AUSTRALIA / AROUND THE WORLD every area, from foreign policy to ecology. Portugal is taking Australia to the World Court after the shameful carve-up of East Timor's oil by the Australian and Indonesian governments-
And in the pattern of reactionary Australian premiers from the Boer War onwards, Hawke didn't even wait to be asked by George Bush before dispatching frigates to assist the US-dominated coalition in the Persian Gulf. In this he rivalled the arch-Tory Robert Menzies, who in 1965 sent troops to aid the US and its puppet regime in Saigon before even being
Small wonder that the government is "on the nose" to working class people. Recent opinion polls have shown support for the ALP at around 30% as opposed to
These will be even further removed from control by the membership. They will be true "paper tigers" when confronted by the victorious Liberals after the next election.
A Liberal victory will end the cosy corporatist relationship which the ACTU leaders have enjoyed with the ALP government.
It will also leave the working people of this country with a weakened trade union movement led by bureaucrats who could not even spell the word struggle, let alone wage one in defence of workers' rights and conditions.
Paradoxically the left has been in decline at the same time as the goverment falters and the economy crashes. The Communist Party of Australia and its newspaper Tribune have collapsed and other organizations have fallen on hard times — undoubtedly a spinoff from the disintegration of Stalinism in eastern Europe and the USSR.
Yet more than ever, militants of the left need to put aside hair-splitting questions of doctrine and come together to form a class struggle left wing to fight for the advancement of all progressive social causes, including those of peace, women, lesbians and gays, the environment and the Aboriginal people. *
AROUND 54% for the Liberal/National coalition. ALP members are leaving the party in droves, disgusted by the Thatcherite policies of their leaders and the inability of the rank-and-file to make their voices heard. Some senior Labor figures have heard wondering who will do the "shit" work for them in elections.
Those elections will be a disaster for the ALP. Unless Hawke can perform a miracle by 1993 the Liberals will be elected on
Already the Thatcherite Liberal leader John Hewson is flexing his political muscles, signalling that he is hell-bent on a showdown with the trade union movement and a roll-back of those conditions which have escaped the effects of the accord.
Hewson's party has steadily moved to the right as a result of Hawke's usurpation of its traditional place on the political spectrum and would act against the organized working class, women and minority groups.
Whilst working people should shed no tears for the coming political demise of the ALP government, they also have to prepare for a Liberal onslaught.
Unfortunately eight years of the corporatist accord has gutted the union movement. Over the last five years the proportion of the workforce in unions has fallen from 46% to 41%, with the most marked decline in the private sector.
Put another way, the accord cost the union movement 437,000 members between 1983 and 1989. Whilst the decline is partly due to unemployment and changes in the nature of work, the main cause is worker disillusion with organizations which seem little more than arms of government.
"Super unions" are paper tigers
The ACTU bureaucrats are in the process of "rationalizing" the union movement into "super-unions"; huge conglomerates which bear no resemblance to industrial unions.
THE
WORLD
GERMANY An unreconstructed StalinA LOCAL court in Frankfurt has ordered the ISP-Verlag publishing house which is based there to cease distribution of a book produced by them, or at least to suppress certain passages of it.
The work in question is Hans Schafranek's "Between the NKVD and the Gestapo" which deals with the handing over by the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany of German and Austrian anti-fascists between 1937 and 1941. Some 858 of these people were taken from the Stalinist Gulag; many of them died in the Nazi camps.
Behind this case lies an unrepentant 78year old Stalinist, Emil Carlebach, who had previously showed his colours in 1949 at the time of the appearance of a book by Margarete Buber-Neumann, "A prisoner of Hitler and Stalin".
At that time he had expressed the view that the victims of Stalinism got what they deserved and that Buber-Neumann was a Gestapo agent.
The latter took Carlebach to court and he was found guilty of slander. During the trial, evidence was given notably by Benedikt Kautsky, son of the social democratic theoretician, who had been detained with Carlebach in the Jewish barracks no. 22 in
Author of a reference work on Buchenwald and the Nazi camps, Verdammte", Kautsky as the head of Block 22, belonged to the camp "aristocracy" and did not hesitate to act ruthlessly against his political opponents - including of course Trotskyists — or other detainees who displeased him. By way of example responsible for the assassinations of two Polish Jews beaten to death at his behest.
Another former inmate, August Cohn, has depicted Carlebach as an unscrupulous apparatchik and accused him of having tried to have an Austrian politician from a different current transferred to Block 46, reserved for human guinea pigs.
This evidence, given under oath by Kautsky and Cohn in the 1951 trial, is in Schafranck's book and is the reason why Carlebach wants the book suppressed.
Exorbitant damages are being demanded from the author and the editor with the evident intention of ruining this modest Trotskyist publishing house.
Austrian historians and the press have protested against the proceedings initiated by Carlebach and praised Schafranek's AUSTRIA Memorial SET up in spring 1990, this movement pursues two aims. In the first place it intends to support the efforts of Memorial in the Soviet Union to establish the whole historical truth about the Stalinist terror and obtain the complete rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinism.
