

The state answered with overwhelming force. The National Guard was deployed, live fire met the crowds, and the uprising was broken within weeks. Around two dozen were killed in the immediate crackdown — but the repression did not stop there. In the years that followed, an estimated 182 to 219 people were killed as the security apparatus hunted down activists, while thousands more were arrested, tortured, or pushed into exile.

The movement never recovered. In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War order it had relied upon dissolved, the Communist Party of Saudi Arabia quietly disbanded. Today its history is all but erased — buried beneath the official story of a kingdom that supposedly never had a left, never had a labor movement, never had a moment when ordinary people imagined something else. But it did. And remembering it is a reminder that resistance has always existed, even in the heart of the Kingdom.

Sources

1. Toby Matthiesen, “Migration, Minorities, and Radical Networks: Labour Movements and Opposition Groups in Saudi Arabia, 1950–1975,” International Review of Social History 59, no. 3 (2014): 473–504 — https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-review-of-social-history/article/migration-minorities-and-radical-networks-labour-movements-and-opposition-groups-in-saudi-arabia-19501975/09573B0AB9AB13154C98DB3B6EA49BBA (JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26394689)

2. Toby Matthiesen, “The Cold War and the Communist Party of Saudi Arabia, 1975–1991,” Journal of Cold War Studies 22, no. 3 (2020): 32–73 — https://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article/22/3/32/12119

3. Toby Matthiesen, The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) — https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/other-saudis/

4. “Rebellion on the Saudi Periphery: Modernity, Marginalization, and the Shia Uprising of 1979,” International Journal of Middle East Studies — https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/abs/rebellion-on-the-saudi-periphery-modernity-marginalization-and-the-shia-uprising-of-1979/499FCA054963D10A97B9FBCC7BACE00C

5. Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2007) — https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=8638

I interviewed Fady Baker, a Palestinian man from Gaza illegally detained and tortured by Israel for 45 days in 2024.

He described Sde Teiman detention center as a “torture center” where all basic human rights are systematically denied. His account aligns with a landmark UN report released today that adds Israeli security forces to its blacklist for sexual violence in conflict zones—the first designation in over 15 years.

The UN investigation verified credible patterns of widespread abuse against 31 Palestinian detainees (14 men, 7 women, 9 boys, and 1 girl), with 13 cases in 2025 and 18 in 2023-24. Documented violations include rape, gang rape, sexual violence with objects, beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, unjustified strip searches, and threats of sexual assault. The UN explicitly classified these violations as systematic torture under international law.

During Israel’s invasion of Gaza, thousands of Palestinian men and women were arbitrarily detained in flagrant violation of international law. Israeli troops documented this violence—sharing shocking videos and images of undressed, injured, tortured, and dead Palestinians—effectively recording the racist and colonial violence that fuels the ongoing genocide.

Yet accountability remains virtually nonexistent: Of 1,680 complaints against Israeli intelligence services, zero have resulted in indictment. Of 52 cases under investigation, only a handful are being pursued. A documented rape case was dropped on March 12, 2026.

As of today, Israel has not provided information about the number of prisoners held, their identities, health status, or locations. Survivors’ voices and testimonies—combined with findings from the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Palestinian rights organizations—remain the only source documenting systematic violence and seeking answers for detained loved ones.

Interview was conducted in 2024 in Gaza.

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On May 27, 1964, the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People's Army (FARC-EP) was founded.

What followed was decades of armed conflict between leftist guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries, drug cartels, and the Colombian state itself — backed by the US — as it sought to crush revolutionary movements inside the country.

The armed struggle continues despite the 2016 peace agreement between the state and the FARC-EP. And as Colombians prepare to elect a new president on May 31 — in a campaign already scarred by violence, including the assassination of candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay — the country's search for peace feels as unfinished as ever.

In 2021, we joined former FARC militants who had dropped their arms in hopes of freedom and peace, only to be confronted with the crushing reality of narco gangs and state-backed paramilitaries filling the vacuum FARC left behind. Our documentary looks into the challenges ex-FARC militants have faced since signing the deal: organized criminal militias invading the territories they once controlled, a surge in drug trafficking, and the murder of more than 450 peace signatories — alongside the killings of hundreds of social leaders, activists, and Indigenous people.


This documentary was produced in 2021 and is being republished for its continued relevance.

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Bolivia is once again at a breaking point. Over the past two weeks, indigenous communities, miners, and the Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB) have launched an indefinite general strike against the government of President Rodrigo Paz. Roadblocks have paralyzed major highways, union leaders have been charged with terrorism, and a 1,000-kilometer march on La Paz forced the government to repeal Ley 1720, a land-mortgage law that critics argued would have transferred peasant and collective land into the hands of large agribusiness interests.

At the center of the unrest stands former president Evo Morales. A court in Tarija has issued an arrest warrant against him, and according to documents reportedly leaked from within the security apparatus, a joint operation involving Bolivian police and U.S. agencies is being prepared to detain him — or, his supporters allege, to kill him. In response, indigenous campesinos from the Chapare region have encircled his residence, forming what they describe as a human shield to prevent his capture.

What is unfolding in Bolivia is not a passing wave of unrest. It is a continuation of the political rupture that began in 2019, when a right-wing-led coup forced Morales from the presidency and into exile. The same fault lines remain: an indigenous and campesino base that built the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) into the country’s dominant political force, set against a U.S.-aligned government determined to dismantle its institutional power.

I have conducted this interview with Evo Morales in Mexico in 2019, just days after the right-wing coup forced him into exile.

This video is being republished today because of its renewed relevance to the events now unfolding in Bolivia.

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For one year now, Berlin-based journalist Hüseyin Doğru has been on the European Union’s Russia sanctions list. The measures are far-reaching: travel restrictions, frozen assets, and blocked accounts.

He currently has only 506 euros per month available to supp ort himself. Donations—whether monetary or in-kind—are prohibited. They are considered circumvention of sanctions. The consequences affect not only him. Doğru lives with his wife and three young children. His family is directly affected and, due to the financial restrictions, finds itself in an existentially threatening situation. At one point, even his wife’s account was frozen, because according to the Central Office for Sanctions Enforcement, which belongs to the General Customs Directorate, it was being used to circumvent sanctions. The family lacks the means to pay rent and cover everyday expenses.

EU Commission Accuses Doğru of Russian Propaganda

The EU Commission justifies the harsh sanctions by claiming that Doğru, through his pro-Palestinian journalistic work, is fomenting “ethnic, political, and religious discord” and thereby supporting “destabilizing activities of Russia.” However, no public evidence of a concrete connection to Moscow has been presented to date.

Doğru rejects the EU’s accusations. He confirms that he previously worked for the format Redfish, which was financed by the Russian broadcaster Ruptly. However, after the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, he ended the collaboration. “I have always criticized that it is an invasion of Ukraine,” he explains in conversation, pointing out that in Russia he would face up to ten years in prison for such a statement.

The Berliner Zeitung was able to view both a response from the Council to Doğru’s lawyers and a Council brief filed in the proceedings before the General Court of the European Union. The documents raise fundamental questions about the state of rule-of-law standards in the EU.

The Council emphasizes that the criteria for sanctions are “clear, specific, and cumulative.” Specifically, this concerns, among other things, so-called “information manipulation” as well as actions that “undermine or threaten” democracy, the rule of law, or security.

At the same time, the Council refers to a definition from the European External Action Service. According to this, “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference” is a “predominantly non-illegal pattern of behavior that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures, and political processes.”

This wording is explosive. Because it means: sanctions can also be based on behavior that explicitly does not have to be illegal.

No Obligation to Prove Concrete Connections

Particularly noteworthy is the Council’s statement that it is “not obligated to prove current connections to the government of the Russian Federation” in order to sanction a person. Instead, it is sufficient that a person be regarded as “responsible for, involved in, or supporting actions or policies” attributed to Russia. According to the Council’s account, it is even sufficient if a person merely indirectly supports or facilitates such actions.

In concrete terms, this means: even a substantive proximity to certain political positions can be sufficient, without concrete organizational, financial, or operational connections having to be proven, in order to sanction individuals.

Media Reports as the Basis for Sanctions

There is another explosive point: the Council makes clear that it can rely on “all publicly available sources” in its decisions. It is not necessary to await the results of police investigations or national court proceedings.

The justification: sanctions are preventive in nature. Waiting for criminal proceedings would “seriously impair the ability to act to protect the values mentioned in Article 21 of the EU Treaty.”

This line of reasoning is also problematic. Because it means that media reports, open-source material, or publicly disseminated allegations can serve as the basis for far-reaching measures—even if they have not been judicially reviewed.

The Council expressly emphasizes that the measures do not constitute criminal law. Accordingly, classical criminal-law guarantees such as high standards of proof or the presumption of innocence do not apply in the same way. At the same time, the Council makes clear that, in its view, the presumption of innocence does not stand in the way of such preventive measures.

At the same time, the consequences are severe: account freezes, economic isolation, and travel bans. Jurists speak in this context of sanctions with “punitive-like effects” which, however, are imposed without the corresponding procedural guarantees.

The Council does point out that those affected can sue against their listing before the General Court of the European Union. What is critical with regard to the rule of law, however, is that the sanctions take effect immediately, while court proceedings often take years. During this time, the measures remain fully effective and, as the Doğru case shows, can have existentially threatening consequences. In addition, the Council grants itself a wide margin of discretion in foreign policy matters, which further restricts judicial review.

What makes matters worse is that key pieces of evidence are sometimes not publicly accessible. This makes it difficult for those affected to defend themselves effectively.

The Council’s stance on freedom of opinion and the press can also be assessed particularly critically. In its letter, it argues that the sanctions do not directly affect these freedoms, since they only include travel bans and the freezing of assets.

But it is precisely these measures that can effectively make journalistic work impossible, for example through the loss of financial resources or the restriction of professional mobility. There is also the danger of a so-called “chilling effect,” meaning a deterrent effect on other journalists.

Legal Criticism: “Civil Death”

Legally, the sanctions against Doğru are considered explosive. In a legal opinion presented in the European Parliament, former ECJ judge Ninon Colneric and international law expert Alina Miron conclude that such EU individual sanctions constitute profound infringements of fundamental rights.

The authors speak of a de facto “civil death”: assets are frozen, access to banking services is blocked, and economic capacity to act is almost completely paralyzed. It is particularly problematic that the sanctions are imposed without prior judicial review and that those affected are not given a legal hearing before being listed.

The jurists also warn of a deterrent effect on journalists as a whole. It remains unclear where the line runs between permissible reporting and sanctionable “information manipulation.” The EU sanctions thereby threaten press freedom.

“Freedom of Opinion and the Press Acutely Endangered”

Originally, the EU sanctions regime was directed against actors from the Kremlin’s circle. By now, however, journalists are also being targeted who are not accused of any crimes and for whom concrete connections to Russia have not been proven. Doğru’s lawyer Alexander Gorski sees this as a fundamental problem. It is not a criminal proceeding, but security-law (preventive law). “There is neither a charge nor the accusation of a concrete criminal offense,” he told the Berliner Zeitung.

His client is not accused of any criminal conduct. The sanctions regime now also affects journalists “who have not committed any misconduct and to whom—as in my client’s case—no concrete connection to Russia can be proven.” Gorski warns of a precedent: should the practice hold up in court, this could have far-reaching consequences. “Freedom of opinion and of the press would thereby be acutely endangered.”

Fundamental Debate About the Rule of Law

The Doğru case exemplifies how the EU, in the name of defending democracy, is increasingly undermining it itself. In order to protect itself against “disinformation” and foreign influence—both difficult to define—fundamental rule-of-law principles are being abandoned. It is also striking that the Council repeatedly formally rejects central fundamental-rights arguments of the plaintiff side, for example by pointing out that they are inadmissible or insufficiently substantiated.

Anyone who truly cares about democracy and the rule of law should oppose such a policy.

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Ladies and gentlemen, Members of the European Parliament, colleagues, friends, comrades — especially those who organised this important event — thank you for inviting me and for giving me the opportunity to speak today.

Unfortunately I cannot be with you today in person, because the German government did not give me permission to attend this event about freedom of speech as a journalist.

Today I stand before you not because I was acquitted. I stand before you because I was never charged. And that should concern you all.

As some of you might already know, my name is Hüseyin Doğru. I am a German citizen, a father of three, a journalist, and the founder of red., a now defunct English-language media outlet.

On 20 May 2025, I was placed on an EU sanctions list.

Not after a criminal conviction. Not after a trial. Not after a court had examined evidence against me.

I was placed on a list.

The reason given was not violence. It was not incitement. It was not a finding by any court. The reason was political: my journalism, my reporting on Gaza, and my coverage of Palestine solidarity protests in Germany were folded into the language of Russia, destabilisation, information manipulation and hybrid threats.

Germany has spent years trying to criminalise Palestine solidarity — through bans, police violence, smear campaigns and allegations that often collapse when they meet a court. Where there are no grounds to bring criminal charges, another route becomes attractive: not the court, but the list.

I cannot prove in this room which government pushed hardest for my listing. But the available facts point strongly toward Germany: before Brussels listed me, German intelligence was already monitoring red. because of our pro-Palestine coverage. At the same time came the smear campaign in German media. Then came the European listing.

The EU listing describes me as a Turkish citizen. I am not. I am a German citizen. I do not have dual nationality. My lawyers informed the Council of this error after the listing was published. It has still not been corrected.

This is not a small clerical mistake. It is far easier to digest if the public is told that the EU has sanctioned a Turkish citizen. It is much more difficult to admit the truth: that the European Union has sanctioned one of its own citizens, living in Europe, for journalism.

Since then, my bank accounts have been frozen. I am banned from working. I am effectively living as an exile within my own country. I am not even permitted to attend this event at the European Parliament to speak about freedom of the press. And later, even my wife — who is not sanctioned — had her accounts temporarily frozen: a move that can only be described as collective punishment.

I cannot buy nappies or medication for my children. And if you buy them for me, you risk prosecution for sanctions circumvention — up to ten years in prison. That is why these sanctions do not only target me. In practice, they punish my twin babies and my seven-year-old son.

But this speech is not about my hardship.

It is about what my case reveals about the state of democracy in Europe — or rather, its erosion.

A sanctions regime that decides guilt without a court is not a shield for democracy, but its graveyard.

What the “Evidence” Shows

Before I explain how the sanctions system works, I want to be concrete about the evidence used against me. Or rather, the absence of evidence — which is itself the most damning evidence of all.

After my lawyers asked the Council to reconsider the sanctions, the application was rejected. The evidence used to apply the sanctions was described as confidential. I am effectively forbidden from publishing the full evidence dossier used against me.

The sanctions listing frames my reporting as “undermining” and “threatening” EU stability, and places it inside Russian disinformation efforts. But the evidence pack does not prove that. It does not show Russian control. It does not show criminal conduct. It does not show that my journalism was directed by any foreign state. On none of the 38 pages of the evidence pack is there even the word Russia.

Instead, it cites journalistic posts and political opinions as disinformation.

Video Source: Florian Warweg

It cites my criticism of Chancellor Merz and European weapons policy — where I described the war in Ukraine as an inter-imperialist war, the same Marxist concept Lenin used in 1914 to describe the First World War. That is not a pro-Russian position. It treats Russia as an imperialist power, not as a force to be celebrated.

The evidence pack cites factual reporting that German intelligence was monitoring red. because of our pro-Palestine coverage. Again, this is classified as disinformation.

And it relies on guilt-by-association smears published in German media: that some of our team had worked for an outlet funded by Russia.

There is no proof here of a crime, no mention in the evidence pack of financial ties to a Russian state propaganda apparatus, and no mention that my journalism was directed by any foreign state.

