'Left' Iraqi regime purges Communists

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The sole remaining 'treaty of friendship between the Soviet bureaucracy and Arab nationalists will shortly join all the others in the dustbin.

This time it.is the leaders of the Iraqi state who have moved to inflict a further humiliating blow against the crumbling : strategy of Stalinist diplomacy in the The government last week accused the Polish Stalinists of shifting support from Arab nationalism to the Israeli state.

Now, it has threatened to break diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union unless all military aid to the Ethiopian military dictatorship is halted.

The major partner ruling coalition is the Ba'ath Party of moderately radical bourgeois nationalists.

But the other group which formed this 'National Progressive Front' in 1973 was none other than-the Iraqi Communist Party!

The days of this Popular Front are clearly numbered.

14 Communists are reported to have been executed in the last month, and the Ba'athists have produced a wide range of attacks on the CP.

Supporters of the Ba'ath argue that 'political and popular losses have relegated the [CP| to an inferior position in an organisation which it led in the past' More particularly the Stalinists have been charged with raising 'doubts about stability in Iraq' and seeking 'to drive a wedge between the Kurdish people and the Whatever the truth behind these unconvincing accusations, the motives of the bourgeois nationalists can be in little doubt.

The Iraqi regime has mouthed the most left' positions of any Arab state on the Palestinian struggle, and along with Syria and the PLO now provides the Eritrean liberation fighters with their only material These positions have won them the recent uncritical admiration of the Workers Revolutionary Party's daily paper Newsline.

But the Ba'athists' turn against Stalinism in no way indicates that they are being inevitably drawn towards the spontaneous pressure of the masses.

These Bonapartists certainly need to contain the anti-imperialist consciousness of the Iraqi workers and peasants by adopting a radical' foreign policy:

Yet far from working to transform capitalist property relations as Newsline has suggested, they are now engaged in forging much stronger economic bonds with imperialism.

These events in Iraq point sharply to the necessity for building a Trotskyist party which can fight against the betrayals of Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism in leading to the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism and the seizure of power by the proletariat.

Begin As in many Arab financial transactions, this involved complicated relationship between the various capitalist powers in the area.

One of the ways this operates in this case is through petro-dollar loans from Saudi Arabia, acting in part as an agency for the US As the Financial Times put it diplomatically on 26 'The Saudis have let it be known that they wish to much stricter programme of economic control in Egypt"

Further attacks on the economic conditions as well as the democratic rights of the Egyptian masses can be confidently expected as a result of the pressure of those well-known supporters of human rights, imperialist President. Carter and the feudalist Saudi Arabian leaders.

A struggle by the Egyptian workers is also inevitable against them.

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The events of the last few weeks in Latin America seem to mark a turning of the political tide. militant worker, countries, countries.

struggles and mass mobilisations have begun to show on a continental scale that the stability of Latin America's military dictatorships: was not as profound as had appeared.

In one country after another the working class and mass movement has shown through the renewal or the intensification of struggles that despite the setbacks (many of them major reverses) of the last decade the working class of Latin America has not suffered a decisive historic defeat.

The readiness to struggle has survived the worst that the repressive, pro-capitalist Latin American dictators can inflict.

Open defiance

In Chile on May 1, 4½ years after the bloody coup of Pinochet in which 30,000 workers met their deaths, 5,000 workers once more came onto the streets of Santiago in open defiance of a government ban on demonstrations.

600 of them were arrested and fined.

There was visible (and in the eyes of Pinochet's increasingly divided junta, alarming) evidence that 30,000 murders and tens of thousands of jail sentences and. "disappearances" are not enough to crush the resistance of the workers' movement.

The fourteen year old military dictatorship in Brazil-imperialism's Latin American showpiece-has received a similar shock in the last two weeks.

In Brazil too the first May Day trade unionist meetings since 1968 took place in spite of a government ban.

Strike

Then on May 16 only a few days after receiving a wage increase which was manifestly insufficient to cover them against the raging inflation, 2,000 workers in the Saab/Scania motor and lorry plant in Sao Paulo went on strike to demand an immediate additional 20% increase. • That in many parts the world would be a predictable enough event; in Brazil it was the first strike for 10 years.

And within a few hours the Saab/Scania workers were joined by 20,000 other workers from Sao Paulo's motor plants (Ford, Volkswagen, Mercedes and others).

Carter It was only hesitantly that Geisel's regime, faced with such an unexpected challenge, declared the strike illegal.

The employers, however, conceded a, large proportion of the workers demands in the hope of ending the action before it set off a strike wave in other industries.

Latest reports say that most of the strikers have now returned to work.

But the self-confidence of Brazilian capitalists and Geisel's shaky dictatorship has received a blow from which it cannot quickly recover.

The blow comes at a moment when the Brazilian ruling class is increasingly divided about the succession to Geisel who is due to be replaced in presidential elections later this year.

Geisel's candidate, secret police chief Joao Baptista Figueiredo has not been universally accepted by his military rivals.

And although Figueiredo's campaign is being financed by American "multi-national corporations" it is known that many sections of both domestic and international capital are very uneasy about the declining prestige of the dictatorship combined with the new rise of workers struggles.

