FRANCE CREME CHALLENGES by O. MILAN Launched during the electoral campaign, the Appeal of the 100 -- a statement drawn up by enlisted men in the French armed forces -- asked candidates to state their position on a series of demands of enlisted men, in particular:
--Freedom to choose date of induction.
--Elimination of drafting outside the borders of the country.
--Elimination of hazing.
--Salary equal to the guaranteed minimum income.
--Freedom of expression, information, and organization in the barracks.
--Abolition of military courts.
--Elimination of Military Security. Today, the electoral context in which the appeal had been issued has been forgotten. The very large number of signatures obtained on the appeal so far (3, 000), the positions taken on it by the military hierarchy, the repression that has hit those signing it, the support for it from a section of the workers movement, and the embarrassed attitude of the reformists have all combined to make the Appeal of the 100 an important political choose between their working-class origins and base and their present submission to the bourgeoisie through the medium of their policy of alliances. This must not be understood as a rejection of unity in action with the reformist parties. We defend this unity in action in all the bodies of struggle and we struggle to realize it among the political organizations; but we accept no alliance with bourgeois parties and we demand that the reformists break their ties with the bourgeoisie. That is the only means of realizing a broad Workers United Front. M event that has already forced the government into beating a few retreats. It is an event that all political forces have had to take a position on. Even though recent events have shown that the level reached by the Appeal of the 100 has been transcended in part today (the demonstration of 200 soldiers in Draguignan, for example), it is still necessary to make a correct evaluation of the possibilities opened up by this action. Reasons for the mass response The response received by the Appeal of the 100 shows that real mass work is possible in the army today, contrary to what was claimed not so long ago by many militants of the far left. The appeal served to reveal the state of tension, even of turbulence, that prevails among the draftees in the French army. It showed that as a consequence of this mood, it was possible to go beyond the stage of propagandistic affirmation of principles ("Down with the army of civil war!") and move to a new practical level of organization and action.
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FRANCE Everyone sees that the enlisted men are less and less prepared to tolerate the arrogance and hazing of the military hierarchy. They are seeking in a confused way to organize themselves for struggle. Only stupid policemen imagine that this is the result of an "extremist plot. " The real reasons for the explosion of discontent are many and profound. Perhaps the most important one is the existing contradiction between the necessities of educating and training youth in present-day society and the retrograde structures of the French army. The army is still organized to receive tens of thousands of young peasants supposedly prepared for a docile acceptance of humiliation and slaughter. Instead, it is getting youth all of whom have been to school until the age of sixteen and many of whom have received a professional education and have some social experience, even an experience in struggle much more developed than their predecessors. The elimination of the long draft deferments, which, according to the calculations of the hierarchy was supposed to result in more disciplined ranks, had the opposite effect in reality. The commanders can no longer play on the opposition between the "manuals" and the "intellectual shirkers. " It would be false to say that youth today presents a united front against the military hierarchy; the differences in class origins are extremely important in evaluating the varying reactions of the ranks. But it is clear that a number of factors have converged in recent years in a unifying direction. The youth who are presently in the army have often had experiences in important mobilizations in the high schools and technical schools during the past few years, and the acquisitions of these struggles are naturally again taken up to press the movement in the barracks forward. The organization of soldiers' committees on a sections or barracks basis recalls the youth mobilizations of the past few years in the concern for democracy and, at the same time, results in a considerable increase in the effectiveness and staying power of the struggles in the army, given the conditions under which they take place. After the school of general assemblies, there is now the school of clandestine work in the barracks. The employers who in the future will take this ferment of workers, and technicians into their factories will have a hardened force to deal with. Those who denigrate the Appeal of the 100 on the grounds that it is only a simple petition forget to take this aspect of the movement into consideration. In order better to parry the blows of repression and to avoid the traps set by the Military Security in its search for "ring-leaders" and to respond to any blows in a collective manner, the signers of the Appeal of the 100 were necessarily organized on a barrack-by-barrack, regiment-by-regiment basis. The Appeal of the 100 is a step in the development of consciousness of the role of the bourgeois army. It is also a step in the political maturation of many militants who got their first experience in illegal work through the appeal.
The repression The military hierarchy reacted to the massive number of signatures for the Appeal of the 100 by resorting to repression: varying prison terms ranging up to eighty days for signers who were considered leaders. Even though Minister of the Army Soufflet was obliged to defuse the situation by authorizing soldiers to receive the press of some left organizations (L'Humanité in particular) and by promising to grant more frequent leaves, the repression did not abate, and many soldiers are still getting significant prison terms that are often accompanied by increasingly arduous conditions.
