AROUND THE WORLD
AROUND
THE
WORLD
SOUTH AFRICA Weekly Mail suspended THE English-language liberal newspaper, the Weekly Mail, has been suspended by Minister of Home Affairs Stoffel Botha for a month until November 28. The Weekly Mail is the third newspaper to be suspended under a special emergency decree promulgated in August last year and renewed and strengthened in June. The paper is accused of publishing articles that were a threat to the "safety of the public", and to have "incited hate and hostility" against the army by publishing accounts by conscripts of tortures by South African soldiers in
The Weekly Mail is the best-known of South Africa's alternative newspapers, originally founded in 1985 by unemployed journalists from the Rand Daily Mail, which was closed down by employers and big business in April 1985. The Weekly Mail has a modest circulation of 24,000, and this suspension is not going to help its financial situation. * TURKEY New revolutionary Marxist AFTER the military coup d'état of September 1980, all left and far-left publications were banned and their editors arrested and given harsh sentences by the military tribunals. The socialist press only survived by means of reviews published by Turkish immigrant groups in Europe. At the end of 1985 and the beginning of 1986, left publications were able to reappear legally in Turkey, taking advantage of a small democratic opening due to the drop-by-drop "liberalization" born out of the government's policy of a rapprochement with the
Smashed to smithereens by the coup d'état, the far-left has still not recovered from the 1980 defeat. Many militants are still in exile or in prison. All the organizations are in crisis, and new divisions and splits have been added to the previous ones. Important political, programmatic and ideological debates are taking place in the 30 or so legal left journals, but their total circulation is no more than a few thousand copies.
Despite the fact that opportunities for le20 gal work have opened up, mainly during the last year, increasingly selective censorship is still used and the situation of the progressive press remains precarious. Since this summer, a wave of repression has broken over all the socialist press. Over a dozen reviews have been seized and their editors prosecuted and imprisoned. Even the big bourgeois papers have not escaped. The daily Milliyet, for example, was forbidden from publishing an article on the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) in June. The police surrounded the paper's offices and the famous liberal journalist, M.A. Birand, who had interviewed the president of the separatism Prosecuted for "incitement to
Refusing to be intimidated by this repression, revolutionary Marxists have taken advantage of the limited liberalization to publish a new monthly journal called Yeniyol ("New Course"), whose first issue appeared in September. Yeniyol aims to be both a militant journal intervening into the workers' struggles that are slowly starting up again, and a discussion tool that can aid the process of left recomposition.
In its first three issues, Yeniyol has published interviews and reports on the strikes taking place among printers and paper-mill workers; features on the trade-union movement, the repression and the struggles in the prisons; analysis and positions on the political situation in Turkey and on the repercussions of the Caucasian national movements in the USSR; debates on socialist democracy, the weaknesses of the Third International and the creation of the Fourth International; and articles on international solidarity, including a denunciation of the massacre of Kurds in Iraq, support for the Palestinian uprising and for Solidarnose in Poland.
Yenra
Türk-İş yöneticileri iscilerin başından defedilmelidir!
• MESS' karse
Subscriptions and individual copies of Yeniyol can be obtained by writing to the bookshop La Brèche, 9 rue de Tunis, 75011 Paris. * BRITAIN Thatcher in concrete THIS YEAR's Tory party conference was held in the south coast seaside resort of Brighton in October. It was the first time the Iron Ladies' troops had met in the town since the 1984 IRA attack on the Grand Hotel, which injured a number of cabinet members, narrowly missing Thatcher
But this time, they were taking no chances. A security operation costing £1.4 million swung into action, involving armed police, bomb disposal squads, a navy minesweeper, Royal Marines in inflatable boats patrolling the shoreline and helicopters with heat-sensitive devices. (Presumably these latter wouldn't detect coldhearted Tories but would be able to pinpoint any socialist-minded hot-heads in the
Around the conference centre itself, a three-mile air exclusion zone was announced and the conference complex was ringed with 270 tons of reinforced concrete slabs. All of which goes to demonstrate very clearly the popularity of the Tory government today! * FRANCE Referendum on Kanaky ON NOVEMBER 6, French voters ratified by four to one the government's "transition to independence" plan for Kanaky (New Caledonia), the French territory in the Pacific. There was an 80% "yes" what was essentially a 10-year postponement of independence, replete with a variety of intermediate stages. But the true tale is told by the abstention rate: two-thirds of eligible voters stayed away from the Rocard government's initiative, despite a last minute media blitz and support from most major political parties. It was the lowest turnout for any referendum since the sec-
