Attempts to weaken representation strike Unemployment bogey used to scare steel strikers

THE 'This-will-be-our-last-strike' warning by clerks Steel Corporation's three Scunthorpe plants reflects unemployment to frighten and intimidate workers int The Redbourne, Normanby Park and Appleby Frodingham works employing 18,500 people are being reorganized around a new £230m steel complex known as the Anchor project involving the loss of 3,000 jobs.

Scunthorpe is virtually a oneindustry town and the threat of unemployment iS not taken lightly.

Some white-collar workers believe that . the present wrangle over bargaining rights at the new complex between the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC) and the Steel Management Association (SIMA) is putting the future of the whole project in jeopardy.

SIMA has local bargaining rights for middle management at three obsolete plants, but the ISTC has told the Corporation it will represent these workers at the new works and they have instructed their members not to work at the Anchor site until their demand is granted.

The ISTC called out its 6,000 nembers at the three plants just over a week ago after 40 were sent home for refusing to take part in tests at the Anchor site.

BSC has not divulged which side it backs, but it is understood to privately favour SIMA, which is more of a staff association than a trade union.

The position between BSC and the ISTC is deadlocked and after Tories defend tortures in Turkey TORY Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas Home has attacked "The Sunday Times' Insight team which recently published details of tortures inflicted on political prisoners in Turkey.

In an interview with the Istanbul newspaper 'Miliyet, he said the details could only encourage disruptive forces and consequently hamper progress.

His remarkable statements were released by the British embassy in Istanbul, a move which clearly indicates they have full approval of the Tory government.

His solidarity with the Turkish military regime is the more striking in that he makes no attempt to refute the well-attested evidenc of torture brought forward by the Insight team and Amnesty International.

I think the Turkish authorities deserve support and understanding in their obvious determination to retain their democratic institutions in the face of ruthless terrorist movements, Sir Alec told 'Miliyet' He referred to the clandestine Turkich Peonle's Tiheration Armi which kidnapped and killed two Britons and a Canadian employed on a secret NATO military contract in March last year.

'Turkey is not only a friend but an ally of the United Kingdom in NATO and in CENTO. I am sorry that in recent weeks a number of allegations have been made against her.

'Such action can only encourage disruptive forces and consequently hamper rather than promote progress.' This is not IAN YEATS day to in the the Corporation's recent display of ruthlessness in axing 50,000 jobs over the next seven years, some clerical workers are getting worried that chairman Lord Melchett may put his red pencil through the Anchor project as well unless the dispute ends.

Two hundred of them lobbied the strike committee headquarters last week in an unsuccessful bid to get the stoppage called off.

And a handful are thinking about asking the National Industrial Relations Court to uphold their right not to belong to union rather than, as they see it, allow their jobs to be held to ransom over bargaining rights.

Their fears have been fanned by the laying off of 1,100 production workers and the announced prospect of the remaining 10,000 being sent home before the end of the week.

ISTC was meeting yesterconsider their next The Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru has demanded the Lord Mayor of Cardiff call a national conference to discuss the threat to the Principality's steel industry. The Party claims 40,000 jobs will be lost under BSC's new modernization plans and they say. the conference should include representatives of Welsh trade unions, the CBI, local authorities, the Welsh Council, MPs, university economists and corporation officials. Sunday Times' investigators reproached Tory government has defended the Turkish torturers. When asked about well-documented cases of torture in Turkey, Julian Amery, Sir Alec's junior Minister, said:

I would prefer to pay tribute to the enormous efforts made by the Turkish political parties to ensure that parliamentary government is preserved.' Sir Alec and Amery, of course, speak for the same Tory government whose troops organized torture of Irish workers at Long Kesh and other centres.

These troops are part of a veritable international of torturers. According to the 'New Scientist, (December 28, 1972):

"Torture has become a science, with schools and research centres and international exchanges of information' Last year, the magazine says, Yahya Khan's Pakistan government was able to order a complete torture kit from the US.

And in November six Belgian commandos were found guilty of using excessive violence while torturing soldiers during NATO exercises in November 1971.

