Shadow of Ran Events Hangs Over Mid-east Regimes

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The ripples from the stone thrown into the pool of world politics by the Iranian Revolution are nowhere more turbulent and intense than in the Arab world.

Every corrupt tinpot potentate in the Arab gulf, every American stooge or agent in the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Jordan, every Zionist landgrabber • now feels under threat from the great surge forward of the Iranian masses.

Every other: tyrant, colonialist and imperialist agent now looks over his shoulder each day, wondering whether he will be the next to go.

PLO leader Yassir Arafat was therefore quite right when during his recent visit to Tehran he spoke of the change in the balance of mid-Eastern politics.

• Palestinian struggle But of course this balance will only tip decisively in favour of the Palestinian national struggle by the mobilisation of the workers and peasants of the Arab world in the kind of mass struggles that toppled the Shah.

This requires a leadership that will develop policies to fulfil the socialist needs of the oppressed masses.

Despite the fact that the PLO has no such perspective, the collapse of a major imperialist bulwark in the area, the close links now developed between • the Iranian. bourgeois regime and the PLO leadership and the decision to cut Iranian oil supplies to Israel have combined to drive on President Carter's anxiety to consolidate the fragile 'peace' between US imperialism's chosen stooge regimes, Egypt and Israel (see other pages).

•Kurdistan But the ripples of the Iranian events are being felt even more sharply in the next most important of the national liberation struggles in the area-the historic battle of the Kurds for self-determination against the regimes of Iraq, • Iran, Turkey and the Soviet Union. • The recent death in Washington of Kurdish leader Mustapha Barzani, known to have received support in the past from both the CIA and the Shah, should now make it possible for this struggle to take a new direction.

Ever since 1925 the regimes of Iraq and Iran and Iran PLO leader Arafat takes possession have cooperated to suppress the Kurds, who have also been the victims of fascist attacks in Turkey.

The new vistas opened up by the Iranian revolution will present a new impetus to this struggle and a real challenge to the new regime in Iran.

This will also challenge the bourgeois anti-communists who run the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.

Saudi allies

These so-called 'lefts' and rejectionists' have recently ther building bridges for their own protection not only with their erstwhile enemies in Syria, but also with the reactionary regime in Saudi Arabia, with whom they have signed a security agreement.

Despite all the regime's sickeningly hypocritical "anti-imperialist" pretensions, Iraqi leader Siddam Hussein has distinguished himself not only by kicking out Ayatollah Khomeini as the mass struggles in Iran began to gather pace, thus declaring clear support for the Shah, but also by arresting and murdering hundreds of Communist Party members and other political opponents.

"Professional killer".

Such behaviour has prompted even Yassir Arafat to denounce Hussein as "a professional killer who has much in common with Menachim Begin". . And the British Morning Star has cafried repeated articles listing the Iraqi CP members of his new embassy in Tehran and: supporters jailed or murdered by the regime.

No such reservations have been shown by the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, however. As the waves of arrests of lraqi Stalinists reached a peak last December, "professional killer" Hussein with other Iraqi leaders visited Moscow, where they met Brezhnev, Kosygin and Gromyko..

Kosygin declared that the talks had:

"discussed in detail our further cooperation in the economic and political fields ... We have done everything so that our relations should strengthen still further."

Meanwhile, Iraq's British apologists-the so-called "Trotskvists' of the crisisSaudi despot Fahd wracked Workers Revolutionary Party-continue to depict Hussein's bloody Ba'athist regime as a revolutionary government carrying out a "socialist transformation" of Iraq!

Smouldering war

The Iraqis' more significant reactionary allies, the Saudi Arabian regime, however, is also facing renewed problems, as the long-smouldering war between its client regime in the desert kingdom of North Yemen and the Soviet-backed 'Marxist' regime in South Yemen has burst into open conflict.

Though the, South Yemenis remain a continuing thorn in the side of the maintenance of imperialist control, it is unlikely that they can be defeated by the North Yemenis who have hardly yet managed to establish a stable capitalist nation state, let alone an efficient army.

As we go to press, none of the 'ceasefire' efforts by the Arab bourgeois regimes has been successful in saving the North Yemenis from defeat. Fighting continues unabated.

and President Carter has come under heavy pressure from the worried Saudi regime to supply unlimited arms and aid to the North Yemenis and to bolster up the comparatively small-scale military forces of Saudi Arabia itself.

While such aid is being made available, it is clear that the US imperialists are doubly reluctant after the Iran fiasco of simply supplying sophisticated weaponry to inherently unstable regimes.

The sight of the Vietnamese airforce sending mixed squadrons of MIGs and captured US F-4 and Phantom jets into action against Chinese troops must also have been a galling one for US imperialist chiefs.

New fleet With this in mind there is now talk of the US itself stepping up its police role in the Middle East, with the possibility or establishing a new fleet 'in the Indiar ocean, and the dispatch at once of the aircraft carrier Constellation to offer at least moral support for the beleagured North Yemenis.

The crucial question as imperialists, bourgeois nationalists and Stalinists jockey for position and struggle each in their own way to shackle and defuse the revolutionary ferment in the Middle East, is for the building of Trotskyist parties in each country as sections of a reconstructed Fourth International.

