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the wound gets THE multi-national force, which describes itself as a "peacekeeping" contingent, sat tight just before New Year as Israeli gun-boats pounded the shore near the north Lebanese city of Tripoli. The official position was that they did not wish to intertere.

At the same time the US has instructed President Gemayel to extend his army's area of control in Beirut. So far this reactionary has not even been able to establish firm control in the capital!

Now that Syria has succeeded in splitting Fatah, the central component of the Palestine NEXT stop in the EEC's budget crisis is the summit of EEC governments in March, when the EEC's financial year closes.

On December 15, the DEC Parliament amended the DEC budget to put the rebates due to Britain and to West Germany into the reserves instead of paying them out. In retaliation, Margaret Thatcher has threatened to withhóld British payments to EEC funds.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is running out of money, and having to postpone payments. An EEC summit on December 4-6, due to discuss CAP reform, ended without even producing an official communique.

CAP is the root of the crisis. Under this policy high prices are maintained for agricultural products within the EEC, these high prices are maintained by tariff walls, and producers are subsidised so that they can export outside the EEC at knockdown prices. (The EEC is the world's biggest agricultural exporter, after the US).

Obviously such a policy is more advantageous to countries like France - with 18% of its exports agricultural products - and Ireland than to Britain or West Germany, with only a 7 or 8% agricultural share exports. Hence the conflict.

There are extremely powerful motives for the EEC governments to come to an agreement. Every one of the West European BOTS BALESOTHO AFRICA Liberation Organisation, and establishing a grip on the Fatah fighters in Lebanon, it is possible that sharp divisions between these fighters and Syria will lead to further outbreaks of warfare.

This, then, is the current state of the imperialist solution: Lebanon is as war-torn as ever; the local partners of imperialism and Israel prove unable to fulfil their promises; the stateless and impoverished refugees are worse off than ever and further than ever away from their goals; unity of the forces of the Palestinian left is put numerically into the shade by a developing rightist alliance on a religious basis among the Muslims; pressure grows both in Israel and in the

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Andrew Hornung reports on the continuing war