Polish strikers challenge police state powers

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Walesa with deputy prime minister Jagielski Small wonder the Stalinist bureaucrats in Moscow, East Berlin and Prague are growing increasingly agitated by events in Last Weeks estened general strike in the Wirew region centred not on ::e largely economic demands a: previous mass struggles 17 Poland; nor was it focussed simply on the demand for independent trade unions.

Rather it focussed on curbing the repressive police state apparatus-on which the lavish privileges enjoyed by bureaucrats in Poland and in all of the deformed workers' states depend.

, The strike was called to secure the release of two supporters of Solidarity, the new mass trade union formed after this summer's strikes.

They had been accused of leaking and duplicating an embarrassing document on the dissident movement which had been produced by the Prosecutor General's office.

Investigation The strikers were demanding not only the release of the two militants arrested by state security police, but a full-scale investigation of the whole apparatus of internal repression.

Faced with the threat of another round of runaway strike action, the Polish bureaucrats agreed to special consultations with Solidarity leaders • to discuss union demands for:

*A cut in the budget of the Internal Affairs Ministry.

*A joint Parliamentary inquiry into the legality of the methods used by the police, the public prosecutor and the internal security service.

*The bringing to trial of those responsible for the deaths of workers in the 1970 strikes and for the ill-treatment of workers arrested in the 1976 stuzzies.

*Tie elease oi the iwo arested militants.

Ixe and point was agreed and implemented last Thursia!. This in iceit is a huge retreat by the pare Already Solidarity leaders nave salü that they wil now publish any and every siste document they obtain.

Weakening But to concede the other demands in full would be to open the way to an even more dramatic weakening of the police state apparatus in Poland.

The third point, for instance, would call into question the very survival of Communist Party leader Stanislaw Kania, who, as head of Internal Security in 1976, was the man principally responsible for the repression!

The fact that such politically charged demands are now at the centre of mass struggle in Poland is a dire warning to Stalinist bureaucrats throughout Eastern Europe.

At first the issue appeared only as 12th in a list of 21 demands raised by the Gdansk strikers. They demanded an end to the privileges enjoyed by the security police and Communist Party bureaucrats.

Such privileges include high pay, access to scarce goods, and special holidays in state Security rest homes at select resorts.

These material privileges of the ruling unlike the profits reaped by the capitalist class in the West, are not the natural outcome of a system based on private ownership of banks, factories and means of production.

They are the result of bureaucratic manipulation of an aconomy that rests upon nationalised industries and centralised planning.

The Stalinist chiefs' only guarantee that they can retain the wealth they have creamed if for themselves is their ability rough police and military ieziession. i contain the anger and militani e the working class and thus presse iner own political power.

If the enormously costly and extensive police and spy network were to be weakened, and the privileges of such parasites stripped away, the prospect of Polish workers organising to take state power into their own hands becomes increasingly real.

And if workers were to oust their bureaucratic rulers in Poland, their example, would swiftly be followed elsewhere.

This is why, even as the weakened Polish bureaucrats seek once again through concessions to hold off the moment of confrontation with the working class, their fellow bureaucrats in the USSR and Eastern Europe are preparing the ground for firm military action to beat back the Polish workers.

The Soviet newspaper Pravda has lent its backing to a hardline article by the Czech Stalinist leaders likening the situation in Poland today to that in CzechoSlovakia prior to the Russian invasion in 1968.

And East German bureaucrats, even more pugnacious in their stand than their Czech colleagues, have published attacks on Solidarity leader Lech Walesa accusing him of having links with Italian fascists.

Walesa, claims the East German daily Neues Deutsch. land, is an anti-communist who feels closer to West Germany than the Polish government.

Yet in the present escalation of struggle Walesa and West Germany may both turn out to be very useful allies for the Stalinists in their struggle for control.

Walesa was at the forefront of efforts to contain the struggle for the release of the jailed Solidarity militants. and pressed ior an immediate return to work. waming of army intervention. His links with the Catholic Church have brought him to play the role of "moderate" within the Solidarity movement.

Meanwhile West Germany along with other Common Market. countries, seems likely to offer cut-price food supplies from the massive EEC butter and grain mountains in an effort to stabilise Kania's tottering Stalinist regime.

A meeting of EEC heads of state seems likely to offer butter, cereals and beef to the Polish bureaucrats to ease the chronic food shortages-and to offer them on cheap long term credit that will minimise the burden on the chaotic Polish economy.

The last thing Europe's capitalist rulers wish to see is the working class carry through the political overthrow of the Polish bureaucracy: nor are they keen to allow a situation in which Soviet and East German troops intervene in an attempt to crush the Polish workers' movement.

