INTERNATIONAL asking that it be entrusted essentially to the democratic July 1959
Appeal of the International Secretariat
IN AID OF THE ALGERIAN PRISONERS IN FRANCE To the Working Class and Its Organizations:
While the workers of France are going away on their molidays, to the seaside, to the mountains, basking in thi sun and enjoying life, thousands of Algerians, mostly workers, fighters of the great Algerian revolution, are rotting in the prisons of France.
For more than a week now, a second hunger strike has been taking place in Fresnes prison, which contains hundreds of Algerian prisoners. The purpose of this hunger strike is to obtain some improvement in the terrible conditions under which they languish, to obtain the rights of political prisoners, and to obtain such elementary things as the right to receive newspapers and parcels; for an end to all reprisals; for the committee on the 30th of June, on the promise that the status of detainees would be modified in accordance with these demands. But these promises have not been carried out; on the contrary, the brutality of the CR S guards has increased and this conduct has spread even to the prison enclosures.
In the second hunger strike of the prisoners of Fresnes, Ben Bella and the other Algerian leaders, imprisoned on the island of Aix, have joined.
In the other prisons of France, by the hundreds and soon by the thousands, the Algerians prisoners are supporting the movement.
During the first hunger strike the French authorities did not hesitate, in order to break the strike, to resort to the scandalous measure of cutting off the water supply to the prisoners - a measure that not even the Nazis carried out.
Working-class brothers of the Algerian working class in France, in Europe, in the entire world: Come swiftly to the aid of the hunger strikers of Algeria, martyred in the jails of the Gaullist dictatorship.
Each day that passes puts in danger the lite of hundreds and before long thousands of couragous fighters of the Algerian Revolution.
Call upon trade-union and political organizations to intervene urgently, call upon the labor press to give publicity to this strike, call upon them to send telegrammes of protest to the President of the French Republic in Paris. Demand political rights and status for the Algerian prisoners in France. Demand the right of self-determination and of independence for the suffering people of Algeria.
Act forcefully and urgently!
Yours fraternally, THE INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIAT OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
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