[We have translated the following article from the February 19 issue of Rouge, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International.]
For more than ten days, our comrade Pierre Rousset, a member of the Political Bureau of the Ligue Communiste and a national leader of the Front Solidarité Indochine [FSI — In-
dochina Solidarity Front], has been held in Santé Prison in Paris.
Pierre Rousset was arrested on Tuesday, February 8, at 2:00 a.m. He is said to have been picked up on Pierre Le Roux Street in the seventh arrondissement by a hypothetical brigade (which had never been heard of prior to this) called the "brigade for the detection of criminal offenses."
According to information in our possession, it is alleged that Pierre Rousset had agreed, on behalf of Latin American revolutionaries, to act as go-between in transporting various items that the police are referring to as "materials capable of being used in making explosives."
Whatever Mr. Marcellin's police may say or claim, one thing is for sure: Pierre Rousset is being isolated in a without without newspapers, cell books, without the wherewithal for doing any work, all because of an absolutely elementary political act of solidarity on his part.
Above all, he must be granted the status of a political prisoner, so that he may read and write in a normal
Thousards Arrested in Antiwar Protosts
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used the case "of a Jew of French nationality" to spread anarchy: "It is clearly evident that behind this disturbance lie Zionist schemes, just as was the case in France in May 1968 with another Jew, Cohn-Bendit."
Sayah's analysis of the French May events is less original than it sounds at first. During 1968, it was shared by the French fascists, who called the popular student leader Daniel Cohn- Bendit "the German Jew." The French student movement responded by adding a slogan to their demonstrations: "We are all German Jews!"
fashion.
It would be a poor move for the French government to keep behind bars an activist whose political activities -as all his comrades, and surely the gentlemen from the intelligence services, know — at least never involved delivering to weapons bloody dictatorships like those of Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua or Paraguay.
By his opposition to the torturers who are crushing their people through misery and death and who assassinate those who oppose their bloody rule
-such as our comrade Luis Eduardo Merlino, who was tortured to death by the Brazilian gorillas- Pierre Rousset has done a service to a cause that is not his alone, but ours as well.
Mr. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing [Minister of Economy and Finance] struts about in Rio de Janeiro praising the "Brazilian miracle"; Mr. Jean de Lipkowski [Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs] celebrates the Greek colonels' "struggle for freedom"; Mr. Raymond Marcellin [Minister of the Interior] collaborates with Franco's police; generally speaking, the French government is the most faithful supplier of weapons to all the dashing and well-bred dictatorships on the planet.
For trying to lighten the load - even a little - of those who will bring down these regimes of sweat and blood, Pierre Rousset has been held for more than ten days. To hold him any longer would be just one more admission of the political sympathies of those in power and of their complicity with the butchers of Latin America.
Freedom for Pierre Rousset!