PORTUGUESE COMMUNISTS Armed forces supported

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33671, 22 October 1974, Page 17

PORTUGUESE COMMUNISTS Armed forces supported

IN.Z.P.A.Reuter-Copyrlght . LISBON. October 21. Portugal’s Communist Party, emerging strongly from 47 years of banishment, wound up a special congress last night with a call for the Leftwing officers who control the country to stay in politics after next March’s elections.

The Secretary-General (Mri Alvaro Cunhal) said that a? way should be found to enable the Armed Forces Movement to have its mem-1 bers elected in the March' ballot for a constituent assembly. The Armed Forces Movement — grouping the officers who conducted last April’s coup — at present wields effective power by occupying most of the important posts in the provisional Govern-1 ment. However, the movement’s' programme commits the military to retiring from: political life once the Con-' stituent Assembly has been \ : elected. A proclamation adopted | unanimously by more than, 1000 delegates at the Con-: gress — only the second open and legal gathering in 531 years — said that the alliance between the people and the Armed Forces Movement was a long-term policy. The proclamation said that this alliance would decide j the fate of the country both i before and after the elec|tions. To break the alliance! between democratic forces I

iand the movement would be fatal for democracy in Portugal. The Congress also called for unity of democratic forces in Portugal, but Mr Cunhal said it was too early to say whether the party would enter into any electoral fronts with other political groupings. To mark its emergence from enforced underground operations, the party for the first time published the names and photographs of the 23 full members and 13 nonvoting members of the central committee. They spent a total of 273 , years in prison under the old I regime, which banned ’he I party. Most of the full memi bers were long-standing : party members, but many ( non-voting members joined (after the April coup. ' In a keynote speech aimed ;at capturing moderates’ supiport, Mr Cunhal said that the party should no longer refer to a “dictatorship of the I proletariat” — a basic IMarxist-Leninist tenet — as l the world dictatorship raised I too many unfortunate memlories of the old regime.