From Our Paris Correspondent The fighting at Nanterre this year has seen the most violent controntations between police and students since the May This time the Nanterre actions have been confined to the Campus, and they have been all the more intense for that. 2,000 students have taken part in the fighting, 10% of the student body. The police have moved university as part of a co-ordinated campaign of suppression.
Principal, has resigned, and Nanterre is now effectively under direct Ministerial Nanterre is not isolated. There have been intensive confrontations schoos and universiues Marseilles, Toulouse, Lyons Clermont-Ferrand, Besanean, Nice, Poities, Le Mans. Si Montepellier, Besançon, Etienne, Rennes...
The actions have often been response to the government's retorms of the archaic French education system. Thev are also coupled with a more serious policy decision by the French state. A campaign of repression is under way in France. Rather than banning groups and their publications, as they did after May (though there are rumours that bans are on the way), the government is harrassing them, arresting their cadres, limiting their actions, and taking a heavy toll in fines and time spent in the courts. The Ligue Communiste are loosing 30 of their sellers every Sunday, who get astronomic fines. even the sellers of Humanité Dimanche. the Communist Party's mass circulation Sunday paper, as stolid and packed with consumer ideology as Britain's Observer. are arrested and fined. For years the Cl has sold its wares in peace. the feeble protests of the C.P. deputies. their paper sellers are being rounded up and detained. Like every bourgeois country France has archaic laws which the police can use at will against any action they want to prevent Lenthy prison sentences have been imposed on shopkeepers and who have fought the government, and the Minister of the Interior, Marcellin, has tried to ban all meetings that bring the Army into 'disrepute' (See our report in the Black Dwarf No 30). Schools are being closed; the Lycée Chaptal in Paris, got four davs extra holiday because order could not be "maintained. The Ministry of Education is working hand in hand with the Interior- education in France has been ones on er d branch of the forces of OTECT
Bernadette Devlin has denounced the murder of Sam Devenney. Not, it might be thought, a very controversial thing to do. But the Unionist M.P.'s in the House of Commons frothed and roared with agony and rage. Sex, religion, compounded to make their blood boil as were The "sanctum' of the House was broken with a few truths of British domination in Northern Ireland. What upsets them most of all is that they are losing political power. And to a gir. Ine barbanc ne uals of parliamentary rule explode as the most complex and intimate imperialist contradiction DrOVeS TO De intractable The Unionist Tories howl at Bernadette While befudled Labour M.P.'s aroused by a chance to prove their chivalry Jumoct, uke norses witnout a knignt, te what they fancy is a rescue.
In this introduction to the interview with Ann Devenney, Bernadette Devlin has been forced to be fact that she is under trial for being behind the barricades in the Bogside in August 1969 prevents her from comment on the Just insurrection that deteated the RUC. The Black Dwarf is not under any Sir Arthur Young, the British-appointed head of the Royal Ulster Constasuch restraint. The lessons of January and April were not lost. The Bogsiders prepared for the August processions and rose to physically defeat the police.
The political control of the Unionists over the RUC has been broken. British omicers and civu servants now directy control physical force operations in the North. They SO preserve Unionist Party and to ensure the safety of Britain's considerable investments in the area. This has tangled them in a contradicuon They must Take effective power out of the hands of the Unionist Young, no steps were taken against these men who are, presumably, The Black Dwarf 20th April 1970 Page 7 Party while at the same time preserving them in office.
It is time to tangle the contradictions further. To ensure that reforms in Northern Ireland are made the workers and students there; not conceded and controlled by the British. The Bogsiders have shown the and red fore sia cobrage. Not the RUC with force and courage. manipulations of the British will have to met With an equal political intelligence.