Kremlin backing foi Bolivian junta?

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Begin grabs Jerusalem Iran's Islamic" parliament has selected a new Prime Minister.

And in doing so it has deepened the gaping wounds which now disfigure the face of the leadership which has emerged in Iran since the overthrow of the Shah.

The selected premier, Mohammed Ali Rajaie, a fundamentalist close to the majority Islamic Republican Party, has been rejected by President Bani Sadr who is himself increasingly denounced by the clergy as a "Westerniser"

Khomeini

The guardian of the nation", Ayatollah Khomeini, has called for less conflict between the different sections of the regime's leadership.

But there is little doubt that, though he has not attacked Bani Sadr as openly as some of the other religious leaders, his strong, sympathies lie with the new • Premier and the most fundamentalist wing of the IRP.

The hysterical barbarism of this islamic crusade continues to grow.

Everyday the Islamic courts carrry, out several executions, sometimes by stoning to death.

The victims of these attacks are of many different kinds.

Everyday some of thern are people charged with "moral offences"-prostitution, homosexuality and drug trafficking.

Executions

Others are more directly political. 400 executions are expected of those alleged to be associated with last month's attempted coup against the regime.

It is hard to tell how many other political enemies the mullahs are disposing of in this convenient category; but they have begun to single out some left-wing leaders.

On July 24 Taghi Chahran, leader of a Marxist-Leninist group called Peykar was judicially 'murdered.

The barbaric inquisition has not yet begun to murder the leaders of the much larger left wing groups, the Islamic. Mojahedin and the Fedayin, though public threats against them are becoming more common from leading clergy.

This regime of indiscriminate terror is an essential aspect of Iran's new religious leadership.' Embarrassment But at the same time they are an embarrassment to President Bani-Sadr and other members of the existing government like Foreign Minister Gotzabeh, who are attempting to construct a regime which looks a bit less barbaric and theocratic.

Gotzabeh, like his predecessor Yazdi and former Prime Minister Bazargan, are already being publicly denounced by the more extreme mullahs.

(Bani-Sadr, himself, who has said that some of the executions are unnecessary, cannot be far The new Prime Minister has already said that he cannot work with the elected President.

And Bani-Sadr has said in his turn that he may appeal to the people over the heads of the Prime Minister and Parliament.

The question now seems to be not whether but how soon this conflict will erupt into full scale open war betwen the rival factions of Iran's new rulers.

Not even the undoubted desire of both groups to maintain and intensify the exploitation of Iranian workers and peasants now seems able to avert this fight.

Increasingly marginalised by the theocracy, Bani-Sadr and his friends are likely to turn to imperialism and the remnants of the dead Shah's regime for Only the pursuit of the independent interests of the oppressed and exploited and the fight to break them from reactionary religious leadership can permit the hopes aroused by the fall of the Shah to be fulfilled in the establishment of a workers' and peasants' government in Iran.

Bani-Sadr The desperate crisis facing the Begin government in Israel has further intensified in recent weeks.

A government which cannot even name a number of major Ministers and would be hard put to get a majority of one in the Knesset (parliament), has nevertheless supported the grabbing of 'settlements' in the West Bank and the take over of Jerusalem as 'the eternal capital of The Jerusalem measure was moved by an ultra-right wing member of the Knesset who does not believe Arabs have any right at all to live there, or on the West Bank.

It was carried with the support of the Begin regimedesperate for any measure to whip up 'popular support, and of the leaders of the 'Labour" opposition, unwilling as usual to resist in any way the most aggressive manifestations of Zionist colonialism.

In this situation in Israeli politics, the main pressure on the regime continues to come The steadfastness and heroism of Bolivia's 50,000 miners and their families, who have entered the fourth week of their strike to bring down the bloody regime of General Garcia and his cohorts, have thrown the military into crisis and made considerable headway in destroying the dictatorship.

Last week a British journalist who was later arrested and expelled, was able to visit the mine of San Jose, isolated from the main complex of CataviSiglo XX, where the workforce had retreated down the shafts to continue the stoppage while the bourgeois press had reported a return to work.

"Death to the fascists, long live the strike!" was the response of the miners who, with the aid of the local peasantry have stockpiled food for a siege of months if necessary.

The third week of the dictatorship saw a significant increase in repression, with the cutting of telex communications with the outside world on August 7 in an attempt to forestall press coverage of the carnage. from the extreme right.

The reluctance of the Labour opposition to force the pace against Begin, whom they could probably press into an election with little difficulty, is indicative of the fact that they have no way of dealing with the ultra-Zionists who are running the settlements, and carrying out terrorist attacks on Palestinian leaders.

It is this same pressure which seems to lie behind the article in the Washington Star of 7 August claiming that the head of the Israeli secret police-the 'Shin Beth'-was resigning because of Begin's reluctance to proceed against those who bombed and maimed the Palestinian mayors in June.

The author of the Washington Star article, David Halevy, in fact holds a leading position in the Israeli army, as do a number of other correspondents in Israel, such as Michael Elkins of the BBC.

