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Total mess

For anyone who missed it, The Sunday Times has revealed that Boris Johnson didn’t bother attending coronavirus Cobra meetings until March 2. The Sunday Times article also quotes a No10 advisor saying: “Almost every plan we had was not activated in February. Almost every government department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans … It was a massive spider’s web of failing.”

Last week’s Telegraph published similar criticisms from the former World Health Organisation director, Anthony Costello: “We should have introduced the lockdown two or three weeks earlier, but we didn’t. It should be combined with testing, tracing and digital apps that have been used so successfully in South Korea ... It is a total mess and we have been wrong every stage of the way.”

Sunday’s Observer reveals a major political cause of this ‘total mess’, when it states that many of the government’s science advisors had become “increasingly concerned that the UK had become out of step with other countries because of political resistance from ministers to measures that would hit the economy. At least two senior government advisors were on the brink of quitting before Johnson switched his approach.”

Another recent Telegraph article reveals quite how reluctant the cabinet was to put lives before the economy when they quoted an anonymous member admitting: “We didn’t want to go down this route in the first place - public and media pressure pushed the lockdown.”

Even ITV’s Robert Peston is now having doubts about his attitude to this government. He recently tweeted that he has emailed ITV colleagues that a senior government source had told him: “We should know within a fortnight or so if we are looking at a pandemic in the UK. The risk is 60% of population getting it. With mortality rate of perhaps just over 1%, we are looking at not far off 500k deaths. Ministers knew by the second week of February the gravity of what confronted us. So I am literally gobsmacked by the Sunday Times disclosure that the PM was not prioritising the looming coronavirus catastrophe till March.”

Of course, Peston’s tweet also raises the obvious question of why he didn’t mention the risk of 500,000 deaths at the time - or when, on March 12, he casually informed the country that “the impact of Covid-19 is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population, so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed, so that those who suffer the most acute symptoms are able to receive the medical support they need …”

The Channel 4 debate from the next day is still chilling to watch. It features one of the government’s science advisors, John Edmunds, whose complacency is truly terrifying! Even more chilling to watch is the video of Boris Johnson asserting that the big problem with Covid-19 was not its threat to life, but that “coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational, to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage”.

HM Government has now taken the rare step of publishing a formal response to the Sunday Times article mentioned above. In desperation to justify the government’s initial complacency, the authors of the response have even dug up a January 23 tweet from The Lancet’s Richard Horton, in which he said that Covid-19 has “relatively low pathogenicity” - while, of course, omitting to mention that Dr Horton soon changed his mind. (As the evidence came in from China, on January 29 Horton said: “It must now surely be time to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”)

The official response to The Times suggestion that there has been a “failure of leadership” is to use the following totally non-reassuring words: “The prime minister has been at the helm of the government response to Covid-19, providing the leadership to steer his ministerial team through a hugely challenging period for the whole nation.”

It’s not just in the UK that various establishment sources are exposing the lies and brutality of Covid capitalism. George W Bush’s former speech-writer, David Frum, makes some surprisingly valid points in his recent article in The Atlantic:

“Trump may not have legal power to order people back to work. But he has tremendous power over the economic resources that allow most people to stay away from work. The $1,200 per person signed into law March 27 will not last long … Unless federal aid is extended and expanded, workers will soon be driven to return to work by economic necessity. If Trump withholds his signature, federal aid cannot be extended or expanded …

“Administration officials speak of a ‘phased reopening’. But if the reopening starts in May, it will be phased not by medical advice, but by the hard grammar of wealth and poverty: poorest first, richest last. In the event of an early and partial reopening, the disparities can only widen. Those who can telecommute, who can shop online, or who work for health-conscious employers like public universities will be better positioned to minimise their exposure than those called back to work in factories, plants and delivery services. The economy will be further divided along its widening class fault … [Trump’s plan] depends less on containing the total number of casualties than on confining the casualties to people deemed expendable.”

Mark Kosman
London

Blame BAME

Black, Asian and minority ethnic people are overrepresented in the overall death toll of the Covid-19 virus - not only over here in the UK, but also in the US. It would seem that the BBC are innocently trying to find any explanation for what is causing this and, to my surprise, have suggested biological causes. I suspect the eugenicists are smirking with excitement. Vitamin D deficiency is one explanation, as higher levels of skin pigmentation can limit the level of vitamin D your skin produces from sunshine. If you are someone who is affected by it, hopefully your GP has made you aware of it and asked you to take supplements. Much like if you have asthma and are prescribed asthma medication.

