[Ethiopian boy soldier with display of captured NATO…]

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Ethiopian boy soldier with display of captured NATO ammunitio - 1 with Cuhan Soviet and Teraali The following story was recently published by the Solidarity Committee of the Els Joglars theatre group in Barcelona.

The play referred to is alleged to contain passages attacking the armed forces.

We reprint the story as an illustration of the fraudulence of the claims of the Francoist government to have 'democratised' Spain.

The scandalous story of Alberto Boadella, director of Els Joglars, is one instance among several in recent weeks of the Francoist army having unilaterally imposed its system of justice' on civilians.

Another recent example is the confiscation of an entire edition of Combate, newspaper of the "Trotskyist' Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (Spanish Section of the self-styled 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International).

La Torna 'On September 6 1977 the Spanish ministry of culture authorised "for the whole public" the show called La Torna presented by the Els Joglars theatre groups.

On September 7 the first performance took place in the town of Barbastro in the province of Huesca.

In September and October various performances took place in Aragon, the Basque country Valencia and Majorca.

In November the show toured around the major towns of Catalonia and contacts were made to present It was a feeling of weakness which led the fake-"socialist" Ethiopian military dictatorship, the Derg, to open its doors this month to reporters of the world's capitalist press.

Through the confusion and anti-communism of the resulting flood of reporting it is possible to see a picture very different from the image of strength and stability which Derg leader Mengistu had aimed to convey.

Virtually all the reports have given first emphasis to the obvious presence of large numbers of Cuban soldiers and the "red terror"

Mengistu-shot his way to power Signing of the Moncloa Pact he show in a Barcelona heatre in January.

On November 30 The terror, which involves the systematic murder of suspected oppositionists, results according to reports in several dozen deaths every night in Addis Ababa during the curfew, the bodies being found in the streets the next morning.

Many of the victims of this slaughter are members or suspected members of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), a guerrillaist Maoist organisation which characterises the Derg as "fascist"

The EPRP is said to have maintained its strength in the Muslim suburbs where the regime has found it harder to organise popular support and where sympathy is strong for the rebel Eritreans and West Somalians.

Repression

Elsewhere the Derg rules through the hebelles-nominally organs of "people's power" but in fact they seem to have become agencies of the Derg's repression.

The reporter of the French daily Le Monde claims to have been told that hebelles which do not come up with their ration of "red terror" victims are subjected to specially high demands for money to finance the war effort.

The EPRP is not the only party to suffer repression. One of the others is a part of the Panethiopian Socialist Movement, known as Meisan.

This group also holds Stalinist conceptions of the two-stage revolution, its main a few hours before the performance, the group received a telephone call from somepresent slogan being cratic rights now"

Until last year the Meisan, composed largely of intellectuals, played a leading ideological and political role in the Derg.

It was only when the US army trained, now pro-Soviet Colonel Mengistu shot his way to power that the Meisan was expelled from power and persecuted.

Military

At that time senior military officers in the Derg were founding their own political parties.

The most powerful of these is the "clandestine" Abyotawi Sedede set up by dictator Mengistu himself.

It is composed mainly of leading military officials of the Derg and controls many of the mass organisations.

The Derg is also supported by the "Proletarian League" founded by the former joint leader of the Political Bureau of the Derg, Senai Legue, who was shot dead in the shoot-out of February 1977 in which Mengistu came to power.

A third supporter of the Derg is the Malerid ("Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Organisation) composed of renegades of the EPRP who have opportunistically compromised with the regime.

Exclusively These three parties comprise a "Quadripartite Progressive Front" along with the Etchat, a party based exclusively on the Oromo people. one who claimed to-be from the military, advising them to cancel the performance.

The group, taking account of the fact that it had all the required authorisation presented the show in the ordinary way with no trouble or disorder.

Then on December 11 Alberto Boadella, the director of the group, was asked to attent a military tribunal.

He was given the order of the Captaincy General of Barcelona to suspend the show and this was complied with.

Boadella made his statement and the following day he received a new summons to appear before the same judge on December 15.

For the rest, all that is known of him, is that he arrived at his lawyer's office under armed guard (machine guns) and there left a note saying that he was being held in custody in the Models jail.

On December 16 the other members of the group were charged in front of the same judge.

The all declared themselves to be equally responsible for what they regarded as a collective creation.

The permanent assembly of theatrical workers in Barcelona met at once and to defend professional rights and freedom of expression organised a week of struggle which culminated in a general strike of theatrical workers on December 22.

The Grand Liceo Theatre, the Scala, and the cabarets and even the cinemas all This latter group, however, seems to be on the point of being persecuted in the same way as the Meison.

One question above all has dominated the way Mengistu's dictatorship has been built since the overthrow of the Emperor and the establishment of the Derg -the national struggle by the people of Eritrea and the Ogaden.

Virtually all the political splits in the Derg (only half of whose original members have physically survived the successive purges) have been on the question of Eritrea.

In each purge leaders suspected of "softness" on the question of Eritrea have been joined the strike.

Other actions were undertaken in the cinemas and television in Madrid, Bilbao, Seville, Valencia, Vitoria, Sarregossa.

On December 28 a judicial procedure. was opened against all the members of the Els Joglars group who are accused of alleged offences injurious to the armed forces.

Except for Boadella the others have not been detained but are under surveillance."

The Solidarity Committee say that Alberto Boadella's health has seriously deteriorated in detention.

He is still awaiting his definitive trail and faces a sentence of up to 18 years jail for insulting the armed Protests have been made against the procedure by the reformists and Stalinists in Spain.

But they say they object it all because it is contrary the Moncloa Pact!

Reformists

This part embodies the popular frontist alliance which the reformists and Stalinists in Spain have with the 'reformed' francoist eliminated.

Yet, despite some success win luval, soviet allu ADI ACI help, in repulsing the Somalian army in the Ogaden, the Derg has made no progress in Eritrea.

Apart from the three main cities which are tightly beseiged, the whole of Eritrea is now under the control of the two main Eritrean nationalist organisations.

The failure to rectify this situation even with such gigantic military aid from Cuba and the USSR, must be a sign of the political weakness of the blood-stained Derg which is now destined to become a regime increasingly kept in power by In the pact the workers" parties agreed to accept rigid austerity measures including wage and public spending cuts in exchange for the vaguest of promises from the Suarez regime about continued 'democratisation'.

Armed police

But Suarez's 'democratisation includes no significant changes in the army or armed police because his rule and that of the capitalist class in Spain still rest as they did under Franco-on the possession and control of this massive repressive apparatus of the Spanish state.

Socialists in Spain must fight for the dissolution of this repressive apparatus and its replacement by an armed workers' militia subject to control through the democratic organs of the working class.

The reformists and Stalinists, however, talk pathetically of reforming' and restructing' the Francoist army just as Allende and the Popular Unity used to talk about 'reforming' the Chilian army.

The prospects of doing that are the same in Spain today as they were in Chile.

NATO CARTRES CAL. WL O BALIN ฿ Castro's and Brezhnev's troops.

The head of this murderous clique is Haile Meriam Mengistu, a man who last week called his personal enemies in Ethiopia "counter-revolutionaries and Trotskyists".

But Trotskyists is just what most of them are notand that is their fatal political weakness.

The Ethiopian masses can only be saved from continued barbarism through the building of an opposition based on the strategy of permanent revolution, which recognises that the fight against the repressive dictatorship is at the same time the fight for socialism.

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