Iran

From the “ruling realism” to the realism of the oppressed

Friday 23 August 2024, by Nima Sabouri






Nima Sabouri examines the brutal repression by the Islamic Republic of Iran, highlighting the state’s use of executions as a tool to intimidate the oppressed masses, while contrasting this "ruling realism" with the resilient "realism of the oppressed" that fuels ongoing resistance and the potential for revolutionary change.

On the morning of 6th August, Reza Rasaei, a 34 year old Kurdish political prisoner and one of the detainees of the Jina Uprising, was executed after enduring months of imprisonment and torture. This state murder, along with the execution of 23 other prisoners during the week prior, occurred at a time when the Islamic Republic of Iran is in the middle of its most acute foreign political-military tensions, especially following the assassination of Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

The occurrence of these executions at this moment, in addition to the issuance of the death sentence for two women political prisoners (Sharifeh Mohammadi and Pakhshan Azizi), is part of a mass murder campaign that has seen the execution of more than 200 other prisoners since the 21st of March 2024 alone (the first day of the Iranian calendar). In 2023, at least 853 persons were executed, about 300 more than in 2022. This accelerated campaign of state killings shows that for the rulers of the Islamic Republic, the main battleground is inside the country, where the regime faces a huge mass of oppressed and angry people. The execution of prisoners, whether political or “non-political”, is actually a tool to intimidate and terrorize this “dangerous crowd”.

A day following Rasaei’s execution, 29 other prisoners were executed in two prisons in Karaj, a city in north-central Iran. On the same day in the women’s section of Evin prison in Tehran, prisoners who held a sit-in in protest of Rasaei’s execution were brutally attacked. Some were physically hurt so badly by the prison guards (amongst them Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Narges Mohammadi) that they had to be treated in hospital.

While the Islamic Republic, in spite of the hype, treats its foreign opponents as always with huge caution (so much so that it even informs them in advance and in detail of its performative military strikes), it does not recognize any limitations or considerations when confronting actual and potential opponents inside the country. This is because the rulers of the regime think that the balance of power in the domestic arena is in their favor (unlike in the foreign arena), and also because, based on their long experience in international politics, they know only too well that they will not be held accountable to any body at the international level for even the most heinous killings and atrocities they commit inside the country. This impunity rests on a core tenant of the international power system — an unwritten custom that dictates non-interference of governments in each other’s “internal affairs”. The effect of this has been that the rulers of Iran and other dictatorial regimes have a green light to attempt to completely suppress their own “citizens”, which would also be an “optimal” solution for the global powers to outsource the maintenance of the dominant order to the dictator regimes.

In the domestic sphere, the regime also hopes that the long-term practice of suffocating voices through maximum repression will still work, so they attempt to control the consequences of oppression and repression with more oppression and repression, via intimidation. This is why, for example, in recent years, we start our mornings every day with news of fresh executions.

Having said that, the situation described above is not as static as it seems. Under the shell of suppression, there exists a flow of resistance. Continuous executions are actually a state-tool of intimidation to curb these resistances. Some visible examples of this resistance-flow (despite the intensification of state repression) are: the stands by justice-seekers (families of those killed by the state), daily and civil resistance of women*, frequent strikes and protests of workers (including retirees, teachers, nurses, industrial workers, oil and gas workers, etc.), the resistance of the marginalized and oppressed nationalities ( Kurds, Baloch, Ahwazi and others), environmental protests, and also the continuation of the resistance of prisoners in dozens of prisons across Iran. The noteworthy point is that, at least in the current phase, the intimidation function of increasing executions has not been as effective as the rulers had expected. For example, parallel to the increase in executions, the range of the prisoners participating in the hunger-strike of the “Tuesdays of No to Execution” campaign in Iranian prisons has expanded (as I write, it is the twenty-eighth week of this campaign).

Furthermore, even if the rulers of Iran’s Islamic system have forgotten the fate of their former political relatives, such as Omar al-Bashir (of Sudan), they are now fearfully witnessing how the anger and determination of the oppressed in Bangladesh has marked a humiliating fate for another one of their political relatives.