The first 12 doctors who died from the virus were all from BAME backgrounds. Am I really expected to believe every one of the doctors was unaware of their own vitamin D deficiency and neglected to take adequate supplements? The state of the NHS these days! Alarmingly, vitamin D deficiency does also affect white people and is reported to be a cause of seasonal affective disorder, which during the winter months can cause depression in some. It is quite prevalent in Scandinavia - a place not renowned for its large BAME populations. But to emphasise vitamin D deficiency as a specific cause for more BAME patients in intensive care, as the BBC and other mainstream media outlets have done, seems to be distracting from more significant factors worth mentioning.

The term ‘key worker’ now applies to cleaners, bus drivers, bank clerks, etc. These people will be at a higher risk of exposure to the disease, because there is a higher chance of them interacting with the public. Much of this work is carried out by people from immigrant or BAME communities. In the government’s employment and occupation statistics for 2019, the BAME ethnicities - south Asian in particular - were overrepresented in many of the occupations listed, notably in transport and health. It is also important to note that these people are also literally putting their lives on the line just by going to work. So, quite deservedly, NHS and other key workers are being recognised for their contribution during this crisis and are cheered every Thursday at 8pm on doorsteps throughout the UK for their service.

One of the earlier fatalities on record really shocked me. It was a young black mother of three, Kayla Williams from south London. Before she died, her partner, Fabian Williams, a refuse worker, called for an ambulance. Kayla was seen by a paramedic and told she was not a priority. Fabian recalls that the paramedic “told me the hospital won’t take her - she is not a priority. [The paramedic] did not stay very long and she went outside to write her report and posted it through the door.” Kayla died a day later. A 2016 American study found that white laypeople, medical students and residents hold false beliefs about biological differences in blacks and whites, which has led to a racial bias in the assessment and treatment of pain. Consequently complaints of pain from black people are less likely to be taken seriously. In this instance, to suggest Kayla’s death was preventable would be to speculate, but to say she wasn’t a priority was clearly wrong.

As an institution, 44% of NHS doctors and 24% of its nurses are of BAME backgrounds. Indian medical degrees were recognised by the General Medical Council from as early as 1892, with a brief exception during the mid 1930s. In 1975 recognition of all medical schools and colleges in the new Commonwealth - with a few exceptions - was retracted. The Merrison committee challenged the validity of overseas qualifications and insisted that, even if overseas doctors had sufficient skill and knowledge, they may lack the understanding of language, attitudes and values of the communities they were to work. (There is an internationalist argument that suggests those out-of-work doctors could have been better deployed elsewhere.) Research suggested that by 1980 the NHS had formed into a racially stratified system in favour of British doctors. Twenty-seven years later Aneez Esmail found that doctors from BAME backgrounds were still at a significant disadvantage to their white counterparts and for Asian doctors specifically to be working in “lower-grade positions in the most unpopular specialities, with a high propensity for long hours and shift work”. I would argue that this pattern can be found not only in the NHS, but across society as a whole.

According to recent medical studies (2019), exposure to racial discrimination can lower life expectancy and lead to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and other cardiovascular diseases, which can in turn affect your immunity to Covid-19. And, as sure as the sun will shine, racism can be expected in the NHS. Or at least, as is revealed in NHS workforce equality data for 2019, which shows that the past five years has only seen racism increase, as, staggeringly, one third of all BAME staff members complained of bullying and harassment in the workplace. As tempted as I am to believe that the BBC and mainstream media’s well-intentioned concern for the UK’s BAME population is genuine, something just doesn’t sit quite right.

For as long as I can remember, mainstream media representation of the BAME population really reinforces the worst stereotypes disproportionately. Far more attention is paid to the worst things that come out of the BAME community rather than the best. A bit like ‘negative reinforcement’ if you will. For example, an entire BBC documentary series, Hometown, centred on the Pakistani population of Huddersfield, depicts the town as a gangsters’ paradise and the UK Pakistani community as one full of armed and dangerous heroin dealers. This portrayal of the BAME population as unappreciative, leeching burdens on our welfare state is one I’ve come to expect from the mainstream media. Given the obviously vital role they are playing in the crisis, it would be refreshing to see the BAME population getting acknowledgement for it (positive reinforcement). But clearly, the ‘good immigrant’ character is an anomaly that doesn’t fit in with the ‘burden’ story. It is a big fat circle, where there’s only space for squares.

