Marcos Rigs the Vote

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Recent events in both Indonesia and the Phillipines have underlined the increasingly shaky hold of the military regimes in those countries.

This is connected of course to the growing economic and political weakness of the United States.

The protectionist policies of the United States hit the working population of South East Asia especially hard.

And the inability of the United States government to contemplate another military intervention in Asia gives hope to all those opposed to PHILIPPINES _POLKE the military regimes it has supported.

The Phillipines was a former US colony and the Marcos dictatorship has been upheld both economically and militarily by the US.

In spite of token gestures to world opinion such as a fraudulent land reform the real income of workers and peasants has continued to decline, while Marcos' relations and friends have amassed huge fortunes.

All opposition parties are banned but this has not prevented agitation both by constitutional means and by armed struggle.

Secessionist

Marcos periodically announces on television the "final surrender" of the Muslim secessionist movement in the island of Mindanao but this is no more convincing than his claims that all his opponents are drug addicts.

It was in an attempt to divert some of this opposition that Marcos announced in January that elections would be held for a constituent assembly.

"Free debate and discussion" was apparently to be allowed. But in spite of his monopoly of the mass media and finance, opposition soon reached a scale which he found intolerable.

Death sentence

Even with leading candidates kept in jail under sentence of death he was still forced to rig the vote in Manila to secure a victory for The brief experiment with democracy finally ende on Sunday April 10 when demonstrating against the rigging of the election were arrested and charged with sedition.

Opponents

They join 64,000 other people arrested for political opposition over the last five years.

But the Laban coalition which opposed Marcos in Manila had no programme for the masses.

Its only uniting factor was the demand for a return to parliamentary government.

It contained an amalgam of labour leaders, clergymen, students, and former Liberal senators who could not possibly agree on programme to meet the desperate economic needs of the workers and peasants.

Guerrillas

The struggle for independent working class leadership is still in its infancy. Unfortunately the largest supposedly "Marxist" organisation, the National People's Army has cut itself off from the masses by a guerrillaist strategy.

Perhaps the startling success of the Laban campaign in mobilising workers in Manila will give a boost to those seeking to create independent working class organisations in the Phillipines.

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Pit: with a loudhailer or carrying out the actions described by Chief Superintendant Geoffrey Priest and Inspector Ian McFarlane.

A clergyman, journalists,

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MARCOS = PICTATORSHIP