In Kanaky itself, the vote was closer, with 57.3% for and 42.97% against. Voting was geographically split in the territory; unlike the homogeneity of France, support increased as one moved from the urban area to the rural districts. In Noumea, the capital of the archipelago, the "no" votes carried the day with 60%. This clearly reflects the distribution of the population between white colonial settlers of French origin and the indigenous Kanaks, in their vast majority relegated to the underdeveloped
The Matignon Accords were conceived by Prime Minister Michel Rocard and signed in June by the government, Jean-
Marie Tjibaou, the leader of the Kanaky National Liberation Front (FLNKS), and Jacques Lafleur, the white colonial settler leader of RCR, a party closely related to the French Rally for the Republic (RPR), in an effort to negotiate a settlement to the increasingly violent conflict. Lafleur's supporters did not share even his lukewarm agreement with the plan, as the vote shows, and Tjibaou warned that "the accord were signed by all three parties, and will be enforced by all three. If one group opts out,
The Rocard plan envisages a 10-year "holding operation" before rediscussing independence, with direct rule from Paris during the first year, and then the creation of four regional assemblies over the subsequent period. Even now it is clear that a disproportionate influence will be wielded by the regional council around Noumea, sure to be dominated by the white settlers. After these 10 years of "practice", the question of independence will voted on by all inhabitants, white settlers and Kanaks alike. Rocard has already stated his "personal" desire for Kanaky to remain within the Fifth Republic.
And it was Rocard who chose to place this plan before the French people in a referendum as a test of political strength and support for his government, elected in May. It is a test he resoundingly failed.
In France, positions on Rocard's plan spanned the spectrum, dividing right and left. The Communist Party (CP) and the Socialist Party (SP) called for a "yes" vote, the former in favor of independence, and the latter not. The centrist UDF, led by Raymond Barre, campaigned with the SP in favour of the referendum proposals. The neo-Gaullist RPR was split both ways, and only Le Pen's neo-fascist National Front was unanimously opposed.
Nonetheless, mobilization around the vote was lethargic, and the hastily set-up New Caledonian Friendship Alliance (organized by the SP) drew a pathetic 200 to its first and last Paris meeting.
Given the fact that the FLNKS, a revolutionary nationalist coalition of parties, was divided tactically over the accords and the referendum, the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League, French section of the Fourth International) called for a boycott of the referendum, arguing that it would resolve nothing and that only real independence could lay any sort of basis for the emancipation of the Kanak people. * USSR Stalin's victims ON OCTOBER 9 Moscow News published an article under the title "Kuropaty: a naso long
Ron.
AROUND THE WORLD tional tragedy that all must be aware of," about fifty mass graves near Minsk. The journalist estimated that more than 100,000 corpses had been buried in this sinister place, called Kuropaty. The victims were all struck down by the NKVD, the political police under Stalin. "This death factory operated every single day from 1937 until June 1941," he said. "The first mass grave must have been filled in winter, we found in it many warm peasant garments...In the course of our digging, one of the things that struck me the most was the large number of
The author concludes: "First, no one can ever hide the truth about Kuropaty. Second — and this is the essential — each honest individual must struggle against Stalinism, this vile, lying, cruel phenomenon that was used against the people".
One remarkable thing demonstrating that there is a serious struggle to prevent any repetition of these crimes is the fact that at the end of October 1988 more than 20,000 people demonstrated at Minsk, the capital of the Byelorussian SSR.
They demonstrated to condemn the Kuropaty crimes, to decry the local and regional CP's hesitations over bringing the entire story to light, and to demand a radical democratization of the party, putting it under the control of the workers' and peasants' rank-and-file.
They demonstrated to stop all-powerful leaders from acting only from the point of view of their own concerns (we would say, in their own interests), and not in the interests of the democratically-decided will of the people. * USSR Trotsky to be published ACCORDING to a Reuter's release dated October 26, Victoria Cheremich, representative for the State Committee on Publications, declared on Radio Moscow the same day that students at the Institute for the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union are preparing some of Trotsky's works for publication. Recently, permission was also granted for access to archival documentary footage which often features Trotsky. Until 1987, all of these things were taboo in the USSR.
Elsewhere, in the October edition of the review Sovietskaya Istoriya ("Soviet History"), an article by Dr. Stuartsev states that during the debates that shook up the Russian CP after 1923, it was Trotsky who was the closest to Lenin's thoughts. The author reminds his readers that in his testament Lenin marked Trotsky out as the most capable member of the party leadership, and that he had proposed to him a political bloc in order to avoid a split in the party.