I can’t imagine that the rightwing press will find it easy, having - in my view - demonised BAME populations for so long, to now have to direct praise and salutation onto them every Thursday. Instead of recognising the socio-economic factors explaining why the BAME population are overrepresented in Covid-19 cases, undue emphasis is placed on the alleged vitamin D deficiencies, which are causing them to clog up our ICUs. This directs blame - at least some blame - away from the government’s catastrophic handling of the crisis and focuses it on the BAME community.

Jagpreet Bhullar
London

Won’t change

An extremely informative article by Mohsen Shahmanesh (‘Coronavirus and capitalism’, April 17) was followed by an informative Online Communist Forum on Sunday, with Mohsen as the speaker. His introduction and the discussion gave a lot to think about, even while every newspaper and TV news broadcast has focussed on little else for the last few weeks.

Thinking on from the discussion, I would like to raise another couple of points. First of all, a lot of people are going to die as a direct result of the virus. The UK government doesn’t seem to know how many deaths we have to date, but worldwide it is likely to be in the millions. It will be a high number in part because of the difficulties involved in dealing with it: eg, getting a vaccine, and in part also because of some of the idiots intent on making things worse: eg, Trump, Bolsonaro and many others.

However, at the same time we have harvests already beginning in the northern hemisphere. They will fall due for the next five or six months now and there are already press reports of the difficulties involved - not least labour. That is, labour which can’t get to the harvest and labour so badly paid that, for instance, social distancing between shifts is impossible. This would imply a loss of food over the next few months, or years, and what food there is will probably go up in price and so be available in the rich north countries, to those who can afford it, but maybe not so much in poor countries and to those who cannot afford it,

This, I would think, will not go unnoticed and maybe unpunished. So we may be looking forward to pestilence, famine and war giving plenty of death - the Four Horsemen as they are sometimes called.

Another point relates to the ‘end of lockdown’ - again much referenced in the press, with Trump leading the charge. But how is this to be done? Cinemas, restaurants and so on might be reopened, but will they have any customers? Manufacturing could be restarted, but there is an article about China in the weekend’s Financial Times which includes the quote: “First we had orders, but no workers to fulfil them. Now our workers are back, but we don’t have any orders. My own goal is survival.”

Well, yes, what’s the point of providing goods and services for another country if that country won’t accept them? What’s the point in providing goods and services within a country if the customers aren’t there?

So if Trump manages to “open America for business” again (could that become an election slogan?), will other countries accept American goods or travellers? Obviously the UK would be the first to bend the knee and Trump might threaten dire consequences on the more intransigent, but there would still be the problems with individuals, or at least those who can afford to make problems: ie, lots of customers.

For any lockdown to end - in a real sense rather than by a mere decree - it will mean trust in governments from citizens and that may be in short supply. One reason for this in the UK can be seen on BBC1 each evening, though it is best not to linger there too long or too often. It will also mean trust between governments, and capitalism has no record of providing trust to anyone much; it’s well down the list below profit.

Again, we have an urgent need to get rid of capitalism to really get out of our current predicament, but even more so to deal with the global catastrophes facing us. The ruling class didn’t take note of scientific warnings over epidemics and found it too expensive to do anything much. They won’t change - we have to get rid of them.

Jim Cook
Reading

Circus of lies

Despite economics not being my strong point, I did manage to grasp enough of a lengthy and highly detailed article in The Guardian - one focusing upon how Covid-19 “almost brought down the global financial system” - to realise how flabbergasting it is that capitalism manages simultaneously to see itself and sell itself as anything other than sanitised but still jaw-dropping chaos, churned together with organised but still clinical-grade lunacy.