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placed outside bakeries and rice Guinea-Bissau and the Cape was. Luis Cabral, brother of the experiments in social reform in renowned leader of the long and the liberated areas.

Amilcar Cabral was one of vas won and after the liberation the most radical of Africa's in 1974 his brother Luis became anti-colonial leaders and during leader of Guinea-Bissau and the long war against the Portu- Aristides Pereira president of guese army his party the African the Cape Verde Islands and Party for the Independence of secretary general of the PAIGC.

Wednesday The extreme political instability of West Africa was highlighted in the last two weeks by major developments in the chronic and bloody civil war in Chad • (including the arrival of large numbers of Libyan troops) and by two coupsone in the former French colony of Upper Volta and the other in the tiny exPortuguese state of Guinea-Bissau:

The political instability of the area is to a great extent the effect of its extreme poverty. Chad, Upper Volta and Guinea-Bissau are all estimated to have a level of national income per head little more than $100 a year.

As in a number of other countries in West Africa, this has been going down and not up in recent years, partly as a result of a sustained drought and resulting harvest failures.

Famine Countries, whose economy remains overwhelmingly agricultural have been suffering widespread famine and have been forced to import a large proportion even of their most basic toods. , It was the imminent social 'crisis caused by a rice shortage which according to most reports played a large role in thè timing of the November 14 coup in Guinea _ Bissau, a country in which for years armed soldiers have as a matter of course been Vieira distribution centres. Verde Islands (PAIGC) condycThe overthrown President bitter fight against Portuguese colonialism, Amilcar Cabral. nurdered before independenc Two countries were therefore nominally ruled by a single a number i of important political party; and it was the PAICG's policy to unite the two countries.

Amilcar • Cabral was In fact, however, very few moves towards unification were ever taken and instead the party in both countries declined as a mass political organisation, became increasingly separated from the masses, and developed growing rivalries between the RTY PAIGC Congress 1977 two national party bureaucracies.

In 'Guinea-Bissau, however, there was one particular feature of the separation of the party leadership from the masses-the fact that many of the leaders were racially not Africans but 'Mestizos' (people of mixed black and white racial origin), some of them originally Cape Verde Islanders like the Cabral brothers.

Not that this racial difference explained the growth of the separation, since during the independence struggle the same leaders gained general mass support.

Rather the racial difference may have come to be linked by many of the black African working masses with the privileges which the leadership of the PAIGC has come to grant itself.

While workers had to stand hopelessly in food queues, their leaders would pass them in chauffeur-driven saloon cars.

The cars, like much else in Guinea-Bissau in recent years, came from Sweden-gifts from a Swedish government which in Guinea-Bissau perhaps found its first neo-colony.

While other African countries are ruled by that famous ethnic grouping the Wabenzi (those with Mercedes cars. Guinea-Bissau became a looks 'Volvocracy' The scant reports from a country which most of the world's press ignores, suggest that the new rulers, led by the black African former military leader of the anti-colonial war Major Joao Bernardo Vieira, have made use both of the racial background and the privileges of their predecessors.

The new junta seized power in the name of opposing the union between Bissau and Cape Verde (surely a euphemistic way of exploiting racial feeling); and they speak of the need to remedy the corruption of the previous regime.

Most aspects of that corruption stil Iemain very little known because of the state monopoly of the press and the prévention by the PAIGC of any serious mass political involvement after independence.

But the new government says that, in addition to the economic privileges of the rulers, Luis Cabral's regime had massacred up to 500 of its opponents who have been found in mass graves.

But, however much the new government tries to isolate itself from its predecessor, it will be hard for it to escape joint responsibility.

Of the new government of twelve members no less than at the recent dev elo West Africa eleven retain the same ministerial responsibility which they had in the previous one!

They have enjoyed the same privileges as the deposed leaders. And if there were massacres, how is it they, too, were not aware of them?

It is hard therefore to credit the reforming intentions of the new regime which remains except for its top two or three figures the same as the old regime. And Vieira has certainiy said nothing about any plans for any real democratisation of the country.

But if the regime changes nothing internally it looks, as though it may mark a signiticant Sult in the international alignment.of Bissau.

Immediately after independence, Guinea-Bissau was expected to follow a cautious pro-Soviet line in foreign policy.

In fact its dependence on aíd from the western imperialists, and the energetic offers of aid and technical assistance from Sweden, meant that the Cabral regime was surprisingly pro-Western.

Sweden

The deposed leaders were very closely connected with Sweden-one of them, Planning Minister Vasco Cabral (no relation) has in fact been granted