The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 13

THE GUARDIAN Tuesday January 1979: Research in California MARTIN WOOLLACOTT, in Tehran, reports on the fate of thousands of ordinary Iranians caught up in a deteriorating confirm The terror machine that has run out of treated, end his frantic family, trexking from cemetery to cemetery, from gaol to gaol, ani from lawyer to lawyer, suffered more than he did- Others, having, cam-mitted. but the possession' of a Khomeini leaflet, have been beaten, or tortureo" with the famous electric grill that was SAVAK's favourite instrument. But SAVAJK's victims were at least selected on the basis of some, information. SAVAK itself his now more or less ceased repressive functions, concerned to keep itself intact and to assure itself a future with any new regime. It maintains contacts with the Opposition and is playing politics and assuming a "moderate" profile.

What is left are the police and the lesser intelligence agencies, without even SAVAK's minimal discrimination and shorn of the vast network of informers that used to service the wiiole Iranian security apparatus. "The minute somebody is missing," says Matin Daftari, "the whole family rushes to the cemetery and if they don't rfind him there, they start going round the gaols that has become an everyday occupation for many families in Iran." such deliberate attacks have involved whole towns, the worst being Najafabad near Isfahan which was sacked and burned by a combined force of army commandos, local and outside police, and peasants or tribals from the surrounding countryside. There, according to Matin Daftari of the Iranian Bar Association, a colonel taunted the. citizens over a loudspeaker as the looting and burning went on. "Infamous and dishonourable people of Najafabad," he is supposed to have said, "come out and fight if you dare.

We will kill rou and tonight we will sleep with your wives." There was an attack on a hospital in Mashhad in which five doctors were injured and two children died. Incidents' like these have been relatively infrequent. What is universal is the arrest and detention without charge and, almost invariably, without any notification to the family of thousands of people throughout Iran. Many are detained during or after demonstrations, others just plucked off the street. One 16-year-old Tehran boy was arrested as he stood outside the front door of his home, and detained for two weeks.

He was not mis groups of hardliners in the police, ihe army, and the security with links to the most Right-wing among the Shah's military and civilian advisers. "There are governments existing withiit governments, at the moment," an opposition lawyer said, "and one of' them is a government of terror." To others, the pattern rather suggests a loss of control, with individual officers, and sub-agencies staging their own attacks without reference to superiors least of all to the Ministries. That -was well illustrated a week agio when police and troops savagely, beat protest ing academics at the Ministry o-f Higher Education, despite specific Instructions from the Minister to treat the demonstrators gently. Tltey smashed the doors dowji and a colonel appeared," Professor Seyyed Fathi said. "He fired a single pistol shot point blank at us, which fortunately missed.

Then the police and soldiers were in, beating and They went particularly Eor the six women pro-. fessors, hitting them in vulnerable places and shouting 'karSot' and 'prostitute' as they ferurt them." The profeisors, 20 of them THE ENGINE of terror and torture that has. for so long been a part of the. Iranian regime is still grinding victims. Despite mass releases of political prisoners, the relative inactivity of SAVAK and the Government's announced policy of minimum force, what amounts to a campaign of terror continues amid contradictory efforts at restraint and at negotiations with the liberal This is separate from the normal clashes between soldiers and demonstrators, where the violence, however excessive, is at least the result of spontaneous action under strain and often after considerable provocation.

These are, one leading member of the Opposition said, "deliberate and planned operations." They range from brutal and sustained punitive attacks on whole towns and on schools, hospitals or other buildings where demonstrators have gathered, to random arrests on the streets, to the detention and vicious mistreatment of the politically active. In the eyes of the more conspiratorially minded, the terror is the result of coordinated action by linked On the twentieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution How the good news was IAN AITKEN recalls eailier triumphs, and RON BUCHANAN looks ahead sent from Havana to the Beast LIKE SO much else in the business of a foreign correspondent, my presence in Cuba on the night before the fall of the notorious Batista dictatorship bore an uncanny resemblance to Evelyn Waugh's classic novel, Scoop. Even Boot of the Beast. Waugh's childlike anti-hero, was scarcely more naive than Expressman Aitken when he stepped on to the tarmac at Havana airport in the early evening of December 31. 1958.

