Communism Will End Capitalism’s Deadly Humanitarian Disasters here ♦ Türkiye: Capitalism Is the Disaster! here ♦ Syria Civil War and Refugee Crisis: A Much Bigger Story here ♦
Communism Will End Capitalism’s Deadly Humanitarian Disasters
February 14–The 7.8 magnitude earthquake last week, which killed at least 38,000 people in southern Türkiye (Turkey) and northwest Syria, is really two stories.
One, the story of southern Türkiye, is one more example of how racist capitalism turns a natural event into a disaster. Geologists and engineers know how to build buildings that will survive this kind of earthquake, but under capitalism, profits come before human life. Communism will do away with production for profit. We’ll work together to rebuild a communist world on the rubble of the old. With human welfare as our top priority, we’ll use science to build safely.
The second story is about Syria, where the earthquake hit communities already devastated by civil war. Where inter-imperialist rivalry has killed hundreds of thousands and forced millions to flee their homes. Where inter-imperialist rivalry and civil war devastated the health and social services infrastructure and meant that NO rescue assistance could cross the border from Türkiye in time to save those trapped in the rubble.
Workers have no nations! We fight for a communist world without borders. The only war we support is a war against the capitalists—a revolutionary war for communism.
Türkiye: Capitalism Is the Disaster!
Many of us have experienced how racist capitalism turns a natural event into a disaster. We have seen the bosses and the government work hand in glove to make profits from the misery of the working masses. We have seen that government aid never makes it to marginalized minorities and that we can only rely on each other.
Türkiye is crisscrossed with well-known faults. Strict building codes were enacted after a 7.4 magnitude quake in 1999. But safe construction cuts into profits. So President Erdogan’s capitalist government allowed contractors to buy legal exemptions from safety codes for up to 75,000 buildings.
New buildings collapsed like pancakes, murdering thousands. As a sop to the mass anger of people who have lost everything, including loved ones, a handful of contractors have been arrested. Some had suitcases full of cash in the Istanbul airport. Erdogan, who faces reelection in May, hopes to deflect anger from himself and his corrupt government.
Türkiye had a strong working-class movement in the 1980s, suppressed by fascist terror. Erdogan should be scared—not just of the elections but of the potential for working-class revolution for communism.
Those who rescued strangers and neighbors after 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans USA, and the 2022 floods in Pakistan, those who were threatened with arrest for digging their friends out of collapsed buildings in Watsonville and trapped cars in Oakland after the 1989 Loma Prieto USA earthquake, know who to count on in a disaster.
The Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) was unprepared and understaffed. The earthquake struck in a largely Kurdish region. Kurds are a marginalized ethnicity whose historic homelands cover much of eastern and southern Turkey, and parts of northern Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Many Kurds never expected government aid. In 2012, after an earthquake in the Kurdish city of Van, the government even blocked aid.
Local people are taking initiative to rescue their friends and neighbors. In contrast, the government that gave construction companies a free hand to profit off workers’ deaths is now sending more cops and soldiers to arrest “looters” than it’s sending rescue workers.
Police are using social media to organize vigilante groups to attack and beat Syrians as “thieves and looters.” Attacks on refugees from the Syrian civil war are part of the bosses’ arsenal of weapons to use against the working class: spread xenophobia, attack immigrants and refugees, divert the masses’ anger away from capitalism.
The European Union (EU) has sent Türkiye tens of millions of Euros to serve as a refuge for asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Somalia. This cynical move – outsourcing the results of wars in their former colonies – is matched by the cynicism of the Turkish government that receives them without providing them a decent life.
At least 3.6 million Syrian refugees live in Türkiye, including 1.7 million under Temporary Protection in the ten provinces hit by the earthquake. Most live in urban areas, not refugee camps. They face a daily struggle to survive as well as increasing xenophobic attacks, fomented by politicians seeking to scapegoat them for capitalism’s economic crisis.
Opposition politicians have threatened to return Syrians to the civil war they fled. Erdogan threatens to send them into Turkish-occupied areas of northern Syria. Readers worldwide will recognize this situation. It echoes xenophobic attacks on workers from Zimbabwe in South Africa, attacks on Central Americans in Mexico and beyond, and the US-Mexico border crisis, with “lesser evil” Democrats continuing Trump’s racist policies.
Syria Civil War and Refugee Crisis: A Much Bigger Story
The story of the earthquake in Syria is the future: increasingly devastating death and destruction from inter-imperialist rivalry and war. The twelve-year civil war in Syria began in an anti-government uprising during the 2011 Arab Spring. It became a proxy war between US imperialism and its Russian rival.
It’s complicated by a jihadist insurgency led by ISIS, ex-al Queda fighters known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Kurdish fighters that won control of Rojava in the northeast, and Turkish-backed fascist militias which control much of the northern border with Türkiye.
The Russian-backed Assad is still in power, showing the weakness of US imperialism in the region. Obama said in 2012 that Assad’s chemical attacks on NATO-supported Kurdish-led forces was “a red line in the sand.” But the US took no action and Assad’s forces consolidated a number of military victories.
The Syria conflict marked a tipping point in the balance of power between the US and Russian imperialists. Future historians will describe it as one of the first battles of World War III.
At least half a million people have died in this civil war. Over six million refugees have fled Syria. Nearly seven million more are internal refugees, many in the northwest. The Afrin/Idlib region, right across the Turkish border, has seen some of the most contested fighting. It’s also the area devastated by this earthquake.
Aid as an Instrument of War
Only one border crossing was open until today. It’s in HTS-controlled Idlib province. But because of earthquake damage it didn’t open for aid convoys until Thursday. It still has only limited humanitarian aid coming through.
The UN spent the last week talking the Syrian government (and their Chinese and Russian backers) into opening a border crossing between Afrin and Türkiye. Afrin is largely Kurdish. It was controlled by the Kurdish Rojava army until the US abandoned them in 2019. Now the Turkish army controls it. When the aid finally comes through, Syrian Kurds won’t be getting any of it.
Meanwhile, US and EU sanctions have decimated the healthcare system, denying Syrians access to medical and other resources necessary for daily life and making it even harder to respond to this disaster.
US troops occupy parts of Syria to control its oil production. They have stood by instead of aiding the earthquake victims. Pathetic sums offered in aid are dwarfed by the vast expenditures on the war in Ukraine.
As capitalist crisis intensifies and wars spread, the Syrian refugee crisis will be replicated around the world. Civil wars in Africa have already displaced millions who, along with their Syrian siblings, brave the Mediterranean seeking asylum in Europe. Climate crises, repression and poverty send thousands across Central America and Mexico to the US border daily. The US-NATO/Russia proxy war in Ukraine has displaced millions of refugees.
All imperialists and nationalists cynically play power games while the working-class masses die in the rubble.
This story tells the future we all face. War, racism, and capitalist exploitation are killing our class. All over the globe, capitalism-imperialism creates the conditions for genocidal disasters.
Faced with this situation, it becomes more important than ever to build the International Communist Workers’ Party wherever we are. It is especially urgent to organize within the military. Workers and soldiers of all nations can turn these wars and disasters into a revolutionary war for communism.
Türkiye Suriye Depremi: Kapitalist Kârlar, Yabancı Düşmanlığı ve Savaş Felaket Yaratıyor
Erdheja Li Sûryeyê : Qezencên Kapîtalîst , Xenofobî û Şer Karesatê Diafirînin
In Arabic: زلزال تركيا سوريا: الأرباح الرأسمالية وكراهية الأجانب والحرب تخلق كارثة
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