Uge Turn-out for Sands

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Danish hunger striker dies isation. tenced to a total of about army personnel and severely. ilise" Spain. name of Rafael will probably • as well known f Bobby Sands. last week Rafael ed while on hunger I as it happens I starvation but of skull after a fall in I where the hunger i taking place, a fall his physical weakweeks of fasting. ene of hundreds of mworkers in the southern Spanish of Andalucia now • death in protest le material penury they are obliged to demands of this rowing movement I be more simpleWork! cry day those basic further from being in as a whole the mated) unemployI has now risen to lalucia it is much the underdevelopthe slump hits in two ways: local unemployment grows and workers who once emigrated in their tens of thousands to the more developed north are forced back.

At the same time the modernisation of agriculture forces farm labourers out of work.

£10 a week It is estimated that 90,000 heads of families in Andalucia are completely out of work.

And 91% of peasants (over 300,000 people) do not have a steady job.

Some of them can get some work in state organised public works programmes -at a wage of about £10 a week.

Even this is better than unemployment pay to which virtually noone is entitled.

The peasant workers? trade union has concluded the only way to gain a hearing for its demands are the hunger strikes.

To date, however, there is no sign at all that the government is paying them At be 1pa the slightest attention.

And this fact is leading to the rapid build-up of social resentment in the south which is constantly expected to erupt into violent mass mobilisations.

At present the government and the Francoist army appear to regard this threat from Andalucia as little more than a sub-plot to the main drama which is unfolding in Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque country in the north.

The last two weeks have seen a terrifying intensification of the threat of an all-out military coup in the wake of new terrorist attacks on officers of the armed On May 4 an army general was killed in Madrid and two para-military Civil Guards shot dead in Barcelona.

GRAPO

first this was thought 1 continuation of the gn of ETA-muitar, sque nationalist organisation.

The police, however, have pointed their finger at GRAPO-the 1 October Anti-fascist Resistance Group, an organisation which claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks since October 1975.

It claims to be the armed wing of the Maoist Reconstructed Communist Party.

There was then considerable speculation, especially on the left as to whether GRAPO was a group of Francoist • provocateursor at least had been infiltrated by the far right.

And that speculation has resumed after these new attacks.

But whatever the nature of GRAPO, the timing of its latest activities is easy to link not with a specific attempt to further provoke the military high command but, as most British: bourgeois papers have failed to mention, with retaliation for anti CRAPO action by the state.

On April 30 an alleged leader of GRAPO, Jose Maria Sanchez. Casas was senNo banners. No placards No leaflets. No papers. The political message underlying the funeral procession for Bobby Sands was rammed home simply by the colossa turnout of support from the whole Catholic community of Belfast and the six counties.

Long before the service or the procession began, thousands had assembled around the church on Sands' Twinbrook estate: and thousands more arrived-on foot from other Catholic areas of Belfast, by coach from around the six coun ties, and by train from Dublin and the south. Many were ferried up the Falls Road free of charge in a shuttle service by the famous fleet of black taxis.

But this never ending stream of supporters was dwarfed in numbers by the crowds that lined every yard of the 3½ mile route of the procession. Shoulder to shoulder, often three or four deep,. the crowds that waited in pouring rain were a complete cross-section of the Catholic working class-smali children, skinhead youth, teenage girls, men and women young and old.

Black flags hung from windows and from lamp trike tenced to a total of 150 years in prison.

If GRAPO really does exist as an independent group then its latest acts were clearly aimed to be retaliation for the sentence of Sanchez.

And if they were the acts of provocateurs then they were almost certainly designed to give a pretext for the open mobilisation of fascists which took place in the following few days at which slogans were shouted calling on the army to seize power.

Devotion The parliamentary politicians fell over each other in their rush to condemn the killings, to declare their devotion to the Francoist generals and to prevent any working class response.

Within days they were assailed by a new crisis wnen ETA militar launched a daring new attack in Madrid in which a bomb placed on the roof of a car killed three from Belfast posts. Painted H-Block slogans adorned every yard of free wall space.

Illegal republican tricolours fluttered from houses and convenient poles.

All shops, bars and pubs were closed the length of the Falls Road, Porters and catering staff at the Royal Victoria Hospital failed to turn up for work: elsewhere too many Catholic workers stayed off work to attend the funeral.

Traffic was at a standstill -with the RUC and army tactfully out of sight, concentrating only on preventing the march travelling past Woodburn RUC station and the Protestant Suffolk estate.

Reporters suggested that hundreds of republicans had travelled from Dublin.

Obviously hundreds had also come from abroad. But of the 70,000 strong turnout it was clear that the bulk had come from the six counties -more than 10% of the entire Catholic population.

"And they keep telling us Bobby Sands had • no support!" triumphanțly exclaimed a number of women on the route of the march on hearing my English accent.

But the show of support for Bobby Sands proved to army personnel and severely. injured a general closely associated with King Juan Carlos.

This time the government responded by offering the resignation of the Interior Minister, the confinement of all army personnel to barracks "for their own safety" and the calling, along with the Socialist and Communist Parties of a two minute strike "in protest against terrorist provocations".

The leaders of the two main workers' parties have, ever since the present acute political crisis began with the attempted military coup of February 23, become less and less capable of saying or doing anything independently of the "democratic" bourgeoisie.

Now they have reached the grotesque depths of calling a strike-the weapon of combat of the oppressedin defence of Francoist generals.

Along with the UCD they chorus that the killings of army officers are a provocation designed to "destabbe more than mark of respect.

The mood was serious but confident: everyone knew it was the biggest ever protest by the Catholic minority in the North against its oppression by British imperialism and the sectarian Orange state machine.

Everyone felt that Sands' struggle, far from closing a chapter in the struggle, had helped unite the nationalist population and open new possibilities.

International supportdemonstrations in the USA, the naming of a street after Sands in Tehran, denunciations of the Thatcher government by Socialist and Communist newspapers in Europe-helped to reinforce the view that Sands' struggle had not been in vain.

With his fellow H-Block prisoner Francis Hughes now nearing death on hunger strike; with Ray McCreesh and Patsy O'Hara also seven weeks without: food; and with Joe McDonnelf now beginning a similar fast to the death and 100 more waiting to join the hunger strike there is no sign that the republican movement will slacken the pace of the fight.

And Sands' Belfast funeral shows that there is no sign that the Catholic people will let them fight alone. ilise" Spain.

In part, of course, this is true of ETA-militar and also of GRAPO.

Revolutionary socialists are critical of a deliberate strategy of provocation towards the military.

Autonomy

But revolutionary socialists also call for a massive campaign to destroy the oppressive Francoist army, in favour of the rights to full autonomy for which the Basque freedom fighters are struggling and for the independent mobilisation of the working class against the power hunger of the Spanish military and also against the present UCD government and its reactionary policies.

The Socialist and Communist leaders have no right to condemn the attacks on the military as provocations because they do nothing to prepare the resistance of the working class or to defend its rights or those of the oppressed nationalities.

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LIST PRESS, Thursday May 14,1981 Th

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SAITS DU PEALEAN