Only such parties can offer the oppressed masses a clear perspective of independent struggle against dictatorial and feudal repression and for national liberation through socialist revolution.

As the March 15 deadline for the UN ceasefire in Namibia approaches, the entire imperialist plan looks increasingly near collapse.

The past few days have seen a SWAPO attack on a South African camp, South African reprisal raids into Angola and sharp denunciations of specific proposals made by UN Secretary General Waldheim from the South African government and its Namibian ally the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance.

The threat to the plan comes not from SWAPO but from South African determination despite guarantees the plan provides, to go for nothing less than a fully controllable 'friendly' regime.

Once again South Africa raises objections to the imperialist proposals with which it appeared to be going along: once again these are raised after a period used to strengthen its own position:

For the Namibian militant, both inside and outside of SWAPO and Namibia, SWAPO support for the imperialist deai has meant greater bureaucratic control and restriction of guerrilla activity by both the SWAPO leadership and the 'frontline presidents; greater. repression inside Namibia, a greater South African army presence, an escalation of South Afiican military attacks.

The same period has meant the military, financial and organisational strengthening of the DTA and other right-wing forces.

. This situation has been brought about by the SWAPO leadership's capitulation to an imperialist plan designed to preserve capitalism in Namibia-a plan described by the Presidential envoy from "Marxist' Angola as 'a victory for Africa and the world' It seems likely that for the SWAPO leadershp, the raid on a South African army camp which preceded the South African attacks was an attempt to safeguard their tarnished left credentials and restore some credibility as militants.

Such propagandistic military acts are likely to be stepped up if the South Africans finally declare a rejection of the imperialist Zig-zags from negotiated capitulation to_adventurist militarism in no way represent a break from a political tie to imperialism and its 'solution' of a 'reform' of the capitalist state.

The recent wave of strike action starting from the Rossing mine, together with continued military acts by SWAPO militants are clear signals that there are forces inside and outside SWAPO who are not prepared to give up their struggles in favour of a deal with imperialism:

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An earlier Sinn Fein demonstration on the 'H' Block issue A police surgeon has told police-military violence in the ITV nrnoramme Week- Ireland it is nereccaru to do 'age The level of anti-imperialist sentiment among the working class in the occupied six counties of Ireland has continued to rise, with a major demonstration through Newry.

The march of several thousand compared in size with those held during the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and shouted ' anti-British slogans along with denunciations of the sectarian RUC. • RUC men later attempted their revenge when they, launched an attack on the dispersing marchers.

. But the growing tensions produced by the anti-imperialist struggle continue to create political problems for the British imperialists and their Loyalist stooges in the RUC.

With half a dozen RUC thugs still due for trial on charges of sectarian murder of Catholic workers, this week has seen a former member of the "Northern Ireland Police Authority Complaints Commission" confirm publicly that there are some 20 "detective savages" at work in the notorious Castlereagh interrogation centre in Belfast.

"Suicide"

Castlereagh was the scene of the suspicious "suicide" of trage union militant Brian McGuire, and has for years been the subject of extensive dossiers documenting police violence against republican and socialist "suspects"

Amnesty has joined a world-wide chorus of protest at the beatings and torture carried out inside Castlereagh.

Now Mr Jack Hasard, an independent Protestant councillor from Dungannon has resigned from the Complaints Committee denouncing its failure to investigate complaints of police brutality.

He declared that:

"In. my opinion the police authority is guilty of a massive cover-up. They. simply don't want to know about what's going on." BOWE OYLE TO YEARS YEARS LIN A1 T HIVSIMIN TY YVILend World that he has seen 150-160 prisoners in Castlereagh who have received injuries that could not be self inflicted.

Such revelations will not please Labour's 'Minister for Torture' Roy Mason, who has himself been campaigning to justify the continued barbaric ill-treatment of republican prisoners in 'H' Block of the Long Kesh concentration camp.

But for the British movement to put an end to MARCH! Saturday 31 March at 1.30 p.m. to march to rally and trade union leaders. far' more than embarass Mason-it is crucial to start an all-out campaign throughout the unions and the Labour Party for 'his removal from office, along with the entire Callaghan-Healey leadership.

The barbarism of military repression will only be brought to an end when the troops are withdrawn and the Irish people have achieved the basic right to self-determination. assembling at Hyde Park n Trafalgar Square.

and NHS cutbacks threaAbout 5,000 students from all over the country joined last Friday's grants demonstration called by the NUS.

The Executive had made sure that no workers were able to attend by calling the march on a week-day ensuring that the fight for full, mandatory grants for all students is isolated from the pay struggles in the public sector and other sections of workers.

Gesture

Nevertheless, the Stalinist-dominated Executive made a . token gesture towards the public sector workers by having a NUPE bureaucrat on the platform at the end of the march.

This NUPE Executive Council member gave a demagogic speech about the plight of the low-paid and their 'industrial dispute' but managed to do this without once mentioning the words 'strike' or '£60 and 35 hours.

NUS President, Trevor Phillips made it clear in his speech that his latest plan for winning the grants claim

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