If this can be called evidence for sanctions, then ordinary journalistic work — reporting, criticism, opinion, and political analysis — can be turned into evidence against a journalist.

If this can be called disinformation, then dissent has become disinformation.

If this can be called a hybrid threat, then political opposition has become a security problem.

From Embargoes to Journalists

EU sanctions were not originally designed for cases like mine.

They emerged from a history of embargoes and foreign-policy coercion. And embargoes had already shown their brutality: Iraq, Cuba, Iran. Entire populations were made to suffer in the name of changing the behaviour of governments. An estimated half a million children in Iraq died. Medicines disappeared. Economies were strangled. And still the promised political results never came.

So “smart sanctions” were presented as a humane alternative. Not whole societies, we were told. Not ordinary people. Only individuals. Only decision-makers. Only those responsible.

But the same underlying problem remained: extrajudicial punishment, imposed politically, with disproportionate consequences and weak legal protection.

They were not designed as a mechanism for disciplining journalists or domestic dissent.

But step by step, they expanded.

First, they targeted those labelled terrorists. And too few people spoke up, because the word “terrorism” was enough to suspend scrutiny.

Then they targeted enemy states. And too few people spoke up, because the language of security was enough to suspend doubt.

Then they targeted oligarchs, companies, broadcasters, families, associates, facilitators, alleged networks. And still too few people spoke up, because each expansion was presented as exceptional, temporary, necessary.

Pastor Martin Niemöller warned us how repression expands: first against those we are told not to defend, then against those we think are too far from us, and finally against those who thought silence would protect them.

But exceptional powers rarely remain exceptional.

And each silence becomes permission. Each precedent becomes a platform. Each emergency becomes a method.

Then came the conceptual leap: sanctions expanded into the field of “information manipulation” and “hybrid threats.” The target could now be a journalist. A media platform. A publisher. A person involved in the production or circulation of information.

The foreign-policy tool had entered the domestic public sphere.

How the Sanctions Machine Works

So how does this regime work? In my case, it worked like this.

Formally, the process is administrative and political. The Council adopted a decision under the Common Foreign and Security Policy. It then adopted a regulation. My name was added to an annex. Once published in the Official Journal, the measure took immediate effect — before I had even been notified.

I had no prior hearing. I had no criminal trial. No court was required to find me guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

The standard was lower. The language was “sufficient grounds.” I received the reasons after the fact, and only then could I submit observations. But by then, the punishment had already begun.

My accounts frozen, my work blocked, the stigma attached.

I was isolated first. What came later was not a meaningful defence. It was a fight against a punishment that had already begun.

So in reality, my listing is an administrative act with consequences even more severe than a criminal conviction.

That sentence matters.

Because the EU insists that sanctions are preventive, not punitive. They are not, we are told, punishment. They are instruments to influence behaviour. They are foreign-policy measures.

But what does that mean when the target is a journalist here at home in Europe?

Does it mean I am being sanctioned until I report differently? Until I stop questioning German policy? Until I stop documenting Palestine solidarity? Until I stop speaking of the crimes we in Europe commit and are complicit in?

If the purpose is behavioural change, then let us say clearly what the goal is here: I am being pressured to change my political speech. I am being punished until my reporting becomes compatible with EU foreign policy. I am being made into a warning to others.

These are not merely financial measures. They are disciplinary measures — a warning to every journalist, publisher and dissenter that political non-conformity will not be tolerated.

The Rule-of-Law Contradiction

And because sanctions are formally not punishment, the guarantees of criminal law do not fully apply.

That is the legal contradiction at the heart of this system.

Due process. The presumption of innocence. The right to know the case against you. The right to challenge evidence before punishment takes effect.

These are not technicalities. They are the minimum protections that stand between the individual and the power of the state.

In dubio pro reo means: when in doubt, protect the accused. Sanctions reverse that. I was listed without trial, without a prior hearing, and without full access to the evidence. Doubt did not protect me. It punished me. So the principle becomes: when in doubt, not protect, but restrict the individual.

Time itself also becomes punishment. A case before the General Court can take years. In the meantime, my work, finances, reputation, and family life are being destroyed. The court may later say: there was an error. But the consequences have already happened.

When guilt is decided without a court, sanctions cease to defend democracy. They begin to dismantle it.

Political Context: Germany and EU Militarisation

There is also a broader political context.

Russia is the central justification. China is increasingly folded into the same strategic vocabulary, along with a growing list of other countries. The language is de-risking, hybrid threats, foreign interference, information manipulation.

Let me be clear. This is not a defence of any government.

It is a warning that Europe is beginning to reproduce the very methods it claims to oppose. We accuse others of silencing dissent, of treating journalism as a security threat, of using administrative power to discipline political speech, of replacing public debate with loyalty tests.

But what is this, if not the same logic translated into European language?

And in Germany, this legal shift is connected to a wider political and economic shift.

Germany is militarising — not only rhetorically, but industrially. Its economy is stagnant. Its old industrial model is under pressure. Its car manufacturers face competition they can no longer easily dominate, especially from China. And now parts of that industrial base are being redirected toward defence production — a pattern whose consequences we know from the darkest period of recent German history.

Lenin analysed this dynamic over a century ago. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he described how monopoly capital, when it encounters limits to profit at home, turns to military expenditure, to armaments production, to the export of capital backed by the export of force. War is not an accident of imperialism. War is its logic.

Because Germany is one of the EU’s dominant powers, this militarisation becomes Europeanised. A permanent atmosphere of threat is needed to justify it: Russia, China, migrants, protest, journalism, Palestine solidarity.

War becomes the answer to economic decline. Rearmament becomes an industrial programme. Dissent must be managed, because a society being prepared for war cannot tolerate too much public doubt.

The Militarisation of Information: DSA and FIMI

This brings me to the central arc of this speech: the militarisation of information.

Marx described ideology as the superstructure that corresponds to the economic base. When the economic base reorganises around war, the ideological superstructure must also reorganise around war. Public debate must be made safe for rearmament. Dissent must be managed. Journalism must be made compliant or made impossible.

If Europe is to be reorganised around war, then public debate must also be reorganised around war.

Sanctions against individuals, and content regulation through the Digital Services Act, may appear to be separate fields. They are not. They work toward the same goal: the management of the public sphere through the language of risks and threats.

Under the DSA, platforms must assess and mitigate systemic risks, including disinformation. At the same time, the EU’s foreign-policy language has shifted from “disinformation” to FIMI — Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference.

Disinformation at least appears to ask a question about content: is this true or false? Even though there is no legal definition of disinformation.

FIMI asks a different question: who is speaking, and in what tone? Are they hostile or friendly?

And the EU’s own definition is revealing. FIMI does not only concern illegal conduct. It describes a “mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour” that is said to threaten or potentially negatively affect values, procedures and political processes.

Mostly non-illegal.

That phrase should alarm every democrat in this room. Because if the behaviour is mostly non-illegal, then the issue is not crime. It is interpretation. It is political labelling. It is the power to decide who is treated as a threat.

The question shifts from what was said to who said it. From truth to alignment. From evidence to suspicion. From journalism to threat assessment.

That is where sanctions and the DSA meet. One acts on the person. The other acts on the space in which that person can speak.

Together, they create a system in which the state does not need to ban a newspaper. It is enough to list its founder, freeze its accounts, frighten its bank, frighten its platforms, and call the whole process democratic resilience.

But it is not resilience.

It is censorship by infrastructure, without the censor’s signature — censorship carried out through banks, platforms, payment providers, compliance departments and risk managers, so that the state can say: we did not silence you. The system did.

This is how power is privatised. Or, in my case, exported from Germany to the European Union.

And let us be honest about Palestine. A long list of genocide scholars, legal experts and human rights organisations have confirmed that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. There are proceedings at the International Court of Justice. There are mass graves, starvation, the destruction of hospitals, schools, universities and entire neighbourhoods. Europe is not a neutral observer. Europe is politically, diplomatically and materially implicated.

So when journalism documents protest against that complicity, it is not “destabilisation.” It is a journalistic duty and the minimum moral response to mass slaughter.

When reporting on protest becomes evidence of destabilisation, the state has stopped treating journalism as a democratic function and started treating it as enemy activity.

The question is no longer: did this person commit a crime? The question becomes: does this weaken our narrative?

When the field of public debate adopts military vocabulary — risk, threat, manipulation — freedom of the press is no longer a right. It becomes a security question.

That is why I am not here to ask for sympathy.

I am here to say something simple: sanctions must never be used as a tool to suppress speech. Journalism should never be sanctioned.

Not because every journalist is right or every report beyond criticism. But because the answer to journalism is more journalism, public debate, evidence, correction, and — where necessary — a court of law.

Not secret files. Not administrative lists. Not financial exile.

Because democracy is not defended by bypassing its courts.

I want to remind you of what I said at the beginning. I stand before you today not because I was acquitted. I stand before you because I was never charged.

And that, precisely, is the problem.

A sanctions regime that decides guilt without a court is not a shield for democracy. It is its graveyard.

Hüseyin Doğru delivered this speech at the European Parliament on 07.05.2026 through online participation.

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The first few months of the new coalition’s government has seen the use of extreme measures, designed to assert Tel Aviv’s dominance over the Palestinian people. New security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, caused a United Nations Security Council meeting to be held after he stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, only days into the formation of the new government. Israel has also increased violent raids on Palestinian cities, towns, and refugee camps, as well as carrying out further home demolitions in the occupied territories.

Additionally, the Israeli Knesset approved new legislation that when implemented will strip Palestinian citizens in Israel of their passports and see them deported if they commit attacks against Israelis. Israel’s new government has repeatedly ignored calls from the U.S Biden administration to halt illegal settlement expansion. Tel Aviv has also recognized 9 settlement outposts and approved the construction of thousands of settler units in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. New legislation has also passed a preliminary vote in the Knesset, to introduce the death penalty for Palestinians accused of attacks against Israelis.

Another policy development has, however that has infuriated a large section of Israeli society is the extreme-right government’s proposed reforms of the judicial system. The reforms are aimed at “eliminating the power of the supreme court to supervise the government,” and makes it “quite obvious that when this reform will pass, they will use it in order to pass anti-Palestinian laws” according to Israeli journalist and editor at Local Call, Meron Rapaport .

I THINK THIS POLICY, OF ALLOWING FOR SOLDIERS AND SETTLERS TO SHOOT AND MAIM PALESTINIANS, HAS BEEN SOMETHING ISRAEL HAS BEEN ADVOCATING FOR YEARS.

The Emergence Of A New Era Of Confrontations

Following the launch of rockets towards Israeli settlements surrounding occupied Jerusalem, the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, launched “Operation Guardian of the Wall”, resulting in the murder of at least 260 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the majority of whom were civilians. This 11-day assault was the fourth major offensive against Gaza, since the start of the Israeli imposed blockade in 2006.

In May of 2021, a small band of armed fighters, from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement in Jenin refugee camp, began an initiative to form what was four months later officially declared as the Jenin Brigades. In June of that year, Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party lost power after failing to win enough Knesset seats to form a coalition. As a result, Naftali Bennet became Israeli Prime Minister, heading what was dubbed to be the most diverse Israeli coalition government in its history known as the “Change government”.

Under Bennett’s administration the Israeli military amended its open-fire policy in December of 2021, permitting occupation soldiers to shoot-to-kill Palestinians who throw stones at Israelis, even when they are running away and posed no active threat. According to Ubai Al-Aboudi, the Executive Director of Bisan Center for Research and Development, “the numbers speak for themselves” as to how the open-fire policy has affected the death toll inside the West Bank. “I think this policy, of allowing for soldiers and settlers to shoot and maim Palestinians, has been something Israel has been advocating for years. What has changed even more recently, under the new government, is that with Israeli ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, they are now overtly working on allowing more of this sort of violence with complete impunity,” Al-Aboudia added.

Dror Sadot, the spokesperson for Israel’s leading human rights organization B’Tselem, told red. media that “the open fire regulations are not transparent, we don’t know exactly what is written. We know some regular guidelines, but we don’t know exactly what the open fire regulations are.” Sadot added that “I don’t think we are talking about the regulations themselves, as much as we are talking about the open fire policy,” which she shares are often conflated with one another. “I think those are two different things, because the policy that the Israelis have implemented throughout the years is not specialized to the Bennet government or any other government…it’s a very lethal policy that doesn’t consider Palestinian life as something to be guarded.”

In February of 2022, an Israeli special forces unit, known colloquially as Yamam, launched the first ‘targeted assassination’ attack in the West Bank in fifteen years. They fired at least 80 bullets on a civilian car, killing three Palestinians who were members of the unofficial Fatah-party armed affiliate, known as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. These extra-judicial killing, carried out in broad daylight, instigated a new era of violent attacks inside the occupied West Bank. On March 31, the Israeli military launched “Operation Break the Wave”, an ongoing campaign that they claim is designed to prevent attacks on Israelis

.

“Israeli aggression is causing Palestinians to increase their resistance, and this is a fact, we see from reports that every time they kill people in Nablus for instance, the friends and extended family of those killed feel compelled to pick up the guns in their place and respond,” says Ubai Al-Aboudi. “I think this is the cycle that Israel wants to induce here, I think they favor the idea of attacking en-mass Palestinians and then painting the Palestinians as terrorists and dangerous as they are armed.”

Meron Rapoport argued that although Operation Break the Wave has proven to be a failure, the Palestinian armed groups do not currently pose a significant military threat to the Israeli army in the West Bank. He explained that at least 35,000 Israeli soldiers are operating inside the territory compared to hundreds of Palestinian fighters. However, he argued that these groups are creating a political crisis for the Israeli government.

The ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, between 1947–1949, was a crime committed by figures who were wrongly described by journalists as socialists, or at least to have been on the Left, this prominently included David Ben-Gurion of the Israeli Labor Party. It is important to note that those who are often described to have constituted the Israeli Left, or to have been socialists, can’t be considered leftwing. In 1951, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed that Israel is neither capitalist or socialist, but that it was simply a Jewish state. It is for this very reason that such assertions about an Israeli Left versus Right should not be viewed in the way such rivalries are usually seen.

Following this period, during a period known as Israel’s “Border Wars” of 1949 to 1956, as many as 5,000 Palestinians were killed. Until 1966, the Palestinians who were not ethnically cleansed in the late 1940’s were then placed under Israeli military rule, inside what was declared as Israel. Many aspects of these policies would later be imposed on the people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, following a further displacement of around 300,000 people from their homes in June of that year.

Speaking to red. media, Meron Rapaport explained that the new Israeli coalition government represents a split from the liberal values of Israeli governments of the past. He says it constitutes a new political alliance, one that “seeks to Judaize the whole space, yes to Judaize the West Bank and to put pressure on the Palestinians inside Israel…but also to Judaize the secular Jews inside Israel, to make them more religious, they see this as one project.”

“This government is really a coalition of, on the one hand openly racist parties like that of Itamar Ben Gvir [Israel’s security minister], openly transferist parties like Bezalel Smotrich [Israel’s finance minister], openly anti-secular parties like the ultra-orthodox parties and I would even say in American terms evangelists; anti-gay rights, anti all that is related to liberal values. So it’s a very mixed coalition with parties that sometimes don’t have much in common, besides a desire for revenge against the liberal side of the Jewish population,” Rapoport explained. Furthermore, he says what has changed with this government, is that it represents a break from the previous policy of maintaining the status quo, bringing the issue of the Palestinians into the public conversation, “something that wasn’t there around two years ago”.

