Pritt demands dismissal of
case against Kenya leaders --

‘Wouldn’t get billing as farce’

NAIROBI

D.N, Pritt, QC, the eminent British lawyer defending Jomo Kenyatta and five other Africans
charged with managing the Mau Mau, last week asked the court to dismiss the accused on the
rounds that there was no case to answer. ,

“It is like seeing Attlee, Morrison and four other leaders of the British Labor party arraigned
for belonging to a terrorist organization,” he said. “And one would naturally think that such a thing

U.S. threat increases

Guatemala gov t wins
landslide re-election

GUATEMALA CITY

A widespread understanding that
the most difficult days still lie ahead
has tempered the rejoicing over ‘the
election victory of the progressive
Coalition which, in the words of
President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman,
iS trying to “transform Guatemala
Tom a backward semi-feudal econ-
emy into a modern capitalist coun-
try.”

So wide was the margin of vic-
tory that few observers foresee any
Serious internal challenge to reform
for some time to come. Completion
of the land distribution program
Was the key issue, and few peasants
fell for well-financed opposition at-
tempts to exploit their religious
feelings ‘and to persuade them that

"€ Only land the government would
8lve would be “plots in a cemetery.”

Out of the 32 congressional seats
aS Stake, all but four were won by
Pro-government candidates. Opposi-
tion deputies now number eight, a
Teduction of two.

Tt is an external, not an internal,

Teat that concerns progressive
Beers here. United States hostil-
in to the regime has been obvious
. €r sincé Arbenz showed that he

‘eant the promises of his March,

41 l inauguration speech, and now
lat the U.S. State Department and
: ited Fruit Company do not have
1 election upset to hope for, the
clief is they will try something
else, x

The comment on the elections
rade publicly by a high U.S. em-

8sy official is taken as advance

Kenya jails overflowing

notice. “It is a pity,” he said,

“that Congress will be dominated
by new and stronger red person-
alities at a time when we are try-
ing to create closer relations with
the Guatemala government, which
during the past few years has fail-
ed to cooperate with us.”

In addition to the power which
proximity gives it over Guatemala’s
future, the U.S. has positions of
strength within the country. ..The
United Fruit Company* owns the
railways and-virtually all piers and
shipping, as well as huge planta-
tions (to which the agrarian reform
law does not apply). At present the
U.S. takes 92 percent of Guate-
mala’s exports, largely coffee and
bananas, and provides 73 percent
of imports.

If it wants to, the U.S. can’ make
it difficult for Guatemala to obtain
the farm implements. it needs to
make the agrarian reform work and
the machinery it needs for the in-
dustrialization which is the next
step. And if economic boycott
seems unwise, it can encourage a
“revolution” of the sort which has
transformed other Latin American
democracies-in-the-making into dic-
tatorships.

To counter the threat implicit
in United Fruit’s monopoly of
transportation, the government is
building a new road to the At-
lantic and a new port.

To counter the larger threat, it
must depend ‘on the strength and
determination of the people, whose
will the elections registered.

New barbed wire compounds have been erected in Kenya to
augment existing jail facilities but even these cannot accommodate
thousands of Africans rounded up by British authorities adopting

€troristic methods to quell unrest.

Last week, Sir Evelyn Baring,

80vernor of Kenya ordered the death penalty “for administering the

all popular organizations.

au Mau secret society oath,” the pretext for British action against

was an ‘attempt to destroy a political
party.”

Pritt made three submissions on
points of law:

@® The prosecution had not re-
ceived the governor’s consent as
required by law.

® If consent was given by an
authorized person, the terms of con-

sent did not cover prosecution.

@® There was no jurisdiction: to
try the case in the Kapenguria dis-
trict (of Kenya).

‘Pritt said the trial, which opened
two months ago, was not merely
an attempt to prosecute people tak-
ing part in the Mau Mau.

Jt was also an attempt to convict
the Kenya African Union, of which
Kenyatta was chairman—‘the only
political organization of the vast
majority of the inhabitants of Ken-
ya’—of having as an integral part,
as a militant wing, a proscribed ter-
rorist organization.

“No sort or kind of evidence,”
he said, “has been brought for-
ward yet by the prosecution that
moves us one inch forward toward
proving that the Mau Mau is a
wing of the Kenya African
Union.”

Pritt said that .the prosecu-
tion had not really shown what the
Mau Mau was and neither had it
shown except in the vaguest pos-
sible fashion, what were its tenets
or activities. Neither had it shown
that the accused: were guilty as
charged of “managing” the Mau
Mau.

