alashas viewed
cis occupiers of
West Bank lands

| Exactly why was Israel so eager to airlift be-

tween 3,000 and 7,000 Ethiopian Jews, called
Falashas, from camps in Sudan under a covert
_| €vacuation operation inappropriately code-named
|| “Operation Moses’’?

One answer comes to mind: cannon fodder. It
| has been reported by Middle East news sources
that over 600 Falashas have since been drafted into
the Israeli army. It is also reported that the Israeli
Military command plans to increase the number of

| Falasha battalion on the West Bank.

- Those Falasha unfit for active military service
Will be settled in paramilitary. Jewish settlements
0n occupied Arab territory; 20 Falasha families
have already been settled at Kiryat Araba near
} El-Khalil (Hebron) on the West Bank.

|| Willthese Israeli army occupation units be replaced
by newly-drafted Falashas?

‘drafted Falashas to 2,000, and to station a special —

Pot boiling in the FRG

BERLIN — A political scandal is rocking West
Germany and bringing the Bonn Government sharp
criticism at home and abroad.

The scandal began when FRG Chancellor Helmut
Kohl found himself treading on a hornet’s nest after
agreeing to address a demonstration of the so-called
Silesian ‘‘Landmannschaft’’ next summer. The organi-
zation is one of the revanchist groups in the FRG which
claim to have been ‘‘banished’’ from territories in
Poland, the USSR, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.

They demand the return of these foreign territories to a-

New German Reich with the borders of Hitler’s Ger-
many of 1937.

The Bonn Government actually supports the Silesian
‘texpellees’’ and other revanchist organizations. Chan-
cellor Kohl, however, found himself in difficulties when
the revanchists announced the slogan of the Silesian
demonstration would be ‘‘Forty Years Banishment —
Silesia is ours.”

To placate criticism, Kohl demanded that the slogan
be changed. The Silesians came up with a new one which
Kohl approved: ‘‘Forty Years Banishment — Silesia is
Our Future in a Europe of Free Countries.”

In Bonn’s language the new slogan implied not only
the grabbing of Silesian territory in Poland by the FRG

but also the disappearance of socialist society in the .

other socialist countries. The new slogan therefore did
not satisfy critics of the old one.

At this point the pot really began to boil. While the
Chancellor said he would now attend the revanchist
gathering, the newspaper of the Silesian **Landmann-
schaft”’ carried an article with a complete scenario for
the military occupation of all the socialist countries up to
the borders of the Soviet Union. The article presented
this fantastic aggression as a futuristic event where West
German armies would simply smash through all the
socialist countries, welcomed by the local peoples as
“‘liberators’’.

The outcry against this call for war and aggression
against the European socialist countries was heard from
Paris to Moscow. Even Chancellor Kohl and several
leaders of the revanchist ‘‘Landmannschaften”’ found it
necessary to dissociate themselves from the article. In

From Berlin

Fils Delisle

actual fact, the article only stated openly what the re-
vanchists and the Bonn Government propagandize with
their never-ending declarations about the ‘German
question” still supposedly being open and their program
for “‘reunification’’ between the FRG and the GDR,
meaning swallowing up the socialist GDR by the capital-
ist FRG.

The author of the article was demonstratively expelled
from the Christian Democratic Union, to his great
astonishment, since he had only written what was a
routine viewpoint among leading CDU and Christian
Social Union spokesmen. But a scapegoat had become
necessary, and he was dragged out to avert criticism
from the government leadership to an obscure and unim-
portant individual.

West German Social Democratic leaders Willy Brandt,
Hans-Jochen Vogel, SPD organizations and others de-
others declared that Chancellor Kohl, who stuck to his .
decision to take part in the Silesian revanchists’ gather-
ing, had brought disgrace upon himself and the FRG by
his role in the Silesian affair.

Neues Deutschland, organ of the Socialist Unity party
in the GDR, said the article in the Silesian revanchist
organ was ‘‘unashamed war incitement on the nazi-mod-
el’’. Neues Deutschland continued: ‘‘What these people
want is clear. They want to reverse the total defeat of
German imperialism in the Second World War. They
want to attempt once more what was not achieved by
those rotting under the ruins of (Hitler’s) Chancellery.
They want to create a new edition of the ‘German Reich’
with military force. They want, so the Schlesier (the
revanchist Silesian newspaper) says, that the army of the
FRG march through the area of the Warsaw Pact up the
Soviet border and into Soviet territory. At the same time
the insane heirs of the nazis also want to swallow Au-
stria. This conception reads like a copy of the fascist
plans of conquest. Only now they call it ‘a solution of
the German question’ and a ‘solution of the European
question’.””

eo

3 . International Focus

Tom Morris |

Solidarity, love,
plunder, murder...

