[A NOTABLE victim of the current crackdown on…]

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McCalman

A NOTABLE victim of the current crackdown on dissidents in the Soviet Union is Anatoly Marchenko, & worker whose account of life in the Mordovian labour camps and Vladimir prison was painfully expressed in his book "'My Testimony"

For writing this work he has suffered subsequent periods of imprisonment and administrative surveillance. In 1975 he was sentenced to a further 4 years exile in Irkutsk, which he described in his book ''From Tarusa to Chuna"

Since his arrest in March a number of his personal documents have been confiscated, including, significantly, his day-to-day comments the situation on in Poland.

As a result of an illness contracted in the labour camps, Marchenko is completely deaf without a hearing aid, but a doctor has given a certificate that he has no need of one and a lawyer engaged to conduct his defence has been refused admission to the investigations.

The determination of the bureaucracy to silence any echo of the struggles in Poland penetrating the Soviet Union itself must be matched by socialists in Britain more actively pursuing solidarity campaigning in defence of dissident workers and intellectuals. SIERRA Leone was hit by the first ever general strike in its history last week.

The strike is in defiance of the wishes of the Sierra Leone Labour Congress.

Striking workers want agreements on price controls for basic foodstuffs, better housing and hospitals, subsidised rents, and a freeze on transport prices.

ALL ACTIVITIES by Pakistan's airline union have been banned.

Union offices have been seized by the military authorities, and any illegal activities will be punished by five years in prison, five lashes of the whip, or both.

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Zia's ban