'All of those involved in the NATO test were volunteers in an exercise to practice both interrogation and anti-interrogation techniques, using procedures learned from Chinese interrogators in the Korean war,' the 'New Scientist' reports.

The Turkish torturers are only carrying out official NATO policy 'in defence of parliamentary government'. This excuse-advanced by the Tory government to jusBritish wer of ssion.

SIR ALEC • government. The Anchor steelworks under construction for the British Steel Corporation at Scunthorpe, using steel from the nearby Appleby Frodingham ibn works.

SPENCER tity the bestial practices of Turkish regime-is laughable.

The army seized power in Turkey in March 1971 and converted the existing parliament into a servile tool of military policy. The 11 most important provinces of the country have been under martial law ever since.

Premier Suleiman Demirel • Support forced out of office by the army and his successors have had to exercise a shadowy vestige of power under the constant threat of being swept away by the army.

Meanwhile the jails are crammed to capacity with trade unionists, students and intellectuals accused of subversion and systematically tortured before trial. In a typical recent trial, 52 school teachers were jailed for up to eight years and ten months.

Their crime? They belonged to the Turkish Teachers' Union which has been banned by the military regime and took part in an "illegal' strike in 1970. They were demanding better living conditions.

These are clearly 'disruptive forces' who must be repressed by every means—in the interests of democracy of course! Just how the Tories friends in Ankara in grisly detail by the Insight team in "The Sunday Times' (December 10, 1972):

Sadik Akincilar is a respected Istanbul lawyer. At noon last April 3 plainclothes police searched his house, confiscated documents and took Akincilar to a nearby police station ...

Akincilar says he was savagely beaten with karate blows: his captors took care not to mark his face. He was then thrown to the ground, his feet were tied together and raised in the air and he was subjected to repeated bouts of falaka-continuous beating on the soles of the feet with a stick or in Akincilar's case, a thin rubber police truncheon.

His feet became terribly swollen and bruised, though, again, care was taken not to tear the skin. At intervals he was forced to walk barefoot on the rough stone floor .. • When beating and falaka failed, he was given electric shock treatment.

HMSO shop

HER Majesty's Stationery Office, High Holborn, London, and the mail order department remained closed yesterday on the second day of a pay and conditions dispute.

This strike is against the ending of a 48-year-old agreement linking shop assistants' pay with an outside agreement between SOGAT and the Federation of London Wholesale Newspaper Distributors.

Yesterday's unsuccessful talks were held after a walk-out by 170 workers on Monday. National SOGAT officers have been session to discuss future action. At present the strike is still unofficial.

The Federation wants a house agreement with the bookshop assistants along the lines of those already negotiated with the Stationery Office warehouses and presses.

"They connected my boa electrodes . . . I was bour d to an iron chair with chains and ropes. When they began connecting electricity to my head through the ears, I felt I was about to go mad..?

Falaka and electric shock treatment continued for almost three weeks, says Akincilar: between sessions he was chained to , his bed in a cell permanently lit by a blinding light.

Akincilar had offended the susceptibilities of the democratic Turkish military by acting as defending counsel in the trials of number of Turkish People's Liberation Army members.

His case is only one of a large number of similar well-attested instances of torture, which the Foreign Office has made no effort to refute.

It is worth noting that apart from 'The Sunday Times', which has now earned Home's official displeasure, no capitalist newspaper has given prominence to the Turkish torture regime.

No doubt these papers have taken the heavy hints dropped by the Foreign Office through both Sir Alec and Amery. In many cases the same papers devoted acres of space to the case of the young drug-smuggler Timothy Davey.

It is clear that Sir Alec's pose as a defender of democracy is a fraud. The man is simply covering up for the systematic erosion even the most elementary democratic rights.

After all, the Tories have already done this themselves in Northern Ireland and are undoubtedly planning to do the same in Britain too, if 'disruptive forces' should get out of hand.

fight a protracted war against imperialism and described 1972 as 'a year of the greatest victory in the