The reason why such a measure might be seriously contemplated by US President Carter is that Peru is now one of the two countries of the Latin American continent where imperialist rule is most threatened (though the Soviet Union-by rescheduling debts and sending military aid - is still trying to save Bermundez).

The other one of the two is undoubtedly Nicaragua, where the political death warrant of the dynastic tyrant Somoza has been outstanding for several months.

Daily events

Violent demonstrations and polițical strikes against Somoza have been common for some time.

But in the last four weeks they have become daily events.

Even schoolchildren have begun widespread protest occupations of their schools.

Frequently as many as 10% of the population of the capital Managua have taken to the streets.

Their confidence cannot be increased by observing what looks to be the impending collapse of the dictatorial military regime in the neighbouring countries of Bolivia and Peru.

In Bolivia, too, presidential elections are due within a few weeks though it is now an open secret that dictator Hugo Banzer, who seized power in 1971, would like to prevent them from happening.

Out of control

His attempt to introduce the appearance of democracy to his dictatorship has increasingly got out of his control as the workers have reestablished their organisations and strength over the last few weeks and as Banzer's support even within the army has melted away.

Banzer has tried to stamp out the new wave of protest by closing the universities and trying to stop the reorganisation of the trade unions.

But the question on the agenda in Bolivia is now whether Banzer himself can survive until the elections are due (in July) and whether the elections will themselves be overtaken by events.

This is precisely what now happening in Peru.

The right wing dictatorship of General Morales Bermudez, plagued by an almost catastrophic economic crisis, had scheduled elections to a powerless "constituent assembly" to take place on June 4.

Last week the regime faced a virtual mass uprising and in panic "postponed" its elections, putting many of the candidates in jail.

The occasion for the new political crisis was a new attempt by the regime to get its long-solicited IMF loan.

Clockwise from top left, Berr Geisel The financial situation is now desperate with debt repayments and. interest expected to eat up a staggering 55% of Peru's expected export earnings this year!

In order to satisfy the IMF of its capacity to repay any new loans the Morales Bermudez regime has introduced a series of austerity measures in which working class living standards have been sharply cut.

In addition a new anti-trade union law has been promulgated, and universities closed down. .

For some weeks. now these actions have provoked growing working class resistance and there has been a sharp rise in the number of strikes (supported even by the Peruvian Communist Party, which backed the military regime for nine years after it seized power in 1968).

Two weeks ago the regime removed food subsidies, producing a vicious leap in the prices of the basic foods consumed by workers and peasants.

Virtually all workers' organisations in Peru seem to have united last week in supporting • a two day nation-wide general strike.

This followed general strikes the previous week in Cuzco and Arequipa, during which workers were savagely attacked by the army.

At least 26 workers have been killed by the army and security police who nudez, Somoza, Pinochet and have also carried out wholesale arrests of local and national working class organisations.

In spite of this the strike has reportedly been almost complete, bringing Lima and the main cities to a complete halt.

The new economic measures are still not enough to satisfy the IMF which, given the political crisis, suggests that the imperialists may be actually attempting to promote the regime's bankruptcy and default in order to justify direct imperialist military intervention.

Although Carter has recently congratulated Somoza on his "restraint" (after he had just killed 'only' 30 people in a demonstration), even the US is beginning to tire of its faithful old servant.

But the major left wing action and working class organisations have pursued criminally collaborationist policies which have kept the rotting tyranny in power and will help to lead to its replacement by another pro-imperialist regime.

The Nicaraguan Stalinists (the Nicaraguan Socialist Party-PSN) have recently in fact been the only political party to take up dictator Somoza's recent, desperate offer of negotiations.

The PSN is also a part of a popular frontist alliance known as UDEL which includes Tories, Liberals, Social Christians and other sworn enemies of the working class.

The Sandinista guerrilla movement has also recently moved into popular front Major riot These are not the only examples in Latin America in the last few weeks of working class resistance and evident ruling class weakness.

In Colombia and Mexico there have been important strikes.

In Ecuador last month a major riot followed an increase in bus fares. And there too the government is threatening to "put off" the proposed elections.

In the Dominican Republic the outcome of the "election" is still uncertain and producing a particularly tense political situation.

The evident strength of the working masses, 'however, is nowhere matched by a principled leadership fighting for working class independence in . the fight against dictatorship and imperialism.

All over the continent Stalinist and "guerrillaist" leaders have shown and continue to show that they are incapable of fighting imperiarism and its agents.

Only guarantee The opportunity to build new leadership and revolutionary Trotskyist parties, to mobilise the independent strength of the working class at the head of these massive upheavals, however, now exists to an extent which has not existed for several years.

It is the building of these parties, based on the struggle for the demands which start from the material problems faced by the working masses and lead to an awareness of the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, which will be the only guarantee that today's new militant struggles will end not in new defeats but in workers' power.

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Startling. new evidence has come to light of the deep complicity between TGWU officials. and British Leyland management in the victimisation of Alan Thornett and other shop stewards at the Cowley Assembly Plant.

The evidence contained in a 19-page dossier submitted to the TGWU by Leyland management in order to support their continuing refusal to recognise Alan Thornett as deputy convenor of the Assembly Plant-a position to which he was elected by shop floor ballot last