Ban is concern of labour movement

AN APPEAL to all sections of the British Labour and trade union movement to oppose the ban on the Pabloite Ligue Communiste came yesterday from Gerard Vergeat, a former member of the organization's political bureau.

In an interview with the Workers Press he said the ban, imposed on Thursday by the Pompidou cabinet, should be the concern of the European labour movement as a whole. Defence of the Ligue Communiste against these attacks was a question of international solidarity, he said.

He described how heavily-armed police had raided the Ligue's Paris headquarters early on Thursday morning following an anti-fascist demonstration by the Ligue and other left-wing organizations. The 6,000-strong demonstration was against a racialist meeting organized by the fascist movement Ordre Nouveau.

'The police arrived between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. They came without warrants. The raid had been carefully prepared in advance. Two police cars blocked the entrance to the cul-de-sac where our headquarters are and Black Marias drew up in the main street.

'There were 100 police outside the offices—60 uniformed CRS and 40 in plain clothes. Our guards—who were specially reinforced—kept them out of the premises for half an hour, but after consultation on the telephone decided it was useless to resist further,' Vergeat said.

'When the police moved in they broke down doors, destroyed shelves in the bookshop and even walked over the keyboards of our typesetting machines. The plainclothes police took away two sacks of papers and documents with which they no doubt hope to try and make a frame-up.'

The 25 people who were on the premises were arrested. The women and all those under 21 were released after details of their identity had been taken.

On the way to the police station they were subjected to the foulest anti-Semitic abuse.

'The police told them: "For you we should reopen the Dachau camps" and "You are international Jewry",' Vergeat said. At the police station 14 were charged with illegal possession of firearms.

Thirteen were provisionally released and only Pierre Rousset, a former member of the political bureau, was held in detention.

During the search police had uncovered two rifles which Vergeat said had been brought into the offices about a week before by an unidentified man.

Internal disciplinary measures have been taken against members who failed to remove them from the premises, Vergeat said.

The charges against the 14 Ligue Communiste members carry sentences of up to two years imprisonment.

Rousset, who already has an eight-month suspended sentence hanging over him, could serve an even longer term in jail.

Attempts to hire halls for a protest rally against the ban had been obstructed by the authorities and when a hall was finally offered by a Socialist municipality just outside the capital, the meeting was banned out of hand.

The ban has evoked widespread protests in France, though the Communist Party has not condemned it.

Vergeat said the CP had refrained from abusing the Ligue Communiste in its articles about the demonstration and ban because it feared the impact of these events on its members in the factories and in intellectual circles.