MINISTERS SWILI WHISKEY WHILE QUAKE VICTIMS ARE SHOT

An agency reporter who last week braved his way into earthquake-shattered Managua, capital of Nicaragua, found a man in tattered clothing wandering through the rubble.

He fixed the reporter with a piercing stare and said: We turn into animals when we get hungry. We'll do almost anything to get something to eat.

What the starved and homeless worker did not know was that at the nearby airstrip tons of food and medical supplies were being hoarded in makeshift sheds. But between the worker and this relief stood inevitably-armed soldiers.

It was no accident that within hours of the earthquake which Killed an estimated 6,000 people and badly injured 20,000 others-the military dictator, General Anastasio Somoza, mobilized the entire National Guard and declared martial law.

To help with the evacuation of civilians? To assist the pathetically small medical service to bring aid to the maimed and injured?

No, their function was "to restore order'. In practice this meant that poor workers who had no food, water or shelter, were shot or beaten up by roving bands of militiamen.

Two eye-witnesses saw soldiers kill a four-year-old street urchin as he scrambled through the debris looking for food. The bullets struck him in the stomach and he died painfully.

Meanwhile Somoza was entertaining his ministers in the luxurious gardens of his fortified mansion. The residence was closely guarded by soldiers, tanks and machineguns. The guests laughed and joked as they. drank their tumblers of whisky.

Somoza himself had been talking to the Press about "looters'. He described them as 'abominable beings'. The National Guard, he said, 'would save the country's honour and that of the armec forces'.

There was a ripple of alarm through the garden party. Reports had just come through Some 'agitators petrol and of a riot at a station. demanded food. They threatened to blow up the petrol tanks unless they received food.

Another group of between 300 and 400 stopped foreign correspondents on the road to Las Mercedes Airport. They carried placards saying 'We are hungry'. Food was being sent to the country, they said and they thanked international solidarity'. But they added: The army stockpiles the donations. It doesn't distribute them.' Somoza, in his yellow uniform, restored confidence among his guests. "There is no ruse for complaint, he said. 'All those protesters should already have been evacuated from the city!

Fresh rounds of whisky poured.

Later day on national radio—who would have had a radio to listen?— to make this vicious announcement: 'Beginning today I have given orders to the National Guard to patrol the city. and halt pillaging. They have orders to shoot if necessary.

'I order that the pillaging stops immediately. Let us establish peace, which is Nicaragua's only salvation.' The greatest pillager' of Nicaragua is, of course, Somoza himself and his century-old dynasty (see story this page). On behalf of his political, financial and military backers in the US his regime has been doing nothing else but pillage. And the 'peace' which his junta urgently needs to enforce is the 'peace' of a clique who fear for the future of their illegal, repressive and corrupt regime.

How did the earthquake, a natural and unpredictable disaster, pose any danger to the stability of this US puppet regime?

In the first place it destroyed property, privatelvowned property, which is the foundation of capitalist exploitation.

And secondly it meant no electricity, food, water OI shelter for the working class, which has always lived precariously on the borderline of illiteracy, starvation and severe With property in ruins, the general and his National Guard had to defend the ruins! Under capitalism private property is sacrosanct. Even if the masses are starving and bleeding from the effects of floods, fires, typhoons or earthquakes, capitalist property relations must be maintained-with the gun if necessary.

It is at this point that the screaming liberals and the clerics make their appearance. From the pulpits, the television and the Press we are treated to exhibitions of monumental hypocrisy. Please give to the refugees, the old and the suffering of Nicaragua, we are told by a variety of personages, including the Pope, Shristian Aid, the Red Cross Save the Children Fund. and the UN relief agencies.

In fascist Spain the Roman Catholic church has been wringing even greater sums of money out of the backs of the massive province-wide collections.

Not one of these 'humanitarian' agencies raises the slightest whimper about the mass devastation of Vietnam by Nixon's B52s. There is no great rush by the Catholics or the Anglicans or the crowd from Oxfam to bring relief to the peasants and workers of Vietnam who have been subjected to bombing raids paralleled only by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

The reason can be put quite bluntly: they like Somoza and his regime more than they do the liberation forces of Vietnam. Behind their mask of humanitarianism, they're all vicious anti-communists.

The relief industry serves to satisfy the aimless guilt of the middle class. It also collects the sympathies of those sections of the working class which aren't class conscious. They are both channelled away from the real questions involved in rehabilitating those communities hit by natural or unnatural disasters.

Objectively, the relief industry plays a more sinister role. It has become a common ritual for the relief to colonial countries to fall into the hands of the ruling clique. It is then used as a cynical bargaining counter to drive the shocked and devastated workers into submission.

Because the means of distribution remain in private hands, relief is eventually distributed through those channels which operate on the basis of capitalist supply and demand. In some cases this leads to rampant black marketeering; in every case to profiteering.

The whole exercise is conducted through imperialist agencies like the UN, the US State Department (read CIA) and the British Foreign Office. Thus, behind the prayers, the One of those who did not remain to assist the Nicaraguans in the relief work was Howard Hughes, the US billionaire believed to be worth some £1,000m. Hughes rushed from the city in his limousine surrounded by his personal bodyguard and flew to London where he is now resting in a Park Lane penthouse suite. collection boxes, the tear-jerking advertising campaigns, remain the objective requirements of imperialism to maintain its puppets and to keep workers enslaved.

This was the lesson of Bangladesh following the typhoon and floods of 1971. On that occasion the imperialists deliberately withheld supplies in the hope that the masses struggling against the military dictatorship of Yahya Khan would be driven back.

Eventually giant aircraft were brought in to disperse sections of the population in the poorer areas of India in a further attempt to decimate their resistance. This 'relief programme' failed. It only intensified the masses' determination to seize independence from West Pakistan.

Capitalism's interest is not to feed, clothe and tend to the masses damaged by disasters. It is to restore its parasitic, exploitative system as quickly boy shot by the Nationa as possible.

Press, Wednesday