THIS NEW GOVERNMENT IS A REFLECTION OF HOW MUCH THE ISRAELI EXTREME RIGHT IS DOMINATING ISRAELI POLITICS

Khaled Barakat, a Palestinian journalist, and a leader of the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path (PARP) movement, told red. media that “In the past Israel would promote itself as a State with a project, but today Israel has lost that. Everything they are doing now is designed to maintain a certain political coalition, to keep it in power, and that is important,” he stressed, explaining that the importance of this change, which has been demonstrated through six general elections in only four years, “shows that it has no historical project, but instead it seeks to serve the colonialist and imperialist powers, along with certain sectors within its own fascist society.”

“This new government is a reflection of how much the Israeli extreme right is dominating Israeli politics today and this is also interesting to see, because in our view this doesn’t actually play in the favor of the Zionist project in the long run, in deepening the internal crisis.” Khaled Barakat says that “even if you take the case of Itamar Ben Gvir and his storming of al-Aqsa, you have to remember that Ariel Sharon did that in the year 2000” and that therefore the actions committed by the Israeli government shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as different. In fact, he argues: “Due to the normalization deals with Arab regimes, to the carte blanche given by the West, to the immunity they receive, they feel that at this time they can get away with anything they want, and this is what is dangerous and we must make this a failure for them. If we look at the resistance forces in the West Bank, this is what they are actually doing, they are embarrassing Netanyahu and Ben Gvir, holding them accountable.”

“Last year was the most lethal year in the West Bank since 2004”, commented B’Tselem’s Dror Sadot, noting “that this was with the Change government, with the Left government, not with this one”. Sadot said that “when we talk about this government, I think that we are going to see things getting worse, but we also need not to view it as exceptional completely…because also the previous governments were using lethal force under the open fire policy, and house demolitions, and taking over Palestinian lands, and backing settler violence.” “I think that now, Israel is putting up tons of very racist legislation”, she said, adding that “now is the time for them to put out the things they couldn’t before, we have to wait to see what they will do, last they just started to try and introduce the death penalty for those who commit attacks on Israel”.

“What they are doing now with the Ben Gvir and Smotrich government is that they are committing these policies as official written policies, instead of them being unofficial” Ubai Al-Aboudi said in relation to the nature of the new Israeli government’s behavior on the ground. In agreement with Dror Sadot of B’Tselem, he said that the greatest change so far has been in the rhetoric of the Israeli government.

More Violence Ahead?

What appears to be a key factor in driving any potential escalation are the activities of Israeli settlers inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem. After a pogrom was carried out by extremist settlers in Hawara town, against Palestinians, some Israeli politicians emboldened the settlers by calling on the Israeli government to go further, in the case of minister Bezalel Smotrich to “wipe out” the entire town of Hawara.

It is clear from a ten-point policy platform put forth by the Religious Zionism List the second largest Party in the Israeli ruling coalition, that the goal is to conquer the West Bank and to make the issue of destroying any semblance of a Palestinian national movement the main goal of the government. Although past Israeli governments have sought to maintain the status quo with the Palestinians sidelined as an issue, this has clearly changed under the new coalition. The strength of an once fringe group of extremist settlers, who see the only way forward as being through the total elimination of the Palestinians as a nation has now become mainstream. Future escalation is likely to be caused by these extremist settlers.

As Donald Trump threatens Venezuela with military intervention, the Venezuelan people are not standing by. Across the country, communities are organizing the Peoples Militia to defend their sovereignty against foreign aggression and internal destabilization.

In 2019, we gained exclusive access to Venezuela’s People’s Militia, speaking directly with those prepared to defend their revolution and their right to self-determination. This video brings forward voices rarely heard in mainstream media and reveals how ordinary Venezuelans are responding to US pressure and threats of war.

Even though this documentary was produced in 2019 it is still relevant today.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/c894329d7bb420a691e600c550165a57/href">https://medium.com/media/c894329d7bb420a691e600c550165a57/href</a>

“The goal is to protect Lebanon” — On the demand for disarmament and the impact of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah. A conversation with Ali Al-Mekdad.

On 27 November 2024, the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon came into effect, ending the clashes between the Israeli army and Hezbollah. To what extent is this agreement being respected?

If we had to grade the implementation of the agreement, we would give Hezbollah nine out of ten points. For the Zionist enemy, it would be the opposite. They have not implemented a single clause. Instead, they persistently violate the agreement, maintain their aggression, continue killing, and carry out brutal attacks. We would give them a score below zero — minus nine out of ten.

Has Hezbollah, as stipulated in the agreement, demilitarized the area south of the Litani River?

Everyone — including the Lebanese army and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who oversees these operations — confirms that the area south of the Litani has been demilitarized and is under army control. The president recently confirmed that the army is in full coordination with the resistance.

Yet Israel continues to insist on a demilitarized zone?

Israelis or Americans do not need a reason to carry out their aggression. We are implementing what Resolution 1701 requires, but this Israeli enemy has never complied with a UN or Security Council decision. When Israel invaded Lebanon and Resolution 425 was passed, demanding an Israeli withdrawal, it took twelve years before it was enforced — and in the end only through force, through resistance.

Is Israel’s aim the complete elimination of Hezbollah as a political force, not just a military one?

Netanyahu has declared that the goal is “Greater Israel” — stretching from occupied Palestine to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. Any resistance to this project, led by Israel and the United States, is treated as an enemy. Israel claims that the resistance is its main target. But the real target is Lebanon as a state — its economy, politics, and social fabric with all its communities and sects — through which the Zionist enemy feels challenged. It does not matter to them whether someone is Muslim, Sunni, Christian, or Shia. They want all of Lebanon under their control. We know why they bomb the airport, the ports of Tripoli and Beirut, and the inland markets that serve as transit corridors to Arab countries.

Has the change that took place in Syria reshaped the balance of power between the axes?

Unfortunately, what is happening today — the Israeli threats to the lands of the Syrian Arab Republic, including killings and the invasion of this vast area that the Zionist enemy has taken — has stirred unrest on the Syrian street. We are saddened and pained that today the Israeli comes and goes in Syria, in certain Syrian areas, without accountability or control.

After this, has the Iran–Hezbollah–Syria triangle changed? Has it undergone any changes, even if only military ones?

No doubt. There is no doubt that today Syria is in a different position regarding the axis. However, although the axis was slightly shaken, it still stands. We still have Iran, Lebanon; Hamas is still present, Yemen is present, Iraq is present. Yes, there has been a setback, but thank God today the axis is doing very well.

Do you expect a renewed Israeli offensive?

You cannot trust this Israeli enemy. How many aggressions and attacks has it carried out against Arab countries, especially Lebanon, since 1948? We do not forget the massacres of Hula or the massacres in Palestine since 1948, when there was neither Hezbollah nor the resistance.

How will Hezbollah respond if Israeli attacks continue?

One of our defining traits is strategic patience. Yes, we are once again losing martyrs. But we say: patience and discernment guide our actions.

Do you see a risk of a return to civil war?

We do not want civil war, and we are proud that after the war in Syria in 2011 we prevented a sectarian civil war in Lebanon. We were an occupied country, and we fought this Israeli enemy to liberate our land. The goal of the resistance is to protect and defend Lebanon, because we are part of this country.

The main idea here, and the main goal of the resistance’s defense, is the defense of Lebanon, because if the resistance were to fall — God forbid — Lebanon would fall. 2006 was proof of this, and the recent war was also proof.

Today, Israel says that its main objective is the resistance. But Lebanon as a state — with its economy, its politics, its social fabric with its different groups and sects — is the only country in the region that challenges the Zionist enemy on many fronts.

This Zionist enemy does not care whether someone is Muslim, Sunni, Christian, or Shia. It wants all of Lebanon to be under its control. And the economic competition — we know why Israel targets the port of Tripoli and the port of Beirut. We know why it bombs the airport. We know why Israel targets the internal markets, which serve as a transit corridor for Arab countries.

Lebanon is the main economic enemy, according to Israel. This is where our problem with them begins.

How does Hezbollah evaluate Trump’s plan for Gaza and the ceasefire deal with Egypt? Do you see them as part of a U.S. agenda and a division of roles?

Today, it is no secret to anyone when Trump says, “I want to make peace through war.” This idea of achieving global peace through wars — no one has ever articulated it like this. “I wage war to achieve peace.” I kill, strike, destroy, displace, commit genocide, carry out massacres, and so on, all to reach peace. This is a new vision in the world. Similar things have happened before, but no one has ever expressed or promoted it this way.

The U.S. administration seeks to terrorize the world, not just the Middle East.

For example, regarding Nigeria — what did they say? We are not defending the killing of Christians; on the contrary. But he said, “I want to overthrow Nigeria. I want to send armed forces. Where? To Venezuela.”

Today, the American does not look at the people. He looks at no one but himself. It sees himself as the number-one arrogant power in the world, wanting to satisfy his own authority and arrogance at the expense of the entire world.

Surely, they will not succeed.

How does Hezbollah respond to the Lebanese government’s call for disarmament?

In implementing Resolution 1701, we refer to the oath of office and the government’s declaration, which state: “Lebanon has the right to defend its borders, its land, its sovereignty, and its independence with the means available to it.” Are there today any means besides the army and the resistance? And yet every country is prohibited from supplying Lebanon with weapons that could be used against the Zionist enemy. And the United States says it wants to arm the Lebanese army to fight Hezbollah. So the Lebanese must sit together and agree on how we can use our weapons to defend this country collectively. We are talking about all of Lebanon. If Dahieh is hit, the rest of the country will feel it. If Jounieh is hit, Dahieh will feel it. If Dahieh is hit, Hermel will feel it.

Washington has set a deadline for Hezbollah’s disarmament by the end of the year. Do you fear sanctions?

Ask the entire Lebanese people! You can talk about economic, social, political, and diplomatic siege, about the threat of massacres — not to mention war. We are a people accustomed to this. Above all, we do not submit. This is our country, our people, our lives, our existence. To submit today to the Americans or Israelis would mean handing your enemy your neck to cut. We are a people who learned something else, and in our minds there is no word for yielding or surrender.

Recently, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul visited Beirut. Does Germany want to play an active role in Lebanon?

Anyone who wishes to come is welcome, but there is an agreement, a committee of five actors — the so-called monitoring mechanism — and there is Resolution 1701. There is no need for delegations to go back and forth.

What is your political vision for Lebanon’s future?

Lebanon is unique in the world. We must protect this national unity, this system that binds the country together, that unites every citizen. It is true that we are a country of sects. May these sects be a blessing for Lebanon. Through our unity, our cohesion, and our capabilities, we can rebuild the country, just as we rebuilt the South and Dahieh after 2006.

In the past, Hezbollah called for an Islamic republic in Lebanon. Does the party still pursue that goal?

Long ago, Sayed (Nasrallah), may God bless his soul, spoke about this. Lebanon is a country for all its children.

Is Hezbollah still primarily a Shia movement, or has it become a Lebanese party?

If you conduct a survey today, you will find that a large percentage of Lebanese who once held a hesitant attitude toward Hezbollah and the resistance — including Sunni brothers, Christians, or Druze, and I am not talking about politicians but ordinary citizens — now support the resistance in their hearts. Because they know that this resistance has sacrificed thousands of martyrs and wounded so that this country can endure and its people can live here with their heads held high.

In light of the pager attack and the killing of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, did Hezbollah underestimate Israel’s military and intelligence capabilities?

There is no doubt there was damage. The pager attack alone was a diabolical operation, unprecedented in the history of warfare. Thank God many people have since been able to return to their work and duties. Many are working again in offices, hospitals, nursing, or municipal services. The resistance leadership — politically, socially, and militarily — has identified the weaknesses that allowed these security breaches and is rebuilding.

Is Hezbollah currently in its weakest phase?

On the contrary. Today Hezbollah is strong politically, socially, economically, and in the health sector — strong in every respect. I do not interfere in military matters because I do not know much about them. There were heavy blows, and we suffered great losses. But do you know what the martyrdom of Sayed has given the Lebanese, the party’s youth, and the martyrs’ families? It has given them incredible strength to continue. The Israelis thought that by killing Sayed they could stop Hezbollah. But the love for Sayed, for Sayed Hashem, and for all the commanders and martyrs has created a positive response far greater than the negative one they expected.

To what extent is Hezbollah planning to reform its military, political, and social structures in response to these attacks?

It is working on all of these fronts — within the cabinet and government. It has many social, economic, health, and political demands. We must not forget that Hezbollah emerged in response to those who want to plunge the Lebanese people into poverty, in response to those who want to starve the people.

When you speak of resistance, do you primarily mean armed struggle?

First of all, resistance begins in the heart. Then it is expressed through actions. It begins in hospitals, on the street, in the car, everywhere. Resistance means standing up to evil. Standing up to injustice. Resisting even in thought. Intellectual and cultural resistance are among the most important forms of resistance. If you do not resist mentally and intellectually, it means you will lose one day. Armed resistance exists to defend that cultural and intellectual resistance.

This interview was conducted for junge Welt and published in German on November 21, 2025.

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This interview with the PFLP political relations person Abdullah Al-Danan is part of an ongoing series featuring conversations with representatives of various Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, the PFLP, and Islamic Jihad. It was conducted in October 2025, shortly after the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel. Since then, Israel has repeatedly violated the truce, resulting in the deaths of several hundred people.

Interview with Hamas spokesperson Walid Kilani

Interview with Palestinian Islamic Jihad senior politician Haitham Abu Ghaslan

After all the dramatic events from October 7, 2023, up to the ceasefire, how do you assess the situation in Gaza? Do you believe Israel will abide by the ceasefire and the other agreed-upon terms?

The situation in Gaza is, of course, dire. There are more than 70,000 martyrs, over 10,000 missing persons, and more than 100,000 wounded — many of them amputees.

As for adherence to the ceasefire, we do not trust this Zionist entity or this enemy. We have no faith in its promises, nor in those who have guaranteed this agreement. (Israel, editors note) has already violated the deal. Today, three martyrs were killed in Gaza. This morning, the ceasefire was breached in the eastern part of the Strip — just as it has been in Lebanon, where the number of violations has now exceeded 6,000.

We have no confidence in this agreement. As some officials noted today, even the American president declared that he would give the green light for renewed bombings if Hamas failed to return the bodies of dead Zionist captives. This agreement is not guaranteed — unfortunately.

But there are also factors preventing this entity from continuing the war in Gaza as before. Israel has not achieved any of the goals it set out at the beginning of its aggression. Not a single one. As Netanyahu himself admitted in the Knesset, he paid a heavy price in Gaza for attempting to free the Zionist captives.

At first, the aggression began with the occupation of Gaza. Then came economic projects aimed at turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” followed by divisions between Arab and international forces.

How do you see the future of Gaza?

We have paid this heavy price with the lives and souls of our Palestinian people.

No, we will not leave Gaza, and we will not accept anyone else governing it. We reject any new mandate — even under international or humanitarian pretexts — because such arrangements only perpetuate colonialism against our people.
The Palestinian people are bound to their land and rooted in it, no matter the cost. The day after in Gaza will be a Palestinian day.

Who will govern Gaza?

The Palestinian people. We have capable individuals — independent, unaffiliated with any faction — who can and will govern Gaza. Under Egyptian mediation, all Palestinian factions have agreed that Gaza should be administered by an independent Palestinian body with the authority to manage the Strip.

After the events in Gaza, Syria, and the recent developments — especially following the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh — can we say the Middle East is on a path toward peace?

As long as Palestinian land remains occupied, the question of peace is far from resolved. How can there be peace when a people live under oppression, and the Zionist entity continues to torture, kill, and imprison?

For 77 years, the Palestinian cause has been influenced by developments in neighboring countries — but not decisively so. We had hoped those countries would stand and fight alongside us, as the people of Yemen have done. The Lebanese resistance tried — they gave their martyrs and risked the destruction of their villages to support Gaza.
No matter the condition of the states surrounding us, the Palestinian people will not abandon their rights.