Another important aspect is how modern-day capitalism is a very different creature to the one perceived and then portrayed by most Leninist/Trotskyist outfits. Many corporations are less dependent these days upon ‘built-in obsolescence’ (and to that limited extent anyway no longer ‘rapaciously profiteering’), but far more upon a market-share-driven balancing act, so as to keep customers ‘loyal’ to their particular brand, product or business model. In other words, those capitalist entities are trying to remain within that hypocritical template of theirs, whilst simultaneously keeping ‘public opinion’ wedded to ‘Dream Society’ as a whole, as well as their particular taster of it.

The main point at issue, however, is simply this. How can Marxism expect to convince working people either of the genuineness of its cause or potential for its programmes if it so ridiculously misrepresents the capitalist system, within which those workers live and function? Many gain benefits from capitalism, while recognising the downside; they are prepared to pay the price in terms of the loss of some rights or other advantages - even some areas of basic freedoms.

But, of course, the price to be paid goes much further and far deeper than any of those considerations. And capitalism knows full well that’s where its weaknesses lie. And so it is, amidst this nominally organised chaos of the Covid-19 epidemic, that the Big Game lever-pullers have chucked all basic rules of post-World War II economic policy out of the window in order to save the day. But the question is whether even that super-manoeuvre will prove sufficient, or will merely postpone an even bigger and then far more damaging day of reckoning. That’s to say, a near total collapse with its associated dangers of mass disgruntlement - even becoming insurrectional.

In short: the net outcome of any and all such efforts at self-salvation from our esteemed capitalist elites is to provide stark exposure of their own decadence. In fact, anybody wanting to find top-notch family entertainment need look no further than 21st-century capitalism’s circus of lies and cesspit of connivance!

Bruno Kretzschmar
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Resounding ‘No!’

I understand the frustration of the Labour left upon learning about how senior figures undermined Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 general election.

But I think that this is an internal matter for the Labour Party and should not trouble your readership. Whilst it will have had an impact on the voters, it was not the real reason Labour lost in 2019. You have to face facts: it was because of Corbyn and McDonnell, and the manifesto. Voters didn’t like them and what they were offering. That is why they gave the Conservatives an 80-seat majority. Voters didn’t do that because the Labour Party was not leftwing enough. They did it due to the incompetence of the Labour leadership and their ‘make it up as they go along’ manifesto. That seemed to be short, in a literal sense, on where the money was going to come from, to pay for the wish list - though I accept that, due to Covid-19, the current lot are spending more than Corbyn promised.

To believe anything else is delusional. Neither Corbyn nor the Labour Party were offering socialism. They would, if elected, have preserved capitalism and tried to reform it. It was this he tried to sell as socialism. How many times have the left championed reforms of capitalism? Can anyone tell me where it has led to socialism? In a way it was beneficial that he was defeated, as he would have been unable to solve the problems of capitalism and the blame for this would have been placed at the door of socialism, thus hampering the cause.

Marx observed that we can only have socialism when the majority want it. At present, they clearly don’t want it or the version that Corbyn was offering. When they do, will we need leaders like Corbyn to get us there? The answer must be a resounding ‘No!’

Steven Johnston
Email

Vote Biden

Dan Lazare warns in his latest Weekly Worker article that the prospect of Donald Trump securing another term in the White House threatens dire consequences for democratic rights: “If Trump steals a second election, he will have a free hand to do whatever he wants amid the worst economic depression in US history. Instead of a constitutional democracy, America will wind up as a constitutional dictatorship - which is to say, a society in which ancient constitutional norms are used to reinforce a lurch toward authoritarianism. One-man rule will arrive ...” (‘Democracy is central’, April 17).

The threat of Trump and the Republicans using the coming elections to claim a mandate to implement their vision of racist authoritarianism is indeed ominous. But, having identified the threat posed by another four years of Trump’s rule, the question remains - what is to be done? According to Lazare, the electoral contest between Trump and Biden will present a choice between two candidates representing equally deadly threats to our interests - “a choice between cyanide and arsenic if ever there was one”. But to make that assertion Lazare must ignore facts, including those he provides in his own article.

Consider his example of racist gerrymandering and voter suppression by the Republicans in Wisconsin. Those anti-democratic means allowed them to hold onto a strong majority of seats in the state assembly in 2018, although the Democrats won a majority of the votes. The same means were essential to Trump’s capture of the White House in 2016. Lazare is indeed right to warn of Trump ‘stealing’ a second term rather than winning it.

