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The vast upsurge of and Bazargan has now joined the continued mobilisation of workers in the factories as a major threat to the attempts by the Shah's successors to impose their authority.

The continued occupation and control of factories by workers' committees is one of the chief targets of Bazargan's government which is desperately trying-often in opposition to the doctrinaire Islamic fundamentalism of Khomeini and the Khomeini committees-to rei establish the conditions for capitalist profitability in Iran.

To re establish discipline in the working "class Bazargan needs to reconstruct the bourgeois army.

Last week's resignation in despair of the army chief of staff reflects the fact that this has not yet been done..

Deserted

Soldiers have continued to desert in their hundreds and the units of the army which remain in, existence have been sent to try ito control the upsurge of anti-Khomeini •and antiBazargan ¡ nationalism in cried "Yes, we can. We don't want the army here. It must be destroyed!"

The "respected" Ayatollah was prevented from speaking any more and the microphone was seized by a Kurdish nation. alist who made a long and much applauded speech on the demand for all democratic rights including national self-determination.

While the military clashes in Kurdistan have declined since then they have broken out in Gorgan in the North on the Soviet border where hundreds of Turkomans, fighting for national rights against proKhomeini forces, have been killed and injured either by Khomeini's militias and Bazargan's army.

Turkoman peasants have been seizing land given by the Shah to army officers and senior civil servants.

The violent clashes, however, began in the main town of the region, Gonbad-e-Kabus, when a demonstration protesting The death that historyand Irish republican forceshanded out to Airey Neave on the car ramp of the Palace of Westminster last Friday has almost certainly thrown thousands of voters into the Tory camp.

The brilliantly carried out assassination of the Tory spokesman on Northern Ireland has made it harder, not easier, to fight in the British labour movement for opposition to British military rule of the violated and occupied SiX counties.

Yet it is now more than ever that socialists have a clear and inescapable duty to throw themselves against the tide of reaction and defend the right of Irish freedom fighters to carry out this assassination.

Neave is no innocent victim. He represented British company's plans. They wanted corporate bargaining in order to take power away from shop stewards and put it into the hands of full time officials and oppression of Ireland in its complete form.

He was the first defender of brutality by the British army, the loudest advocate of censorship of all republican views, and the strongest ally of Orange sectarian interests in Ireland.

It was on his advice that Mason introduced open SAS operations into Ireland and on his outcry that BBC TV put their final muzzle on republican statements.

His death was not murder, It was the legitimate execution of one of the most ruthless civilian generals in the army of British imperialism.

Neave's apologists present him as a hero of Colditz; a man who escaped from the most secure fortress of Hitler's Germany.

There is a bitter irony here. In 'H' Block at Long Kesh concentration camp in Ireland, victims of the British war machine are locked in a prisoner-of-war camp better guarded and far more cruelly run than Colditz:

Yet they are denied political status-let alone the luxury of being described as prisoners of war.

They live in filth and squalor that no tine war hero like Neavt endured.

No rights They have no Geneva convention to protect them, no status, no rights.

They are branded ..as "criminals" • and denied. even the most elementary trappings of an impartial trial.

Gerry Fitt's cringing statement that "Those responsible for his death might have killed a friend rather than an enemy' is a speech with which to bury the SDLP, not. Neave.

Labourites have once again rushed to join the Tory backlash.

In the wake of the Birmingham pub bombings the Preven-

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struggle for national rights in Iran against Khomeini

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