NOV An open letter to the British Communist P

Scan page 4

•Pinochet's barbaric crackdown in Chile ACT We are writing to call upon the British Communist Party to play a role in attempting to avert what threatens to be a tragic repetition of the Chilean catastrophe-the emergence of a military/fascist dictatorship in Turkey.

We believe that unless a sharp turn is made by the workers' parties and the trade unions in Turkey, there is a real danger that the current campaign of violent provocations by the alliance of extreme right wing and fascist forces will lead to a military coup with the aim of brutally crushing the Turkish workers' movement.

Faced by an insoluble economic crisis that has been worsened immeasurably by the recent oil price increases, the Turkish bourgeoisie is increas ingly desperate in its attempts to increase the exploitation of the working class.

Despairing of the ability of Prime Minister Ecevit and his Republican Peoples Party to carry through "austerity" measures on the scale demanded by the imperialist International Monetary Fund, sections of the Turkish bourgeoisie have consciously turned to the creation of a mass fascist party-with half a million members it is the biggest in the world.

The strategy of the fascists has been to use a mounting campaign of violent provocations against the workers' movement, both to intimidate militant workers and to force the Ecevit government into the imposition of savage martial law restrictions which are used almost exclusively against the unions and the left wing.

While 1800 workers and leftists have been murdered by fascists, Ecevit's martial law has led to the suppression of all workers" papers in Istanbul and Ankara, and to mass arrests of those trade union and political leaders that attempted to stage the traditional May Day demonstration this year.