But, when Lazare says that the Democrats are equally poisonous, he offers no evidence. Do they engage in similar systematic assaults on voting rights in order to steal elections? They have shown many times in the past that they are not above rigging elections when it suits them. But today the Democrats rely on people of colour being able to vote and have their votes counted, in order to stand a chance of winning. For their own opportunistic reasons, therefore, they can typically be expected to oppose racist gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Lazare’s ‘pick your poison’ gibe ignores this reality. It has disarming and dangerous consequences for charting a socialist course for the defence of democratic rights that are essential to the prospect of working class and oppressed people to organise in defence of their interests.

Consider the Wisconsin Republicans’ latest move in their war against voting rights. As Lazare points out, they weaponised the Covid-19 pandemic against the most vulnerable citizens - the working class, especially blacks and Latinos - by insisting on in-person-only voting. Lazare did not mention that the Democrats sued to enable mail balloting, so that all could exercise their right to vote; that was blocked by the Republicans. The Wisconsin Democrats’ defence of the right to vote deserved the support of all - we should now be demanding that the Democrats in Washington fight for the same provision in the presidential election. But to place such demands on the Democrats requires recognising the specific difference between their interests and the Republicans’ that Lazare blinds himself to.

Lazare ignores more than basic facts in equating Trump’s Republicans to Biden’s Democrats. Sadly, he also ignores the significance of his past analysis of the country’s mounting constitutional crisis. In his trailblazing study The frozen republic, Lazare brilliantly explained how the undemocratic checks on popular rule that were adopted by the ‘founding fathers’ in the constitution have led to the increasing paralysis of the federal government - a paralysis that inspired his book’s title. The constitution is virtually impossible to amend, since it grants veto power to as few as 13 states, which today could represent only 4.4% of the population. The grossly undemocratic Senate, in which the least populated and whitest states similarly wield disproportionate power, can nullify acts by the more democratic House of Representatives.

Today the Republicans are trying to unfreeze the republic by securing a new majority in the Supreme Court committed to an unprecedented, counterrevolutionary reinterpretation of the constitution. Republican judicial activists aim to end the treatment of the presidency, Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government, each checking and balancing the others. This set-up was devised to limit popular power, but the Republican goal is even less democratic. They plan to establish the presidency as an authoritarian “unitary executive” that is free to “decline to follow the law”, in the words of one of Trump’s Supreme Court justices, Brett Kavanaugh.

If Trump secures another term in office and can appoint at least one more justice, the far-right majority will establish such strong-man rule not simply by enforcing the “ancient constitution”, as Lazare suggests, but by dramatically overturning the way it has long been interpreted. And they will not stop there. It is well known that the far-right legal theorists aim to nullify the protections won by the civil rights movement and subsequent struggles by oppressed people, and demolish the gains of the labour struggles of the 1930s embodied in the new deal. The right of workers to organise in unions is an immediate target, and no social welfare programme will be safe.

To be sure, Democrats have done much to establish today’s imperial presidency, especially its ability to spy, torture and wage war. But they are not pursuing a sweeping constitutional counterrevolution; and in their recent impeachment of Trump, however narrowly focused, they took a stand against such lawless authoritarianism.

Under these circumstances, to follow Lazare’s equating of Trump and Biden is to aid disaster. He is right that Biden is “one of the most odious politicians the Democratic establishment has ever produced”. Nevertheless, a victory for Biden will avert the Republicans’ immediate drive toward authoritarianism and buy time for working class and oppressed people to use their rights to vote and to organise in unions to struggle against the imperialist-capitalist policies of both parties. Voting for capitalist parties despite their crimes when it is necessary to defend democracy has been a Marxist tactic from the beginning.

This is a vitally important argument to make. The fact that the Republicans and Democrats have traded power for so long, each in turn advancing anti-working class agendas, has blinded many on the left to fundamental differences that have emerged between them today. The Republican threat to unfreeze the republic by instituting racist authoritarian rule will only be aided if the minds of socialists like Lazare remain frozen in the past.

Walter Daum, Matthew Roberts
New York

Popular frontist?

I read, somewhat to my surprise, that I am a popular frontist, in the tradition of Earl Browder (whose popular frontism was so egregious that the poor man found himself on the wrong side of Stalin’s affections and excluded from the Communist Party he led for some years ... ).

