International solidarity
with British miners
In France ...the CGT (the Communist Party-dominated union confederation) has not organised such a strong campaign of international solidarity for a long time, as it has with the British miners. In two weeks they collected 400 tons of food and 700,000 French francs (£60,000). Together they formed a convoy of 22 lorries escorted by several dozen cars, which stretched over one mile.
The convoy was sent on its way from the CGT headquarters near Paris by a meeting on Thursday, October 12, addressed by Malcolm Pitt, president of the Kent area NUM. It was greeted by a delegation at Lens, a town on the way to Calais.
At Calais on Saturday October 14, Pitt addressed the meeting in this way: 'A victory for one section of workers is a victory for the world workers' movement!'
A little incident at the end of the meeting shows just how much those present agreed with this sentiment. The French union leadership tried to get a singing of the 'Marseillaise'
Several workers piped up instead with the Internationgoing. al'. Krasucki, the CGT leader, jumped to the microphone and took up their chant. dressed the delegation.
It is vital that this kind of activity is followed up in consistent support. The LCR, French section of the Fourth International is currently organising a tour for miners and a miner's wife to raise more support all over France and get a real discussion of the issues. After one week on the tour approximately £4,000 has been raised. In Belgium ...in a tour organised for miners from the Bold NUM lodge by the PSO, Belgian section of the Fourth International, 370,000 Belgian francs (£4,900) was raised. Between October 1 and 6, Dennis Pennington and Susan Gannon (Bold Miners and Miners Wives' Group) went to Liege, Brussels, Louvain, Ghent, Charleroi and Antwerp.
They participated in five meetings, organised by the PSO. They visited a series of factories and met union officials there, mainly from the FGTB (General Federation of Belgian Workers), the socialist-dominated union.
In Liege, they were received by shop stewards' delegations in four Cockerill (steel) plants. In the Brussels region they met trade unionists from the Renault car factory.
They did a series of interviews with the press especially union journals and the feminist press. Susan also gave interviews to some well-known women's magazines with mass circulation such as Femme d'aujourd 'hui (Today's Woman).
Danish supporters picket docks to prevent movement of coal (DR) In Canada... the solidarity movement is growing apace. Union leaders representing about 2,000 nickel miners and smelter workers at Falconbridge Ltd in Sudbury boycotted a reception for the English queen in September to show their support for the striking miners. The president of the local branch of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union stated that the miners' union in Britain had supported them in the past, and that they owed their solidarity now. Several tours of miners have been organised, and Steve Shukla of the Armthorpe branch of the NUM has been touring since October 13. The official leaders of the trade-union movement are beginning to respond, and the Canadian Labour Congress took an important step in sending 16,000 Canadian dollars (about £10,000) across for miners and their families. In the Soviet Union... Ukrainian miners £50,000 and paid for a visit by 150 members of mining families to a Black Sea holiday resort. The leader of the Soviet coal miners' union announced an embargo on exports of coal and light crude oil to Britain. Last year, Britain imported 2.7 mil lion tons of oil, and spent £2.1 million on Soviet coal. In New Zealand... miners Derek France and Kevin Hughes of the Yorkshire Area Executive toured the country at the invitation of the Federation of Labour. By the end of the tour, some 60,700 NZ dollars had been raised for a special FOL fund for the miners. The New Zealand seafarers' union has already sent a container load of lamb plus thousands of dollars. FOL president Jim Knox, summed it all up when he said, 'If the miners go down in Britain it will affect the whole of the trade-union movement in the world. In Italy... the October 28 issue of the Communist Party daily L'Unita announced the start of a series of indepth eyewitness reports on the strike, and launched an appeal for solidarity. It calls on all its 'readers, comrades, workers, intellectuals, women and youth to join in a solidarity campaign which should be a European-wide one because the Europe that the left wants cannot be built if working people are marginalised. An official call for help from a party with the Italian CP's influence and re sources, and its one-and-a-half million members could really boost support for the miners. This is just a beginning. In Tasmania ...yes, even far-off Tasmania, the island state of Australia, is the scene of actions in solidarity with the miners'
Recently, a group of trade unionists and unemployed strike. activists met and formed a support committee in order to build
International Viewpoint 12 November 1984
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NATIONAL SOLIDARITY
This was what Frans Mattesen from Aarhus support com- harbours for ships that might be taking coal to Britain.' financial and moral support for the strikers. Members of the local branches of the Socialist Workers Party, the Australian section of the Fourth International, have been prominent in the
A public meeting at short notice in the Hobart Town Hall drew an audience of around one hundred people and a substantial amount of money for the strike fund was collected. Further public meetings are planned in the near future for other major population centres and the organisers plan to send speakers and video tapes to workplace meetings of miners, building and maritime workers.
Speakers have already addressed Hobart dockers and received a good response. After the meetings on the waterfront the dockers voted to impose a 20-dollar levy on their membership.
The campaign has received good media coverage with one activist who travelled in the British coalfields being interviewed on radio and in the press and TV. In the Spanish state ...the solidarity campaign with the British miners is just beginning. Relative to the northern European countries, this obviously requires much more of an effort in a country where the standard of living of workers is much lower and where they have suffered severe defeats in recent years in hard-fought struggles.
