AROUND THE WORLD
Antilles GRS election appeal THIS COMING MARCH, legislative and regional elections will take place in France and its overseas departments. The Groupe Revolution Socialiste (GRS), the section of the Fourth International of the Antilles (French West Indies), has just adopted at the last meeting of its central committee a position of active participation in regard to the regional elections. We reprint below translated extracts from an article on this question that appeared in the mid-January issue of Revolution Socialiste, a publication of the GRS.
On December 26 and 27, 1985, the Central Committee confirmed the orientation of the organisation toward active and determined participation in the upcoming regional elections. The people should not be left just with a choice between a revengeful right and a local left, which have, in the Antilles just as in France, done their groundwork by applying policies hardly distinguishable from each other.
Our presence aims to offer a revolutionary, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist alternative. We want to build this alternative with those who are interested in a double perspective of national liberation and of power for the working masses, with those who conclude from this general perspective the necessity for joint tasks in the coming period.
With this in mind the GRS has begun discussions with Combat Ouvrier [a formation linked to Lutte Ouvriere in France], an organisation whose programmatic positions are known to us and which is composed of anti-colonial militants who, although with different origins than ours, are nonetheless opposed to reformist capitulation (in Guadeloupe as well as in Martinique).
The GRS has also written to the Movement pour l'Independance de la Martinique (MIM), proposing that this organisation weigh the conditions for joining with us on a slate of independents who have not been implicated in any class-collaborationist projects.
The GRS will account for all these proposals, but it announces here and now that it will, in any case, enter the coming fight, in a unified 26 cadre if possible, but alone if necessary•
For now, we call on all our sympathisers, our friends, workers loyal to their class, determined anticolonialists, democrats who have respect for the proletarian struggle, to lend us the financial, material and political support that we need in order to fulfil our obligations to the masses. Mauritius Revolutionary campaign THE MUNICIPAL elections of December 8, 1985, were a political confrontation of national importance. In the first place, they constituted a trial run for the formations entering the lists, a preview of the legislative elections that would normally take place in 1988. Also they provided the occasion for a vote against the politics of the regime and the orientation of the governing coalition, the Alliance. This Alliance unites the Mouvement Socialiste Mauricien (MSM) of Prime Minister Aneerood Jugnauth, champion of the interests of the Hindu faction of the bourgeoisie; the Parti Mauricien Social Democrate (PMSD) of the vice prime minister, Gaetan Duval, a great admirer of the racist Republic of South Africa and traditionally the supporter of the interests of the Franco-Mauritian sugar-producing bourgeoisie; and a collection of former Parti Travailliste (PT) members who had been excluded from the latter because of their participation in the coalition government.
Only the Movement Militant Mauritien (MMM) [a left party that has been moving to the right] seemed to be sufficiently strong to really oppose the present regime. However, the MMM of 1985 is no longer the same as the MMM of the late 1970s which used to sermonise: "Class struggle, not race war' '. After a brief period in the government in 1983, in a coalition with the bourgeois party that is now a member of the Alliance, the MMM began a clear political evolution to the right. This recentering, pushed by the MMM leadership, was shown during the time of the party's participation in the government by the many compromises it accepted with big sugarproducing capital and international financial institutions. The recommendations of these interests were scrupulously followed by Paul Berenger, a leader of the MMM and finance minister at the time. This caused a severe disorientation among the people who had voted massively for a real change in policies.
The mass disorientation in the face of the MMM's about-face, its electoralist evolution and the communalist campaign by Aneerood Jugnauth, increased the divisions among the workers and popular classes along communalist lines.
On the island of Mauritius, communalist demagogy and patronage find a fertile field for their development because the bourgeoisie is itself split up along the various communalist lines and the working masses also are divided between the small farmers, mostly Hindu, and the urban proletariat, largely Creole.
The importance of communalism has been very apparent in the recent municipal campaign. Within this context of manipulation of the communalist reflexes of the minorities (Creole, Muslim), setting them in opposition to the majority Hindu community, which the present prime minister claims to support, the electoral victory of the MMM has been largely distorted. True, it carried all the municipalities and 19 of the twenty electoral districts, but it continues to be, as a leaflet of the Organisation Militante des Travailleurs - Front National Anti-Souffrance (OMT-FNAS) states: 'an unhealthy political situation' . This document, which draws up a balance sheet of the elections, affirms: The island of Mauritius is divided into two communitarian blocs. The MMM has made a clean sweep of the PMSD's electorate in Beau-Bassin and Curepipe and has taken control of all the municipalities. But on what basis? The general elections of 1976 and 1982 were decided on the basis of class. But the December 8 municipal elections were decided on the basis of race. The MMM has succeeded in uniting a fraction of the working class, the middle class and the bourgoisie linked directly to the sugar interests, by a strategy of a communal alliance of minorities.'
The meaning of the participation of revolutionary candidates in these municipal elections must be viewed in the context of the division of the workers movement along comInternational Viewpoint 10 February 1986
munalist lines. The OMT-FNAS presented slates in four districts where it is most implanted.