Unlike Boot I carried no cleft stick for the transmission of my despatches. But I was wearing a winter-weight suit, and my luggage consisted largely of a toothbrush, a typewriter, and a number of wildly inaccurate illusions about the guerrilla war which Fidel Castro had been fighting for several years in the jungle-clad mountains. For one thing, I was under the impression that a major set-piece battle was taking place at a small town called Santa Clara some 100 miles eastwards along the central highway. American news agency which I had read in Caracas, put the suggests the world will get colder la tie next century. GEOBGE' ALEXANDER investigates Will it be an ice age? THE FORECAST is for continued cool wca.th.er all over the earth through the mid-1980s, with a global warming trend setting an thereafter for the rest of century followed by a severe cold snap after 2000.

A cold snap that might well last throughout the first half of the twenty-first century. That, at least, is the way that Dr leona IJbby and Dr Louis Pandolfi project the world's climate for the next 70 years. Their forecast is based on a detailed' analysis of past climatic patterns as seen in several hundreds of years old trees and backed up by geological evidence. Dr Libby, professor of engineering at tlie University of Los Angeles, and Dr Pandolfi, a research scientist with the global Geochemistry Corporation of Santa Monica assumed that the "world climate is cyclic. To prove this they have made chemical analyses of samples of tree rings ranging in age from a few hundred years to more than 1,800 years.

A tree lays down a new ring each year from the rainwater, carbon dioxide and other nutrients it absorbs during the course of that year. By calculating- such factors as the ratio of certain isd-. topes (different farms of the same element) lilte oxygenic (O 16) to oxygen-18 (O 18) from a tree ring of, say, 800 or 900 years ago, and comparing it to a ratio from a more recent ring for which the annual average temperature is known, Dr Libby and Dr Pandolfi have been able to work out the climatic conditions of past centuries. The tree ring measurements reflect, for example, the little ice ages of the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when the annual average temperatures dropped one to two degrees Fahrenheit. That slight temperature drop was enough for glaciers in the Alps, Scandinavia, Alaska and New Zealand to extend much farther down into their valleys than they 1 now.

The growing season was also shorter and cooEer than it is today. The tree ring- data of the two California researchers point to the same sorts of climatic hard times in the fourth century. It is known that the Emperor Diocletian imposed price controls on wheat, and Dr Libby wonders if this perhaps -was a consequence of short supplies brought about by poor weather over sereral decades. "In trees which grow on rain water," the two say. "isotope variations in their (annual) rings should be climate indicators because the.

isotope composition in rain' and carbon dioxide varies with temperature." Proof of the theory came when a trace of Hie isotopic variations in a series of very old trees from around the world coincided almost perfectly with a trace of temperatures made in England with mercury thermometers since the early 1700s. This corroborated record shows the trees German oaks, Japanese cedar and American sequoia with reduced oxygen-18 concentrations in the first and last decades of the eighteenth century, decades thiat thermometer records clearly show to have been colder than average. The isotope record and the thermometer record agree for the cold decades at the ends of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "when annual average temperatures fell by one tenth to two- tenths of a degree, and for the periods 1700-1730 and 1890-1940. when average temperatures rose by three-tenths and almost five-tenths of a degree. Dr Libby and Dr Pandolfi believe that the san's output may vary by 1 jer cent or so over long periods of time.

How it does this, if in fact it does, is still very much of a puzzle to sci-eatists who debate the effects of that small a percentage of variability Still, Dr Libby fcelieves that solar variations are the root of changes in trie earth's climate and that these variations are cyclic. Looking at her record of past -variations, she said that "we feel that we have a very sensitive way of looking at past misbehaviour of the sun, as well as a way to predict future behaviour." And when she and Pandolfi project their curves into the future, they lower average temperatures from now through the mid-1980s. "Then," Dr Libby added, "we see a warming trend (by about degree Fahrenheit) globally to around the year 2000. And then it will really get cold if we can believe our projections. This has ta bo tested." How cold Easily 1 or 2 degrees," she replied, "and maybe even 3 or 4 degrees.

