Phillipines Crack-down

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At the beginning of last week the army arrested en bloc over two hundred workers on strike in a factory in Manilla, capital of the Phillipines.

The strikers, who worked in a rope-factory, producing for export, were rounded up under the savage inartial law exercised by the dictatorship of President Marcos, and carted off to a military concentration camp.

This was only the latest in a series of acts of repression. A féw days earlier several hundred people demonstrating against the forcible evacuation of areas of the Manilla dems were also arrested by the amy.

The Marcos dictatorship, trad. tonally a protege of US imperialso in SE Asia, is now attempting • after the collapse of the US in Vietnam - a measure of diplomatic Te-alignment".

And, despite its utterly reactionay character, it is being enthusBenigno Zaccagnini, the party's general-secretary boasts through election posters that "the new Christian Democracy has already begun"

DESPERATE

But there is nothing new about the way the Christian Democrats in this election campaign are conducting a desperate and unscrupulous fight to hang on to their near monopoly of power.

Aided by anti-communist campaigning, by the Pope and clergy, their campaign has been strongly slanted towards getting some of the 9% of the votes cast for the MSI fascist movement in the last general election.

Violent incidents in the campaign are cynically used by the Christian Democrats (as they are by the Communist Party) to point to the need to elect a party of "law and order"

Some Christian Democrat leaders have even tried to use violence as an excuse to postpone the elections.

SHOT

In the most violent incident of the campaign a CP member was shot dead by a group of MSI fascists which included one member of parliament (Sandro Saccucci) and AnP menher of the

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*tically courted by the Stalinist premicacies in both Peking and