Break Silence on Eritrea!

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Officials at the Soviet embassy in London last Saturday arrogantly refused to accept a letter protesting about the role of Soviet troops in Eritrea. -The attempt to deliver the letter was made by delegates from a 200-strong march organised by. the Association of Eritrean Students and Workers in the UK and supported by the Workers Socialist League.

Apart from the strong WSL contingent on this march, there was scandalous absence of any other contingent from the British labour movement.

Nearly all the supposed opponents of Stalinism and defenders of the right to national self-determination evaporated when called on to support a protest against one of the greatest crimes being perpetrated by Stalinism today-the participation of Soviet and Cuban troops in the Ethiopian military Derg's war of extermination against the long-oppressed people of Eritrea.

Eritrean speakers, representing the organisers of the demonstration, stressed the need for international solidarity with the Eritrean struggle, especially after the recent military setbacks.

They called for aid from working class and progressive forces.

'Socialist Press' issues a challenge to other groups which claim to adhere to Trotskyism to say why they do not support the Eritrean In particular we call upon the IMG, British section of the USFI, publicly to dissociate itself from recent statements in the USFI journal 'Intercontinental Press' by leading members of the American Socialist Workers Party, claiming in effect that the Cuban military presence in Ethiopia is evidence of Castro's proletarian internationalism (See 'Intercontinental Press' October 2 and our comment in 'Socialist Press' of October 18).

Even the French and Italian Stalinists last week issued statements showing (belated and half-hearted) support for Eritrea's right to self-determination and criticising the role the Of course, this is not a sudden conversion to proletarian internationalism by these Stalinists but more an adaptation to the anti-communism of the bourgeoisie.

But, as the WSL speaker at the demonstration stressed, there was no place for anti-communism and no comfort for imperialism in Saturday's demonstration.

It had to be seen as a demonstration not against the Soviet Union and Cuba, which the workers' movement must defend against imperialism, but against the bureaucratic rulers who usurp power in Moscow and Havana.

But impe as well rialism, brezhner as the Stalinist bureaucracy; is also the merciless enemy of the democratic rights of the Eritrean people.

The demonstration was aimed at the Soviet embassy partly, because the immediate enemies of the Eritrean workers and peasants are the Derg and its Soviet and Cuban backers and partly because that Soviet bureaucracy •IS a permanent obstacle to the struggle against imperialism.

The WSL speaker also said that the right of Eritrean • workers and peasants could only be fully won through socialism.

And that required the building of a revolutionary Trotskyist party in Eritrea (and in Ethiopia, Cuba and the Soviet Union) as part of reconstructed Fourth In demonstration which made up in voice for what it lacked in numbers, many of the slogans shouted by the WSL were also taken up by the rest of the march:

Troops out of Eritrea! Independence now!

Mengistu dictatorshipout!

Workers and peasants government-in!

Defend the Soviet Union! Out with the Kremlin traitors!

Arms to the EPLF!

For an Eritrean Trotskyist Party!

After this demonstration it remains an urgent task to redouble the campaign for concrete international solidarity with Eritrean workers and peasants who are being so cruelly exposed to the treachery of Stalinism.

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WIRKERS PR WI SILALD AB

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