N bans lett wing paper

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Fi textile workers march in support of the FSLN rancoistsfear army In banning the news- = tha narro paper El Pueblo on January 25 the Sandinist government has taken one of its most dramatic moves yet against the left in Nicaragua.

El Pueblo is the paper of the Frente Obrero (FO-Workers Front), an organisation which split to the left from the Sandinists in the early 1970s and now leads the armed, Anti-Somoza Peoples Militias.

We do not have enough information to make a rounded political assessment of the FO, but' the bureaucratic Sandinist moves against it seem to be very directed against any independent action of the masses in pursuit of their interests.

Severe sacrifice The Sandinist regime accuses the FO of organising strikes of industrial workers and seizures of 'private land by landless peasants.

The regime recently promulgated its new economic reconstruction programme which demands • years. of severe sacrifice and austerity from the workers and peasants.

The main aim of the plan is to restore a profitable private sector of the economy.

Publication of the plan was delayed to take account of objections to 'the original from the main local capitalist organisation the Higher Council of Private Business (Cosep).

ists as pital the ecospirat, envisages little extension of state control beyond the already nationalised former properiy of ex-dictator Somoza, plus the* banks, insurance companies and a few small US and Canadian owned mining companies.

coup The ghost of Franco still walks. Last week the man Franco made into one of his most talented political lieutenants-the present Premier Adolfo Suarez-removed from his command of the Brunete armoured division stationed near Madrid a man who Franco had appointed as an officer forty years before-General Luis Torres Rojas.

Torres . was sent to be military governor of distant La Coruna in the far North-west. (Franco had been similarly sent to the Canaries early in 1936 by the Popular Front government.

But today it is the "liberal, democratic" government of Francoists which fears a coup from the hardliners in the army and police.

Torres was reportedly •lotting a coup. . He had demanded that King Juan Carlos (Franco's choice to succeed him as head of state) dismiss Suarez. And he recently paraded his tanks, unauthorised, through Madrid to show that he meant business.

Torres' attempted* • coup 1s certainly not the first to have gone off half-cock in the four years since Franco's death and Spain's move towards a Francoist version of bourgeois demoThe most publicised. was "Operation Galaxy" at the end of 1978.

But that and several other It does f sidies and tax 40 most impr in the hope 20% below v the civil wai catastrophic level of unt estimated at force. No i foreseen. In Christmas bo wages was The FO (The People), active sabotag plan in orde back to th people", acc ment of "sell ariat to the lo The polic istas seems to get nalf-prom USA and th nurse the lóc to profitabilit Foresee giving s ub: : concessions to the ortant private fir :ms they will step up now probably s still what it was befi ore 1) and reduce i the and threaten ing employment, IOW 45% of the lab‹ rage increases are fact the norr mal inus of a mont th's withheld by the through. El Pue, blo has called for " the ge of the econor nic I to bring por wer e hands of the using the gove erning out the prol letcal bourgeoisie" ly of the Sand lin, be to go all out ito: rised aid from 1 the e World Bank, to al capitalists ba ack ly and so to pu It a publicised coup plans by maverick, adventurist generals are something of a smokescreen for a complete general staff whose "responsible" leaders are certainly ready to seize political control if the political situation gets any further out of control.

It was almost certainly under their insistence that Adolfo Suarèz declared virtual martial law in Euskadi (the Basque Country) only four weeks ago.

police and milane else the Basque separatist movement ETA have continued.

At the same time terrorism against the left by fascist groups has been stepped up. Seven left wing Basque nationalists 'have been murdered this year. 1 "In this atmosphere of mounting right wing terror and threats the political question in Spain today is When will Torres come back from La Coruna?' Franco was five months coming back from the Canaries.

The lesson of 1936 must be. seized by the Spanish working class.

*For the creation of an armed workers' self-defence militia against fascist and state *Dissolution of the repressive forces of the state!

*General strike against military coup!

•*Form committees of workers and other exploited and oppressed groups! Euskadi, Catalonia and offer *Self determination nationalities!

*For a workers' government! firm brake on any attempt by workers and peasants to seize factories and land or to exercise workers control and management of the economy.

But given the vast gap between the expectations aroused in the masses by last year's revolution and the miserable conditions they now have to live in, the regime is certain of growing opposition from the masses:

Twin strategy To deal with this contradiction the Sandmists are employing a twin strategy of building up bureaucratically dominated mass organisations, such as the Sandinist Trade Union Federation (CST) on the one hard, and repression on the other. * The banning of El Pueblo joins the expulsion of the Simon Bolivar Brigade last August as an example of the counter-revolutionary nature of the Sandinista "The revolution will continue, but with the essential aim of guaranteeing the development of the country".

