Algerian minority fights for rights

Scan page 3

against the central government.

Correspondents of foreign newspapers have been forbidden to visit the region and the government party (FLN) newspaper brief mention of aily tion, used by foreigners to destabilise the regime".

But several reports speak of agitation in the towns of TiziOuzou and Azazga by students, workers and peasants from the neighbouring countryside involving demonstrations, factory occupations, barricades in the streets, assaults on FLN offices, official buildings and hotels and the burning of public buses and police vehicles.

: The university students of Tizi-Ouzou, who appear to have led the protests so far, are complaining about "cultural repres sion, farced Arabisation" and crass ignorance of rights of the Berber culture and language."

Berber students have also demonstrated in Algiers itself.

This agitation on national rights must be deeply disturbing to the bureaucratic military regime of the new President Chadli.

Berber people from Kabyle played a major role in the nationalist struggle against French imperialism and have provided many leading members of the FLN.

Despite this and the heavy economic spending by the regime in Kabyle, the FLN government, facing its first major political test since the death of General Boumedienne, appears to have lóst mass support in a key area of the country.

Repression

Chadli's only means of response to mass opposition so far is bloody repression-several deaths of demonstrators in TiziOuzou and Azazga have been reported-and an attempt to label the agitation "foreigninspired"

As in the easy to explain why. Berber nationalism should have surfaced at this point.

Indeed the termi Berber is misleading, since it embraces several subcultures who share little other than the fact that their spoken dialect is derived from the same root.

The most important group in number and influence are the Kabyles-some 3 million strong -in an Algerian population of 17 million-who live in the mountainous areas East of Algiers. .

The second largest are the Shawiyas-around 1 million; there are also other groupings, generally little involved in national politics.

: The: Kabyles-many of whom have emigrated to France in search of employment-are in general more Westernised and cosmopolitan in outlook than the other Berber groupings, but do not appear to suffer from economic or political discrmination at the hands of the central At the same time they must point out that the problems of oppressed minorities cannot be resolved in the imperialist epoch even by full political independence.

They can only be resolved by social revolution-one of the political conditions of which is an alliance in struggle with the working class within, the oppressor nations, and the construction of a Marxist leadership based firmly on the Trotskyist strategy of permanent revolution.

DONT LET TURKEY

BECOME ANOTHER CHILE Workers Socialist League Pamphlet Price 30p including p&p From WSL, BM Box 5277, London WC1V 6XX exported to capitalist Europe, where they "are opened and their real contents-best Soviet caviar -repacked and sold at astronomical prices.

The difference between the herring price received by the Soviet state and the caviar price realised on: the world market has been shared between the capitalist dealers and the Soviet officials they were in league with and deposited in a Swiss bank account.

Cracked

Last week the Soviet police finally cracked the racket and arrested 200 officials for what is being called one of the worst economic crimes in the history of the USSR.

in fact, of course, the caviar racket is simply a particularly dramatic sample of the kind of crime which goes on all the time and which the Soviet system of bureaucratic planning withqut any democratic workers control encourages, The "greatest economic crimes" of Soviet history are not those committed against the regulations .of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies; they are those committed by the bureaucracy itself against the masses of workers and peasants, millions of whom have died for the Stalinist travesty of the planned

Scan page 4

SOCIALIST PRESS, hednesis, April 30. 1980 possible legal action at the over the publication: by the of the policemen-one of whom hands of the Director! of poster describing the six-strong Friends of Blair Peach of a killed Peach.

SPG squad as wanted for report on last year's Southall The DPP is considering murder, and against the Sunday events commissioned by the whether to take court action Times for publicising the names NCCL has been published. It The policeman whose truncheon blow to the head killed Blair Peach already knows he is to get away scot free: but the Friends of Blair Peach who have fought to expose the murder face • Public Prosecutions! Meanwhile the independent condemns the council for allowing the National Front to stage its provocative moeting in Southall Town Hall; the courts for their biased handling of the cases of those arrested; the DPP; the media; the police for their brutal methods and racist abuse; and the Coroner's court hearing the inquest on Blair Peach. WORKEKS