It only takes 10 degrees to bring on an ice age. It was less than a half-degreft drop in the annual temperature that led to the little ice age during the late 1700s. So if our projections are correct, this drop, after the start of the next century, could be vary significant for the Los Angeles Times. seriously injured, including one with a ruptured liver, spent a night in prison before being released, or given medical attention. But they were, luckier than some of the senior pupils at at the Ershard High School in eastern Tehran.

Trcc-js and police ringed the school after the boys, aged 13 to 18, began demonstrating on their first day back 10 days ago. There were no attempts to negotiate their dispersal. Soldiers fired at the school ate and rammed through it in an army truck. They moved through the school shooting and beating, then assembled the boys in the school yard and systematically thrashed them, using truncheons and rubber hoses. A young lawyer from one of the civil rights associations here who visited the school the next day said the playground was full of blood and excrement.

Some of the younger boys were so frightened, they lost control, of their functions." The younger boys were put out of the school to go home, but the older ones were arrested, and 45 of them axe still held, according to the civil rights organisation, at a barracks near Tehran. But the worst cases was our Havana stringer." Halfway along the seafiont the cab skidded to a halt and the driver dragged me OTit and shoved me into the gutter. Neat holes were appearing in the bodywoTk above our heads. Boot-lilse. I enquired what was going on.

"Don't you kn ow "7 screamed the driver euphori-cally. "Batista has fled. It's the revolution." It was indeed, and Expressman Aitken was there, even if it was largely by accident. Fulfilling the dream of e-verv foreign correspondent. The airport promptly closed while the telephones to New "Sfo-rk continued to work.

Save for two other British reporters. I had the story to myself. But it was the beginning of a hairy day. The terrifying Havana mob turned out on the streets, looting the well-loaded casinos of their Hogmanay takings, saciing the shops, and hunting down the justly-hated Batista police. Ruby Phillips, a veteran of 30 years in Cuba, forecast that it would get a great deal worse.

She knew what she was talking about. She had seen it more than which characterised their efforts in the early years, particularly when Che Guevara was a prominent member of the Government. Fidel Castro has admitted that the road to economic prosperity has been long, difficult and full of blind alleys he says, though, that the early idealism was motivated by genuine revolutionary enthusiasm." Iho huge advances which Castro-'s revolution has made in education and public health have never yet been matched in the economy as a whole. The country is as dependent as ever on sugar as its major export earner, despite advances in the production of nickel and frozen shellfish. Time after time the So-viet.

Union and other countries have had to hail Cuba out. Castro has already indicated that his Government may be prepared to consider certain forms of foreign investment, and this year 1lie Spanish Prime Minister, Adolfo Suarez, was welcomed to Havana with a warmth normally reserved for Soviet leaders. One of the areas to which the attention of foreign in them murderers and threatening to burn their offices. Some understandably hostile and extremely troubled members of the public have relatives in hospital whose operations, are delayed by in-dustrial action. To tMs NUPE can say little, except that the poor state of the NHS has forced small groups into a reluctant withdrawal of labour as a last, agonised protest at their pay and conditions.

Mr Alan Fisher, tie union's general secretary, is acutely aware of the bad showing of NUPE in the public esteem, but argues strongly that all too often the effect rather than the cause of a dispute is emphasised by the media. In the recent case of the Cheshire Homes, for example, he sa.il, few people were aware that relations between NUPE and the Homes were usually good but that on this occasion local management had sacked the union's 17 members simply for belonging to NUPE. This had been- done, according to Mr Fisher, because NUPE was demanding similar rates to the ones paid in comparable local authority homes in the Liverpool area. And in Mr Procedures which, however defective, at least provided some protection to detainees have now been largely abandoned, partly because of the confusion of the times and partly because the always nominal subordination of police to judiciary has now become, says Daftari, a "complete fiction." Mohammed Eqbal, another lawyer active in the human rights movement, says Terror has moved from the prisons into the streets." Despite the Opposition's charges, much of what is happening is not countenanced by the formal government. Army and police officers responsible for some of the worst excesses have been transferred.