True peace exists only between peoples and nations that stand as equals. Between us and the Zionist entity, there is no equality — they possess nuclear weapons and every kind of armament used to kill our families and our people.
But we possess something stronger than those weapons, stronger even than U.S. backing: the right and the will to resist. That is why we say peace will only come when the Palestinian people themselves can live in peace. Peace begins in Palestine.

Some claim the Palestinian cause has suffered a serious blow — perhaps even a setback — particularly concerning the axis of forces supporting it. Do you, as the PFLP, share that view?

Quite the opposite. The battle for Gaza has strengthened the determination of the Palestinian people to return to their towns and villages in Palestine. Today, more than ever, we are committed to our credo: to liberate all of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
The Palestinian cause today is the world’s foremost cause — and that gives strength to our people. Public opinion and the world’s conscience now stand with Palestine.

One of the pillars of this entity was its Zionist narrative — portraying itself as a victim, arriving in Palestine as refugees fleeing persecution. That victimhood has vanished.
Today, it is the Palestinian people who are the victims.

We must build on this international solidarity and use it to advance our cause. Today, an International Criminal Court warrant is out for Netanyahu, the head of this hostile government. He can no longer fly over many countries. Zionist diplomats are now received only by the U.S. government. Just look at how other delegations behaved when he tried to speak before the UN.

All of this strengthens the Palestinian people. That is why we are now more determined than ever to return and liberate all of Palestine.

Regarding the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh — there was a similar one in 1996, called the “Summit of the Peacemakers.” But what kind of peace are they talking about?

There will be no peace until the Palestinian people return to their homeland. Our vision of peace is that every Palestinian returns home and that the Palestinian people reclaim the rights denied to them in 1948 through acts of violence.

Will the resistance continue?

Resistance lives in the hearts of the Palestinian people.
I will close with the words of our legendary comrade, the writer Ghassan Kanafani: “Either Palestine — or fire, generation after generation.”

Note: Due to security concerns on the ground, the interview had to be canceled during the recording. We plan to conduct it again in the near future.

Interview by Hüseyin Dogru

This interview with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad senior politician Haitham Abu Ghaslan is part of an ongoing series featuring conversations with representatives of various Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, the PFLP, and Islamic Jihad. It was conducted in October 2025, shortly after the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel. Since then, Israel has repeatedly violated the truce, resulting in the deaths of several hundred people.

The interviews will be published successively in the coming days.

Here is the first Interview with Hamas spokesperson Walid Kilani

Was the current ceasefire in Gaza imposed by external powers, or was it genuinely negotiated and agreed upon by the Palestinians themselves?

Naturally, as resistance movements, we have demanded — and continue to demand — an end to the genocide against the Palestinian people. Efforts were made at various levels to achieve this goal. However, as it has now become clear, Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government have repeatedly obstructed such efforts.

Undeniably, U.S. President Trump’s proposal forced a political and military shift and compelled Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire. The Palestinian resistance was clear in its position: it insisted — and continues to insist — on a full ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces, reconstruction, the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, and the return of displaced persons to their villages, camps, and cities.

Israel sought to expel the Palestinian people, to eradicate what remained of them. The world witnessed unprecedented massacres and acts of genocide that continued for more than two years — the burning of journalists, the bombing of children and women — all without accountability. These scenes have changed perceptions in the West and led to the isolation of the Israeli entity. Israel is now seen increasingly as a rogue state — one whose leaders must be tried for war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

Israel has become isolated, while Palestine has returned to the global political stage — both in the West and across the region. The blood and steadfastness of the Palestinian resistance brought about this transformation, which ultimately led to the imposition of the ceasefire.

What exactly has been agreed upon in the ceasefire negotiations so far? Which points have been settled, and which remain under discussion?

The U.S. President’s proposal outlines general principles, meaning further negotiations are required to finalize the details. A broad framework was drafted, followed by discussions on specific points — namely, the ceasefire itself, the exchange of prisoners, and the release of Palestinian detainees.

Do you believe the ceasefire will hold in the long term and that Israel will abide by its commitments?

Of course, we trust neither Israel nor its leaders — nor the United States or Trump. Both Israel and the U.S. are currently motivated by a shared interest in ending their international isolation, which also gives them an incentive to maintain the agreement.

That said, violations have already occurred — and they may continue. But as Palestinians, as a resistance movement, we remain committed to this agreement.

The first phase has been concluded. The next step — a second phase to be achieved through ongoing negotiations — has yet to begin. Netanyahu is actively trying to block these efforts through repeated violations. Without U.S. intervention and Washington’s interest in sustaining this process, the agreement would have already collapsed.

The ceasefire stipulates the daily entry of 600 truckloads of humanitarian aid into Gaza. So far, less than half of that has arrived — a clear violation of the agreement. More than 40 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire — another grave breach. There have also been violations concerning the withdrawal of forces along the designated “yellow line.”

The resistance has fully completed the release of all living Israeli captives and has returned the majority of the bodies of deceased Israelis, continuing to search for the rest. Delays have occurred due to a lack of resources, equipment, and specialists. The Israeli enemy has repeatedly obstructed these efforts by blocking the teams and tools needed to recover and return the remaining bodies.

Was your organization directly involved in the ceasefire negotiations, or were they primarily led by Hamas?

A Hamas delegation led the talks, but there were also delegations from the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It was a joint effort shaped by the situation on the ground. The Islamic Jihad is an integral force in Palestine and Gaza — with its own prisoners, martyrs, and sacrifices — and was therefore directly involved.

Does a ceasefire mean peace?

No, of course not. We are not at peace with this enemy. This is a ceasefire — nothing more. The matter concerns the Palestinian people and the genocide committed by Israel with the explicit backing of the United States. The U.S. President even boasted in the Knesset that they had supplied Israel with new weapons tested on the Palestinian people.

For that reason, as Palestinians — and especially as the Islamic Jihad — we cannot accept the existence of the Israeli entity on Palestinian land.

So far, those responsible for the genocide — and their supporters — have not been held accountable before an international court. Should that not be part of the negotiations?

Fortunately, some countries — notably South Africa — have filed cases. We had the honor of participating in two conferences there, where recommendations were made to take legal action against the Israeli enemy. Arrest warrants have been issued against Netanyahu and several Israeli leaders.

Netanyahu now avoids traveling to certain countries. Public opinion in the West appears determined to pursue this matter to the end. This marks a major shift — one that Trump himself fears. It was this very pressure that led him to propose a ceasefire that effectively forced Israel’s hand.

Would your organization accept a transitional or international administration in Gaza? Under what conditions or guarantees?

Under no circumstances can we accept external administration — that would amount to international trusteeship, a new form of occupation.

The Palestinians who endured over two years of war, murder, and blockade have achieved what can only be described as a miracle through their resistance — a legendary act of endurance despite limited resources. They will not accept a new occupation or any foreign oversight of Gaza.

Who, then, should govern Gaza?

Gaza’s governance must be determined by the Palestinian people and the resistance. Hamas had already announced — even before Trump’s proposal — that it was prepared to hand administrative control of Gaza to a technocratic committee. It has since reaffirmed this commitment.

The resistance accepted this arrangement but emphasized that such a committee must have Palestinian legitimacy. As long as occupation persists, no one can halt the resistance of the Palestinian people.

Many international proposals envision a Gaza government without armed resistance groups. How does your organization view such a plan?

No one can disarm the Palestinian people. These are the weapons of Fathi Shiqaqi, Ahmed Yassin, and all just resistance fighters. These arms — and the resistance itself — are justified by all norms and international law.

If the United States were under occupation, would even one of its citizens remain silent and refuse to resist?

Would your movement consider a lasting truce as part of a future political settlement? What are the red lines that cannot be crossed?

These are indeed the challenges of today — and the resistance movements must turn these challenges into opportunities. The resistance now possesses legitimacy and strength, making it a genuine counterforce to all projects hostile to the Arab and Islamic nations.

What does this new balance of power mean for the region, especially after Hezbollah’s weakening and Iran’s diminished influence?

We are fully aware of the gravity of regional changes and the depth of these transformations. But we are equally aware of the steadfastness of the resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which continues to play an essential role in supporting and strengthening the resistance front.

Today, resistance movements no longer rely solely on weapons. The idea of resistance existed long before Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah — since the first Zionist settlement was established on Palestinian land.

This is a century-old struggle, and it clearly demonstrates that the resistance — led by the Palestinian people and the nations of the Arab and Islamic world — is a genuine movement with a vision and the capacity to organize its forces in the pursuit of liberation and victory.

Nearly two years ago, Prime Minister Netanyahu said the entire Middle East would be reshaped. What dangers or changes do you see emerging from this?

His aim was to crush the resistance movements in Gaza — Islamic Jihad and Hamas — as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the resistance in Yemen, and ultimately to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran.

We recognize that the resistance and its fronts have suffered heavy blows — that is undeniable. Yet they have not been defeated, nor has Israel succeeded in imposing its will. The project of a new regional order, with Israel as the dominant power, has failed.

The proof is clear: Netanyahu, who once vowed to annihilate Hamas and Islamic Jihad, now finds himself negotiating indirectly for the return of captives.

Can the current U.S. administration — widely seen as the most pro-Israel in modern history — be trusted to act honestly in regional or ceasefire negotiations?

This is not a question of trust. Trump’s power and the United States’ ability to exert pressure on Israel are what truly matter. The Israeli entity plays a functional role; without such external power and enforcement, it cannot survive in this region.

Trump made this clear in his address to the Knesset. In practice, Netanyahu cannot defy Trump — if he did, he would be politically finished. That is why Netanyahu has adapted to this policy, whether he likes it or not.

Hamas leaders have repeatedly criticized Arab states for not doing enough to end the war in Gaza. How do you assess the role of the Arab countries and Turkey, all of which have maintained relations and trade with Israel while publicly condemning its actions?

The Arab and Islamic countries could have exerted significant pressure on the United States to stop the war.

Our position was clear: Trump could have ended the aggression with a single phone call. This was evident from the earliest days of Israel’s assault on our people. These Arab governments could have withdrawn their ambassadors, suspended normalization, or cut off financial and logistical support to Israel.

Sadly, they failed to take serious measures — or to adopt a meaningful stance — until after the genocide had already taken place.

Yet two crucial factors stand out: first, the steadfastness and resistance of Gaza itself; and second, the movements in Western societies that have driven this shift in global consciousness.

Why has the West Bank been almost entirely excluded from the ongoing negotiations?

The resistance remains strong in the West Bank, despite the difficult conditions and Israel’s colonial project aimed at annexation, fragmentation, and Judaization — effectively preventing the creation of a real Palestinian state.

So when some talk about “two states for two peoples,” this is not possible in practice. The settlements are expanding, the number of settlers is rising, and Israel exercises full control over all areas and daily life in the West Bank.

Based on statistics — including Israeli sources — there have been more than ten thousand resistance operations in the West Bank alone in the past two years.

Despite all these sacrifices, despite abandonment by many, we have no fear for Palestine or the Palestinian cause. From 1921 and 1929, through the Qassam uprising, the modern struggle, and successive Intifadas, our people have remained present — sending a clear message to the world: Palestine cannot be erased without erasing the Palestinian people themselves. And that, God willing, will never happen.

Most countries continue to push for a two-state solution along the 1967 borders. Is this a framework your organization supports, or do you continue to demand the end of the occupation of all Palestinian lands — meaning a single Palestinian state?

We do not support the two-state proposal — nor does Israel. Within the Israeli establishment, there is near-unanimity that a Palestinian state in the West Bank would pose a strategic threat to the Jewish state.

That is why Israel continues to expand settlements and intensify attacks — developments we witness daily in the occupied West Bank.

There have been reports of public executions in Gaza after major fighting ended. How do you respond to these allegations, and how does your organization ensure accountability within its ranks?

The situation has been greatly exaggerated. Yes, there were incidents of field executions, but not on the scale portrayed by the media. This issue has been exploited by Israel and by those who benefit from it.

It is often said that justice in wartime begins as provisional justice — mistakes can happen. I am not familiar with the procedural details, but one thing is clear: collaborators must be punished.

There are continuing allegations that your organization and other resistance groups have violated the ceasefire. Who, in your view, is actually breaking the agreement — and how?

As a resistance movement, we remain committed to the agreement because it serves the interests of our Palestinian people.

More than two years after October 7, Gaza lies in ruins — tens of thousands dead, infrastructure destroyed, and international recognition of your governance severely weakened. Given these realities, can it be said that your movement has lost this battle, or do you see a different outcome?

I would not speak in terms of victory or defeat. The situation is far more complex.

The Palestinians have endured — and in doing so, have thwarted Israel’s objectives. Even the enemy itself has acknowledged this. It failed to eliminate the resistance, failed to reclaim its prisoners except through indirect negotiations, and failed to erase the Palestinian cause or expel our people from their land.

How can one speak of victory when none of their stated goals were achieved? All they accomplished was genocide and destruction — something that was, sadly, predictable given their military power.

Looking back, how do you assess the cost and outcome of October 7 — politically, militarily, and morally?

The operation of October 7 — “Al-Aqsa Flood” — marked a decisive turning point in the history of the resistance, in the trajectory of the Palestinian cause, and in the political landscape of the region and the world.

Today, the discussion goes beyond Gaza. Gaza has become just one part of a broader transformation — one that has altered global perceptions and exposed the limits of Israeli and U.S. power to reshape the region according to their designs.

We are fully aware that the path taken by the heroes of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” — and the one they continue to follow — is a path toward freedom, independence, and the complete liberation of Palestine.

Interview by Hüseyin Dogru

This interview was conducted for junge Welt and published in German on November 3, 2025.

This interview is part of an ongoing series featuring conversations with representatives of various Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, the PFLP, and Islamic Jihad. It was conducted in October 2025, shortly after the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel. Since then, Israel has repeatedly violated the truce, resulting in the deaths of several hundred people.

The interviews will be published successively in the coming days.

Let’s begin with the ceasefire. Were there direct negotiations with Hamas, or was it imposed by an external actor? Or did the Hamas set its own conditions, negotiate, and achieve a ceasefire in Gaza?

A decision on the ceasefire was made when the movement’s proposal was presented. This proposal consisted of twenty points. The movement took its time and never withdrew from previous negotiations, including the most recent ones. The Zionist enemy, however, consistently avoided and delayed the negotiations and even attempted to assassinate the negotiating delegation. Hamas was responsible for its own actions.

The purpose of the entire negotiation process was to end the war and the genocide against our Palestinian people. Therefore, the expectations of the negotiating delegation reflected those of the Palestinian people: to end this genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Resistance exists because of occupation. If the occupation ends, there would be no need for weapons or resistance — we would function as a political party like any other in the world.

If we look at the issues that were negotiated — for example, ending the genocide and the killing of civilians, or allowing the entry of humanitarian aid — these are fundamental human rights. Yet the enemy, supported by the United States, forced us to negotiate even over such basic rights.

By making basic human rights a matter of negotiation, are the West and Israel setting a precedent?

Unfortunately, the Zionist enemy began politicizing the food supply of the Gaza Strip last year. They started negotiating with the resistance over the food supply for the people of Gaza. The so-called civilized world — the West as well as the Arab and Islamic world — remained silent in the face of this crime.

Neither in the First nor Second World War, nor in any other war, have we seen people dying of hunger or a population forced to fight against starvation. This is the point we had reached: the Zionist enemy wanted to free its prisoners, while the resistance set several conditions — a ceasefire, withdrawal of the Zionist enemy, entry of humanitarian aid, the return of displaced persons, and reconstruction. We already saw a violation in Rafah on the second day of the ceasefire.