For the OMT-FNAS, as this organisation explained in its electoral manifesto, it is a question of proposing a 'vote against the economic policy and the strategy of pro-capitalist development of the Alliance government', but also la vote against the MMM's plan for economic development and 'against austerity, whether it is labeled left or right'.
The OMT-FNAS conceived of its electoral campaign as an important opportunity to reinforce its implantation and its coverage, especially through developing grass-roots bases of the FNAS, its mass front. The results here are encouraging since several branches of the FNAS have formed and about two hundred young activists have been recruited.
these activists have waged a campaign imaginative enough to counter-balance their unequal financial situation vis-a-vis the other political parties. Thus in the districts where the OMT-FNAS had candidates, a door-to-door campaign was waged to present its ideas and the symbol of its slates entitled 'dimunn' ("ti-dimunn' in Creole means 'the little people'). The December 8 issue of the journal Week-end reported on the OMTFNAS campaign in these terms: *Following the example of the two large bloes that are confronting each other in the municipal elections today, the OMT and the FNAS organized a march yesterday to mark their presence in these elections. Six automobiles filled with OMTFNAS activists, about a hundred cyclists and some motorcyclists took a route along Berthaud to Quatre Bornes and on to Port Louis, radiating out particularly into the working class areas ... The slogans called upon the electorate to vote for a "workers' " alternative, and against the capitalist policies advocated, according to the OMT-FNAS, as much by the MSM-PMSD Alliance as by the MMM. They also urged a vote for the unity of the "ti-dimunn" the "dimunn mizer" (miserable) and the small farmers. It was a march, novel in its conception, which illustrates the power and the means of the two movements as well as the role they intend to play in the current joust?
The electoral results of the OMT. FNAS slates are quite encouraging. Since cross-voting was possible, the candidates on the different OMTFNAS slates got different results. In Port Louis, the head of the slate received 1.1% of the votes cast in one district and 2.4% in another. The best results were obtained in Quatre Bornes with 2.5% of the vote.
International Viewpoint 10 February 1986
Philippines Election machismo PRESIDÉNT MARCOS has sought to undermine his opponent in the Philippine elections, Corazon Aquino, by playing on the machismo of Philippine men. For him, 'the Philippines' first woman presidential candidate was misbehavington ald me the, ant "challenging the man"! ary 25-26, 1986).
Marcos' wife, Imelda, concurred with this, noting that 'women have their place somehow - at home (idem). And, when addressing dockers in Manila, she denounced Corazon Aquino for not using make-up or going to a manicurist. Developing this theme, Imelda justified, in her own terms a vote for Marcos: *All Filipinos who love beauty, love and God are for Marcos. I know the Philippine people ask for nothing else from life than this - beauty. This is what they aspire to more than to wealth and power.' (Le Monde, January 11, 1986).
More than 50 per cent of Filipinos live below the poverty line. Imelda Mareos, on the other hand, a former regional beauty queen, and wife of the president, is one of the most rich and powerful people in the country. As minister of state for human settlements, amongst other functions, she controls some of the main networks of corruption in the country. She personifies the crisis of the regime. Grenada Humphrey freed ON JANUARY 21,1986, the Grenadan Court of Appeals finally returned its verdict; it overturned the decision made a year earlier to extradite the trade-unionist, Chester Humphrey, to the United States.
Humphrey was accused of having falsified some documents in 1979 while he was living in the United States, and of having furnished arms used in the overthrow of the dictator, Eric Gairy. The court found that there was not sufficient evidence to sustain the charge.
The court's decision is an important victory vis-a-vis the United States, which sought to end Humphrey's participation in the Grenadan trade-union movement. After the invasion he spent 23 months in prison.
This victory is owing to Humphrey's tenacity in starting a hunger strike in September and the demonstrations that have spread during these last few weeks in Grenada and in other countries demanding his release.
The victory is all the more remarkable in that it came about a month before Reagan's visit to Grenada and at a time when the Grenadan government was trying to criminalise the left: in December, the police claimed to have discovered some men engaged in military training, and on January 7 they searched the house of two leaders of the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement, looking for weapons. • Liechtenstein Women get the vote AT THE end of January the women of Liechtenstein went to the polis for the first time in the legislative elections. At long last the government of the tiny principality, bordered by Austria and Switzerland, has been forced to concede this most basic democratic right, one of the last, though not the last government in Europe to do so (there are still some cantons in Swtizerland where women do not have the vote). D Canada Missing missile CANADIAN anti-nuclear protestors received an unexpected and perhaps unwelcome bonus during recent cruise missile tests in the Cold Lake area which, the US government says, is an ideal site for simulating Russian conditions because it is covered in snow. The community of Wandering Valley, Alberta, were startled to see a missile going by at 1000 feet which should have passed five miles away. When the missile reached the weapons testing ground it went down in almost inaccessible territory and it was three hours before the US Strategic Air Command could find it. This is the fifteenth missile to suffer a mishap during testing.
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