It is for all of those reasons that for the rulers of the Islamic Republic, the main battlefield has always been inside the country; that is, their “main enemy” or the main obstacle to the expansion of their absolute power has been the oppressed, angry and desperate masses. The confidence of the rulers in recognizing this main enemy, and their ruthless determination in advancing this fateful battle, is due to the knowledge they have, more than anyone else, of the depth of the multiple crises they have created during the life of their sinister political system. These crises are so deep that even if they (presumably) want to, they can not provide any ointment to reduce the suffering and anger of the masses. In addition, the successive waves of mass uprisings in Iran since December 2017 have revealed the extent of the gap and antagonism between the state and the oppressed.

Therefore, the Iranian rulers’ awareness of the irreversibility of the path they have taken is the main theme of their “political realism”. This “ruling realism” has determined the main strategy of their governance beyond the ideological and religious sediments of the past. Based on this “realistic” strategy, the main goal of the Islamic Republic is nothing but maintaining the survival of its political system, under any conditions and at any cost. This goal partly explains why the Islamic Republic has increasingly embraced militarism, especially in the last two decades, and has so tightly mixed its capitalist economy, domestic politics, and foreign policy with militarism.

Since capitalism, despite the diversity of its local and regional children, is a global system, the imperialist mechanisms supporting this system also operate on a global scale. This is how – for instance – the glorious revolution of the Sudanese peoples, in the absence of global solidarity, has been surrounded by global and regional powers and is caught in a “war of the generals“, with the aim of destroying its revolutionary surpluses in famine, mass displacement and mass killing.

The current and nascent political revolution in Bangladesh reminds us, however, once again, that revolution is a manifestation of the “realism of the oppressed” — that there is no other way to freedom. This is, in itself, an emancipatory realism, even though its transformative power can only be realized through deepening the revolution and solidarity of the oppressed on a global scale.

16 August 2024

Source World Without Prisons.

P.S.

If you like this article or have found it useful, please consider donating towards the work of International Viewpoint. Simply follow this link: Donate then enter an amount of your choice. One-off donations are very welcome. But regular donations by standing order are also vital to our continuing functioning. See the last paragraph of this article for our bank account details and take out a standing order. Thanks.

Attached documents

• from-the-ruling-realism-to-the-realism-of-the-oppressed_a8644.pdf (PDF - 910.7 KiB)
  Extraction PDF [->article8644]

Iran

• Joe Biden’s Crime Against Humanity
• An election without electors in Iran
• Campaign to stop the execution of rapper and metal worker Toomaj Salehi
• The mullahs weakened, the people’s struggle continues
• "Tehran found itself backed into a corner by the attack on its consulate."

• Nima Sabouri

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

DESANTISLAND

Florida’s Conservative CFO Proposes State-Owned Public Bank

By Marco Rosaire Rossi

August 22, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Creative Commons Image via negativespace.co

On August 19th, public banking advocates found they have a surprising supporter. Florida’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Republican Jimmy Patronis, announced that his office requested that the Florida legislature consider creating a state-owned public bank. Dubbed the “Sunshine Freedom Bank” by Patronis, the bank would move Florida’s approximately annual $150 billion in revenue and assets away from out-of-state financial institutions mostly located in New York and into a single state-owned and operated institution in Florida.

To get the project off the ground, Patronis is requesting that legislators approve a feasibility study that would explore the practical requirements of establishing the Sunshine Freedom Bank, including the necessary regulatory framework, initial investment costs, technological logistics, and potential governing structure. 

Florida is one of many states that have proposed researching the creation of a state-owned public bank in recent years. In 2019, California’s legislature passed AB 857, the Public Banking Act. The law did not create a state-owned public bank, but instead enabled cities, counties, and joint powers authorities to establish their own public banks. Since then, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and Alameda County have agreed to a joint venture to create a public bank for the East Bay region, and the Los Angeles city council has voted to allocate funds to a feasibility study for its own public bank. Also in 2019, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed Executive Order No. 91, which created a Public Bank Implementation Board that was tasked with researching and designing a public bank for the state. Last year, representatives in Washington introduced a bill to create a public infrastructure bank for the state’s local, municipal, and tribal governments, while at the same time neighboring legislators in Oregon passed a bill to conduct a feasibility study for a state-owned public bank.