Will the ceasefire hold in the long term — and is Israel a reliable negotiation partner?

Whether the ceasefire and this agreement will last depends on the role of the Arab mediators. They play an important role together with the Republic of Turkey, international guarantors, and the U.S. government. According to statements, the U.S. government seems serious — even though we do not rely on it — but it is determined to ensure that the agreement is observed and the ceasefire remains permanent.

The October 7 operation was a strategic operation. Yes, it was a military action, but it had political objectives.

Trump declared that the war was over, repeating it three times, but Netanyahu is trying to avoid this agreement for several reasons, which we will discuss in this interview.

Were there consultations with the other parties — the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other organizations — regarding the agreement?

Certainly. When the movement’s proposal was presented, we consulted the Palestinian resistance groups, mediators, and allies of the resistance. The decision was almost unanimously accepted by the Palestinians.

Does a ceasefire truly mean peace ?

As long as Israel continues to occupy territories — whether in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, or elsewhere — it remains an enemy, and we cannot call this a peace agreement. It is a ceasefire agreement. This enemy is an occupier, and there can be no peace with an occupier.

A group of Palestinians has tried the Oslo Accords for thirty years, but they have brought neither safety, stability, nor peace to our people. That is why we say this enemy understands only the language of force. It has tried to pressure the resistance in all forms but failed to achieve any of its objectives or goals.

Can a ceasefire or end to the war be achieved without holding those responsible for the genocide — and their supporters — accountable before an international court? Should that be part of the negotiations?

Many human rights organizations have begun filing lawsuits against the perpetrators of crimes in the Gaza Strip. Let us not forget that Netanyahu himself is wanted by the International Court of Justice — a fugitive from justice — along with far-right figures such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich.

Complaints are being filed against all of them. Some media outlets have already reported that human rights organizations are filing cases against named soldiers, and we hope that all those who committed crimes against our Palestinian people in Gaza will eventually be brought to justice.

Many international and Arab proposals call for Gaza not to be governed by armed or “extremist” groups. What is Hamas’s position on this?

Hamas’s position is clear. Regarding the administration of the Gaza Strip, we support a technocratic government — an administration or committee that is independent, competent, and purely Palestinian, capable of managing Gaza.

We are not determined to govern Gaza as Hamas. This aligns with the position of all Palestinian factions. However, the issue of weapons and Palestinian resistance is an internal matter. Weapons are tied to the occupation: as long as the occupation continues, resistance will continue.

Weapons are also connected to the concept of a Palestinian state. If there were a Palestinian state with an army, resources, and the ability to protect its people, that would be sufficient. Resistance exists because of occupation. If the occupation ends, there would be no need for weapons or resistance — we would function as a political party like any other in the world.

So weapons are a consequence, not a cause?

Yes.

If there were an international transitional administration for Gaza, how would you view it? Should it be Palestinian or Arab?

This independent administration, committee, or government must be understood and accepted by all Palestinian factions, resistance groups, as well as the Fatah movement and the Palestinian Authority. It must have the support of all factions — there must be consensus.

We have previously agreed on this and discussed it with all factions — in Cairo and in Beijing. Again two days ago. Talks are currently underway in Cairo on this topic. Therefore, we have no objection to those governing Gaza as long as they are purely Palestinian, independent, and supported by all factions.

Security in Gaza and its management should be entrusted to a technocratic government. Nature abhors a vacuum — there must be someone to maintain security, distribute aid, and ensure its protection. Thus, in the first phase, the role of political factions should be limited.

Do you believe the regional changes — from Assad’s fall in Syria to the war in Lebanon and the aggression against Iran — have affected the resistance movement and the Palestinian cause?

Today, the Palestinian cause stands at a new stage. Previously, we said that the train of normalization had started moving through the Arab world, with many Arab and Muslim leaders on board. It seemed that the Palestinian cause had been forgotten and that normalization and the Abraham Accords would dominate our region.

Then came the “Al-Aqsa Flood” to reaffirm that the Palestinian cause is still alive. What happened during “Al-Aqsa Flood” revealed a deep sense of empathy for the Palestinian cause and the rights of the Palestinian people.

We witnessed demonstrations and movements across all sectors — workers, students, universities, artists, athletes, and others — showing solidarity with the Palestinian people.

At this stage, the U.S. government acted as both opponent and overseer. The U.S. President proudly spoke of the airlift that supported Israel while simultaneously launching this new initiative.

Do you trust the current U.S. government — the most pro-Israel in history — to act honestly in regional negotiations or a ceasefire?

Of course, we do not trust the U.S. government or President Trump. The United States practices political hypocrisy and double standards on the Palestine issue. They are the main supporter of the enemy — politically, militarily, financially, and diplomatically.

They used their veto six times in the Security Council against a ceasefire. How can we trust such a government? We are negotiating a ceasefire and will adhere to it as long as the occupying power does. Therefore, we have no trust in the U.S. government, as it is the main supporter of Israel — and we have seen this clearly in every possible way.

How do you assess the stance of Arab and regional countries, including Turkey, over the past two years?

Some did not dare to sever ties or suspend trade with the enemy. Regarding the role of Arab and Islamic countries, we unfortunately saw that during the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” three Arab and Islamic summits were held — yet they achieved nothing for Gaza. They could not even deliver a glass of water to Gaza.

How can we trust them? We have great trust in the Arab and Islamic world, its peoples, and its leaders, but we had hoped for a stronger role — especially in the face of genocide. They should have moved beyond mere condemnations and statements to actually holding the enemy accountable, punishing it, and supporting the Palestinian people and resistance.

The Zionist enemy sought to expel the Palestinian people from their land. Moreover, it will not be satisfied with the borders of Gaza or the West Bank; it will continue to expand. This is Netanyahu’s expansionist project — to reshape the Middle East and create a “Greater Israel.”

The Americans and Israelis are attempting to disarm the resistance on all fronts — in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and now Syria. They are calling for the disarmament and eradication of the idea of resistance. How do you view this?

The resistance and its weapons are legitimate, and we are not ashamed of them. These weapons and this resistance are guaranteed by all universal and divine laws. Even the UN Charter guarantees the right of occupied peoples to fight against those who occupy their land, including through the use of weapons, as stated in Article 154.

The enemy wants to dominate this region and will not tolerate opposition. There was massive resistance in Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and South Africa. How did these movements liberate their countries? Through force and confrontation.

Resistance arose because there was occupation. Without occupation, there would be no resistance. This is clear — it is the law of nature and the law of the land.

What is the movement’s stance on a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders?

The resistance stated its position long ago. But it was Israel that rejected the idea. Weeks before the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, Netanyahu displayed a map of the Middle East, declaring there was no place for a state called Palestine.

This was echoed by far-right Finance Minister Smotrich, who said the war would not end until Syria was divided, Iran’s nuclear reactor destroyed, Hezbollah eliminated, and Palestinians expelled from their land.

They do not want Palestinians to have any role in their own land. Recently, Israel voted to annex the West Bank. How could they then grant the Palestinians a “state alongside Israel”?

In 2002, the Arab League in Beirut expressed support for a two-state solution, but these decisions were ignored, as Israel’s repeated statements make clear: they do not want any Palestinian entity within the “State of Israel.”

How do you assess October 7, 2023, after all the attacks, genocide, and destruction of the past two years? Was it part of the strategic efforts of the resistance?

The October 7 operation was a strategic operation. Yes, it was a military action, but it had political objectives. It was launched after the Palestinian cause had been largely forgotten — after decades of injustice and neglect.

Normalization was advancing, and the Palestinian cause was fading as if nothing had happened. It was therefore a strategic operation intended to deal a heavy blow to the enemy and stir stagnant waters — to disrupt the regional balance and push forward the establishment of our Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

What is the relationship between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority? Will there be cooperation, especially in governing Gaza?

The Palestinian resistance has met several times with the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah movement. They met in Cairo, Beijing, and recently again, compelled to organize the common Palestinian home.

We support these efforts to unite and organize the Palestinian home, because the Zionist enemy wants neither Fatah nor Hamas nor any Palestinian component. Its goal is the eradication of the Palestinian people.

This is the first time we have come together to unite and confront those who seek to expel us from our land. We are preparing for the next phase because, as I mentioned, the Zionist enemy wants no one. A team tried through the Oslo Accords and the peace process, but it achieved nothing. Five years after the signing, the promise of a Palestinian state was still unfulfilled.

In Berlin, three people allegedly affiliated with Hamas were arrested in early October, accused of planning an attack on Jewish or Israeli institutions. Does Hamas support initiatives outside occupied Palestine?

Hamas has denied that any of its members were arrested in Berlin and has stated that it carries out no military activity there. Since its founding, Hamas has never conducted military operations outside Palestine and has limited its military actions to Palestine, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

This is a principle we adhere to, having learned from the experiences of others. Since its establishment in 1978, Hamas has never conducted operations outside Palestine. The West should understand this: we are a national liberation movement seeking to free our land.

We are present globally — as Palestinians in all capitals — but our main struggle remains against the entity occupying our homeland.

If Qatar yields to foreign pressure and closes the Hamas office, how would that affect the relationship between Hamas and Qatar?

Our relations with all Arab countries — including Qatar — are excellent. We thank Qatar for hosting the movement’s delegation and a number of Palestinian prisoners. Our relations are therefore strategic and fraternal. Qatar has never asked the movement’s leadership or any of its members to leave.

Relations remain friendly and brotherly. As everyone knows, Qatar acted as an honest mediator, deeply committed to achieving a ceasefire. It has also pledged to support the Palestinian cause and to help achieve a positive outcome — the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

We thank Qatar, other Arab countries, and all resistance groups — from Hezbollah to Ansarallah in Yemen, Iran, Syria, and Iraq — all those who stood for and supported the Palestinian cause.

Interview by Hüseyin Dogru

This interview was conducted for junge Welt and published in German on November 3, 2025.

In the early hours of Wednesday, the 28th of August 2024, the Israeli army announced it would be conducting a large-scale military operation focused in the northern occupied West Bank. However, this operation has already spread elsewhere in the occupied territory and is directly connected to its war on the Gaza Strip, fitting into a larger Israeli plot to annex Palestinian land.

Israel’s “Operation Summer Camps,” which the occupation army announced was geared towards serving its “security interests” and destroying Palestinian resistance groups, has already begun to take shape as a Gaza-style campaign. Israel has used attack helicopters and drones in addition to special forces units and armored bulldozers to kill over 30 people across Tubas, Tulkarem and Jenin. On top of this, it has also sought to completely destroy the local infrastructure in these areas, causing residents to flee their homes on foot with what little belongings they have.

Western corporate media have reported on the military operation, which has primarily targeted refugee camps like Nour Shams in Tulkarem, al-Fara’a in Tubas and Jenin refugee camp, as being a separate issue from Gaza. However, the evidence points in the opposite direction. From October 7, 2023, when the genocide in Gaza began, until August 31, 2024 over 660 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank. In fact, every year since 2021 the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank has risen, to levels that match those death tolls recorded during the Second Intifada of the early 2000’s. This new Israeli military assault however, is the largest in the West Bank since the infamous “Operation Defensive Shield” in 2002, which led to the killing of around 500 Palestinians.

THE BROADER CONTEXT: ANNEXATION AND RESISTANCE

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Jewish-American Middle East historian, Zachary Foster, spoke to red. media about the nature of Israel’s military operation. He says that the West Bank is another front of the Gaza Genocide and is “inherently connected because it is part of the same struggle.” “Israel believes it can eradicate militant resistance through force. This was the belief in Gaza, that you can actually kill every single fighter and there would be no new fighters. The same seems to be the belief in the West Bank, that you can just go around and kill every fighter, then when you kill them all there will be no more resistance.”

Elaborating on why this campaign was launched now on the orders of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Zachary Foster also noted that “this is also about his coalition partners” and that “they are hellbent on annexing the West Bank.” He further adds, “In July 2023, they essential already did annex large swathes of the West Bank, putting the administration in charge of the settlers, calling it a civilian administration, this has been put in place under the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, previously they were under the control of the army, but has been transferred to a civilian branch of the Israeli government making it essentially dejure annexation.”

Speaking to red. media on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive security situation, a Hamas leader in the West Bank said that “the enemy decided to carry out the military operation with several goals, the most important of which are: preventing the resistance in the West Bank from accumulating its experience and developing; preventing the West Bank from becoming a main battlefront that affects the deployment of forces and capabilities; and helping the religious-nationalist movement implement its plans.” He also added that “The current battle in the West Bank is to confront the decisive project launched by Smotrich with Netanyahu’s approval last June, and is being implemented through the armed settler militias established by the Zionist Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir.”

ISRAELI TACTICS AND THE FUTURE OF THE WEST BANK

The Hamas official also stated that the campaign designed to target the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank is not only connected to the war in Gaza but “is central and at the heart of the Zionist project’s agenda, as controlling the West Bank has religious and geographical importance for the Zionist project.” “This [religious-nationalist Zionist] movement considers the defeat of Palestinian society to be an essential part of implementing its vision to control the West Bank, and this defeat can only be achieved through force.”

“The enemy acknowledges the development of the resistance and its way of thinking in managing the conflict with it, and this is consistent with an effort that has extended for at least five years. The resistance in the West Bank needs assistance in weapons supplies, as its capabilities are modest and it is waiting for all Arabs and Muslims to support it. The resistance in the West Bank and Gaza is one resistance.”

When asked whether the Israeli military may have successes in its attempts to destroy the West Bank resistance and whether the armed groups have a strategy to carry on in the event that Israel does replicate the 2002 assault on the territory’s resistance forces, the Hamas official offered the following assessment: “The resistance today is made up of waves. The enemy may succeed in a military operation and the resistance may retreat for a month or two, but it returns stronger and more planned, and this is what the enemy indicated. Operation Defensive Shield was a major operation similar to the pattern of wars, as the enemy mobilized more than 30,000 soldiers in the West Bank in order to eradicate the resistance, but as a result, the resistance is still present on the ground of the Jenin camp, the site of the famous battle.”

Commenting on the role of the Palestinian Authority, which in 2002 had actually been on the side of the resistance groups to some extent, the Hamas leader told red.media: “The Palestinian Authority is still playing a neutral role at best, while it has played roles in favor of the occupation by pursuing the resistance and dismantling explosive devices. Today, the invitation is open to every free and honorable person in the Authority, especially members of the security services or anyone who sees himself as free and honorable, to be with the resistance. The leadership of the Authority must stand by its people and confront the brutal enemy that is implementing the project of decisiveness in the West Bank openly and under its eyes.”

Another element of Israel’s attack on the northern West Bank is its attempt to replicate their strategy used against the Gaza Strip. Specifically, by using widespread collective punishment through the destruction of infrastructure and the fragmentation of the territory to place Palestinians in isolated enclaves. Foster noted that this Israeli government “has for some time been dead set on taking over the West Bank and by the way, that’s why around 75% of Israeli forces were deployed in the West Bank, not in Gaza, on the eve of October 7, because of the desire to take it over.”

“You are seeing the same military tactics by Israel”, as the ones being used in Gaza, Foster notes He cites the use of drone strikes, the utilization of hellfire missiles and the blockade of aid. Foster tells us that “they are blocking aid, for example, in the Jenin refugee camp you can’t get in aid. You have dozens of families that are essentially stranded with no food and no electricity. They are essentially just stranded in their homes, surrounded by Israeli armored personnel carriers […] with no ability to flee the violence. That is exactly what Israel has done in Gaza.”