Large numbers of prisoners have been released, although their places are instantly taken by fresh ones. But there are those in the establishment who are, at the least, guilty of allowing this partial terror to continue so as to have a lever on the Opposition. A young National Front aide says Time and again they tell us to reach a compromise or they will no longer, be able to hold the hard men back, that there will be more Najafabads and Mashhads unless we give in." austere economy. When delegations of exiles visited Havana for talks recently they formed queues in the dollar store to buy products, such as tape recorders and electric fans, which their relatives on the island cannot buy with pesos. Hugh Thomas, author of an exhaustive but critical study of the Cuban revolution, has said that he believes that the present Government will consolidate its power for so long as the country remains poor.

It is when the economy begins to produce results, he reasons, that the danger of political conflict may arise. The removal of the siege mentality might take political unity with it. However, Eugenio Rodriguez Balari, Cuba's head of marketing, recently summer: up the mood of Cuba'? leaders in an interview with the London-based publication. Latin America Economic Report. Cuba welcomed tourists, he said, though theiv consumer customs might bn different from those of, the local population.

"If they bring income, let therii come." he said. Our ideology is superior." Ron Buchanan Messrs Fisher and Ci-: could soon be adding to their unpopularity if the threatened action by 1.3 million local government workers goes ahead from January 22. Overflowing dustbins, untreated sewage fouling rivers and no school meals would be among several extra winter hazards facing the population. This week the NUPE executive sent out instructions to its branches to be ready for action and set aside a strike fund of 1 million. In addition each NUPE member will be levied a penny for each hour worked.

If this looks to be a considerable preparation, then it should be remembered that with 5 a week strike pay, the union would quickly exhaust its fund following an all-out call to its members. The Government's concession and, with it) another blast to its shaky 5 per cent pay policy to allow public-sector workers staged comparability with other groups may soon change the position. So. too. could that new disputes procedure for the NHS.

Vith them, NUPE could quickly and with some relief give up the title of being the union the public likes to hate most. At the cemeteries, people sometimes find gruesome confirmation of their fears, in the shape of badly mutilate! corpses. "This was newer done before," says Daftari. Such bodies were always disposed of secretly. Nor they are being deliberately brought to the cemeteries in-order to spread terror." But the efforts of the security units are not entirely random.

Those picked Tip. and in many cases still in detention, include officials off newly formed trade and writers and academics: with a history of political activism. The worst case in Tehran is that of a woman sociologist, who fought famous court case against the: award of phoney fail masks to radical students. She was arrested by armed! men in civilian clothes, raped! and cut with a knife, then tied up with rope and tossed out of car in a field on tha outskirts of Tehran. She nas now had a nervous breakdown.

The situation has been made worse by the collapses of what law and procedures existed in Iran. In towns and regions the judiciary is on strike because "the police have stopped obeying their orders or even listening; to them not persuade the Americans to lift the embargo. Washington has made it clear that no-such action will be takeiu until Cuban troops are withdrawn from Africa and a. solution has been found to the problem of compensatLoiL for American companies-nationalised by the revolutionary government. On this last point the: Cubans are making ai counter-demand for compensation for damage done to.

the economy by the XJS embargo and for the freezing: of Cuban assets in the US, On foreign policy, there is no immediate prospect of a. reversal of the policy oE proletarian internationalism" which has taken large numbers of Cuban troops to-Angola and Ethiopia. At a. time when the revolution Is. reversing many of its former-economic policies, solidarity with African nations has-played an important ideological role by maintaining the spirit which led to the overthrow of Batista.

But the new policies will, bring new problems. Both the flood of foreign tourists and the return of the exiles could have a demoralising: effect on a country with an brothers like the transport workers or the general and municipal workers, but no--w, says Fisher, it will do tie eating. What became known as t5ie "dirty jobs" strike in 1970 when the late Sir Jack Scamp infuriated Ted Heath by awarding 2.50 pay in-creases to one million local authority workers, certaiiLly helped to boost NUPE's repu-tation among low paid workers. Personalities have played their part. Fisher, together with Bernard Dix, ttis number two, have become accepted as the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the more' ment.

