surgery in the Queens Medical Centre,
Nottingham to the toretront of health campaigning.
In the run-up to the budget, unions were half-heartedly demanding an extra £2.5 billion for health: now
Thatcher under pressure has coughed up £750m from the contingency fund, it is time to press home the fight for the rest •
HARRY SLOAN
7
Yerevan, Armenian schools have been closed and the Armenian population has remained static in numbers while falling as a proportion of the total population of the region.
What has brought this situation to a head at this particular time is difficult to determine. It seems that the burning of an Armenian primary school in early February touched off mass protests including a spontaneous rally and strikes in Stepanakert. In response to this the local soviet in Nagorno-Karabakh called for the incorporation of the region into Armenia.
The Armenian Communist Party headed by Karen Demirchyan, taken to task in recent months for its very slow implementation of perestroika, its thoroughly corrupt practices and the victimisation of its own internal critics, might have used this opportunity to cover its misdeeds were it not for the fact that it was immediately by-passed by the mass movement and the spontaneous leadership which committee composed of intellectuals from which the communist party was absent.
The organising committee led the mass mobilisations in Armenia itself including a one-hour general strike on 11
Representatives of the committee also met Gorbachev in Moscow on 25 February — an acknowledgement of its authority - and they brought back Gorbachev's appeal for calm.
During the course of the mobilisations the committee seems to have expanded to include representatives from local committees in communities and factories.
Unfortunately, the limitations of glasnost have been all too easy to discern in respect of the events in Armenia.
Little information has 8 emerged through official channels, western journalists have been banned from the area and western radio stations blamed for instigating the troubles. References have been made in the Soviet press to Gorbachev's appeal for calm but as yet the text of this appeal has not been made known.
The scale of the "pogrom' of Armenians in the Azerbaidzhanian town of Sumgait varies from 30 to 300 dead depending on sources but has been put officially at 32. The fact that leading politburo THE US attempt to extradite on drug charges General Mañuel Noriega, Panama's defence force chief, is only the latest in a long list of cases of US interference in the affairs of Latin American countries.
Washington is simply trying to do by means of drug charges what the CIA itself has said it might otherwise have done by invasion or assassination
In an attempt to kill two political birds with one stone, Washington has even tried to implicate Cuba in the drug Colombia, Panama's existence as an independent state owed much to the interests of the US which, unable to obtain from Colombia the conditions it sought for bisecting its territory with a canal, gained agreement with 'independent' Panama within several days of its
Under the treaty, the panama canal zone became a foreign enclave, a military post for the US in Latin America, with over 10,000 uS troops stationed there.
Recently Panama has been used by Washington as a staging post for operations in Nicaragua and Honduras. The original canal treaty was renegotiated by General Omar Torrijos, who ruled Panama for a decade before his death in a mysterious plane crash in 1981.
Torrijas was a populist who maintained friendly relations members have been in Stepanakert and Yerevan and have addressed rallies has only been briefly acknowledged
The Kremlin has rejected incorporation into Armenia and only appears to be willing to grant 400 million roubles in socio-economic aid to Nagorno-Karabakh with a promise that Armenian language broadcasts will be received in the region. But a general strike has been in effect in Stepanakert and will continue until incorporation is reconsidered.