Miners Vs State!

dorean army that they are winning the war ring hollow. Colonel Adolfo Blandon for example has attempted to claim that the rebel forces have suffered ‘considerable casualties’ (Irish Times, Feb 16), but could produce no figures. Reporters at the scene of the operations reported only evacuations but few guerilla casualties or arms captures, confirming rebel Radio Faribundo Marti’s claim that the army’s attacks had been no more than ‘a run around the hills’ for the troops.

The same Colonel Blandon, Salvadorean army chief of state, was unable to point to any success for efforts to clean up the image of the Salvadorean army. To date the main action against the army officers responsible for the killings of tens of thousands in El Salvador has been the transfer of two officers to government posts outside the country. The failure to clean up the army’s image is yet another US policy failure. ~ There is no way that the Salvadorean army can be made to look respectable — it’s too steeped in«blood for that. And the death squads, widely believed to operate out of the army’s HO under manoeuvres involved 5,000 US troops in thinly disguised practice invasions of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.

POPULAR SUPPORT That the US hasn’t so far been able to convert this military pressure into a real invasion is due to the fact that the Sandinista-led government continues to enjoy huge popular support. The Sandinistas have been able to organise a large popular militia and an efficient defence force while basing themselves on the mass organisation of the workers and peasants. In spite of the enormous cost of the war the country has made giant strides in the fields of health and education, being named in 1983 as a model country by the World Health Organisation and UNICEF.

US imperialism is not the most aggressive military power in the world for nothing and when the Big Pine exercises have officially ended, some 700-800 troops will be left in Honduras. Significantly, the US troops will be left in a narrow strip bordering both El Salvador and Nicaragua along the Gulf of Fouseca. This position would facilitate their use either in an invasion of Nicaragua All the warnings over the last 15 years about the lessons ‘of counterinsurgency learned. in Ireland being used in Britain have shown to be true. The British miners have been under an enormous assault from the British state for daring to fight for their jobs. Snatch squads, road_ blocks, political interrogations and massive police operations are all tactics perfected here which are now being used against the miners. In the following article John Ross in the British socialist paper ‘Socialist Action’ looks at the background to the The Tory press this week ranted, on against the ‘extremism’ of the miners. The Thatcher government was supposedly ordering in thousands of police to defend the right of ordinary workers to go into the pits.

These statements are hypocritical lies even by the standard habitually set by Thatcher. The Conservative Party planned its confrontation with the NUM in detail more than five years ago.

Tory thinking was drawn together in a_ report authored by Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley. The Ridley report récommended that each nationalised industry should be instructed to achieve a ‘totally inflexible rate of return on capital. Directors of nationalised industries would be instructed to achieve this target even if this, ‘might mean that men would be laid off, or uneconomic plants would be closed down, or whole businesses sold off or liquidated."

Nationalised industries were then divided into different groups according to how easily the Ridley report believed it would be to take on and defeat a strike. ‘S€werage and water workers, electricity, and gas were defined as areas of maximum difficulty for the government. To give the government tactical flexibility it was explicitly stated that where industries, ‘have * the: national interest by the: jugular vein the only feasible option is to pay up.’

The government should: provoke confrontations early in its term of office with groups of -workers in+ sectors where the employers had a particularly strong position.

PROVOKED Confrontation with stronger groups of workers should be postponed until later in the government’s term of office.

The final confrontation which would be provoked would be the mining industry. This struggle should be carefully prepared by building up maximum coal stocks in the power stations, by making emergency plans for importing coal, and by encouraging the _recruitment of ‘good non-union drivers’ who would be paid to cross picket lines under police protection.”

Above all the police should be carefully prepared for large scale strike breaking. Large mobile squads of police, centrally. organised and with communications equipment to back them up, should be organised for smashing picket lines.

Now the real target has come in the Tory sights: The Yorkshire NUM: the- group of workefs that organised the deféat of Heath in 1972 and 1974.

Those clashes on the picket line have nothing to do with ‘miners’ violence’. It is the NUM fighting against the most vicious and coordinated assault on the trade union movement since 1926. lf the Tory government defeats the NUM it will turn on any. group of workers which dares to fight for its jobs, its wages or its conditions of work.

RPOBLACHT SHOISIAL ACH