While all these legislative efforts have seemed promising, they have faced serious setbacks. In California, the local banks have faced regulatory hurdles which have dramatically slowed the process; many activists are anxious that they will not get a public bank off the ground before the end of the decade. In New Jersey, very little action has been taken to move the project forward, and it is only this year that the Public Bank Implementation Board finalized its report. Meanwhile, the public banking bill in Washington was killed in committee, and Governor Tina Kotek in Oregon vetoed the legislature’s plans for a feasibility study. 

Considering this reality, it is hard for public banking advocates to be too optimistic regarding Patronis’s announcement, despite the CFO’s enthusiastic support. Still, Florida presents a unique situation for the public banking movement.

First, while other states have faced—at best—passive support to public banking from their state’s treasurer or financial officer, in Florida it is the financial leadership of the state that is taking the initiative; furthermore, it’s doing so absent the type of robust social movement that is found in other states.

Second, while the other states considering public banking legislation are liberal bastions, with Democrats dominating state politics, Florida is another story. In the past two decades, the state has moved dramatically to the right and become a Republican stronghold. Indeed, while Patronis has emphasized the profitability of the Sunshine Freedom Bank, he also recognizes the institution as a means of promoting his party’s conservative values. During the announcement, Patronis decried investment plans that incorporate environmental and social governance or diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines instead of focusing solely on maximizing returns. “Woke banks and regulators in New York, California and Washington, D.C. have been imposing their toxic ideology on hard-working Floridians by controlling their money, when they should be focused on core business functions and maximizing returns on our investments,” read the message from his office.

Still, while most activists in the public banking movement are leftwing progressives, the issue has elements that appeal to both ends of the political spectrum. While the left is drawn to public banking as an alternative to free market capitalism, the right sees it as an opportunity to ensure localized control of finances and a means to get capital to need areas—especially rural communities—without having to raise taxes. Afterall, it is North Dakota—a deeply conservative state—that remains the one state in the country that has a functioning state-owned public bank. And, despite being a creation of rural populists and urban progressives in the Nonpartisan League at the turn of the last century, the institution currently maintains strong support throughout the state.

What Patronis’ announcement does definitively indicate is that the public banking movement is growing. For a variety of reasons, different factions within American society have become alienated and frustrated with the country’s current banking model. More and more, people are recognizing the need to treat banking—and by extension control of the country’s money supply—as a public utility that demands public oversight and management, rather than a private endeavor that is mostly controlled by a handful of shareholders located in the country’s financial centers.   

Marco Rosaire Rossi is the Executive Director of Washingtonians for Public Banking and a part-time adjunct professor in political science. His previous articles on banking reform and public banking have appeared on the blog the Cascadia Advocate and in Real Change.

BDS Win: AXA Divests from Israeli Banks and Elbit Systems

In a resounding victory for the BDS movement, Palestine activists have forced French multinational insurance company AXA to divest from all major Israeli banks and the weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

By Michael Arria

August 22, 2024

Source: Mondoweiss


Palestine Action activists are removed from an Elbit Systems factory in Oldham, Greater Manchester, January 2022. Photo: Palestine Action

In a resounding victory for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the French multinational insurance company AXA has sold its investments in all major Israeli banks and divested from Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

The news was confirmed by a new report published by the corporate accountability group Ekō, which is part of the coalition that’s been pressuring AXA to divest for nearly a decade.

“BDS pressure works. The confirmation of AXA’s divestment from all Israeli banks and Elbit Systems is a major milestone for the movement that follows years of strategic BDS campaigning,” said BDS Movement Europe Coordinator Fiona Ben Chekroun in a statement.

“Corporate criminals try to sear into our consciousness the impossibility of prevailing over them, but BDS works and we have prevailed over AXA and many other much larger companies,” she continued. “We surely can prevail in many more corporate accountability struggles in pursuit of freedom, justice and equality.”