At the same time it wants to make an inventory of all the Austrian victims of Stalinism, notably those anti-fascists who fled to the Soviet Union, where they suffered repression and/or were handed over to the Gestapo after the Hitler-Stalin pact. Aborition has been sen too the Soviet 27 authorities calling on them to open the relApril 29, 1991 • #205 International Viewpoint
nternationa
AROUND THE WORLD evant archives. Among its many signatures are those of prominent personalities including of the former Austrian chanceldent of bourgeois and neocolonial forces. Unfortunately on the eve of the national conlor, Bruno Kreisky.
VIEWPOINT
As a first contribution to this research, a small book was published in October 1990 by Junius- Verlag which gave some examples of militants who went into the Gulag ference, the main inspiration behind La Cause, Grégoire
Mavounia, died. When his death was announced, students requested that classes be
1990 bound volume or died in Stalin's jails.
A typical case was that of a founder
(Collection of IV, issues no. 177 member and leader of the Austrian Communist Party, Franz Koritshoner (1892-
1941). He was a friend of Bukharin, who
A real bargain at $25, E15 or he got to know during the latter's time in
Vienna between 1911 and 1913.
He was a delegate to the Kienthal con-
Add on $2, £1.50 or 15FF for ference in April 1916, where he met Lenin postage (surface mail only).
and Radek and aligned himself with the
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Bolsheviks. Starting in 1930 he worked a substantial additional donation!
for the Red International of Trade Unions in Moscow before falling victim to the
Send orders to: "IV collection", PEC purges in 1936.
2 rue Richard Lenoir, Montreuil, 93108, France
Sentenced to three years in prison and
(For further payment details see subscriptions then ten years exile, he was handed over to the Gestapo at Lublin in April 1941 with
40 other prisoners. He died in Auschwitz on June 8, 1941. After the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 he was rehabilitated.
CONGO
Death of democratic
THE "democratization process" in the
Congo is one of the most spectacular of the developments of this kind now underway in many countries in Black Africa.
Dozens of parties and associations are coming into existence and putting forward their point of view.
The regime, weakened by the economic crisis and social pressures, pressure from the dominant imperialist power in the Congo, France, which is pushing for a controlled democratization here as in most other African countries.
The various cliques that have succeeded each other in power over the past 20 years fitted out in "Marxist-Leninist" language a regime built on corruption, tribalism and in the end submission to imperialism and
The whole system is in crisis and a period of uncertainty has set in, which promises to be prolonged and difficult. There is no guarantee that this type of process will give rise to a new independent workers and popular movement.
Some indication of the state of play was provided by the national all-party conference held at the start of March, at which all the various political forces were able to show what they had to offer and confront
("association for social control and the emancipation of the people by themselves") appeared as the most radical current, particularly concerned that the process of democratization be indepen-
International Viewpoint #205 • April 29, 1991 stopped for a week and more than a thousand people attended the funeral.
Young people of both sexes wanted to carry the coffin after demonstrating in Mavounia's honour on the campus where he taught. Trade unionists and religious figures also took part
Mavounia's funeral was a sign of the immense hopes aroused in the population and the support that exists for the construction in the country, more than thirty years after independence, of a popular, radical and socialist movement free from the scourge of corruption.
BELGIUM
Conference on Third World debt
THE Belgian committees for the cancellation of the Third World debt organized a conference on the theme "Third World debt: a timebomb" in Brussels on March
16, 1991, with around a thousand attend-
Among the speakers were: Gilles Perrault, one of the initial signatories of the appeal against the debt; Susan George, a
United Nations and UNESCO expert on
Africa; the agronomist René Dumont and
Ernest Mandel.
According to UNICEF, 40,000 children die each day of malnutrition and curable diseases. Nine months of the Gulf War cost the coalition nearly $100bn. It would cost an estimated $2.5bn each year to save
This Brussels initiative will be followed an international mobilization against the summit of the seven richest countries to take place in London on July
13, 1991 and by the organization in Paris on June 8, 1991 of an assembly around the theme "six hours for the cancellation of the debt." *
EAST EUROPE/
SOUTHAFRICA
Where are they now?
"WESTERN radio has announced
South Africa has given permanent residence to former police and secret service agents from eastern Europe. Is this true?"
asks one K. Klimov in a letter to the mass circulation Soviet weekly Argumenty i to 197) now available.
160FF. box on page 2) Fakty (no. 10(543), March, 1991)
The journal's S. Youriev replies:
"In the recent period a significant number of former secret service, army, intelligence and police officers from Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the ex-GDR have received permission to go and live permanently in South Africa. Relieved of their former functions, they are being recruited there by police, army and intelligence units.
"According to the South African press, the 'eastern European officers' are more hardworking in their field than their white South African colleagues, they have a good professional experience and are even more resolute' when it comes to restoring order in the black areas.
"One should not overlook the material advantages of their new career. When they go to work for the South African state they receive a good house and a car; and after six months of irreproachable service they can become South African citizens. "* ALGERIA General strike A general strike in protest against price rises was called by the principal Algerian trade union, the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), on March 13 and 14 1991. The strike was widely supported and placed the Islamic trade union, which had not supported the strike call, in a difficult situation. Many workers observed the strike in enterprises where the Islamic union was dominant.
The success of this strike, going well beyond the base of the UGTA, has given a new confidence to the Algerian working class and marked a defeat for the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front, only a few months before Algeria's scheduled general elections. *