Statements from the Ponti-

fical lips during his 12-day
_ Swing through the poverty-
Stricken Andean nations of
- South America rank among the
Most fascinating yet.

In the shantytown of El
Guasmo, Ecuador, Pope John
Paul II talked of his ‘“‘interest,

Solidarity and love’’, while a

Spokesperson for the Indian
_ people told him their lives have

hot improved since the
_ Spaniards arrived carrying the
| Sword and the cross 450 years

ago.

He urged slum dwellers to
“reject exploitation’? and, in
the same sentence, to reject
“extreme ideologies’. The
Pope declined to suggest who
_ Was exploiting whom. He may

: as well have visited a hospital

~ Cancer ward and harangued pa-

tients to reject cancer.

In Arequipa, Peru, the Papal
caravan arrived on the heels of
a 33 per cent hike in transit
fares, gasoline, bread and
other basic foodstuffs. ‘‘In-
terest, solidarity and love”
failed to bring prices down as
the caravan departed.

In Lima, Peru, where
unemployment runs at 50 per
cent, government troops aided
by 11,000 specially-trained
youth carried out ‘‘Operation
Saturation’’ to sweep the city
of prostitutes, abandoned chil-
dren and ‘‘suspected terror-
ists’’. Over 6,000 people were
rounded up and removed from
the Papal vision. The bill was
$250,000 in a country stagger-
ing under 4 $13-billion foreign
debt.

The Spaniards first arrived
in the land of the Inca people in
1533 to murder, plunder and
bring their Christian “‘civil-

ization” to the New World.
They came by ship.
This latest expedition carry-

ing ‘‘the word’’ travels
Alitalia.
‘My own
Babiy Yar’
In this year of the 40th anni-

versary of the defeat of Ger-
man fascism, many Soviet citi-
zens, former soldiers in the
war, have been writing their
recollections of those epic
years.

One such story, told by
Colonel-General David
Dragunsky (twice decorated

_ Hero of the Soviet Union, the
country’s highest award) deals
with a subject much in the
news here — the attitudes and
actions of the USSR toward
Europe’s Jews persecuted by
the Third Reich.

Dragunsky begins on a per-
sonal note: ‘I had my own
Babiy Yar. Having seized my
native village of Svyatskoye,
the nazis immediately shot 74
people, activists and Jews. The
first executed was my father, a
tailor. The same day they kil-
led my sister Sophia and’ her
three children; my younger sis-
ter Anya was next. My mother
followed ...”

He tells this, he writes, to

counter charges that the USSR |

was indifferent to the fate of
Europe’s Jewish people. ‘““We
should remember,” he says,
“that in 1938-39 the USSR
opened its frontiers to the Jews
of Germany, Poland and other
countries. The U.S. and
Canada remained deaf to ap-
peals for help ...”’

Colonel-General Draguns-
ky’s service took him through-
out Europe, arriving with the

advancing Soviet Armies in
Budapest in February, 1945:
‘*We came closer and closer to
the ghetto where 70,000 Jews
were being held. The SS men
had decided to decimate the
ghetto. Our quick action saved
the inmates. Other military ac-
tions prevented trains loaded
with Jews from being sent to
camps in Germany ...”

‘‘Hundreds of thousands of
Jewish soldiers, along with
Russians, Ukrainians, Geor-
gians, Tatars, Kazakhs and
other sister nations fought the
enemy for freedom and _ in-
dependence,’’ he writes.
“‘Among those decorated for
valor are nearly 20,000 Red
Army officers and men of
Jewish nationality.”’

One man’s story. There are
tens of thousands such stories
by Red Army veterans.

-

BUT Now WATCHING IT IN PRACTICE! AND HATRED IS A TERRIBLE THING.SO |
THINK THIS 5 UNLIKELY BECAUSE IT ~ TRY To COUNTER BALANCE THIS BY TRYING =~
FOMENTS CLASS » HATRED! ALL THosk WHO ARE SO UNLOVED

THOUGHT IT COULD HELPPEOPLE = _
~ AND COULD PLAY A ROLE IN REDUCING
THE ENORMOUS -. GAP BETWEEN THE

RIGA AND POOR, A

/

IM THE ARCHBISHOP OF NICARAGUA. | WAS. -
ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT LIBERATION

LIKE THE CONTRAS....
BEGINNING OF THE

iH

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 13, 1985 e 9