Israeli forces have also besieged hospitals in Tulkarem, Tubas and Jenin, while executing civilians in the streets and destroying the roads with armored bulldozers. Israel immediately began blowing up mosques too, starting with the Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq Mosque in Tubas. On the second day of the assault, an elderly Palestinian man named Ayed Abu Al-Haija was shot in the head in front of his home in Nour Shams refugee camp. In Jenin, a 50-year-old named Ayman Rajeh Abed, from the town of Kafr Dan, was left dead at the Salem checkpoint after being kidnapped and interrogated by Israeli forces during their invasion, with clear signs that he was tortured to death.

AN ANNEXATION OPERATION

For some time, Israel has eyed the annexation of the West Bank. However, it is important to note that this plot is not intended to include the major Palestinian population centers. Instead, the focus is on annexing what is known as Area C, constituting some 60% of the West Bank. It is clear that this is the intention of the Israeli government, not only due to its own rhetoric, but even when it comes to which American presidential candidates Israeli lobbyists choose to support. For example, Miriam Adelson (Israel’s richest billionaire) pledged $100 million to the campaign of Donald Trump with the understanding that should he become President, he will recognize Israeli annexation of the West Bank

Ultimately, the military campaign that is now being launched in the northern West Bank is not isolated to Tulkarem, Tubas and Jenin. Instead, there have been frequent raids and curfews placed on other major cities, such as al-Khalil, following a series of military operations targeting Israeli soldiers and security personnel. Refugee camps in Bethlehem, Nablus and the area surrounding Ramallah have also been raided. This strategy has now triggered a series of retaliatory lone wolf operations in the southern West Bank, which has killed four Israeli soldiers and security personnel and even injured a commander of the Etzioni Brigade. This indicates that instead of bringing about stability and security, the military operation is having the opposite effect and is only encouraging further resistance. Yet, the use of collective punishment and isolating key portions of the West Bank from one another is all part of a strategy to help pave the way for an easier transition into annexation.

Today’s people’s war in India is recognized as one of the most advanced revolutionary struggles in the world. Dubbed India’s biggest internal security threat by the Indian state, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) is a leading force combating the privatization of natural resources, exploitation of labor, and the promotion of Modi’s Hindutva agenda.

In an exclusive interview, we spoke with the party spokesperson Amrut, Central Committee Member and Head of International Affairs of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) about the unique conditions in India, the efforts to build a new society within guerrilla zones, and their perspectives on pressing questions facing the global left, including the character of China and the rise of new imperialist powers.

HOW LONG HAS THE CPI (MAOIST) BEEN ENGAGED IN THE PEOPLE’S WAR IN INDIA, AND WHAT STAGE IS THIS CONFLICT CURRENTLY AT?

This is the fundamental question of the Indian revolution. To answer this, allow me to go back five decades in history. The history of people’s war in India is deeply rooted in the resounding period of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) of the ’60s, which was well known as a turbulent decade. It was the time when the two outstanding and front-ranking leaders of our streams — Comrades Charu Mazumdar and Kanhai Chatterjee — emerged on the scene in the course of applying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) to the concrete conditions of India and by fighting, exposing, and breaking from the age-old revisionism of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the neo-revisionism of the CPI (Marxist) brand.

The great Naxalbari revolt led by Comrade Charu Mazumdar in May 1967, was at the time hailed as the “Spring Thunder over India” by the Communist Party of China (CPC), proved to be the clarion call for revolutionaries. Under the revolutionary leadership of comrades Charu Mazumdar and Kanhai Chatterjee, thousands of cadres broke away from the neo-revisionist CPI (M) and joined hands with them. Comrade Charu Mazumdar formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), and Comrade Kanhai Chatterjee formed the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC). These two great Marxist teachers conducted a class analysis of Indian society and laid down the political strategy for the Indian New Democratic Revolution.

The political strategy of our party is armed agrarian revolution and the seizure of area-wide political power. The military strategy of our party is protracted people’s war (PPW). According to this strategy, we make the countryside our base areas, where the enemy is relatively weak, and then gradually encircle and capture the cities, which are the bastions of the enemy forces.

According to comrade Mao’s theory of PPW, there are three stages to capturing state power. At present, the Indian revolution is in the stage of “Strategic Defensive.”

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THE INDIAN STATE HAS BEEN ATTEMPTING TO ELIMINATE THE CPI (MAOIST) FOR DECADES, PARTICULARLY THROUGH OPERATION GREEN HUNT. WHAT IS THE CURRENT STATUS OF THIS MILITARY OPERATION?

We must recognize that before the commencement of Operation Green Hunt, the Indian revolutionary movement had already faced severe repression and suppression campaigns in past decades. Our erstwhile parties, CPI(ML)(PW) and MCCI, faced fascist repression by the reactionary Indian state since the outbreak of the Great Naxalbari Armed Peasant Uprising. The first counterinsurgency campaign, “Operation Steeplechase,” began in the 1970s, and various repression campaigns were carried out by central and state governments in the ’80s and ’90s. With the merger of two revolutionary streams, our new Party, CPI (Maoist), was formed in 2004. Since then, the Indian State has declared it the single biggest internal security threat. From that time, the Indian State has been undertaking protracted counterinsurgency campaigns such as Salwa Judum, Sendra, Operation Green Hunt, Operation SAMADHAN, and in the beginning of 2024, the Indian State began a new military offensive campaign named “Operation Kagaar” (Final War), which is part of the reactionary Surajkund strategic counter-offensive operation plan. All these campaigns are part and parcel of the Low-Intensity Conflict, which is the strategy of US imperialists to crush worldwide people’s movements. More than 15,000 comrades of all ranks and files of our party and the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), including revolutionary mass organizations and revolutionary people, have laid down their lives until now in the incessant killings by the police and in retaliating against fascist repression campaigns.

IN THE MULTI-POLAR WORLD ORDER, SOCIAL-IMPERIALIST CHINA IS PUTTING IN IMMENSE EFFORT TO REPLACE THE DOMINANT IMPERIALIST FINANCIAL SYSTEMS LIKE THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION AND INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND, WITH ITS OWN FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS.

AMRUT — CPI(MAOIST) SPOKESPERSON

Operation Green Hunt is a continuation of these repressive campaigns. To cite a few examples from recent decades, there were Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, Sendra in Jharkhand, and the Peace March in Odisha in the first decade of the 21st century. These are all white terror campaigns organized by the Indian State and funded by big corporations. The Party, PLGA, revolutionary mass organizations, and Revolutionary People’s Committees, together with the revolutionary people, defeated these campaigns with their heroic resistance and enormous sacrifices. For the first time, the Indian state came out openly with an all-out counterinsurgency campaign throughout the country in the name of OGH in September 2009. The Indian State never acknowledged the commencement of any such campaign.

Operation Green Hunt continued for 10 long years and was reviewed after the Minpa ambush, in which a significant number of Central Armed Police personnel were annihilated. Then, a new operation named SAMADHAN began in May 2017. The Indian state announced SAMADHAN with a stipulated time period of five years to eliminate Maoists in the country. It reviewed SAMADHAN in October 2022 and introduced the reactionary Surajkund strategic offensive operation military plan (as we named it).

Currently, Forward Operational Bases (FOBs) are being established, and security is being intensified throughout the areas of the revolutionary movement. The deployment of armed forces, including the Indian Army under the guise of state forces, is on the rise. At present, there are about 700,000 government armed forces, including paramilitary, commando, state, and district forces, in the areas of the revolutionary movement. A police informer network is being built by the central paramilitary and state forces. To lend a humane face to its repression, Civic Action Programs (which are fake social service agencies) are being conducted by the police personnel. Additionally, there is the psychological war in the form of negative propaganda against the Party, PLGA, and revolutionary people’s committees, aimed at demoralizing and delegitimizing the Indian revolutionary movement.

The state has introduced several draconian laws such as the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA), Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), which was amended in 2018 by the Brahminical Hindutva fascist power in the Center, making the act even more draconian. It is being foisted on all those who express dissent against fascist rule. Political prisoners are repeatedly denied bail. Intelligence agencies have been significantly strengthened to crush the revolutionary movement. In recent years, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is a department under the central government, was given more powers under the guise of fighting terrorism. It is now being used against civil rights activists, artists, writers, students, teachers, and democratic and progressive forces under allegations of sedition. While Brahminic Hindutva Fascism is spreading its tentacles into all spheres of people’s lives, the exploited, oppressed, and harassed classes and sections are raising their voices and building movements against the fascist regime.

In an attempt to crush all these struggles and suppress those dissenting voices, the Indian state introduced a new term “urban Maoist” and then “pen-wielding Maoist,” in the name of which it is pursuing these forces. The NIA prepares a database of “terrorist activities.” A National Forensic Science University was established to create fake evidence of fake crimes. This has become the norm of the rule of law. From the second term of Narendra Modi’s government at the Center, aerial attacks are increasing on people in the struggle areas. Roads and communications are being laid on a large scale to facilitate the movement of police forces into the guerrilla bases. As already said, a new counterinsurgency campaign has been started by the Indian State in the name of Operation Kagaar to wipe out the leadership of the Maoist movement in the coming three years. For this purpose, thousands of additional forces are being deployed in the Maad region of Bastar, in the state of Chhattisgarh.

HOW DOES THE NARENDRA MODI GOVERNMENT DIFFER FROM PREVIOUS ADMINISTRATIONS? HOW HAVE THE CPI (MAOIST) AND PLGA EXPERIENCED THE CHANGES UNDER MODI’S LEADERSHIP?

Yes! The current regime, which is under the leadership of Narendra Modi, is different from previous ones. Our Party recognizes that Indian feudalism is caste-based feudalism and Brahmanism is its ideology. All earlier governments were the representatives of the Indian ruling classes which comprise feudalists and the comprador bourgeoisie whose ideology is nothing but Brahmanism. But the current form of the Indian State, as per our Party’s understanding, is Brahmanic Hindutva Fascism. It is under the leadership of the RSS and BJP. At present, Narendra Modi is the key leader of Hindutva Fascism, and he has been the prime minister of India for a decade. The current BJP government wants to convert India into a Hindu-Rashtra (Nation) in the name of “New India,” which is nothing but comprador bourgeoisie-feudal fascism. The BJP government is not even allowing the functioning of “formal democracy,” and is gradually intensifying its attacks with each passing day.

The previous governments, which were under the leadership of Congress and the Congress-led alliance United Progressive Alliance, also implemented anti-people policies and ruthlessly crushed mass movements. All the Indian ruling class governments incurred enormous benefits to the ruling classes and their imperialist bosses. The Modi regime is implementing pro-imperialist policies more aggressively than earlier governments. At the same time, it is aggressively implementing the divisive Hindutva agenda.

After the BJP came to power in 2014, it intensified counter-insurgency programs against our party, the PLGA, the United Front, and the revolutionary masses. To eradicate our party and the revolutionary movement, the BJP government is carrying out suppressive policies throughout the country, particularly in our struggle areas. Their corporatization and militarization have become a new norm in an unprecedented way. Drone attacks and aerial bombings on revolutionary struggle areas and on tribal villages are the new norms under the BJP regime. Several abhorrent acts are being committed by security personnel with state impunity.

So, the Party, PLGA, and the United Front, the three “magic weapons” of revolution, are taking up several tactical programs to resist the Brahmanic Hindutva Fascism. Several mass movements under the guidance and leadership of our Party are building up in the revolutionary struggle areas against the policies of the Brahmanic Hindutva BJP government. Several heroic military actions were successfully carried out by our PLGA red fighters even after the BJP came to power in the Center. Recently, on January 16, 2024, our PLGA comrades, along with the involvement of hundreds of revolutionary masses, carried out a heroic raid on the Dharmavaram camp in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh as a response to the newly started Operation Kagaar by the Indian State. In this raid, 35 security personnel were eliminated and around 40 of them were seriously injured. While the repression and encirclements are escalating, resistance against it is also increasing.

INDIA UNDER MODI HAS A HISTORY OF OPPRESSING RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC MINORITIES BOTH PHYSICALLY AND RHETORICALLY. WHAT IS YOUR PARTY’S STANCE ON THIS ISSUE?

It is not Indian chauvinism but Hindu chauvinism. Yes. You are absolutely correct that the Modi government is demeaning religious and ethnic minorities and polarizing society. Our party understands that religious minorities, particularly Muslim communities, tribes, Dalit people, and women, are living as secondary citizens and need to unite against the Hindu chauvinism practiced by the Modi government for their emancipation. Our Party aims to organize them in the ongoing people’s war for their emancipation. The present government combines its Hindutva politics of casteism and communalism with corporatization in the interest of imperialists, the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie, and landlords. The BJP is utilizing religion as a powerful tool to stay in power and to create schisms in society. Using this religious tool, the BJP is diverting the masses from the real issues. The consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on January 22, 2024, is the perfect example of how the masses are being distracted from the severe political, social, and economic crises facing our country.

Our party stands with the principle of secularism, the right to religious freedom, freedom of speech, and hails the diversity of cultures and languages, food habits, etc. Whereas, Hindutva fascism is against all these democratic values.

ALTHOUGH IT IS A LONG WAY TO SUCCESS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST PATRIARCHY, THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WOMEN’S MOVEMENT HAVE BROUGHT CONSIDERABLE CHANGES IN THE SITUATION OF WOMEN IN THE GUERRILLA BASE AREAS.

AMRUT — CPI(MAOIST) SPOKESPERSON

DURING THE NAXALBARI UPRISING OF THE 1960S, PEASANTS KILLED LARGE LANDOWNERS AND SEIZED THEIR LANDS. WHAT ROLE DO PEASANTS PLAY IN THE CPI (MAOIST) AND THE CURRENT STRUGGLE?

You have brought up the past practices of our party which upheld the left adventurist line of annihilation of the class enemy as the only path to success in the Indian agrarian revolution. We have already rectified that wrong practice. We uphold the Marxist principle of worker-peasant unity. Let us come to your question. India is an agriculture-based country. Peasants constitute the majority of the country’s population. Peasants also constitute the majority in the Party, PLGA, revolutionary mass organizations, and revolutionary people’s committees. In that sense, peasants are part of the social, political, military, and economic aspects of the ongoing people’s war. All the heads of the party committees, militias, and the organs of people’s state power at the local level are peasants. Currently, the majority in the PLGA are tribal peasant comrades and are leading platoons, companies, and battalions.

Peasants are involved in every activity of the agrarian revolutionary program, such as the distribution of land to the tiller. Under the leadership of our party, the revolutionary people’s committees are working for the people’s welfare by undertaking programs such as land leveling, construction of embankments, laying of ponds and bridges, and developing village connectivity to improve productivity. We are giving special importance to practicing collective cooperative methods of work. Our PLGA guerrillas and party cadres unite with the masses in all their production activities.

IN THE AREAS CONTROLLED BY CPI (MAOIST), HOW IS SOCIETY ORGANIZED AND WHAT DOES YOUR PARTY DO DIFFERENTLY FROM THE GOVERNMENT?

As per the above-mentioned strategy followed by our party for making revolution, we start from the interior tribal areas, extend to the plain areas forming organs of people’s state power, and finally seize power in cities of the enemy’s stronghold. The tribal society is feudal, where the head of the village has the say. With the changes brought through the revolutionary movement, the village heads no longer have power. The local party committee, comprised of poor and middle-class peasants, leads the village. In the plain areas, the society is mainly Brahmanic Hindutva with a minority of other religions.

The ruling exploitive government speaks a lot about people’s welfare but does nothing. The peasants lack minimum requirements for farming such as irrigation, seeds, and agricultural implements. The revolutionary people’s committees look after the needs of the peasants and focus on raising the yield. The exploitive government is not in the least bothered to run schools and hospitals for tribal people. The revolutionary people’s committees are running local schools. Every local government has a medical department and a doctor. The concerned party committee has a budget for schools run by the revolutionary people’s committees. The doctors from PLGA impart training to the revolutionary people’s committee doctors. The cottage industry department is yet to become active so as to help the people in selling the forest produce and purchasing daily needs in the market.