The following is the description of an initial solidarity tour from the October 19 issue of Combate, the paper of the section of the Fourth International in the Spanish state:
On October 3-6, Adrian Pirt, a Nottingham miner, Euskadi appealing for solidarity for the very long and heroic struggle that 140,000 British coal miners have been waging for more than seven months against the government's decision to cut the number of working pits to less than half in the space of
The lack of solidarity here so far, for this exemplary resistance struggle, which moreover is so similar to others we have experienced, such as at Sagunto and Aceriales, is eloquent testimony against our trade unions, which have lost their sense of practical proletarian internationalism. We think that through the trade-union left wing, we can make up for this neglect, as the magazine Nuevo Claridad helped to do by organising a tour for miner Adrian Pirt.
callies in solidarity with the British miners strike were o anised bv Nueva Claridad, together with the Left Socialis Coordinating Committee [Coordinadora Socialista de Izquierda] and the Ezkerra Marxista [Marxists expelled from Euzkadiko Ezkerra, a group formed by revolutionary nationalists but which later moved to the right] were held in Pamplona and Alava and in the Navarran town of Estella.
Unfortunately, the tour was rather limited in scope, consistmittee for the British coal miners said. The support committee with the dockers stopped a new attempt to send coal from Aarhus to Britain at the beginning of October.
With the approach of winter and cold weather and with the dwindling coal stocks, the British National Coal Board is on the verge of desperation. The fall and the winter are good allies for the British miners. The NCB is trying to bring coal in from everywhere, no matter how small the shipments. It all helps.
Internationally, at the moment, the NCB is getting coal mainly from three countries - the Netherlands and Belgium, where it has its own reserves, and Denmark.
Dansk Shell earlier admitted to Klassekampen that it has been selling South African coal to Britain through the Aarhus coal terminal.
In this respect, it is the Kul og Foderstof Kompagniet [Coal and Fodder Company] that has gone the furthest. the Korn og Foderstof Kompagniet, it has become the Kul og Foderstof Kompagniet. We sell coal, not politics, a spokesperson for the company said ans Meltesen sai, in his is support to haging in goti
Frans Mattesen said. ment against the miners.'
The ship Militence from Rochester with an English crew -but under a Cypriot flag of convenience — arrived in Aarhus
On Monday, trucks from Loekke, Gravesten and Faarup company began carrying coal from the KFK to Dock No 114. It was unloaded on the dock. The DSB hired a crane to load the coal on the ship.
The dockers were mustered to load the coal. At a meeting they refused to do the work. At the same time, the support committee went to block the coal at the dock so that the trucks could not unload. On the basis of the blockade, the drivers refused to do any more trips.
The ship had been loaded to one third of capacity when the work stopped. A hundred blockade watchers met in the atter noon afraid that the police would try to guard the loading. They did try to, but had to give up. The sailors on the ship gave the blockade watchers beer and music.
It was the Blaesbjerg Shipping firm in Aarhus that handled the order. And it is quite clear that the NCB at the moment is trying to use ships like the Militence to take coal into the small unregistered British harbours.
"Therefore, it is important now in all Danish harbours to keep an eye out to see where the KFP or others are sending coal to Britain,' Frans Mattesen said. "This could be done from any harbour in Denmark."
On October 17, the Danish police moved in to break the Aarhus blockade in the same style as attacks they made on a peaceful workers' demonstration during last winter's dockers' ing of rallies of vanguard workers and press conferences. None- strike. In fact, in Denmark the escalation of police repression theless, a very clear interest was aroused by this first attempt at mobilising solidarity here with the miners' magnificent strug Thatcher's Britain.
In Pamplona, with the support of the Workers Commissions and the Plant Committee, Adrian Pirt managed finally to speak to an assembly of 200 miners in a Potasas de Navarra mine, after a first attempt was blocked by the management.
The Potasas miners dug deep into their larders and their pockets to support their British comrades. kilos of food valued at 60,000 pesetas (about 1,200 US dollars) plus 16,000 pesetas to transport it to Britain. There was also another later assembly with 100 miners at a training school in the province of Navarra.
In Vitoria at a rally of 150 persons, the miners collected 40,000 pesetas. And a commitment was made to extend the campaign of economic solidarity to all the factories through the delegations of the UGT-Fourth Congress, that is, the old Vitoria UGT (General Union of Workers, the Social Democratic-dominated union), who were expelled at the end of last year by the rightist bureaucracy of the UGT. In Denmark ..Klassekampen, the paper of the Danish section of the Fourth International, reported the following in its October 11 issue: 'Not an ounce of coal should be sent to Britain. That would be international scabbery ' International Viewpoint 12 November 1984 against the workers' movement has paralleled the trend in
The October 18 Klassekampen described what happened and the response of the solidarity committee.
'Shortly after 8:00 p.m. about seventy cops with dogs swarmed into the harbour area and sealed off Ostre Mole so that the coal trucks would have free access to the ship. demonstration was quickly organised on the docks with about a hundred participants. It turned out that there were four to cops among the demonstrators who were
"The Aarhus support committee thinks that this action means
There has been a lot of talk about it in the press and everyone now knows that there is a support committee, one of the activists, John Jessen told Klassekampen.
"This is a good starting point for mobilising more people.... Only a mass blockade and work stoppages can keep coal from being shipped out of Danish harbours under police protection.
*The KFK has announced that it has lost money in this operation because of the blockade. Therefore it, and perhaps others, will prefer to use the smaller Danish harbours to ship coal. Moreover, it is reported that Holland, Belgium and Denmark have been chosen as way stations for the coal the British coal board is importing now that winter is at the door.
"Therefore, it is important to keep a watch on all Danish
The situation of the struggle alongside the people to prevent our country falling once again into the ber 1982, the report underlined the fact that the popular masses had been prepared to make sacrifices because the new government seemed to them to represent a step forward. However, president Siles Suazo and his government quickly adopted measures which went against the