This is the first time such an opinion has ever been expressed in a legal journal in the USSR. It differs considerably from the historic deformations and myths about Trotsky which are still put about by the 21
From perestroika to the
People's Front - II
THIS IS the second part of an interview with Boris Kagarlitski,
International Viewpoint #152 • November 28, 1988 which was begun in our last issue. Kagarlitski was one of the founders of the grouping of informal associations that gave rise to the Federation of Socialist Clubs. In the first part of the interview, held in Moscow in September, he spoke to Sasha
Petrov about the debates in the Marxist left on perestroika and glasnost, and about the complex national questions in the
USSR.
Here, Kagarlitski gives his point of view on the new political situation opened up for grass-roots initiatives after the June congress of the Communist Party (CPSU). Things are moving very quickly in the USSR, but at the same time some developments are marking time. For example, the People's
Fronts in the Baltic republics held their first congresses since the summer and have, de facto, been legalized by the Soviet authorities. But things are very different in Russia. There, the
People's Front that Kagarlitski talks about is a very different animal from its Baltic namesakes, an organization whose outlines are less clearly defined. It still only acts as a regroupment of clubs and informal associations, which has conflictual relations with the authorities.
The Russian People's Front has mass support, particularly in Moscow, and its fluid organization largely explains the numerous conflicts inside the clubs themselves, on tactics and on the form and content of the People's Front in Russia, which, Kagarlitski tells us, wants to be socialist.
Paradoxically, it is more difficult for us to appreciate the problems for this left regroupment as regards perestroika, as much on an ideological level as in its relations with the regime. But we are learning as we go.
formal associations was held and the Federation of Socialist Clubs
(FS) was set up. Can you briefly describe developments in this federation since then, and also the present situation?
The conference was held barely one year ago, but the landscape has changed so much since then that it seems like years.
The most important result of the August
1987 conference was the creation of the
FSC. At that time, this sort of federation had been criticized as too centralist, a bit too socialist and not democratic enough.
They were criticized, for example, for not allowing people with anti-socialist views to
22 become member on heal a nization, an
, become members of the organization, al-
(Catherine Verla) and anti-dogmatic organization. Now, there seems to be a consensus that the Federation, as it was created, belongs to the
Indeed, the Federation of Socialist Clubs was a loose organization with no clear structure and practically no documents regulating its internal functioning. Its programme was also very diffuse, comprising simply on some very general democratic and socialist principles, with almost no economic programme — only a few general ideas about defending social guarantees in the process of economic transformation, and around the democratization of planning and so on. There were only three pages of demands and 32 pages of text in total about the constitution of the Federation. The whole movement was quite chaotic,
In the FSC, Marxist groups were in a kind of minority because there were different groups of anarchists, populists, environmentalists and so on. So, it seemed that the movement was very unstructured, not only because people didn't want it too structured, but also because of the internal differences. It was almost impossible for us to organize any kind of systematic work across the Federation. However, we managed to establish information links between the clubs all over the country, to establish better relations between the Moscow and the provincial groups — a kind of informa-
The provincial groups are more or less homogeneous, almost always with a Marxist orientation. But two important tendencies exist, Marxists and environmentalists, who have few differences and who are quite used to working together. In any case, the Federation will continue for a time as an information network. • It seems the preparation of the June conference of the Communist Party (CPSU) and the conference itself changed the conditions for the development of initiatives coming from the grass-roots?
Yes. In August 1987, there were a number of diverse groups in Moscow, and next to nothing in the provincial towns. Moscow led the movement, along with Leningrad, where there had also been certain results and real progress for the movement.
Before the party's conference, there was a real explosion of grass-roots activism across the whole country. In Yaroslavl and Kuibyshev, as well as in Astrakhan, there were rallies against party secretaries, calling for them to be thrown out of the conference. The demonstrators won and the whole affair was taken up by the press. In Zagorsk and Kalinsk, the party secretaries were sacked following a strike in the workplaces. People thought that the movement could deliver the goods, could achieve concrete results. There was a growing movement of thousands of people who wanted to organize and go out into the streets, who were organized by very tiny groups of Marxist activists acting as organizers for the people's protest. • What do you mean by Marxist activists?
I mean by that activists of small independent Marxist groups. For example at Kuibyshev, one of the organizers of the popular protests there is also one of the founding
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