Fisher does not mind the analogy of Dix as grand strategist and himself the aggressive mouthpiece. Dis, who came from the TUC to form NUPE's research department, says that he arad Fisher do not always agree but that they can differ without rancour. Annoyance among other union leaders with NUPE's failure to back the TUC's mainstream thinking on pay has thwarted Dix's aim to establishing a power base on lite national executive of thtc Labour Party. Nevertheless, he keeps on trying. 'It is when the economy produces results that the dangers of conflict may arise' TWENTY YEARS after his rebel army entered Havana.

Fidel Castro is pushing Cuba in a new direction. This fresh revolution in the revolution is changing the face of the economy and of the country's national and international politics. With troops in Africa, consumer goods on the horizon, and a new deal for and political prisoners, no one (least of all the Cuban leaders) can be quite sure where this new revolution will lead. The most significant change has taken place in the economy which the guerrilla fighters of yesteryear have described as "the new battleground" of the revolution. In words which send shivers down some New Left spines in Europe, the party newspaper, Granma.

has heralded the advent of "a New System of Economic Management." The main weapon in this sphere is "economic calculus" which bears more than a passing resemblance to accounting in capitalist countries. By next year all Cuba's "state enterprises will have adopted the system hundreds have done so already. In all of them inputs and outputs arc rigorously casualties at up to 20,000, and described the affair as the decLsive battle of the war. Tlie reports later turned out to be almost totally untrue (in fact, about a couple of dozen people had been killed or wounded in a minor skirmish but they were enough to send me on my way to Harvana with a keen but cryptic cable from my Foreign Editor saying simply "Okay. Warwards fastest." It was Hogmanay, and the casino at the National Hotel was jttst getting going when I checkt-d in.

But I was tired, and decided to see the New Year in from my bed. I awoke noxt morning to an extraordinary cacophony of car hooters and church bells, and peered out of the window at a scene of wild celebration. That, concluded, was the jolly way in which Cubans customarily marked New Year's Iay. I shaved, showered, dressed, and went downstairs in search of a taxi. We set off towards the office of! a local reporter.

Miss Ruly Hart Phillips, who measure! by computer. Every enterprise, says Granma, is expected to meet its expenses out of Lame ducks will not be kept alive at the expense of the more fcffieient. Public health and social service e-ntcrprises will still be allowed to make book losses, but in industry, the production of a surplus is to be regarded as the norm. The new system replaces what Culan officials describe as "no system at all," the keeping of economic records. Enterprises used to keep a record of: their transactions, but they were not expected to account for them.

Inevitably, resources were seriously rmlsallocated. Managers ordered raw materials whether they needed them or not. There were no penalties for mistakes. Graiuma now runs a daily complaints column to which readers contribute stories of wastage and inefficiency. Thus the economic penalties of the new accounting system are given added backbone by public criticism.

Several inefficient managers have already been removed. Cuha's leaders are not ashamed of the idealism THE National Union of Public Employees, the fifth largest union in the country with 710,000 members, has become associated in the minds of most people with hospital disputes perpetrated by individuals who don't care a damn if their selfish demands threatened the livfcs of others. impression has quickly grown, fostered by certain sections, oi the media, of a callous, unthinking leadership, ofclivlous to the helplessness of the sick and needy, That impression is difficult to dispel, although it must "be said that the number of disputes in the National Health Service has been growing steadily in recent years and these are not confined to members of NUPE. Tor its part, the union claims that few disputes threaten life, none has actually caused a death, and the amount of attention given to them is disproportionate compared to those occasions when consultants and junior hospital staff assert themselves. Uniom officials at NUPE's headquarters are often bombarded with telephone messages ffroon people calling Fidel's promise of a form of justice for Batista's war criminals which undoubtedly prevented a terrible orgy of lynching and murder all over Cuba.

1 still believe that to be trie, even though many of the subsequent mass trials bore little resemblance to a Western concept of justice. The pity of it is that, like so many revolutions before and after it, the Castro revolution soon began to devour its own children. Today, 20 years after the event, the gaols are only now to be emptied of the men who rode triumphantly into Havana with Castro or stood cheering him at the kerbside. But 1 thought at the time, and I still think now, that Castro's historic victory could have been saved if America and the rest of the West had not turned their backs on Cuba at th.e first whiff of That decision drove Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union, and set Cuba and America on the road to the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. It might have been rather different.

