statement
S INCE LAST August the Syrian
security services have been engaged in a campaign of arrests aimed at the Communist Action Party. This continuing offensive aims to destroy the party. It continues the long struggle of the security forces since March 1977, a few months after the foundation of the PAC. Since then, there have been around a dozen crackdowns against the PAC, all with the same objective: the definitive elimination of the most active leftwing opposition party in Syria, the party which has stood up the best to the general repression. Although more than 300 members and sympathizers have been arrested,
THE COMMUNIST ACTION
PARTY tion. Payments to Pierre Rousset. Preferred: French francs payable in a bank located in
France. Also: bank transfers to Crédit Lyonnais 30002/816/47170C/44, or postal giros to CCP
Paris 11 541 97 T. Please indicate amount for NSR on combined payments).
Mail to: CER/NSR, 2, rue Richard-Lenoir, 93108 Montreuil, France.
including most of its leaders, the party has been able to continue its political activity.
The present crackdown started on August 11 with the arrest of two members of the Central Committee of the party who have been hunted for several years: Akram al-Bunni and Wajih Ghanem. In the fol-
SYRIA
THE Communist Action Party (PAC) is a proletarian revolutionary lowing weeks the security services arrestoriented organization, founded in August 1976 as the Communist ed hundreds of people, most of whom
Action League out of Marxist circles that appeared in various were not in any organized political activity. Apart from those accused of belonging parts of syria from 1970. Its present name was adopted at its to the PAC, and kept imprisoned for this first congress in 1981. The PAC is independent from any States.
reason, dozens of others were kept as hosit is in favour of building an international Communist movement, tages so that their friends and relatives with the Fourth International as one of its component parts.
who were being sought by the repressive
At the moment the PAC fights for overturning the dictatorship in state forces would give themselves up.
Syria and for winning political freedom. With this immediate goal
It goes without saying that those detained have not had the right to any form in mind it refuses all alliances with reactionary forces, such as the of trial, and during the interrogations have
Muslim Brotherhood, in distinction from the orientation of the disbeen submitted to differing degrees of torsident fraction of the Syrian Communist Party (known as the "Poture: from the most "banal" methods such litical Bureau"). The PAC was the first organization in Syria to as whippings, beatings or electrocutions to more perverse methods like sexual cruelty denounce the Intervention since 1976 of President Hafez elor the use of racks which cause paralysis or a rupture of the spinal column.
The PAC's publications are The Red Flag, its main journal; The
Communist, its theoretical revue; The Call of the People, an agitational bulletin; and The Proletarian, its internal discussion bulletin.
Serious injuries from
In addition, the PAC has published a number of pamphlets. *
Assad's troops in Lebanon.
torture
Several prisoners have suffered serious injuries from this torture, which is of course intensified when the victims hold
Notebooks for Study and Research out and refuse to give information that
CLASS STRUGGLE AND TECHNOLOGICAL they are supposed to have. Wajih Ghanem for example had a paralyzed right hand
CHANGE IN JAPAN SINCE 1945 and internal bleeding. Adnane Mahfuz was taken into intensive care at hospital after
FREE ENTERPRISE ideologues often present Japan as a model of social three days imprisonment. Akram al-Bunni harmony and economic dynamism. In NSR Nº5, had a damaged back. Lina al-Mir, a wom-
Muto Ichiyo, an independent Marxist, is in danger of dying from an detainee, describes the real situation of Japacardiac insufficiency.
Some considerations:
• The security services are for the first time in this crackdown raiding public places, aiming to create a climate of fear
• A large number of people, a majority nese workers and unravels the mechanisms of this apparent consensus. He explains how the strategic choices of the labor movement in the 1950s and 1960s laid the basis for the current rightward shift. In the framework of a Marxist analysis.
women, are being held as hostages. This is he deals in an original and dialectical fashthe second time that this method has been ion with the changing relations between US and Japanese imperialused against the PAC since the wave of ar- isms, the links between the Liberal Democratic Party and the masses, and the effects of Japanese-style rationalization (gorika) on workers' rests in 1986 targetted on the party and the Palestine Popular Committees linked to it. power on the shopfloor. 48 pages. £2.50, $4.00, 25 FF.
• The number of people arrested since Also available: August, including those who were released N°1 - The Place of Marxism in History, Ernest Mandel. 20FF, £2, $3.50. after a few days, tops 450. More than a N°2 - The Chinese Revolution - Part I: The Second Chinese Revolution third are still detained. and the Shaping of the Maoist Outlook, Pierre Rousset. 20FF, £2, $3.50.
• Although the destruction of the PAC N°3 The Chinese Revolution - Part I: The Maoist Project Tested in is undoubtedly the main goal of the crack- the Struggle for Power. Pierre Rousset. 25FF, £2.50, $4,00. down, the aim is also to terrorize the popu- Nº4 - Revolutionary Strategy Today, Daniel Bensaid. 20FF, £2, $3.50 lation and the opposition as a preventive Forthcoming: Populism in Latin America, Michael Löwy et al.; Stalinism, measure, faced with the brutal drop in the Ernest Mandel; The Bourgeois Revolutions, Robert Lochhead; Marxism, standard of living. Feminism and the Labor Movement, Marijke Colle.
• Despite the scope of the crackdown Subscribe to NSR (9 Issues): 180FF, £18, $31; airmail add 20%. Indicate first issue of subscripand the violence of the torture, the security services have not succeeded in seizing the PAC's underground printshop. The last time it was seized was in 1982. *
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27 November 23, 1987 • International Viewpoint
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