TRADE UNIONS VERSUS LAND=SHARKS by Tom Yengraf (Algiors correspandent )
The Algorian Trade Union journal Rovolution and Labour (23 January 1964) exposes the struggle for hegemony that continues in Algeria todays
"In our issue of September 5, 1963, on article failed to please the plunderers of vacant lands, the sabotours of self-management. The article, entitled "Tho class-struggle at Dou Smail around self-manage— mont", described the struggle by the agricultural workers against a gang of land-thieves, Our journal has holped to unmask those who ? attempt to swindle the people and has contributed towards thoir defeat, One should have been able to think that the resistance of the thieves would have ended there, but they found a powerful ally -— the Law.
One of the land=-sharks, Boudjali, of whom we wrote that he owns a transport firm and a cafe and that he has not even the right to onter as a worker into a self-managemont farm, has not hesitated to attack us legally. The judge at Kolea awarded the case in his favour. At the hoaring, Boudjali formally admitted that he had appropriated vacant lands and that he had at tho same time oxercised his activity as bourg cois employer. He attacked us in the following fashions: our denunciation of him as pluralist and land-shark, however truc, was morally defamatory, This was exactly tho case, our intention being to show him up as an enomy of the people and as an enemy of self management. The extraordinary feature of the case is that the Judgo of Kolea decided in his favour,
The Judge decided that the robber who had been denounced had the right to damages from the militants who had accomplished their duty of revolutionary vigilance. For the Judge, revolutionary vigilance is an offence for which militants are tried and for which they pay fines}! The other astonishing aspect is that the sentence to pay 200,000 Algerian frenes (over £150) was aworded against Brother Amar Kharroubi, secretary of the local branch of UGTA at Dou Smail who gave us the information. Revolution and Work was neither sued nor even called to the hearing.
It is easier to make a cowardly attack upon a militant than to make one on a national organisation, jut in this way one attacks the UGTA and self-management that it defends. That is the profound sense of the decision taken by tho court. One must admit that from the point of view of Fronch bourgeois law, the judge's decision was perfectly correct.
The problom, therefore, is to know by what criteria our courts will make their judgement. Will they defend the "honour" of bourgeois thioves or will they defend the decrees of March and those who apply thom?"
The official journal of the FLN, in reprinting this, also not only announced its total support for the stand of Revolution and York but also demanded that the decision should not be simply annulled but that an official enquiry be made into the facts presented by the UGTA paper so that the thiosves of national property and the enemies of the people and self-management should be punished properly. loth the difficulties that confront the regime and its clear orientation towards them are revealed in this small nows item.