Healy saugh n his own net

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Still in the throes of its "worst financial. crisis for a decade" • Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party is now up to its neck in an even more intractable political mess.

For severai years Healy has scandalously and without scruple grovelled to the most motley array of Middle East despotisms and petty bourgeois nationalists.

The WRP's daily Newsline has been turned into a British press agency churning out uncritically reams of left' demagogy and anti-imperialist statenents. from the bloodstained regimes of Libya, Iraq and Syria, and from the Arafat leadership of the Palestine Libe Liberation Organisation (PLO).

More recently the WRP switched its position on the Khomeini Islamic regime in Iran dropping its criticisms and accusing those who. supported the struggles of Iranian women for democratic rights, and those who denounced the massacre of gays and the oppression of national minorities in Iran of opposing the Iranian revolution.

Opportunist web

But the evolution of events has now trapped the WRP in its own opportunist web.

The new upsurge in the historic liberation struggle of the Kurdish national minoritycurrently oppressed by the bourgeais governments of Turkey, Iran and Iraq-has come at a time when the tragi Ba'athist dictatorship fear above all the growth of a mass movement that might oust them from power.

They have responded by a vicious anti-communist crackdown in Iraq-jailing thousands of students and trade unionistsand with savage aerial bombing of the Kurds not only inside Iraq's borders but also reaching into Iran.

The Khomeini/Bazargan regime, though equally hostile to the Kurds' struggle for self-determination, has for its part called for a mass uprising in Baghdad to oust the present Ba'athist 'gangsters and tyrants' and replace them by a rule of divine justice' But the WRP's problems are more complex still. In their struggle against repression from