Afghan guerrillas attack Kabul bases

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LAST weekend, according to reports by western diplomats, Afghan Muslim forces attacked Russian military bases in the capital city of Kabul. Fierce battles are said to have occurred.

This is the latest indication that firm control of Afghanistan still eludes the USSR, 3½ years after its December 1979 invasiothere are There are now over 100,000 sion.

Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. They occupy the cities, but they are not secure from attack there. Muslim forces have been able to mount repeated attacks within Kabul and other major cities. In October 1982 a rocket was fired into the Soviet Embassy in Kabul.

The Russians have no control at all over most of the countryside. Muslim control of the Panshir valley has survived repeated full-scale attacks from massed tanks and planes. They have been strong enough to impose a truce for the area, an important military base, on the Russians throughout most of 1983.

In most of the countryside the Russian army is at war with the entire population. It relies on the well-known techniques of occupying armies in such situations - punitive bombing raids on villages, including napalm bombing; scorched earth tactics against crops and so on.

The American State Department has repeatedly accused the Russians of using chemical warfare — defoliants to destroy crops, poison water supplies and kill livestock. An investigation into these charges by the United Nations réported that there was no definite proof to support the allegation but that "circumstantial evidence" did suggest that the USSR has O'Mahony used toxic chemicals in its Afghan war. (NY Times, 5 December 1982).

UN relief organisation figures put the number of refugees who have crossed the border into Pakistan at around three million. Other accounts put it as high as four million, or roughly the population of the 26 counties of Ireland. (Estimates of the Afghan population vary from 16 to 20 million). •Most of the reports come from people hostile to the Soviet Union, but thère is no serious ground for doubting that the general picture is accurate and that the Russians are in full-scale military confrontation with the vast majority of Afghans.

The Russians invaded in December 1979 because the regime installed by the military coup of April 1978 was crumbling. Afghanistan had been a client state of the USSR since the mid-1950s. The '78 coup was organised by officers trained in the USSR and members of the middle class Communist Party, the PDP:

With no base outside the officer corps and Kabul, the regime relied from the beginning on napalm bombs and gunships to terrorise the Muslim population. This, and clumsily bungled attempts to impose reforms from above, roused the country, against them, under the leadership of Muslim reactionaries.

Bitter faction-fighting between two PDP factions -Khalq, in control; Parcham, which had the support of Moscow - decimated the regime.

Purge and slaughter almost wiped out the top ranks of the Russian-trained airforce, and for months before the invasion the USSR was running the airforce The Russian invasion removed Khalq (its leader Amin was shot), and put Parcham power. They retreated from the Khalq's programme of radical land reform.

3½ years on, the Muslim forces probably control more of the country than before the invasion. There is now serious outside intervention - CIA, Chinese, etc. (In 1979 talk of serious CIA involvement was just Kremlin propaganda).

The base of the PDP is probably even narrower: one report of the weekend's fighting says that some Khalq joined in the attacks on the Russian bases in Kabul.

The USSR says it wants to get out of Afghanistan. It wants "a peaceful solution that would end the rebel threat" and leave the present regime in power.

Talks have been going on for nearly a year between the puppet Afghan government, Pakistan, and UN Under Secretary General Diego Cardovez, to fina a way of reaching a 'political solution' which would allow the refugees to return and lead to Russian withdrawal.

Last March UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar met Mr Andropov in Moscow for talks which included a search for 'ways of normalising the situation around Afghanistan' According to a report in the Paris daily Le Monde, the KGB, the Kremlin's experts in political control, are pressing within the bureaucracy for withdrawal. But some observers see the Russian willingness to talk as no more than an attempt to placate its Third World critics.

Meanwhile the bloody war continues. THE explosion of sectarian violence against Sri Lanka's Tamil minority seems to have subsided for now.

It leaves an officially admitted 300 dead and perhaps as many as 80,000 homeless: tens of thousands of Tamils have moved north to 'their own' área of Sri Lanka.

Something like $300 million worth of property has been destroyed by Sinhalese gangs systematically burning down Tamilowned houses and shops.

Whole areas of the capital city, Colombo, have been destroyed. The damage to the economy - in which Tamils have long been disproportionately prominent - is said to be massive.

Politically, President Jayewardene is now effectively a dictator. The main opposition in Parliament, the Tamil United Front, has been outlawed under new laws which prohibit advocacy of a separate Tamil state.

Three left wing parties, the CP, SVP and NLSSP, have been banned.

The last general election was in 1977. Last year a referendum answered yes to Jayewardene's proposal to prolong the life of the Parliament without election. The next general election is not due until 1989.

The concentration of embittered Tamil refugees in the north must increase support for the democratic Tamil demand for a separate Tamil state.

The anti-Tamil pogroms Report from Rob Johnstone THE American NORAID dele gation to Northern Ireland was the one that made the headlines. but an important delegation from Britain toured the Six counties at the same time.

This year's annual TOM delegation to the North of Ireland -200 delegates - was a marked improvement on previous ones.

Many were delegates from labour movement bodies like Birmingham Trades Council.

This is a sign that the question sparked off Sinhalese guerrillas.

by the killing of 1: soldiers by Tam:

Support for the guerrillas and for an armed struggle to win Tamil independence wil inevitably grow in these circum. stances.

Sri Lanka now faces the pect of a full-scale war. ded, to the north west by Henr Taggart British Barracks and ti the south-west by Fort Jericho another British barracks, whil just over the back to the south east there is Macrory Parl Police Post.

And in these forts sits you local friendly bobby looking ou through his gunsights.

These forts and' barrack which are all over the place i Catholic West Belfast are not t be seen in any of the Protestan