Ops Settle in After Slaughter

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until the threat of further insurrection has been stifled and the vast mining operations can be resumed in profitable peace.

Meanwhile the bourgeois press clings to its lie that the troops were sent to avert a 'massacre of whites'despite clear evidence. that only 200 Europeans have died compared with well over 1,000 Africans gunned down by imperialist forces.

The economy of Zaire will collapse rapidly into chaos unless this happens very soon, and already some mines have started working again.

But imperialism is tormented by the knowledge that an invasion in the near future even from a small body of half-trained rabbits would be almost enough to rout the army of Zaire, which is at present ruled by corruption, demoralisation and disaffection.

CIA funds alone cannot succeed in propping up the dictatorship of General Mobutu for very long against any organised opposition.

Despite claims by President Giscard d'Estaing that all French troops had been recalled, the commander in Zaire declares that he has received no such instruction and that paratroopers are to remain indefinitely. .

rtmouth Park Hill, London NW5 Mobutu But it is politically inconceivable that the French government could alone: guarantee the survival of Mobutu.

This situation has driven imperialism to seek a Pan-African 'peace-keeping' force, with, troops from every reactionary and pro-imperialist state in black Africa.

But such a proposal has been greeted without enthusiasm by bourgeois leaders who know what strains this would impose on their own political credibility and power.

Only Moroccan troops lave so far interyened alongside the French, and the pressure of continuing war against the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara makes it unlikely that Hassan's tyranny could undertake the long term defence of imperialist interests in Zaire.

The task of the international workers' movement-a task rejected by social • democratic and Stalinist parties throughout Europe-is to force the withdrawal of all imperialist forces from Zaire, to enable the popular resistance to Mobutu to sweep away this vicious military dictatorship and open up new avenues of revolutionary struggle in Africa.

Central to such struggle must be the fight for the building of a Trotskyist leadership capable of asserting at each point the leading role and political independence of the working class.