Five revolutionary militants arrested by the Egyptian regime last summer are still being held without trial or even formal charges. The five are Abdel Kazim Shahit Mahmoud and Muzahim Muhi el-Takriti, both Iraqi teachers; Reda Ibrahim Farag, a student; and Mahmoud el-Sayid Munammed el-savia and hasnad ivansour Mustata e -Becawi. boin workers.
ney were among sixteen peopie originally arrested in early July 1975. The Egyptian press reported then that they would be charged with having made contact with the Revolutionary Communist Group in Lebanon and the Fourth International, and witn naving organised to overinrow ine bolticar ano economie regime in Egypt and replace it with an 'extremist Trotskyist Communist in Egypt!
others have been given bail - although they too have not been formerly charged. Their release shows that the Sadat regime, which is now trying to polish up its liberal image, is susceptible to international pressure on the question of political orisoners. nowever-te commute imprisonment of the other five may indicate inat the reaime intenes to no tem indefinitely, while refusing to risk a political trial.
International solidarity can be vita in ensuring their release. But while they remain in jail some of their families are deprived of any income and desperately need assistance. Please send contributions to Gisela Scholtz, Postal Account Number CCP0G0-1085001-56, brussels, belgium, togetner witn notrica religious fanaticism. Palestinian resistance.
The Christian minority in Lebanon which was traditionally protected and given political and economic privileges by the colonialist powers, had long taken a position against Arab nationalist and anti-imperialist strug gles. The Christian bourgeoisie's only hope, therefore, lay in turning. the war into a religious civil war, mobilising the Christian petty-bourgeois masses by whipping up their The Moslem bourgeoisie, while also favouring the repression of the Lebanese mass movement and the clearly could not go along with such schemes without being completely compromised in the eyes of the Moslem masses (their electoral base). Their role, therefore, was to distract the leftwing groups, Moslems and Palestinians with all sorts of political nemovement and masses in both countries.
Middle East.
Majida Salman and Saleh Jaafar ss actions MEMBER OF THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST UPPORTERS OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL)
tails of the sort of work that developed following the establishment of such barricades?
Throughout the civil war there were two main things that had to be done, sometimes simultaneously and at other times independently of each other. First of all we had to defend the neighbourhoods from our permanent positions on the barricades Arab regimes extracted out of their military defeat partially called into question the process of de facto colonisation of the 1967 occupied territories. In the West Bank this has brought about a qualitatively new rise in the mass upsurge against the Zionist occupation, that for the first time has had profound repercussions on the Arab population living inside the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel (i.e. those Arabs under colonisation since 1948 or 1956). Furthermore, the mass upsurge of the Arabs under occupation is also in large part influenced by the Lebanese events, due to the physical intermingling of the Palestinian It is therefore clear that since October 1973 the implementation of the peaceful settlement has not taken place 'smoothly' in the absence of mass confrontations and political explosions. The special interests of different sections of the Arab ruling class, combined with the unevenness of development of the mass movement in the Arab world and its uneven ability to apply pressure on these same ruling clases, have placed contradictory conditions on the successful implementation of an imperialist settlement in the Arab region. It is these contradictions that are being reflected in the explosions going on today in the yists fight for which the various neighbourhoods and groups are not dominated by highly conscious revolutionary leaderships, expropriation can occasionally take on the character of looting and mere robbery. Therefore, we centred this kind of political intervention on ance of transforming 'expropriations' into genuinely revolutionary acts, that could facilitate the further the importMiddle East 7