We are working against a semi-colonial, semi-feudal, strong state that is backed by imperialists. As per our strategy, we build revolutionary people’s committees wherever we succeed in bringing down the exploitive government. We thus build area-wide organs of state power, gradually extending and strengthening them. The guerrilla bases are enduring even amidst a lot of massacres, killings of leaders and activists of party committees, militias, revolutionary people’s committees, and sexual atrocities on women. We now hold power on a very small level. So, there are limitations to the development activities that we take up.

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WHAT IS THE INFLUENCE OF THE CASTE SYSTEM IN THE AREAS YOU’VE LIBERATED? HOW IS THE PARTY CHALLENGING FEUDAL STRUCTURES AND SOCIETAL ATTITUDES?

There are as such no liberated areas until now. There are base areas in special guerrilla zones that we seek to unite and liberate. The caste system is one particular feature of Indian society, and communalism is another that is linked to it. It is part of Brahmanic Hindutva’s Chaturvarnya system and is rooted both in the base and superstructure of the present society and is dialectically entwined in both spheres. Caste is meant to divide the people to facilitate exploitation and oppression of the working classes. It is not an easy task to eliminate it. It is linked with the success of the New Democratic Revolution and construction of the socialist state. The fight to eliminate caste is part of the agenda of the party and the revolutionary mass organizations. We fight both in the base and the superstructure to eliminate caste. Coming to the guerrilla zones, caste does not exist in tribal society where we are based, per our strategy. However, it is reflected in the form of differences in the status of different tribes. Whether it is in the tribal, plain, or urban areas, uniting people is the main activity. We work to unite all the toiling castes to isolate the enemy classes.

HOW IS YOUR PARTY COMBATTING PATRIARCHY?

Although it is a long way to success in the fight against patriarchy, the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary women’s movement have brought considerable changes in the situation of women in the guerrilla base areas. Patriarchy in tribal society manifests in various forms such as forced marriage, bigamy, polygamy, and wife-beating. The party and the women’s organizations have educated the society that all these patriarchal attitudes are negative not only to women, but they also hinder social development as a whole. Women are part of party committees, the three forces of PLGA namely the main, secondary, and base forces (meaning militia), and the revolutionary people’s committees and revolutionary mass organizations. Women are working in all spheres of activity in the movement such as party building, military offensives, people’s welfare, communications, and manufacturing arms.

HAS THE MODI GOVERNMENT CHANGED THE SOCIOECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN INDIA? SOME SUGGEST THAT INDIA IS NOW AN IMPERIALIST POWER.

The Modi government only worsened the socioeconomic conditions of the people of the country. Peasants are losing farmland and tribal people are being displaced from their forests for corporations. Food crisis, unemployment, and displacement are growing at an alarming rate. Agriculture, industry, and manufacturing sectors have been privatized. People are being deprived of their fundamental needs of life. Health care is almost nil for the poor classes. Pandemics are taking the lives of poor people in large numbers. The majority of the people are in a state of misery. The people’s struggles in the country reveal the actual situation.

Modi has been using religion as a way to distract people from the conditions the vast majority is living in. In doing so, he has been diluting the diversity of our country in the name of Hindutva. To saffronize the country, he is attacking the Indian constitution, which promised the Indian people a secular government. Modi’s government is bulldozing the houses of Muslim communities. In the name of “cow protection,” it is lynching Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis in broad daylight. Hate speech is being aired through government-supported mainstream media channels.

All the talk about India becoming the “third biggest economy” is a big sham. The country is experiencing growth in unemployment. In fact, the parameters with which the government claims “progress” in the economy are not accepted even by bourgeois economists. For example, the growth in the GDP of the country. The criticism is that it is not correct to include the investments of foreign corporations to measure GDP. The government is helping members of the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie such as Adani and Ambani. Indian society is witnessing a deep breach in social harmony with the deliberate deeds of Brahmanic Hindutva on the basis of religion and caste, in its bid to serve the domestic comprador class and its master, the imperialists. The heavy technological development benefits the crony capitalists who serve the imperialists while more than half of the population lives below the poverty line. India is dependent on imperialist capital, import of technology, and capital goods. It has no characters of imperialism and cannot be labelled “imperialist.” India is still a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country.

INDIA IS A MEMBER OF THE SHANGHAI COOPERATION. HOW DO YOU EVALUATE THIS COOPERATION, WHICH INCLUDES RUSSIA, CHINA, BRAZIL, AND SOUTH AFRICA?

In 2006, it was estimated that the total value of bilateral trade was of the order of $20 billion. As China developed new forms of political relations with its central Asian neighbors, bilateral meetings on border and trade issues were found to be inadequate to deal with the rapidly changing geopolitical environment. Political Islam became more and more influential in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and the new governments of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan considered it a serious threat to their authority. All of the regional powers perceived that despite great differences between them, they had a common interest in combating this new force which they all saw as a threat to the stability of the region.

The first meeting of what was to become a major regional grouping took place in Shanghai in 1996 when the foreign ministers of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan met to discuss common concerns. An agenda was constructed around the issues of border security and how to combat insurgent Islamic forces. The group, which planned to meet on a regular basis, was first known as the Shanghai Five but was later renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in June 2001 when Uzbekistan was admitted. The new name was sufficiently flexible to allow for the admission of other members. Pakistan, the only other state being seriously considered for membership, was not permitted to join.

Since the British left India, the ruling classes of India have been trying to be close to all the imperialist countries. It continued to serve Britain and later developed close ties with the US. When the Soviet Union was strong, India was close to it. It is now close to China and its alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation. It is also part of BRICS, led by China and Russia. India has enormous natural and human resources and a large market due to a huge population that attracts capitalists from all over the world. India is characteristically governed by the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie and Big Landlords. Therefore, its membership in the alliance is part of a foreign policy in line with its comprador interests. The expansionist attitude of the Indian ruling class is also one reason for it joining the alliances. In 2017, India became a member of the rising imperialist alliance, BRICS. Today, in the multi-polar world order, social-imperialist China is putting in immense effort to replace the dominant imperialist financial systems like the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, with its own financial institutions. India is nothing but a poster-boy of US imperialism in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

I want to emphasize that US imperialism remains the primary enemy of the oppressed people and nations. But that in no way means that social-imperialist China and other imperialist countries should not be fully opposed. The ruling class of China has kept busy with the propaganda of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is nothing but imperialism with Chinese characteristics.

India’s expansionism can be seen in Sri Lanka where it helped the ruling class crush the national liberation movement; in Nepal where the Indian comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie has invested in the tourism industry; in Myanmar where it helps the ruling class crush the Rohingya Muslim organizations; and similar activities in other neighboring countries.

INDIA IS NOTHING BUT A POSTER-BOY OF US IMPERIALISM IN BRICS AND THE SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION.

AMRUT — CPI(MAOIST) SPOKESPERSON

WHAT IS YOUR OPINION ON THE CONCEPT OF “SOCIALIST CHINA” AND “SOCIALISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS,” AS PROPAGATED BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT, ACTIVISTS, PARTIES, AND JOURNALISTS?

China ceased to be a socialist country since the late 1970s. Our party considers that China became a social-imperialist country around 2014. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is nothing but a false claim of the present imperialist ruling class of China. A few comrades are not clear about the imperialist characteristics that China attained in the process since the restoration of capitalism. In 2017, our party released a document titled China, a New Social-Imperialist Power: It is integral to the world capitalist-imperialist system explaining our analysis of China. Leaving aside facts and figures, the economic, political, social, and cultural policies of the ruling class of China are clearly imperialist.

China is therefore neither a socialist nor communist country. It is a social-imperialist country. The facts that shows this are that monopoly capitalism and financial oligarchy are on the rise. Capital is accumulated in a big way. Finance capital rules. China is investing capital in almost all parts of the world. It is contending with the US for world hegemony. It is leading alliances such as the Shanghai Cooperation and BRICS, together with Russia, in its attempt to redivide the world to exploit raw materials and markets.

HOW DOES TODAY’S CHINA DIFFER FROM CHINA DURING MAO’S TIME?

Mao led the Communist Party of China and continued waging socialist revolution even under the proletarian dictatorship through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). GPCR is a great contribution of Mao. This was a theoretical political struggle and a great upsurge of the revolutionary masses. The objective of GPCR was to continue the revolution in all the fields of the superstructure in order to advance the socialist economic system towards the construction of a communist society. It’s goal was to absolutely eliminate the possibilities of the restoration of the classes overthrown in the New Democratic Revolution (the big landlord and comprador bureaucratic bourgeois classes serving imperialism) and to continue the dictatorship of the proletariat by thwarting the attempts of the enemy classes to reinstate capitalism.

The GPCR also had the immediate aim to end revisionism, employ the mass strength in a struggle based on mass line to remove the capitalist roaders settled in the party leadership and party organization. This was a tortuous class struggle against the capitalist roaders and the continuation in China of the worldwide struggle against modern revisionism. It could contain restoration of capitalism for 10 years. Due to a lot of mainly internal and a few external factors, capitalism was restored later. Today, China is a social-imperialist country.

SOME DESCRIBE THE CURRENT MOMENT AS A CRITICAL JUNCTURE FOR THE GLOBAL LEFT. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS?

The revolutionary forces were never at a crossroads, whether it was in the period after Stalin’s death in the Soviet Union, or Mao’s death in China, or when it was influenced by Soviet revisionism and Deng’s revisionism. When Khrushchev and his revisionist clique took over power in the Bolshevik party and the Soviet government in the mid-1950s, it was for capitalist restoration. China was then in the construction of socialism. The Communist Party of China (CPC) under the leadership of Comrade Mao Zedong took up a theoretical struggle against the modern revisionism of Khrushchev, that came to be known as the “Great Debate” in the International Communist Movement.

Eastern European countries such as Yugoslavia took to Khrushchev’s revisionism and left the path of socialist construction. Mao also gave an analysis as to why the Soviet Union failed to go forth in socialist construction. Mao took lessons from the Soviet Union and applied them in China. The CPC under his guidance called for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which contested capitalist restoration for a decade. Later, when Deng took over the reins of the CPC and the People’s Government of China, he led a counter-revolution to restore capitalism. Since then, there has been no socialist base in the world.

Capitalism was restored in both countries because the contradiction between capitalism and socialism was not resolved. This is the process of struggle in which society progresses, from feudalism to capitalism and then to socialism, and finally to communism. All countries of the world need to take these lessons to make a successful revolution. The proletarian parties that bear this understanding are working to accomplish revolution in the concrete conditions of their respective countries.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU’D LIKE TO ADD?

Lastly, I wish to express solidarity from our party to the ongoing people’s wars, national liberation movements, and anti-imperialist struggles of the world. I wish to appeal to all these forces to come together in revolutionary activity to root out imperialism from the earth and establish socialism and then communism all over the world. The time is ripening. Let us act bravely. Let us achieve victory. Workers of all countries, unite!

Türkiye’s over-zealousness in adding a military dimension to relations in Africa may offer an irresistible temptation to compete with former colonialists like France, but it also poisons Türkiye’s relations with the continent.

Türkiye is not the only country with ambitious plans for Africa, but its initiatives create more controversy than their real weight due to the noisy rhetoric of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While Erdoğan’s focus on former French colonies such as Mali, Senegal, Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Gabon intensifies the rivalry with Paris, at the same time Libya and Somalia stand out as places where Türkiye’s ambitions to become a “hard power” are taking hold.

One of the symptoms of becoming an imperial power in recent years can be seen in Erdoğan: Similar to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Erdoğan looks at coups and regime change in Africa with the expectation that the post-colonial power structure will be dissolved then political, economic and even military spaces will open up for them in a new hegemonic order.

While feelings in once-Ottoman-dominated North Africa and the Red Sea coast range from suspicion to nostalgic interest, there is also great potential for cooperation with “untested powers” in many parts of Africa. As regimes that maintain dirty partnerships with former colonialists are overthrown, new rulers looking at the opportunities and cooperation offered by different actors are undoubtedly interested in countries like Russia, China and Türkiye . Erdoğan’s political style of airing the dirty laundry of former colonial powers, especially France, contains the proposition: “We are different, we are not colonialists”.

While being a “soft power” was idealized during the first years of the AKP government, Africa was being increasingly penetrated through the opening of humanitarian aid channels via a mobilization involving public institutions such as the Turkish Red Crescent, Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), Religious Affairs and civil organizations such as IHH, Yeryüzü Doktorları, Deniz Feneri and Sadaka Taşı. Humanitarian activities such as opening educational institutions, providing health services and drilling water wells have become widespread. Although Türkiye’s “Action Plan for Opening to Africa” dates back to 1998, relations gained momentum during the AKP era with the “New Ottoman” metaphor.

From the very beginning, Erdoğan, has seen Africa as a valuable “virgin geography”. In 20 years since 2002, the number of Turkish embassies in Africa has increased from 12 to 44, the number of business councils from six to 46, and the number of destinations flown by Turkish Airlines (THY) from four to 62. The number of African students studying in Türkiye with scholarships exceeds 17 thousand. Also, thousands of students received education in Türkiye with own financial resources . Both these students and those who learn Turkish in schools in Africa are naturally perceived as Türkiye’s agents of influence. While the network of economic and political relations has expanded in parallel with humanitarian diplomacy, Erdoğan has neither hesitated to drag Türkiye into the field of “fierce competition” after making some room for his feet. While his son-in-law’s company, Baykar, made breakthroughs in the production of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) with state support, Erdoğan worked as a marketing executive for the products of the Turkish defense industry, especially the TB2 drones, in all the countries he visited. In addition to the drones, Erdoğan’s marketing list includes products such as ships, helicopters, tanks, armored vehicles and howitzer cannons. Consequently, the opening to Africa, which started with the declaration of 2005 as the “Year of Africa” and whose humanitarian dimension was emphasized, has since gained a military dimension.

WHY IS SOMALIA SO IMPORTANT?

Somalia, today home to Türkiye ’s only military base in Africa, is one of the most important pillars of Ankara’s strategy to gain a foothold on the continent. It was a risky but uncompetitive country that many actors avoided as a “troublemaker”. On August 19, 2011, Erdoğan got hold of a wrench which opened the doors for his long-term influence on the continent, venturing to Somalia with marvelous timing during that country’s famine.

Erdoğan has begun to write his play by investing in the lack of central power in Somalia, which is seen as a “failed state” in the hands of pirates in the Horn of Africa, the Islamist Al-Shabaab and unstable governments. The first military relations with Somalia were shaped by agreements signed in 2010 and 2012. While TURKSOM, the Turkish military base established in Mogadishu in 2017 for $50 million, became the cornerstone of Erdoğan’s new Ottoman dreams, the era of “Turkish-trained soldiers and police” began in the Somali security umbrella.

It’s at TURKSOM’s Anadolu Barrack’s where the Somalia Turkish Task Force Command (STTFC) started to train Gorgor (Eagle) Battalions of the Somali National Army. Alongside this military training, he STTFC’s officers and sergeants to be get an accelerated Turkish education. According to Turkish Defense Minister Yaşar Güler, “Gorgor Battalions full of patriotism have become an important role model in African geography.”In addition Türkiye gives consultation to Somalia’s Ministry of Defense, the General Staff and the Land, Naval and Air Force Commands, and provides specialized training for soldiers destined for the Navy and Air Force, as well as commandos and Somalia’s Special Police Forces (Haramcad or Cheetah).