According to the Ekō report, AXA held over 2.5 million shares, worth $20.4 million in Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, and Israel Discount Bank until last September. However, the new data reveals the company “engaged in clear, fast, and intentional divestment from these complicit banks” and by June 2024, its shares in the banks had effectively dropped to zero.

In 2020 the UN Human Rights Council listed all three of those banks in the UN database of businesses connected to Israel’s illegal settlements.

Last year pro-Palestine protesters in Ireland occupied AXA offices in Dublin calling on people to boycott the company.

The AXA news comes just days after the Cambridge Day reported that Elbit Systems have effectively stopped operating its office in the Massachusetts city. The building has consistently been targeted by protesters for months.

“We will continue organizing until Elbit Systems leaves Cambridge. Should Elbit leave their current offices at 130 Bishop Allen Drive, we advise other local real estate companies that Elbit is a difficult tenant. Where Elbit goes, disruptive community protests follow, as Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. has learned over the past year,” said BDS Boston in response to the story.

“Two incredible wins to celebrate from Massachusetts to Paris thanks to BDS and Gaza protests,” tweeted journalist Rafael Shimunov.

The BDS National Committee celebrated the news in a press release, but noted that the campaign was not ending.

“AXA is not off the hook, though,” it reads. “Amidst Israel’s live streamed genocide in Gaza against 2.3 million Palestinians, the coalition will continue to monitor AXA’s investments to make sure it is not complicit in the ongoing genocide.”

“The BDS movement, with its intersectional partnerships worldwide, calls for intensifying pressure on all financial institutions profiting from oppression and injustice,” it continues. “Investing in apartheid Israel has always been unethical and illegal. With Israel’s economy in steady decline, it’s now also really reckless.”

UK

What the Anti-Immigration Riots Tell Us About Starmer’s Labour  Government

Labour strongly condemned the riots, but can Starmer’s faction confront its own dark history of race-baiting?

By Brian Chikwava

August 22, 2024

Source: African Arguments

The anti-immigration riots in Southport, UK, 5 August 2024. Courtesy: By StreetMic LiveStream, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151177179



What we know is that the far-right riots in the UK were not a legitimate outpouring of anger about the stabbing of children because, even after their reasoning justifying their violence had collapsed in the face of facts, something else continued to drive the rioters to attack mosques, Muslims and black people.

It did not matter that the 17-year-old boy who stabbed the children was not a recent foreign arrival, as they had believed. It also did not matter that the boy was not a Muslim, as they had believed. Something else was driving them, but the British political and media classes could not name it.

The riots cannot have been about the raw deal that the average Brit has got out of the neoliberal settlement because, as ex-Labour MP Laura Pidcock noted, these bearers of “legitimate” anger were notable for their absence at sites where communities were fighting hardships. They don’t help at food banks, aren’t bothered by homelessness, and are absent at campaigns against government spending cuts, by Tories or by Labour. Their issues are not economic.

The riots cannot have been about the immigrant question in general, as the media tried to tell us, because if that were true, we would have seen Ukrainians, Eastern Europeans and Australians under attack. The riots were about a specific kind of immigrant: the Muslim. If you were black or brown, that made you a fair target.

We cannot trust the new Labour government to take an honest position on the problem because its leading lights got where they are by way of a strange relationship with the truth. For a while now, Westminster, Fleet Street and the BBC have operated in ways barely distinguishable from a psyop on the general public. We already saw some of this. When anti-fascist groups organised to meet a planned countrywide march on Thursday, 8 August 2024, Starmer’s government instructed Labour MPs not to join any anti-fascist marches. Yet as soon as it became clear that the anti-fascist groups had successfully deterred the planned countrywide marches by the far right, the government and the media were quick off the blocks to give credit to, erm, the good British people for seeing off the rioters. Neatly skipped over was the political identity of the people who came out on the streets to face down the far right, for they were none other than anti-fascists, pro-Palestine protestors and the usual anti-war groups. In short, the same people that Westminster and mainstream media were calling “hate mobs”, “terrorists”, or “antisemites” at the height of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government will avoid as much as possible answering any basic questions, such as: is Tommy Robinson a fascist? Is Nigel Farage far right? Are we racist? Labour is afraid and incapable of naming things; if it can’t correctly name Islamophobic riots, it cannot hope to find the correct solution. Even when Starmer condemned ‘far-right thuggery,’ it sounded dishonest to frame the people involved as a mindless fringe group of thugs whose appearance on the streets was irrational and puzzling when the evidence of recent years is clear: Islamophobia is Westminster’s last respectable bigotry. Eager to investigate antisemitism in the Labour Party, the Equality & Human Rights Commission has steadfastly refused to do anything about evidence of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. The Forde Report found a racism hierarchy in the Labour Party.

