Turkish reign of terror

Scan page 7

(Secretariat, Turkey Solidarity Campaign)

THATCHER's attempt to reintroduce hanging into Britain may have been thwarted, but she is no doubt consoled by the sentences of execution being handed down by her allies in Turkey's military junta.

With the military takeover in 1980 the Turkish state has been freed from Parliamentary niceties and has pursued a ruthless campaign of arrests, torture, mass imprisonment and trials against its opponents.

Execution is demanded as a matter of course. At the end of the recent trial in Diyarbakir of alleged members of the Kurdish Workers Party, 35 were sentenced to death and 340 others imprisoned for between five and 36 years.

Other grim statistics are the 30,054 convicted for "political crimes' with sentences ranging from five years in jail to capital punishment, since the coup and 14,180 still on trial.

And these are only the numbers admitted to by the generals.

Most of these trials receive little or no publicity, especially those involving left-wing organistions such as Dev-Yol and Dev-Sol.

One exception to this is the show trial of 770 people in Amasya involving the former mayor and a large section of the population of the Black Sea town of Fatsa. They are accused of overthrowing the state and the death penalty is being demanded for 268.

A successful, international campaign has been developed around this trial led in Britain by the Turkey Solidarity Campaign.

The TSC is making plans now for a series of events around the third anniversary of the coup on September 12 and the fight for solidariy with Fatsa by the BM Box 5965, London WC1N 3XX labour movement.

A public meeting is being held in Hackney Town Hall on Saturday 10 September with speakers invited from Hackney and Islington councils, who have been in the forefront of support for the Fatsa campaign.

A feature of this event will be the British premiere of a video on the Fatsa trial and the launching of a pamphlet on the struggle of the Fatsa townspeople, which has been produced by the Islington, and Hackney borough councils.

It is also hoped to have in attendance representative from one of the delegations which have visited the trial this year. plummetted to 38%.

Overall, total fixed investment in manufacturing in Britain declined 31% between mid-1979 and early 1983.

Remember all the Tories' talk about control of the money supply being the be-all and end-all? Wonder why it's all gone quiet?

The rate of expansion of the stock of money is now well over the government's targets -whichever of the many possible ways you measure that stock. I has been over the targets for most of the time since 1979.

One of the corner-stones of monetarist theory is that the velocity of circulation of money is pretty stable. In fact this velocity has been falling, and at times falling sharply, since 1980. This has permitted rapid monetary expansion to go together with moderate inflation.

----- pull-quotes -----

TURKEY INFORMATION BULLETIN Turkey Soldarty Campaign I Aura 19ss FATSA: A TOVIN ON TRIÁi