Commandos and police are trained in Türkiye itself, in the commando center in Isparta Türkiye , and for the police in Foça. The result is that the Somali military now has an elite, Turkish-speaking force. A staggering one-third of the Somali Army has been trained in Türkiye with 16,000 soldiers.
But the story does not end here. The two countries took their relations to a new level with “The Framework Agreement on Defense and Economic Cooperation” signed on February 8, 2024. According to Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mahmud, the agreement covers cooperation in Somalia on issues such as combating terrorism, external threats, piracy and illegal fishing, coastal protection and development of marine resources.

In this framework, Türkiye will protect Somali territorial waters for 10 years and contribute to developing marine resources. This is a mission far beyond Türkiye’s reach, not only because Somalia has a very long coastline but also because it has to deal with potential confrontations or challenges with Somaliland and Puntland, de facto independent regions that reject Mogadishu’s authority, along with Al-Shabaab and pirates in the territorial waters.

Al-Shabaab also described the deal, which it called illegal, as a new reflection of Türkiye’s hegemonic ambitions in the region. There is no doubt that the reward for the risks taken here is Somalia’s offshore oil and gas reserves, and in this field there are other actors who have a faster hand than Türkiye . Within the framework of hydrocarbon exploration operations, Houston-based firm, Coastline Exploration, acquired seven offshore blocks from Somalia’s federal government in 2022 paying $7 million to Mogadishu. Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil and Shell had begun exploring in Somalia in the 1950s but bolted when the civil war erupted in 1991. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil and Shell are reportedly considering a return to Somalia.

In a meeting with Turkish officials in Ankara in early February this year, Defense Minister Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur, who signed the agreement on behalf of Somalia, added a bit of nostalgia to the partnership by stating that Türkiye -Somalia relations date back to the 16th century. “We were proud to have the Ottoman Navy on our side against the Portuguese ships,” Nur reportedly said, referring to the fact that Ottoman intervention in the Horn of Africa played a key role in pushing back Portugal’s colonial ambitions in the region.

Nur’s love for Türkiye stems from his graduation from Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Sciences. Just before Türkiye’s presidential elections in 2023, Nur wrote an opinion piece for the Anadolu Agency in which he explained why it was important for Erdoğan to stay in power. “The people of Somalia, who have intertwined their destiny with that of Türkiye ’s destiny, are eagerly awaiting the results of the upcoming election in Türkiye ,” he wrote, expressing gratitude to Türkiye under Erdoğan’s leadership for its “unconditional support” to Somalia. “Before Erdoğan’s visit, Somalia was a desolate land,” Nur said, describing Türkiye as “an irreplaceable partner for Somalia”. Nur explained that Türkiye had helped Somalia get back on its feet by building hospitals, airports, parliament and senate buildings, roads and agricultural education institutions, claiming that Türkiye had given a spirit woven with patriotism to Somali commandos trained and equipped by Türkiye and that they had dealt heavy blows to Al-Shabaab. Nur also had a message: “It is not only for Somalia, the continued support of Türkiye is required for all oppressed geographies in the world.” This rhetoric was copied from the AKP’s fallacious neo-Ottomanist mentors and shows that AKP cadres have achieved the desired results in Somalia. By the way, the Ottoman geography did not cover the whole of Somalia, but the territory of today’s Somaliland which was named “Zeyla”.

OVERLOOKED RISKS: TÜRKIYE BECOMES A PARTY TO THEIR PARTNERS’ CONFLICTS

The military dimension of relations with Türkiye’s new partners inevitably brings with it certain risks, drawing Ankara into the internal conflicts of these countries. Again, Somalia has epitomized this.

Ankara’s position of strengthening the hand of then-President Mohamed Abdullah Farmajo during a turbulent election process in 2020–2021 sparked substantial controversy. Opposition candidates accused the Turkish ambassador of siding with Farmajo when he accepted the controversial electoral commission in 2020 and they wrote a letter of warning over concerns that Harmacad and Turkish military equipment would be used to hijack the elections. The opposition also asked Türkiye to postpone its arms shipments to Harmacad until after the elections. Türkiye sent 1000 G3 rifles and 90,000 ammunition to Harmacad on 26 December 2020, which were stored at TURKSOM.

When Farmajo attempted to extend his presidential term for another two years during a dispute over how to organize the elections, the opposition took to the streets on February 19, 2021. Harmacad, Gorgor and armored vehicles donated by Türkiye were used to suppress the demonstrations. Two months later, the radio station Mustaqbal was raided by the same forces. The transformation of Harmacad and Gorgor, which were trained against Al-Shabaab, into a tool of political pressure brought Türkiye’s role into the spotlight. However, the Turkish authorities rejected responsibility, stating that Somalia’s federal government was in command.

In order to facilitate military agreements and arms sales, Türkiye does not seek special conditions on where and how they will be used. In other words, it is trying to reach the neo-imperial position more quickly.

This pragmatic approach ensures that the interest-driven status quo remains unaffected by changes in power. Maintaining the status quo is not only about Türkiye’s military base but also about sustaining the interests of AKP businessmen. In Erdoğan’s world of relations, heroism also makes money! Companies such as Albayrak, which operates the port in Mogadishu, and Kozuva (Favori LLC), which operates Mogadishu Aden Abdulle Airport, are part of Erdoğan’s inner circle. In Somalia, shady contracts, irregularities, unrecorded profit transfers, fraudulent accounts, labor murders and bribery scandals involving Turkish companies have come to the fore. But their impunity has not been affected by the change of power in Somalia, the support of a power like Türkiye is not an option that anyone in Mogadishu can ignore. Consequently, Sheikh Mahmud, who replaced Farmajo, became the most ardent advocate of partnership with Türkiye .

US TROJAN HORSE?

There is a parallel between Türkiye’s moves and the US’ efforts to return to Somalia after it left the country in disgrace in 1993 with the Black Hawk Down scandal. While Türkiye spent $1 billion for Somalia in the 10-year period since 2011, the US allocated $2.4 billion for the reconstruction of the country between 2010 and 2020. Since 2014, the US has trained about 3,000 members of the Danab Brigade, a special counter-terrorism unit of the national army. American forces withdrawn under President Donald Trump returned under Joe Biden and after 30 years, in October 2019, the Americans were able to open the doors of their embassy in Mogadishu. Then on February 5, 2024, the US signed a memorandum of understanding with the Somali government to build five military bases for the Danab Brigade.

Nevertheless, it is difficult for the US to catch up with the picture of cultural interaction that Türkiye proudly presents and for the US, Türkiye’s initiatives resemble a pioneering mission. It would not be out of place to suspect that this is in fact a Trojan Horse mission of the US, because there is a geostrategic interpretation that views the Turkish presence as a counter to American adversaries. The escalating competition in Africa has the potential for axis wars. Participating in the Antalya Diplomacy Forum on March 2, 2024, US Ambassador to Ankara, Jeff Flake, said: “We appreciate what Türkiye is doing in Africa, especially in competing with China.

DREAMS DASHED INTO THE RED SEA

Erdoğan attempted a similar move in the Red Sea with a more nostalgic flavor. In December 2017, he persuaded then-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to allocate Suakin Island to Türkiye for 99 years. According to the signed agreement, a port was to be built on the island as well as reviving Ottoman artefacts. However, in order not to frighten the squirrels, they refrained from officially announcing the military base. Erdoğan, who had already angered the Gulf bloc led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a base in Qatar, made the countries along the Red Sea, especially the Saudis and Egyptians, fear that “the Ottomans are returning to the Red Sea” with the Suakin plans. However, the future of the Suakin deal became uncertain after Al-Bashir’s ouster and the Saudi-Emirati duo opened the purse strings and forced Khartoum to change its axis.

However, the ill-fated Suakin plan unnecessarily raised dust. Egypt was worried that Sudan would expand its claim to the disputed Halaib Triangle in the Red Sea with the power it received from Türkiye . Türkiye’s plans to acquire naval and air bases in Libya were already making Egypt’s nerves jump. To maintain the balance of power, Egypt built the Mohammed Najib Base on the Libyan border and strengthened its military presence in the Halaib Triangle. Meanwhile, while the partnership between Eritrea and Egypt against Ethiopia was developing, Cairo put Bernice, the largest air, sea and land base in the Red Sea basin, into service in 2020. Saudi Arabia and the UAE who were then engaged in a proxy war with Türkiye , were also behind the show of strength from Egypt. There is already an Emirati base in Eritrea and while Türkiye was concentrating on Somalia, the UAE was investing in ports in Somaliland and Puntland, which have unilaterally declared their independence from Somalia.

Meanwhile, Erdoğan showed his pragmatism by hosting in Ankara the two rival actors of Sudan’s post-Bashir era, General Abdulfettah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Sovereignty Council, and his deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daqlu (Hamideti), at a time when they were not yet at loggerheads. But there is no sign yet that they were able to salvage the deal.

THE TURKISH ROLE IN ETHIOPIA’S TIGRAY WAR AND THE DAM EQUATION

Another place where the use of Turkish weapons in internal conflicts has put Türkiye in a difficult situation is Ethiopia. TB2 drones sold to Ethiopia were used in the war against the Tigray region, according to Tigray fighters and some military experts from Dutch nongovernmental organization PAX and Amnesty International. This earned Türkiye the enmity of a part of Ethiopia. In 2020, there were reports that the course of the war between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front changed with the TB2s. Türkiye was forced to evacuate its embassy in Addis Ababa and move its consular services to Kenya for a while in case of a possible attack.

To strengthen its hand in tensions with Egypt and Sudan over the construction of the Renaissance (Hedasi) Dam on the Blue Nile, Ethiopia has put more emphasis on relations with Türkiye .
During this process, it was revealed that Ankara provided Ethiopian diplomats with training on hydropolitics to strengthen their country’s position against Egypt.

But when relations with Egypt normalized after Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Türkiye rebalanced between Addis Ababa and Cairo. Erdoğan realized that he could not sacrifice Egypt for the future of his larger interests in the region, especially in Libya. Egypt also started to show interest in the TB2 drones to strengthen its hand in the power equation. Meanwhile, on January 1, 2024, Ethiopia signed a 50-year agreement with Somaliland for the allocation of a naval base. According to the agreement, Ethiopia, which has no access to the Red Sea, will be able to use Somaliland’s Berbera Port. Türkiye , which logically should not have forced itself to choose between Ethiopia and Somalia, has been quicker and clearer than expected in favour of Mogadishu. Türkiye , which has a consulate in Somaliland, confirmed its commitment to Somalia’s unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. As Türkiye’s recent agreement to protect Somalian territorial waters also came as a retaliation for the Ethiopia-Somaliland agreement, Ankara was drawn back into the controversy, and the question of whether Türkiye -Ethiopia relations will be affected by this agreement was put on the agenda.

ERDOĞAN’S LOVE FOR DRONES, COUPS AND MILITARIZATION OF RELATIONS

Another critical point in Erdoğan’s opening to Africa is weapons. Every time the President travels to the continent, he looks to increase the number of drone customers. Having signed military-security cooperation agreements with 25 countries in Africa, Türkiye has so far sold defence products to more than half of these countries. Drones have a special place in those sales, particularly the TB2s which are produced by Baykar, the family company of Selçuk Bayraktar, Erdoğan’s son-in-law.
Erdoğan’s sending then-Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu to Bamako immediately after the coup in Mali in 2020 was perceived as an “opportunistic” appearance, and it bore fruit the following year, when Erdoğan announced the good news of military cooperation with Mali’s new junta. Soon, TB2s also arrived in Mali.

After being criticized for “siding with the coup plotters” in Mali, Erdoğan was more reserved when coups were repeated in Burkina Faso and Niger, but he continued to count the blows suffered by the colonial powers, especially France, as profit. French President Emmanuel Macron commented on the rising anger against the French in these countries as follows: “There is a strategy directed by foreign powers, such as Russia or Türkiye , who are playing on post-colonial resentment. We must not be naive: Most of those who appear in the French-speaking media, who give a voice, who make videos, are paid by Russia or Türkiye .”

Despite this, Türkiye has shown to be keen to build upon its pre-coup relations with Niger, which gained momentum with the signing of 29 bilateral agreements and Niger’s purchase of TB2s and HÜRKUŞ combat aircraft.

HUGE AMBITIONS; COLOSSAL INCOMPATIBILITY

Turkish schools, Yunus Emre Institutes, TRT Africa’s broadcasts in English, French, Swahili, and Hausa, the increasing number of representative offices of the state media agency, Anadolu, and the mosques being built, strengthen Türkiye ’s cultural and information pillar of the new hegemony in Africa. This hegemony is being forged along with Russia, China and India in the vacuum being left by the continent’s former colonial powers who are increasingly rejected. While these instruments are not enough for a Francophonie-like transformation, they have not been developed as extensively by China and Russia, and give Türkiye a competitive advantage. Türkiye’s geographical proximity also strengthens its hand. However, Türkiye’s share in Africa’s trade is not proportional to the size of the networks it has developed. The trade volume, which was $5.4 billion in 2003, increased to $40.7 billion in 20 years. Despite the growth, it is still a modest share of Türkiye ’s $617 billion total foreign trade volume last year and it has
high investment vulnerability due to its domestic economic instability. At the same time, it is overshadowed by large-scale actors such as China, whose trade volume with Africa reached $282 billion in 2023.

Despite this, the US values the initiatives, especially those with a military dimension, of its Turkish ally, which serve Washington’s interests of balancing China’s influence in Africa. As part of the international force in Somalia in 1993–1995, Türkiye essentially shared the same defeat as the US and Ankara’s quicker recovery and return prepared the ground for Washington’s. Türkiye is at odds with France in Africa, but the road map it is following coincides with the geostrategic interests of the US-British axis. In 2019, Türkiye’s involvement in the conflict in Libya in favor of the forces in Tripoli also received the support of the US-British duo as a move to balance Russia. According to the Anglo-Saxon perspective, the possibility of Russia “threatening” NATO from the south was eliminated by the Turks in Libya.

In conclusion, Africa is one of the geographies where Erdoğan’s motivation to become an imperial or sub-imperial power manifests itself. But Türkiye’s over-zealousness in adding a military dimension to relations is inadvertently embroiling itself in problems in the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and North Africa. The militarization of relations may offer an irresistible temptation to compete with former colonialists like France, but it also poisons Türkiye’s relations with the continent.

When the plan for a base in Suakin was put into action in addition to the bases in Somalia and Qatar, the columnists close to the AKP government fueled the enthusiasm for conquest with claims that the defense of Türkiye’s borders started from the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. They argued that a Turkish triangle had been formed in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. Undoubtedly, these arguments describe a state of inadequate ambition; that is, there is a gap between the size of ambitions and the capacity to fulfill them. Moreover, Türkiye’s exaggeration of its position has fueled fears among the Arab countries of the region. Since the declaration of the Year of Africa, Erdoğan has acted with the understanding that “the caravan is organized on the road”. This leads to many mistakes.

In Türkiye , African studies in universities are lacking and Ankara has too few diplomats who know Africa and can give the right advice to the government.

Where this kind of institutionalization is lacking, Erdoğan fosters relations through personal friendships which sometimes develop outside the bounds of law and diplomatic practice. For example, when the son of his Somali counterpart was involved in a fatal accident in Istanbul, Erdoğan could help the suspect escape, flouting the Turkish legal system. Erdoğan-style politics gets quick results, but it does not promise stability and leads to distorted relationships and scandals. Moreover, personal ties lose their relevance in ordinary or extraordinary changes of power and expose Türkiye to vulnerabilities.

FEHIM TASTEKIN for red. media

Fehim Tastekin is a Turkish journalist specializes in Turkish foreign policy and Caucasus, Middle East and EU affairs. He is the author of several books on Syria, Kurds and Islamic movements.