[The Bingham report on sanction busting in Rhodesia…]

Scan page 12

The Bingham report on sanction busting in Rhodesia is a whitewash job with a very small paint brush.

In 1905, when Smith declared that his racist Govern ment would go it alone, the Rhodesian government was importing about 4,000 tonnes of oil products a year.

In 1978 it imports about twice that amount.

Never once in the 13 years of UDI has a garden gate in the white suburbs of Salisbury so much as squeaked for the lack of oil.

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Wilson The size of the market, compared to the entire African operations is not large.

The decision by BP and Shell and other multi-national oil companies, together with the South African government, to keep the oil supplies flowing was only secondly a question of maintaining profits on oil to Rhodesia:' Primarily it has been a political decision to maintain the white racists in power.

It is in that context that the Wilson "Government's decision to give a nod and a wink to the sanction busting should be seen.

Understatement

As Bingham put it in understatement of the year:

"It induced among some of those most directly concerned .. a belief that compliance with the Sanctions Orders was to be regarded as a matter of form rather than of substance, that it was the letter which mattered, not the spirit' He also says the Labour workers' inquiry linking the knowiedge of workers in London, Paris, New York and of the black African workers who have seen the oil arrive will bring out the full truth.

Already there is more than enough evidence to kick Wilson, Callaghan, Healey and the rest out of the Labour Party.

Let them join their former fellow Minister Richard Marsh in the Tory Party.

The pathetic bleatings of the 'lefts' are not enough.

Callaghan and Healey must be replaced with a leadership prepared to expropriate the minority interests in BP and Shell and open the books of the companies to an international inquiry of black and white workers.

The trial of Aubrey, Berry and Campbelf under the Official Secrets Act was journalistic It was stopped because the extent of clumsy state intervention necessary to secure conviction had been bubbling to the surface throughout the trial, which was rapidly turning into a public platform for the defence.

The revelation at the beginning of the trial that the names of all 80 odd potential jurors had been handed to the prosecution for security vetting had underlined in heavy ink the political frame up that was taking place.

But when it also became known that the foreman of the jury was a former SAS man who had served imperialism in Malaya, Cyprus and Northern INIT Carnival demonstrators last Sunday Ireland, the possibility of the trial rebounding caused the state to cancel it and start again.

This time there wili be determined effort to prevent the prosecution evidence from being made to look quite so ludicrous.

The charge of 'collecting information' against Duncan Campbeil is to be droppedwhich will reduce the number of occasions on which the prosecution will have to insist that the Post Office Tower is referred to only by a number.

The jury foreman it has since been revealed, volunteered for the job of chairing the jury and would not stop talking about the case, even at meal breaks.

Of Berry, the former soldier, he had declared that he "should have had a military trialstraight in, fourteen years, straight out".

Of Campbell, that he must have intended to pass his information onto someone.

----- pull-quotes -----

not stopped because of "gratuitous

gossip', as the judge, Mr. Justice Willis, claimed.