President Bani-Sadr certainly has every intention of pursuing his political course to consolidate the counter-revolutionary triumph of petty bourgeois nationalism within the Iranian Full backing His struggle to end the US embassy occupation is now proceeding with the full backing of Ayatollah Khomeini-the very 'Imam' in whom the 'Islamic students' placed their faith.

Khomeini has agreed that the release of the hostages no longer depends on the return of the Shah and his fortune to Iran and so opened the way for final diplomatic haggling over the terms of reference of the international inquiry' and the terms of the 'apology' to be conceded by Carter's administration.

But the volatile political conditions within Iran leave BaniSadr no time to rest in complacency. .. AS floods sweep across south-western Khuzestan, violence has flared once again in the north-east:

After a demonstration by armed militants of the Fedayeen in Gonbad-e-Kabus, several days of fighting broke out when the army and the Pasderan attacked both the Fedayeen and armed Turkmeni fighters for national The Eighth Congress of the Polish United Workers (Communist) Party last week found its leadership in complete disarray not knowing which way to turn either in domestic or in international policy.

All the problems can be rights.

This latest demonstr. tion of the force of the nation I ques tion in Iran was followe I by an explosion within the armed forces themselves.

Turbulent

For a week, 2,000 junior officers and technicians from the airforce and army have been occupying the Tehran University, mosque, demanding democratic elected councils within the armed forces, in opposition to the government's moves to re-impose the rigid officer structure of the 'professional' army.

It. is against this turbulent background that Bani-Sadr is working to establish his authority and bureaucratic power. This project is involving a major shift of policy in the treatment of elements complicit with the Shah's dictatorship or collaborating with imperialism.

Many under arrest have been released, and there has been a dramatic turn from severity to leniency in sentencing.

Needless to say, this shift has not helped the still-imprisoned Trotskyist militants of the HKS.

Sickening display

The stalwarts of the Islamic clergy have fiercely denounced these moves by the ProcuratorGeneral Ghodoussi.

And in a sickening display of religious zeal, the Stalinists of the Tudeh Party have adroitly thrown their cries behind the 'anti-imperialist' bigots:

•What kind of Islam does Mr. Ghodoussi practice? The Islam: of the exploiters or the Islam of the dispossessed?" socialist economy' to meet the and peasants in the country.

growth was minus 2%, and that ruling team stands closer to the precipice than any of the other ruling Stalinist cliques in eastern Europe.

This frightening position obviously resulted in: some attacks of vertigo on the part of the leaders during the Congress.

The worst affected was the Prime Minister, Jaroszewicz, who until half way through the week unexplainedly stayed away from the Congress altogether, while : •othér bureaucrats took advantage of his absence to launch a whole series of criticisms of his administration behind his back.

Responsibility

On Wednesday he reportedly resigned and this gesture threw into the balance also the fate of other senior government ministers, including: Planning Minister Wrzaszaczyk. « Nobody has yet suggested (publicly, that is) that the real strong man of Polish Stalinism, Party Secretary Edward Gierek, might share some responsibility for the economic disasters.

Gierek's three hour report dominated the gloom-laden Congress. And its content, as well as repressive actions before the Congress, gave very clear evidence of the political plight of the bureaucracy.

The most striking feature of the speech is that it did not explicitly support the actions of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, nor did it utter a word against the policy of the imperialist countries. It did no more than regret the cold war.

This extreme reticence is no doubt a reaction to two things: to hostility towards the Soviet Union from the Polish masses and to the Polish bureaucracy's desperate need to carry on borrowing from capitalist banks in order to avoid the level of austerity measures which might mate. need for the coming year sear Failure to be able to borrow imperialists and avoid taking side of the Soviet Union in new Cold War.

At the same time however Gierek showed that he could not afford to be so flexible in his internal policies by arresting 12 dissidents of the KOR civil rights group immediately before the Congress.

But this repressive gesture now looks very like trying to hold back an incoming tide, since Poland is now awash with more or less open opposition currents of intellectuals, the Catholic church and most threateningly of all the working class.

All of these opposition organisations are making things increasingly uncomfortable at home for the Polish bureaucracy. But what, makes it fear for its life is the memory of the spontaneous eruption of working class fury in 1976.

The crisis of the Polish regime comes hard on the heels of crises with many similar features in two other Stalinist ruled states-Cuba and Vietnam.

Other Stalinist rulers must be fearfully asking themselves Who is next?' Whether because they feared what might happen if they left home, or because they did not want to watch the discomfiture of the Polish leaders, very few of them turned up in Warsaw.

There were no Party Secretaries at the ringside to watch the debacle. Most of the observers were pensioned off Politburo members including General Giap who was recently chopped as Defence Minister in Vietnam (though he is rumoured to be about to be promoted again in . a new reshuffle at the top in Hanoi).

After this disaster of the Eighth Congress the Stalinist leaders of Poland will not be. in a hurry to summon the Ninth!

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Wednesday February 20, 1980

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