Albania repels "invasion"

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ÜRKEY SOLIDARITY CAM to the Turkish Solidarity Campaign. TSC, BM Box 5965, London WCIN THE Peoples Socialist Republic of Albania continues to be the source of mysterious stories and peculiar events. Following the strange death of Prime Minister Shehu last December and explosions in -the Yugoslav Embassy in the i capital, Tirana, this year, there are now stories of an attempted invasion of the country by Italian-based Lemigres.

Radio Tirana announced that on Saturday night SepItember 25, a gang led by bandit leader Xhevdet Mustafa had landed on the ¡Adriatic coast of Albania with "guns, dollars and spyglasses" • Unfortunately for the "criminal gang" they had been spotted by local inhabAffiliate Write to: 3XX. itants who promptly reported their presence to the People's Army.

Eventually the invasion loice was 'liquidated' after a battle which lasted five hours.

The Hoxha government describes gang leader Mustafa as a well-known criminal and supporter of the deposed Mussolini puppet king of pre-war Albania, Ahmet Zogu. However nobody outside of Albania has ever heard of Mustafa, and so specualtion as to the truth behind the story has commenced in Belgrade and Vienna (where the limited news fróm Albania is often monitored). • Owing to the incredibly rigid, ultra-Stalinist police state that exists in Enver Hoxha's Albania it is very difficult to find out very much about internal politics there, so stories mushroom. Current theories on the invasion range from it being a mistake by badly disoriented Greek smugglers to it. being connected to the present inner party power struggle of which the last symptom was the death of Shehu during a Politburo gunfight (not the first time this sort of thing has happened at Party of Labour Politburo meetings).

There may well be some truth in this latter theory because changes in Hoxha's isolationist policies are both needed and show signs of appearing.

They are needed because after Hoxha's assorted quarrels with anyone who matters in the Stalinist world (except the idealised image of Stalin himself), Albania's economy needs assistance. Russian and Chinese projects were left unfinished and much of Albania's machinery relies on cannibalisation in order to lumber along.

Trade deals with North Korea have been set up, and farming experts from France and oil technologists from slightly • less i maverick Romania have been spotted in Tirana.

These changes, their pace, sluggishness or existence, may well be at the heart of an inner party dispute which could rock Albania to its Stalinist foundations.

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Socialist Organiser no.104 October 14, 1982 Page 5 nternational News International News Internationar News. nternational News International News Yes becoming president. How long will ther "A triumph for democracy", trumpeted the Morning Star as it hailed the inauguration of a civilian government after 18 years of almost un"

- and there is no stability, for the new government.

The team announced by the \new President Hernan Siles Zuazo is. described by the Star as 1 a . "left wing popular unity government" It incorporates two Communist Party ministers: but it also embraces members of Siles nun bourgeois nationalist party, the National Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MNRI).

And the petty bourgeois Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) also finds seats in the government.

This same alliance won a majority in the last elections in Bolivia (June 1980): but they were prevented from taking office by a military coup led by officers who could not stomach. the notion of 'Communists' in power.

Since then Siles and his allies have conducted a limp campaign around . the embassies of other Latin American and imperialist governments, pleading for recognition as a "government in exile"

They succeeded, too: Siles' inauguration was marked by a major display of support from, especially, EEC diplomats, eager to see some more rational capitalist regime replace Bolivia's corrupt cocaine-trading generals.

But it is typical of the politics of this grouping that their, notion of such a struggle was to appeal to the international bourgeoisie rather than the militant workers and peasants of Bolivia, who showed in repeated strikes and' mobilisations their determination to rid the country of its succession of military dictators.

This passive attitude to the fight in Bolivia is no 1980: the tanks roll in to stop ..nl na.. accident: it reflects the politthe ial оапктирісу "popular unity" leaders themselves, who, like all such formations, are incapable of presenting anything resembling a revolutionary solution to' the working classes.

Siles' own party, representing the interests of an extremely small section of anti-dictatorial Bolivian capitalists, uses populist rhetoric to enlist the support of sections of the peasantry.

He has said in his first Presidential address that "We cannot demand more sacrifices from those who have already suffered so much"

But the demands and needs of the peasantry cannot be fulfilled by pious speeches: require material action - to expropriate the landowners, the banks and other capitalist holdings, to provide cheap credit and guaranteed markets for agricultural goods, and to disband the standing army whose vicious, corrupt existence stands as a •threat to the Bolivian masses Sile as a whole and a huge burden upon the debt-ridden economy- economySuch steps would bring Siles directly into conflict with the Bolivian capitalists his party represents: he has no intention of undertaking such action - and is incapable of so doing.