In the aftermath of the riots, New Labour veteran Margaret Hodge came forward to say, ‘We’re too frightened to talk about immigration.’ Yet it’s impossible to find one subject that has consistently been at the centre of British politics as much as immigration. In 2005, Tony Blair was panicking over what to do with the high numbers of migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq and how that would impact Labour at the ballot box. In 2007, Hodge earned the applause of the far-right British National Party after talking about the “fear” triggered in her constituency by the sight of “different” faces in schools. Prime Minister Gordon Brown resurrected the National Front slogan “British jobs for British workers”; Labour’s 2015 election campaign featured explicitly anti-migrant coffee mugs, and in the most recent election campaign, Labour was competing with Tories over who could be the most horrible against immigrants. Talking about immigrants, particularly the sort that Boris Johnson called “letterboxes,” helped the Brexit campaign over the line in 2016.

Hodge is one of the reactionary Labour Party grandees who want a Labour Party that is essentially the Conservative Party Light. At the height of Blairism, these are the folks who claimed that everyone was middle class: “We’re all Thatcherites now”.

Blair is famous for “modernising” the Labour Party by dropping clause IV of the party’s constitution. This clause obliged it to represent the interests of working people. Labour is now ideologically incapable of offering working people a path to a place where their first point of identification is social struggle. Lacking a genuine political offer, Labour has chosen to follow Tories’ who are not shy to encourage people to identify along racial lines. A party that once belonged to working people but is now a vehicle of political careering by a group of liberals who can operate the party with a vanishing membership because they don’t need membership fees if the party can be funded by corporate lobbyists, city bankers and vulture capitalists presently waiting for Labour to start yet another round of stripping away public assets for a song. Starmer’s government is available to the highest bidder. And racists bid the highest in this country.

UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer exuberant about Labour’s landslide, on 5 July. Courtesy: Keir Starmer social media.

Starmer’s clique came into government on the back of extraordinary duplicity, with the support of the liberal mainstream media, likely looking for the first opportunity to slip out of the sham and pretend they were not at all involved. The liberal commentariat for years encouraged people to “vote for the lesser evil.” They soon forgot that they chose evil, started defending evil, while self-describing as “sensible moderates.” Paid to mis-represent the world and how power shapes it, they threw their support behind the right wing of the Labour Party when it sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s party leadership. They pretended not to see the difference between people supporting Westminster’s most notable anti-apartheid campaigner and a far-right bloke who is eager to murder in order to assert preferred racial hierarchies. So, Jeremy Corbyn was routinely compared to a Nazi prison guard; the BBC broadcast General Sir Nicholas Houghton in full uniform saying the Army would be ‘worried’ about a Corbyn win, and no one raised an eyebrow; the BBC’s premier news programme, Newsnight, depicted Corbyn as Lord Voldemort, and army squaddies did target practice on an image of Corbyn.

If Brexit and its obsession with coming swarms of foreigners took the country halfway to where it is now, the political assassination of Jeremy Corbyn completed the journey. The signals were loud, public and unmistakable: the British voter had had enough of the foreigner, and the land’s rulers would not tolerate a redistributive agenda. A senior Labour figure allied to Starmer felt obliged to scream racist and sexist language at the first Black female MP, Diane Abbott, intent on breaking her.

