[rescinded after 1000 militants beseiged the barracks. The…]

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rescinded after 1000 militants beseiged the barracks.

The organised working class has also been flexing its muscles. Several thousand steel workers on strike answered the call of the CP and Trade Unions to march through Lisbon. However, the. CP is desperate to hold back the independent developments of the working class. They dominated the demonstration with the slogan: "Vasço must return!"

The stalinists, however, have made all sorts of statements about supporting the "counter-offensive of popular forces" and have correctly denounced Mario Soares call for an all-Europe conference of Socialist and Communist Parties to discuss Portugal.

These moves are a desperate manoeuvre to try to win back support in the forthcoming union Central to the Stalinists' strategy is to divert away from their coalition with PPD reactionaries and the right wing of the AFM in the sixth provisional government. The workers and soldiers now forcing the pace in spontaneous struggle must demand now of the various workers' parties that they break all links with the ArM and bourgeois parties and form a workers' government to carry through the economic and political changes necessary to defend ›jobs and wages in the growing economic crisis.

Central to this demand is the consolidation and extension of committees of workers and peasants which must link with committees of rank and file soldiers and sailors on a local, regional and national basis, paving the way for the all-out ctrumale for the sncialist revolution The Malaya: week finalised amount to the a police state -to contain the of liheration ian cabinet last measures that imposition of in an attempt rising struggle forces. Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak VL LUVARL decreed emergency legislation giving police and 'security' forces the right to round up suspects and hold them with The new repression: follows actions within the last month by the military wing of the illegal Malayasian Communist Party, including the blowing up of the 'National Monument' in Kuala Lumpar (the capital) - a 250 ton bronze statue celebrating the government's 'victory' (with the help of the most savage repression by British troops) during the "Malayasian emergency' in the 1950s and an attack on the headquarters of the notorious paramilitary 'Police Field Force'. This followed a series of other clashes in the countryside between liberation fighters and government troops and police, and the discovery of caches of rice and equipment hidden by guerrilla forces for use in future campaigns.

Abdul Razak's dictatorship is centring its drive on the villages in the state of Pahang, the poor, heavily forested region in central Malaysia east of the capital. Based particularly on the Chinese popul ation - an increasingly oppressed national group under the government's policy of 'bumiputras': preference towards Malay-speakers - the Communist Party is now thanoht hy anvernment snurces to POLICE STATE LAWS IMPOSED in almost every village in the area. To deal with this situation, govern ment officials are already debating the reintroduction of some of the most brutal measures of the 'emergency years.

One of these is so-called 'food denial' - severs penalties for carrying quantities of food around in the countryside - an open i admission by the government that it is dealing not with a minority but with. a movement that has mass support in the rural areas. provoked protest from almost the The new legislation has even entire Malaysian legal profession. As well as powers of prolonged detention, the authorities will also now make it compulsory for judges to give maximum sentences, do away with juries, allow denunciations from children and anonymous witnesses, abolish appeals to the Privy Council in London, and above all place the burden of proof on the accused person.

It is clear that the drive to the right by the Malaysian regime is an attempt to crush a liberation movement that has gained strength and encouragement from the victories in Indochina and the advance of liberation movements in neighbouring southern Thailand. Abdul Razak's government now returns - with the tacit support of the British government - to the same methods of police terror that were used in that 'emergency' by British officers. The British labour and trade union movement must take up the defence of the Malaysian workers, peasants and students, whose basic rights are again being trampled underfoot by a client regime of British

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isday October, even join the reactionary anti