By entering a coalition with such a party, therefore, the Communist Party and the reformists of the MIR are explicitly abandoning any hint of socialist solutions to the crisis, and thus nailing their colours to the mast of "democratic" rule.

But there is simply no social basis for a "democrátic" capitalist government to operate in the situation of Bolivia.

Siles and the MNR. were at the head of a revolution in 1952 wnich nationalised the tin mines, pushed through sweeping land reform, and virtually destroyed the military caste. Bat it remained within capitalist limits and failed to open a way for the workers and peasants to escape from now? crushing poverty. By 1956 Cilac mracidant vuvo, as pissiuell, was imposing an IMF austerity plan.

Since the military regained power in 1964, rival cliques have replaced each other in coup after coup: but a constant factor has been their absolute determination to block any reforming efforts that give a hint of resuming their work of the 1952 revolution.

The national bourgeoisie itself numbers only hundreds out of a population of nearly six million. And the gulf between this elite grouping and the 50% of the workforce who toil at agricultural labour is colossal.

The desperate conditions faced by the masses are attested by the 13% infant mortality rate, and the fact that 20% of the population in 1975 existed on £30 a year.

There is a small, but highly organised and militant working class whose developing class consciousness has been diverted time and again by a combination of reformist and populist politics from their trade union leadership and political parties like the MIR.

It was general strike action by the working class, not / the hand-wringing of Siles and company, which last month persuaded a divided and discredited military regime to hand over power to the new "Popular But the new government takes lover in the worstever economic crisis - and its first action, once the leftish speeches have been made, must be to tour the world's imperialist banks and the IMF cap-in-hand seeking extensions of existing loans and fresh credit to bale out Bolivia.

Only the naive will believe that such loans can be achieved without intensified attacks on Bolivia's working classes.

Meanwhile the military -in disarray but by no means disbanded - remains as the LLUSIONS were short-live:

or those who believed tha le troops sent to Lebano: by the French, Italian an IS governments were ther partially to "keep th eace"

Last week French par:

roops accompanie ebanese army soldiers in eries of massive raids on th Muslim areas of Beirut.

The state radio statio nnounced that the raids ha esulted in the arrest c 'many people living ebanon illegally* In fact they appear t lave rounded up hundred standing threat! hovering behind the Siles government.

Siles may have made a braggadocio beginning -removing the old army high. command and replacing them with officers "loyal to democracy". . But this means only that the bitter lessons of Allende's reactionary "Popular Unity" government in Chile - incorporating 'democratic' Generals as well as 'Communists' , reformists and capitalists - have not been learned in Bolivia, any more than they have by the British Stalinist: Morning Star. • Siles stressed that he wanted cooperation, not conflict, with the military.

Likewise he is seeking class coopezation in industry: he has announced plans for workers' participation in management.

But as long as the armed forces of the coitalist state remain in being, then irrespective of the composition of the "democratic" regime, of Palestinians and left wing militants as a further wave of the offensive mounted in the Israeli invasion. "

But this repression is, not surprisingly, entirely one-sided. While the oppressed Muslim people are hounded and harassed, there is no parallel search for arms or arrests of thę 25,000-strong militia of the Phalangist Indeed there is no sign of any attempt to find or bring to trial the gang of Phalangist gunmen who carried out the ental sla chideen in the Palestinian Sabra/Chatila camp.

The fact is that the objective of the "peace-keeping"

exercise is to provide addistrike has left nationalreports the working masses of Bolivia face the most acute danger.

They must be organised in workers and peasants councils which in turn must be armed, physically and politically to defend themselves and to press home the fight for a workers' and • peasants' government. Only such a government can enact the sweeping revolutionary •socialist policies to meet the needs of the Bolivian masses. Palestinian areas, have since adopted a stance of collaboration with Gemayel, and supervised the disarming of their own supporters. Now the Lebanese army, with its imperialist sponsors, putting the boot in.

The parallel which cannot be avoided is with the situation in the. North of Ireland. There was a brief period in which many people fondly believed that the British troops dispatched to the six counties in 1969 were there as a "peace'keeping" force' to protect the oppressed Catholic minority. But it soon became unmistakeably clear that their purpose was precisely to repress the Catholics and to crush the forces opposing

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Will Bolivia take the 'Chilean road' to ruin?

uroken military rule. But the triumph is far from complete

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A general A general strike has

pushed pushed Bolivia's military into handing over to the same

ist politicians whom they ousted by a coup in 1980 What now? Harry Sloan