The case was important because
it was a political case. Deputy Pub-
lic Prosecutor Anthony Somerhough
had made it into a political case at
the beginning of the trial by sub-
mitting that the Mau Mau was a
militant wing of the Kenya African
Union.

“There are thousands of people
around us who think the accused
should not be defended or even
tried,” he pointed out.

(A plain-clothes police guard has
been attached to Pritt because of
threats to his life. He has received
a number of letters, some typed
and some written in an illiterate
hand, threatening various forms of
violence if. he continues with the
Kenyatta case.)

“But,” he added, “there are many
more thousands of people who think
the accused should not be prose-
cuted.”

Pritt said the difference between
the Crown’s opening of the ease
and what had come out in evidence
was “really qtite extraordinary.”

Of all the 44 witnesses for the
Crown there was not one who
claimed to have attended a Mau
Mau. meeting since the middle of
1950 or to haye seen Kenyatta or
any of the other accused since that
year.

He told the court that if any-
body had put one part of the

prosecution’s case “into a second-
rate farce, no management would
put it on.”

The whole resources of the goy-
ernment of Kenya had set out to
prove the. accused were directing
the Mau Mau but had not produced
a tittle of evidence.

There were only two possible ex-
planations—the first of which he
rejected as impossible. First, that
the Kenya police were utterly in-
competent, and second, that there
was no case because the accused
were innocent.

Police attacks and‘ wholesale arrests failed to halt popular
demonstrations in Rome against the fraudulent new election
law. Women were among more than 2,000 arrested.

Appeal to people issued

ROME

The Italian Communist party
and the Socialist party have de-
cided to launch an appeal to the
people against the undemocratic
electoral law forced through the
Chamber of Deputies by Premier
De Gasperi.

The 200 MP’s of the two
parties, singing the International,
marched out of the Chamber last
week in protest against the un-
constitutional proceedings after
a 60-hour filibuster.

When the vote on the new law
was taken after the march out
of the Communists and Socialists
839 voted in favor and 25
against.

Immediately the five Commun-

Italian Left exposes
election law fraud

ist and Socialist members of the
presidency of the Chamber re-
signed in protest.

The new law, intended to re-
duce Communist and Socialist
representation out of proportion
to the popular vote, provides
that in future elections any party
or alliance of parties which gets
half of the electoral votes cast,
plus one vote, shall receive two-
thirds of the seats in the Cham-
ber of Deputies.

It is designed to force the con-
solidaton of all _ reactionary
parties behind De Gasperi, who
pushed ‘it through in order to
strengthen his position in the

April elections.

‘Chinese positions
like underground

town’ says POW

(The following report of his interview with a Canadian POW
from Alan Winnington, correspondent with the Chinese Volunteers
and Korean People’s Army, confirms reports already sent out by
Canadian correspondents with U.S. forces in Korea.)

By ALAN WINNINGTON
PYOKTONG, North Korea
“JT never saw anything like the
Chinese positions. They are like
underground towns. They even had
tunnels under our posjtions.”

This is what a Canadian taken
prisoner on October 23 told me
when I talked with him here.

“When the Chinese attacked it
was still light, but when they got on
top of our positions it was still
dark. Timed to the dot.

“JT used to watch our shells go-
ing into their}lines and think I
wouldn’t like to be under them.
Now I know it doesn’t matter to the
Chinese. They sleep under our ar-
tillery.”

A young Scottish POW, 23-year
old Robert Brand of Glasgow, .a
delegate to the Berlin Youth Festi-
val in 1951, stated:

“TJ was’ wounded and they (the
Chinese volunteers) carried me on a
stretcher through deep tunnels
which were receiving direct hits
from our artillery, but it scarcely
shook a grain of dust from the
walls.”

India scores
Malan racism

HYDERABAD

The 58th plenary session of the
Indian National Congress—the goy-
ernment party—last week called on
all nations to support “Satyagrana,”
the passive
launched in South Africa against

resistance movement

racial discrimination.

The Congress accused the South
African’ government of continuing
to “flout world public opinion,”
even as embodied in the moderate
resolutions of the United Nations.

The resolution noted, with deep
satisfaction, that Africans, Euro-
peans. peonles of racial
descent, and Indians nad made com-

mon cause in the struggle against
oppression and racial violence.

mixed

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 30, 1953 — PAGE 3