In truth, the problem is a misunderstanding on the part of comrade Daniel Lazare. On the face of things, it is trivial and easily corrected. I do not advocate that the American left collaborate with bourgeois elements for a lowest-common-denominator set of ‘nice things’, but rather that they (a) fight to split the Democratic Party on class lines and (b) that part of that must involve a distinctive programme for actual democracy. The former claim is not explicitly present in the article comrade Lazare responds to, but is implicit in my criticisms of the Communist Party of the USA and the Democratic Socialists of America; and is explicit in many other articles I have written on the subject.

The second part is explicit, of course, and is the rather thin basis on which I am conflated with comrade Browder, whose kind words for Thomas Jefferson (about whom, so far as I know, I have never written a word in my life until now) are somehow projected onto me, such that they are “more or less what Demarty is saying today. Given Jefferson’s deep racism and conservatism, one dreads to imagine what this anti-Hamiltonian revolution would look like.”

This is what you would call a stretch. I claim merely that democracy has concrete determinants, and among them are the supremacy of a unicameral legislature, election and recall of all public officials, freedom of speech and association, procedural transparency in government, the right to bear arms and the militia system to replace the standing army, and so on. (The USA has some, not others, and has allowed still others to atrophy over the centuries until they exist in name only.)

If this is Jefferson’s programme, then fine - let us purge it of its racism and its romanticism of yeoman farmers and place ourselves, critically, in that tradition. I rather suspect it wasn’t, but do not know him well enough to say. It certainly wasn’t Hamilton’s, which is why his latter-day hagiography is so nauseating. Browder’s error was social-patriotism - that is, skirting over the unpleasant parts of Jefferson’s career, so as to burnish the CPUSA’s patriotic bona fides. We should no more be afraid to quote the slave-owner, Jefferson, than the slave-owner, Aristotle, so long as we do not paint either as uncorrupted by their social existence. (I make this point merely because this sort of argument is politically corrosive - it serves, for example, as an alibi for left liberals to dismiss the right to bear arms, since it only existed for whites for centuries and therefore served as a material factor in white supremacy. True enough - but surely the Panthers had the better response to that problem.)

But I - and really this is a we, inasmuch as this is the core of CPGB politics - further claim that this is a programme that can only be led by proletarian class forces; and indeed that there was never, really, a time when the bourgeoisie was a democratic class (as Lazare’s article seems to imply), if democracy is taken to mean what I have said. This is embarrassingly obvious in the present American scene - if I were really advocating a popular front with run-of-the-mill left liberals in favour of (among other things) a literalist reading of the second amendment, then I should surely be thought delusional. The point is to fight for what we need, and to bring along with us whatever forces we can - and decisive among the things we need are radically democratic political forms, in which alone the proletariat can rule, until it is itself dissolved in the higher stage of communism.

I think comrade Lazare and I share at least some analysis of the present bind - that American society is divided between an openly Bonapartist right and a liberal left, imprisoned in a neoliberal realism that is no longer terribly realistic; and that a key moment in that dynamic is the failure of corrupt, pseudo-democratic political norms. Perhaps we are merely in violent agreement, as the saying goes.

Paul Demarty
London

Hunger strike

This is to let you know that members of the socialist music band, Grup Yorum, have been on a hunger strike in Turkey for over 300 days. Helin Bölek, the soloist of the group, has died after 288 days. We are working to raise awareness about the continuing hunger strike of guitarist İbrahim Gökçek and another young man, Mustafa Koçak.

We demand the following:

As for Mustafa Koçak, an unjust verdict by a Turkish court changed his life and has brought him to the brink of death. Even under torture, he didn’t agree to be an accomplice in the political crimes and games of the anti-terror police, who wanted him to give names and testify against dissidents of the ruling AKP party. Another oppositionist was forced to sign a police protocol against Koçak and the result was a severe life sentence (at least 42 years), which really means a whole life in prison for Mustafa Koçak. His family and lawyers aren’t even allowed to visit him due to a Covid-19 ban.

The prosecution had nothing else against him and the person who signed the protocol might well be regretting what he did and thinking of withdrawing his statement. But the Turkish ‘justice’ system is not interested in getting to the truth. They just accepted the case put by the police and prosecution without asking for evidence, and they are not interested in evidence provided by the defence.

Grup Yorum Solidarity Committee
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