It seems inconceivable therefore that Halevy's report did not have its origins in the highest reaches of Israel's rulers.

The last two dispatches to be sent from Bolivia contained two statements by the Minister of the Interior, Colonel Luis Arce Gomez.

The first said all was "peaceful and back to normal"; the second threatened union leaders with "military justice" if they did not order a return to work.

In the last week neariy all foreign journalists have been expelled, two jailed and an almost total censorship imposed only the rightist El Diario is allowed to publish.

This is principally because of d number of reports which detailed a new schism within the ranks of the military, faced with the enormous social cost. of implementing a Chile style dictatorship—or 'pinochetazo' The military commander of the key city of Cochabamba, Col. Vargas Salinas, Minister of Labour under Banzer, has withdrawn his support from the Junta.

A few days later he was followed by General Hugo Echeverria, commander of the motorized division in Santa Cruz, Bolivia's second city and Banzer's stronghold.

Echeverria has pulled his tanks off the streets and refuses to resign, while the powerful La Halevy even managed to locate the West Bank settlements the failed assassins came from, a judgement not denied by anyone else.

Begin's denial that he blocked the arrest of the terrorists and the secret police chief's denial that he was resigning over this may have been enough to convince ordinary Zionist supporters.

Skillful

There can be no doubt that the skillful israeli secret police could find the bombers that struck on the West Bank if indeed their membership does not include those involved.

However the task of finding such people is not high on their list of priorities.

Probably of greater importance to them is to pursue the kind of faction fight indicated by the Halevy article, with the possible aim of establishing an even more right wing government under the control of the military.

The new Junta Paz garrison has forbidden any of its officers to take part in the It may be that Banzer, in harness with the American State Department (which stated that it believed 'more moderate officers may soon take over'), is manoeuvring to oust his proArgentine colleagues with a remodelled dictatorship in a desperate effort to provide an alternative to both the crippled 'democratic' opposition and the present butchers who have proved incompetent imitators of his 1971-78 dictatorship.

Any such attempt to renovate the Banzer dictatorship is doomed to fail in the face of massive popular opposition, but it may still be chanced.

Meanwhile, the junta continues to imprison and kill relentlessly. Conservative estimates put the number of those held in the La Paz footbali stadium and the concentration camp at Viacha at over 2,000.

. The prime architect of this 'state of internal war' is Interior Minister Arce.

He was responsible for many of the murders committed by the army on the Night of San Juan' massacre of miners in 1967, is a drug trafficker, head of military intelligence for Begin the oppostion and retine torture methods.

It has been widely rumoured openly reported and does not seem unlikely that Juan Lechin, president: of the COB (TUC), was kicked to death by soldiers after he was forced to make a TV call for resumption of normal work four days after the coup.

Arce would clearly rejoice in Lechin's death but prefers the greater political efficacy of Argentine methods to those of Chile.

Videla himself announced extensive aid for the bankrupt Bolivian economy but the cutting of US aid alone will lose Bolivia $250 million in two years and with the Andean Pact and the major European states blacking the junta as well as the loss of income from tin sales, the dictatorship will require massive injections of cash if it is to survive for more than a few weeks.

When questioned about this, the new president of the Banco Nacional, Fernando Bedoya, a close friend of Garcia's stated:

"Everyone is going to be with us-Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chileand they will help us"

He added that arms and aid had been offered by Israel and South Africa and that economic assistance had also been proferred by the Soviet Union:

"Gen. Garcia told us not to accept it, but also not to refuse it because if the Carter administration doesn't change its position, we will talk to every. body". (New York Times, 7 August 1980).

If this statement is true, the treachery of Stalinism has reached new depths in actively bolstering counter-revolutionary murder at the very moment that the proletariat is fighting for its very survival, when the life and death struggle against imperialism is at its peak.

CP members

It was several years before Moscow began to sell T-54 tanks to Pinochet or enter into arms agreements with Videla; but in Bolivia there is now the prospect that the counter-revolutionary scum of the Kremlin will aid and encourage the butchering, present and future, even of their own supporters in the Bolivian CP, many of whom, honest workers, have already died in the struggle.

That such vile treason against not only Marxism but also elementary international worker solidarity is well within the capacity of the Kremlin was underlined last week by a visit to Buenos Aires of a senior Stalinist bureaucrat, Yuri Fokin.

Fokin made no mention of Bolivia at all, expressed some concern over Videla's refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and then went on to state that the Soviet Union was only interested in human rights when there were "massive violations" • detailing the cases of Ulster, Palestine and Chile but making no mention of the 20,000 deaths in Argentina since 1976.

What is also remarkable, at least in the short term, about the Kremlin's apparent move is that Hernan Siles' UDP alliance, Bolivian 'government in clandestinity' and is calling for recognition by foreign states.

This bourgeois democratic revival still stands to capture the allegiance of many workers, despite the fact that it did so much to disarm them in the face of the coup.

This development makes the struggle for Trotskyist positions and the call for a workers' and peasants' government in the midst of the battle against the dictatorship all the more critical.

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of which the Muscovite CP is a part, has declared itself a