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calm" The most prominent of them, The number of political prison- remain effectively under house The final days of 1976 were marked by murder and carnage in the black "townships" of South Africa.

According to the South African police, 12 blacks were killed and hundreds of others wounded. Forty six of the dead were in the province of Natal, 26 in the suburbs of Nyanga, Gugulato and Langa around Cape Town.

Hundreds of others were wounded and thousands made homeless as a result of arson.

OFFICIAL VERSION

The official version of these events given by the racist police is that the deaths and injuries were suffered mainly by black students and resident workers who had attacked migrant workers who then retaliated. The migrants were refusing to participate in a planned "Christmas of mourning" for the hundreds of blacks murdered by the police earlier in the year.

Although the Vorster regime's censorship makes it hard to establish the exact truth, there can be no doubt that its account is a lie.

Tensions certainly exist between migrant workers and others in the ... Continued from Front Page Christmas Day speech to the national conference on agriculture could be expected to arouse opposition in important sections of the working class and peasantry.

Alongside the routine obeisances to Mao and the denunciation of the 'gang of four' and Soviet 'social imperialism' came demands for higher output and labour productviry. and to 'systematise norms and national standards' in industry.

This - put more bluntly seans a policy of aliowing pay. -fierentials to be revived in the enterprise (such differentials were ase of the main targets of the Cultural Revolution.) and a turn :aards the 'economic' pricing of #: e35: consumer products.

Suh a policy will mean an -e=s cation of work loads, and = : the living standards of the x7=: ?2d. while leaving intact the Fieges of the bureaucratic layers.

TrE regime is attempting to =2=6 = opposition to its policies 1s see termented by the 'gang of 10It eaky. though. Chiang Ching 207 ==: supporters never went The limits of a struggle TECT ibe bureaucracy: just as black urban areas but, as last Sep tember's events in Soweto proved the hostility has been systematical ly fostered by the police.

WHIM

Migrant workers are exceptionally low-paid even for South Africa and they can be sent back to the destitution of the "tribal homelands" they came from at the whim of the white authorities.

This allows the police to bribe and threaten them into taking action against the leaders of the growing organised movement of rebellion among South Africa's urban blacks.

Eye-witnesses have consistently reported provocative actions by the police over the last two weeks of slaughter; and hospital evidence shows that a large proportion of the dead and injured had been shot down by police bullets.

The police casualty figures for the past two weeks should probably be at least doubled.

A detailed report sponsored by the Rand Daily Mail, The Cape Times and the South African Institute of Race Relations has revealed that since the black uprising first broke out in Soweto Chinese workers much as Hua, the so-called 'radicals' were anxious to avoid any real political mobilisation of the Chinese masses, with all the dangers this would bring for the rule of the bureaucracy as a whole.

It is because the 'left' are part and parcel of the bureaucracy that Hua has been able to make political capital out of Mao's widow's life of privilege and arrogance.

But he is much more reluctant to undertake any sort of systematic charges against them - though if they are guilty of one hundredth of the crimes they are accused of, this would justify immediate trials.

Such trials would, however, be exceedingly difficult to limit to them alone.

In the political crisis opened up by Mao's final illness and death, the Chinese working class will need to build a new political leadership, based on a thoroughgoing opposition to the Stalinist policies of all sections of the bureaucracy.

Such a leadership would settle accounts, openly and democratically, with the privileges and abuses of the ruling caste, and open up for the masses to examine the hidden history of the Chinese Communist violent deaths, "no more than a normal weekend"!

ers detained since June is unknown arrest. since hundreds of blacks and Asians nowever, including Winnie Mandela, have been immediately subjected to "banning" orders which mean they New political arrests and new police murders go on.

But 1976 will be seen as the year in which the bloody struggle to end South Africa's racist dictatorship entered its final and decisive phase.

Now is the moment to redouble the fight in the British labour movement to end the Labour government's shameful collaboration with Vorster's regime and to give the maximum material support to the fighters for black liberation throughout Southern Africa.

The Vorster Government

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Christmas Soweto was "completely "Only 19" people died