Ian Aitken atrocities committed under the Batista regime. The exiles, once reviled as gusanos (worms), are to be allowed to make group visits to Cuba to visit their relatives. By this initiative, Castro ever a skilful politician has managed to win the support of many of his former enemies. He has even appeared as the champion as the released prisoners in their efforts to gain admission to the United States. Castro's move poses a problem for the United States.

All 3,000 existing political prisoners and their families are being allowed to leave the island, though already many have chosen to remain. In addition, the country's 12,000 former political prisoners and several hundred "boat people" who have tried, "but failed, to leave Cuba in small vessels, are being allowed to leave. There is every likelihood that, in the future, Cuba will be able to look to at least some of the exiles in the US for-supjort in its campaining to lift the "US embargo on trade with Cuba, imposed in the lflfMs. But Castro knows that his initiative alone will Fisher, receive family income supplements because their pay falls well short of the 50 a week allowed for a marriei person with two children, "It is ridiculous that a low paid hospital worker has to go round the corner to the Social Security office tc get money from the same department which employs him just because that department is a bad employer," declared Mr Fisher. NUPE can probably claim to be the union whith has done most on behalf of the low-paid in the past 10 years.

Two thirds of its members are women. Its astonishing growth over this period is due to the organisation of part-time workers. An increase of 400,000 members since Fisher assumed the leadership 11 years ago is no mean feat and leaves Clive Jenkins some laps behind. A single branch of 6,000 school meals ladies in Birmingham, where Fisher began his union career, testifies to NUPE's organisational hased on 23,000 shop stewards. It will go where other unions do not bother, even organising child-minders- in suburban Sutton.

Once it could have been swallowed up by its bigger once before, losing her husband in a previous revolution. And then something quite unexpected and extraordinary happened. Youngsters, most of them mere teenagers, appeared on the streets wearing black and red armbands. They told the crowds of rioters that they were Fidel Castro's underground movement, and that they were taking charge. They told the mob to go home, with the promise that Castro was already on his way from the mountains to mete out justice to the torturers and murderers of Batista's security forces.

Slowly but surely, the crowds dispersed. It was a unique event, by the standards of Latin American revolutions. A few days later Castro himself drove into Havana at the head of his bedraggled but triumphant little army to a hero's welcome. Within a few weeks the trials and executions had begun. I told this story before, on the tenth anniversary of the Castro revolution, pointing out that it was vestors may well be drawn is tourism.

After a long period in which tourism was equated with the gangsterism and prostitution which characterised pre-revolutionary Cuba, the country has begun to construct hotels and to modernise the existing facilities for holidaymakers. There have been 'talks with United States businessmen over the possible development of a 3200 millions tourist "paradise on Cayo Sabinal, an offshore island inhabited only by wild horses. The nascent tourist industry should be given a boost by the most significant recent event in Cuban domestic politics the programme to release all the country's 3,000 political prisoners. The move is part of an attempt to achieve a reconciliation with the large exile community, many of whose leaders have moved from a position of implacable hostility to the Castro government to one of sympathy and understanding. In what amounts to an admission of past shortcomings, Castro has told the exile leaders that he wants his prisons freed of political detainees, save the handful still serving sentences for Fisher's view, the recent dispute at Charing Cross Hospital would never have flared up if there had been a disputes procedure.

It is in this area particularly that NUPE is confident that some progress can be made so long as there is a reciprocal will on behalf of management the Department of Health and Social Security. Proposals for a proper disputes procedure for the NHS are now being discussed between the hospital unions and the Government and Mr Fisher believes that agreement can be achieved at a very early date." NUPE is also ready to discuss a code of practice for the NHS which would be strictly adhered to by both sides. Mr Fisher even goes as far as to say that the code would exclude industrial action, but only if a clause were written into it protecting the position of hospital staff by saying that they should be treated at least as favourably as those in comparable jobs elsewhere. The fact is that NUPE members in hospital jobs are appallingly badly paid which accounts for the greatest part of their pent-up dissatisfaction. Many of them, says Mr As action by local government workers looms, KEITH HARPER examines the: reality behind NUPE's public image The justified grievances of Britain's low paid workers Alan Fisher.