Starmer’s Labour government is ill-suited for the task not because it lacks ability but because the party leadership earned its place by distortion and disinformation. They had to be really ugly to thwart Corbynism and the threat it posed to capital; if naked racism and sexism were required, that was fine. Eventually, they found the perfect weapon to decapitate Corbyn: antisemitism.

Here, they really shone as political ghouls. For their efforts they have been rewarded with a thundering parliamentary majority despite fewer people voting for them than did for the supposedly unpopular Corbyn-led Labour.

After the Equality & Human Rights Commission’s report over the Labour Party’s antisemitism row, when Corbyn failed to apologise for saying claims of rampant antisemitism levelled at the party under his leadership were exaggerated, Starmer and his mob leapt at the opportunity to start kicking Corbyn out of the party. It is worth remembering that in the purge that followed, Starmer’s Labour expelled left-leaning Jewish party members at such a blistering rate, that it became statistically more likely to be kicked out if you were Jewish.

Starmer claimed to be cleansing the party of the scourge of antisemitism. All the clever political editors, conduits of the antisemitism outrage, displayed a wonderful collective incuriosity about the satirical nature of what was unfolding. When the party was done processing a backlog of 10,000 antisemitism cases inherited from Corbyn and 183 party members were rightly expelled, the media again excelled with their disinterest.

187 individuals is, of course, 0.03% of peak membership during the Corbyn years. Way before Corbyn was party leader, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s own political party surveys going back years had estimated antisemitism in the party to be at about 23 – 32% of the membership – an estimate still lower, it should be noted, than the figures for the Conservative Party. In fact, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s survey had shown antisemitism going down under Corbyn. But since the antisemitism row was hardly a search for the truth, hard facts did not count.

The political and media figures behind the duplicity over ‘rampant antisemitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party have never had to account for anything. The media has responded to Al Jazeera’s shocking documentary, Labour Files, with mind-boggling silence. Everything they told us was true about Corbyn turned out to be the opposite. That is not a story the establishment is interested in. It’s also not a story that Starmer’s political outriders are interested in, and they most certainly will not want to be reminded about the Forde Report, commissioned by Starmer but now buried, its recommendations ignored because it gave the wrong answer.

Martin Forde KC found a racism hierarchy where he was expected to launder the antisemitism row. Look, a black barrister has said it: the Corbyn gang were irredeemable racists. The BBC unsuccessfully pressured Forde to change the report before publishing it to make it look more favourable. When the report finally came out in July 2022, the media ignored it entirely. The blackout perplexed Forde: by March 2023, he had not heard anything from the Labour Party. Neither had a single media outlet spoken to him.

Only when Forde spoke to Al Jazeera about the report, did he hear from the Labour Party: a legal threat saying he was “acting against the party’s interest.”

And this is why the Labour government will struggle to address the riots: it cannot tackle Islamophobia and racism in the country when it resolutely refuses to face up to the same poison within its own party.

The late David Graeber did not foresee Labour’s Islamophobia problem, but did predict that Starmer was going to lose the progressive left and fail to win over the right vote. This is already evident from the last general election. He also noted that when fascists start marching on the streets and the police vanish, as they often do in that hour, the people that Starmer’s Labour was eager to call antisemites will be the lot having running battles against the fascists.

As with Brexit, which was driven by Etonians and billionaires styling themselves as the resistance, we saw the riots being fanned by the same figures: Tories on various levels and even Elon Musk. As for Starmer’s lot, they are at home cutting deals with the establishment, avoiding the hard work of developing an intellectual framework against the beasts.

At this moment, luck favours the devil.

Brian Chikwava is a London based Zimbabwean writer.

Broken Promises: Western Hypocrisy in the Global Minerals Scramble

LIKE CANADA DOESN'T

Western governments need to enforce strong regulation that ensures responsible mining and holds accountable all companies involved in extracting and sourcing minerals.

