Workers strike to break the chains

At wark while the white foreman looks on.

Comedials Boxing. Sans Weather. chan. room. 4.50 News 4.55 Rorest rangers. Freewheelers. reports. 6.15 Nanny and the professor. 6.45 London. 11.30 Epilogue. SOUTH AFRICA'S racialist and repressive government faces its biggest challenge for decades in the 9,000strong Ovambo strike in SW Africa. • For the first time since brutal police activity five years ago, African workers -driven to work for international companies virtually in chains - have defied the police state and struck in Windhoek and Walvis Bay.

The strikers, mainly from Ovamboland in the N, are demanding end the vicious contract-labour scheme operated by Africa, or a return to their homeland.

The strike could paralyse the country. It has far wider implications than the immediate complaint against working conditions.

For based on the labourcontract scheme--an open form and industrial con tests.

General Strike, of S African law, Ovartboland, industriaists could do little with the enormously S porcatial mining wealth in he man or let it me nee throcy called agency Athen Labour Association agency employers -with the help factories.

Once selected the men ondly, industry and finally those capable of doing only domestic work.

Every worker recruited through the scheme has to carry an identification disc around the neck specitying the grade and name of the person.

The contact then lasts about nine months, after which the worker must return to his Earlier this year the International Court of Justice, meeting in the Hague, declared Africa's presence in the territory illegal.

But Balthazar Vorster's apartheid regime has too much at stake in SW Africa to be able to listen to humanitarian gestures from a bourgeois court.

In the current confrontation, his government could bring in troops to start work in industry and break the strike.

S Africa has already moved in outside labour, which many observers believe to be army men in civilian clothes.

The other alternative, of course, would be another Sharpeville and a massacre of Ovambo strikers. Vorster has hesitated SO far in displaying any. open military involvement.

He knows that for decades the Ovambos have been of underground guerrilla activity. Windhoek was, for many vears the stronghold of the SW African People's Organization. Many of members in the capital operating pressure placed by illegality and police terror. deported overun et has already about 20 of the strike leaders, along with 1,000 others, back to their homeland. But this has only hardened the strike. townships Katatura, African workers. In the newly-built the situation is tense.

The Ovambos living there are also on hunger strike. They refuse to eat the food prepared by municipal officials. Police armed with pistols, truncheons and riot equipment have surrounded the area and sealed it off completely.

Katatura came into being when the authorities decided to demolish an older location near Windnear to the 'white are to be too hoek which happened The township is divided into sections, each inhabited by one ethnic group, and includes the compound where the contract labourers from the N live.

Earlier this year the police organized SWOOD on the 'Ovambo compound' arresting 800. Ninety-two of them were either detained or sent back to Ovamboland while the rest were forced to continue work.

A similar swoop at this stage would be nothing new to the Ovambos.

In the words of a SWAP publication, the system has pro duced many of the traits which were found among inhabitants of Hitler's concentration camps: violence, desperation and moral 'One of the basic facts is that people are treated as objects and not human beings and this inhuman treatment leads to degeneration and suffering unheard of elsewhere' UO The struggle for power most obscene of places. Importing priests FIDEL CASTRO'S conciliation remarks about the Catholic church during his Chilean tour were not made by chance. A general reconciliation is taking place between his Cuban regime and the church.

Priests are being ordained again for the first time since Castro took over. To remedy the shortage, another 150 foreign priests have been allowed into the country.

The church was closely linked to the wealthy Cuban ruling class and the Batista regime. Most priests fled or were expelled after the revolution.

The church itself paved the way for a reconciliation by giving the regime . tacit support, accepting that it is likely to last for some time.

In other Latin American countries, where reactionary regimes are earning popular contempt, or are likely to be overturned, the church is adopting a more discreet attitude than it had in Batista's Cuba.

Earlier this year a number of priests caused something of an uproar in conservative circles by giving up a whole day to cutting sugar cane.

Practising Catholics are said to be a small part of the population, but they include a number of Castro's comrades-in-arms from the Sierra Maestra days.

However, Castro can do with the support of the church both in Cuba and in other Latin American countries.

The reconciliation helps to define the nature of the Cuban revolution and shows that it is not an export product.