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The government and the ministry tried their usual operation. They tried to make people believe that they considered the Appeal of the 100 harmless and they took advantage of the fact that public opinion had been directed elsewhere in order to strike harder at certain of the signers. That is why it is more than ever necessary for civilian antimilitarists, the Committee to Defend Draftees, the antimilitarist committees, and the unions that took positions in support of the Appeal of the 100 to continue to publicize the cases of repression and to continue to extend their support. But the attitude of the draftees toward the repression changed, and this was also an important sign of growing determination. Although the reports of the Military Security during the past few years indicate that fear of military prison was a weapon of disuasion sufficiently powerful to avoid movements of great breadth, the militants -- without adventurism and without at all underestimating the disagreeable features of a stay in "the hole"- were completely determined to run that risk if it proved useful for the movement. The Appeal of the 100 & the workers movement It is not only inside the army that the Appeal of the 100 received a broad response. Many motions of solidarity with signers who had been repressed offered the opportunity to pose the problem of "antimilitarism" within the trade unions. In certain cases the trade-union bureaucracies were obliged to go beyond the traditional framework of motions demanding the "democratization of the army" and a "democratic status for the soldier" and to take positions on the concrete cases of repression. They were thus compelled by the facts themselves and by the pressure of the rank and file to give their approval to antimilitarist work within the army itself, even though such work is illegal. In many trade-union locals the problem came up of taking charge of youth who were leaving for the army; they were always working youth, members of the union, and it was therefore up to the trade-union local to give them material aid, defend them against repression, and even to propose an orientation of struggle to them. These debates in the local unions allowed discussions on the role of the army, which had come up last year around the analysis of the repression in Chile, to be taken up again in a very concrete way. How to act concretely to avoid a military coup against a rise of the workers movement? For that it is necessary for the workers organizations themselves to take in charge the work of disintegrating the bourgeois army and organizing the workers in uniform.
Obviously, the reformist and Stalinist bureaucrats were not convinced, but it was demonstrated before the workers that it was not only vital but also possible to act in this way.
The French Communist party itself was forced to go rather far.
In fact, it went so far as to publish its own Appeal of the 200 (signed by 200 soldiers of the infantry regiment in Montléry in Chad). The demands differed significantly from those raised in the Appeal of the 100, for they remained within the framework of the proposals of the Common Program (the reformist program of the Union de la Gauche -- Union of the Left -the electoral alliance of the CP, the SP, and a handful of bourgeois politicians). Nevertheless, we salute this initiative, the first illegal action to be taken by the CP in a long time.
(Later, the petition was called an act of disobediance and was severly repressed.) This initiative can only help to open up debates among the enlisted men and the workers organizations. We confidently await the reformists on this terrain. The Appeal of the 200 allows us to measure the pressure that we have been able to bring to bear on certain sectors of the Communist Youth, to whom the CP is forced to give somewhat of a freer reign out of fear of losing them. It is significant that the CP abandoned its SP and left radical allies in this affair. They were afraid to do anything at all in this area. Today we must go further Far from being a "harmless" act, the Appeal of the 100 showed the force of the movement of enlisted men. They felt that they were not isolated in their barracks, that many others analysed the military repression and structure in the same way they did. BOLIVIA by NESTOR ALBA Barely nine days after having celebrated its accession to power, the Bolivian military dictatorship was shaken by serious conflicts that led to the resignation of General Hugo Banzer Suarez, thus in turn aggravating the crisis within the dictatorship and bringing the crisis to the brink of explosion. (A state of alert was declared for the police and the army and the dictatorship's ever more rare supporters were mobilized.) Banzar presented his resignation to the United Armed Forces at 8 o'clock in the morning on August 30, 1974. It was then discussed during a joint meeting of the High Command and the military cabinet. The resignation was finally withdrawn on the afternoon of the same day at a press conference during which General Carlos Alcoreza, president of the High Command, read a communiqué from the armed forces and Banzer himself explained his position. While military circles, the leaderships of the government parsidered the crisis a farce. Causes of the resignation The High Command communiqué gave this as the reason for the resignation: "the difficulties encountered in uniting the parties that form the Frente Popular Nacionalista (FNP -- Nationalist Popular Front) on a solid basis into a great political formation, " a task in whose accomplishment Banzer was "held back, bothered, and misunderstood." The dictator, who suffers from nervous depression when his decisions are discussed (his physician had to give him a sedative in order that the meeting could continue), declared in announcing the withdrawal of
This movement must now be developed and consolidated through other initiatives, so that the committees that now exist in many barracks can organize the struggle on this or that precise point (against hazing, against racism, for more leaves, etc.) and so that it can be organized better and be renewed. In the committees it must be shown that the simple struggle against military oppression must be transformed into consciousness about what the French army represents more and more: an army of civil war, an army increasingly being prepared to be used to repress popular movements. The mobilizations of the draftees take on their full meaning only through this conjunction with the fundamental interests of the working class and its actions. This is the meaning of the demonstration of the 200 soldiers in Draguignan who marched with fists raised, singing the Internationale. This is the conjunction that the militants of the Front des Marins, Soldats, et Aviateurs Révolutionnaires (Front of Revolutionary Sailors, Soldiers, and Airmen) is working toward. The Appeal of the 100 is continuing. But the Appeal of the 100 is only a beginning. •