By Alex Kopp

August 23, 2024

Source: FPIF

Anti-extractivist coalition actions in Quito, Ecuador in March 2024 

| Image Credit: @memed.act

Western governments have finally realized that the energy transition is happening—and that the resources needed are mostly in Chinese hands. Transition minerals, by some dubbed the “new oil,” are the key ingredients for renewables technologies like EV batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines that make the transition happen. A large share of those minerals are extracted in the Global South, but China controls their value chains to a large degree. China processes over 90 percent of rare earth elements, almost 100 percent of graphite, over 75 percent of cobalt and over 60 percent of lithium. China also produces around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and makes between 60-80 percent of the world’s electric vehicles, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries.

Hardly a week goes by these days without Western governments announcing a new partnership or strategy to gain the upper hand in the minerals scramble. It’s difficult to imagine that just a few years ago an American company sold off one of the world’s biggest cobalt mines to a Chinese company. Resource nationalism has replaced the Western vision of a globalized free market for raw materials.

From the Spanish Conquista’s gold and silver plundering to the more recent minerals booms, those unfortunate enough to live on land bearing valuable resources have often been driven away and/or seen their land polluted. In policies and press releases Western governments vow that this time it’s going to be different with declarations about projects with “respect for human rights” using “responsible practices” and declare they will follow “high” and “rigorous ESG standards.” Yet, a closer look at recent policy decisions leaves much doubt whether Western countries live up to their promises.
Weak Regulation

The hastily negotiated Critical Raw Materials Act from last year is the basis for the European Union’s approach to better access key raw materials. The EU vows that supported projects shall be “implemented sustainably,” particularly with regard to the “prevention and minimization of environmental…and socially adverse impacts through responsible practices” but allows at the same time the fast-tracking of permitting processes and authorities to “override” adverse impacts on the environment.

With almost 70 percent of the world’s transition minerals extraction projects located on or near indigenous people’s or farmer’s land, their meaningful consultation is key to avoiding the environmental and social problems mining has caused in the past. And yet many mining projects are launched without properly informing affected communities, let alone obtaining their consent.

The United States doesn’t have sufficient regulation in place to hold mining companies accountable for their overseas operations. Instead, it relies largely on the industry’s self-policing through voluntary schemes that have often failed in the past. A prominent example is the Brumadinho tailings dam that broke in 2019, killing 272 people in Brazil despite an inspection having certified the dam’s stability just four months before.
Turning a Blind Eye to Corruption

The extractive sector accounts for one in five cases of transnational bribery. Bribes do not only deprive the often poor population in resource-rich countries of revenues, but the massive unearned income from natural resources can also undermine countries’ democratic institutions and rule of law, a phenomenon called the “resource curse.” Past commodity booms have unleashed large waves of corruption, which is why governments’ strong stance against corruption is particularly important at this moment. But the United States and UK have sent out opposite signals.

In December 2017, the United States sanctioned the Israeli businessman Dan Gertler for his corrupt deals in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through which he is alleged to have siphoned off over $1.3 billion of public funds to his companies, which Gertler denies. In a sharp turnaround, the United States has now proposed to lift the sanctions if Gertler sells off his remaining stakes in giant copper and cobalt mining operations in the country, effectively allowing him to further profit an estimated $300 million from ill-gotten assets. The United States hopes that the deal will incentivize Western-leaning companies to better access the DRC’s minerals. Seventy percent of the world’s cobalt—a key ingredient for EV batteries—comes from the DRC. U.S. government officials also mentioned to the Wall Street Journal that Saudi Arabian mining companies are interested in buying stakes in Congolese cobalt and copper mines through which American companies would get some of the metals.

In August 2023, the UK dropped a 10-year investigation into the Kazakh mining company ENRC centered on suspected bribes for cobalt and copper mining contracts in the DRC, saying it had “insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute” after facing a wave of legal proceedings from the company, which vehemently denies wrongdoing. By signaling to the mining sector that it is not under a close watch, such decisions risk spurring further corruption.
Risky Finance

In their quest to catch up with Chinese competitors in accessing critical minerals, Western governments are willing to prop up mining operations with big sums of money. Through export credit agencies providing government-backed loans and insurance, Western governments support projects that investors may otherwise deem too risky. The White House senior adviser for energy and investment recently admitted as much when he said, in May 2024, that “the government has a real role here of incentivizing private capital by taking more risk.”

In the past, mining projects backed by public funds have destroyed unique habitats, used forced labor, fueled violent conflict, and heavily polluted the environment. As part of the Minerals Security Partnership, a U.S.-led coalition of allied governments, the U.S. Development Finance Corporation offered a loan of up to $150 million in November 2023 for a graphite mine project in Mozambique. It is located in a region of the country where it may have serious human rights impacts given a conflict between the government and an Islamist insurgency that has led to almost 5,000 deaths during the last five years .

The EU’s strategic partnership approach, designed to secure a steady supply of critical raw materials, provides finance for producer countries through the Global Gateway, the EU’s version of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In February, the EU agreed on a partnership on “sustainable raw materials value chains” with Rwanda, which should raise major red flags. After having plundered 3T (tin, tantalum, tungsten) minerals directly in the DRC during the second Congo war, Rwanda has profited from taxing smuggled minerals, which have been connected to conflict ever since. The strategic partnership is being negotiated at a time when the Rwandan army has invaded the DRC and supports the armed group M23, which controls much of the smuggling from some of the largest coltan mines in the world. The European Commission proposes “traceability…at the core of the EU-Rwanda critical raw materials partnership,” supposedly to counter the risk of sourcing conflict minerals. Yet Global Witness has shown that the dominant traceability system for 3T minerals in Rwanda has laundered huge volumes of smuggled conflict minerals since it has been set up.
Investor Courts Undercutting Environmental and Social Regulation

Free trade agreements with producer countries are another common tool for Western governments to secure access to minerals from third countries. These often impose an untransparent investment protection system that allows investors to sue governments for billions of dollars for state action that may negatively affect their investments.

When the Guatemalan supreme court ordered a halt to a mining project for lack of consultation with affected indigenous peoples in 2016, the mining company Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA) initiated a lawsuit against the government for over $400 million for not providing adequate protection to KCA’s investment against community protests, effectively claiming that the government did not do enough to suppress local opposition to the company’s mine.

Colombia faces 14 arbitration processes and eight more in pre-arbitration stage, many of which involve mining companies. Altogether, Colombia is being sued for an estimated $13.2 billion. By insisting on such investment settlement clauses in trade agreements, Western government are complicit in undermining protection for mining-affected people and land.
New Frontiers, New Destruction

While Western governments haven’t set targets to reduce materials use that could curb minerals demand, they support projects in new, high-risk territories that will likely have devastating environmental impact. The deep sea is one of the few areas that has so far been spared from destructive mining. Norway, however, is determined to change this, and among U.S. lawmakers support for deep sea mining is growing as well. As the seabed has scarcely been researched, it’s difficult to assess the precise effects that mining would have, but experts assert that it would lead to indefinite reductions in biodiversity and impacted areas wouldn’t recover for decades or even centuries.

As if these prospects weren’t dire enough, there are even greater risks looming on the horizon. With Western governments and allies forming clubs such as the Minerals Security Partnership against the Chinese market dominance, pressure on producer countries to align with one or the other side mount.

If the CEO of the world’s biggest EV manufacturer had his way, foreign interventions against governments who are unwilling to bow to Western conditions could soon be back. Reacting to a Twitter user’s allegation that the United States organized a coup against Bolivia’s president to access the country’s lithium, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk wrote “We will coup whoever we want—deal with it!”.

Some analysts fear that we may see military escalation of the scramble for the “new oil” in the near future. The Arctic region, home to a large rare earth mine, is one area that has recently come into the crosshairs of geopolitical interests with Europe, the United States, Russia, and China struggling for influence.

Global superpowers must keep the quest for minerals within the boundaries of economic competition and refrain from using force. Western governments need to live up to their promises of a just energy transition by putting in place and enforcing strong regulation that ensures responsible mining and holds accountable all companies involved in extracting and sourcing minerals.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.  Donate


Alex Kopp
Alex Kopp is a senior policy advisor on transition minerals for Global Witness.