For a week now, an unprecedented wave of terror has been unleashed against the Tamil minority on the island of Sri Lanka [formerly called Ceylon]. Tamils make up 20 percent of the population.
Hundreds of Tamils have been massacred in what can only be described as pogroms. Many men, women, and children have been burned alive. Others have been tortured to death. More than 50 Tamil political prisoners were savagely killed inside the prisons.
These massacres and the self-defense measures taken by sectors of the Tamil minority in these conditions have been used by the conservative government of J.R. Jayewardene as a pretext to launch an out-and-out witch-hunt. The majority of the Tamil nationalist organizations, and three left organizations — the Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Front (JVP), and the New Equal Society Party (NSSP), which is a left split from the Social Democratic Ceylon Equal Society Party (LSSP) — have been banned.
More than 150 leaders and figures in the workers movement have been detained. The left is accused of having systematically organized the riots, massacres, and looting in Colombo. This is a complete lie.
This wave of reactionary terror has to be placed in the more general context of political, social, and economic developments in Sri Lanka over the last few years.
Mrs. Bandaranaike’s coalition government of the reformist parties (LSSP and CP) and the bourgeois-liberal Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) had deeply divided and demoralized the working masses through its repression of the [1971] JVP youth insurrection, its anti- Tamil policies, and its austerity measures. This paved the way for the return of the conservative United National Party (UNP), led by Jayewardene, to power in 1977. This government carried out a systematic political attack on the organized workers movement. It broke strikes, limited democratic rights, and changed the constitution in order to stay in power.
The workers movement, thrown on the defensive and disoriented by its discredited and bankrupt traditional leaderships, was increasingly weakened, not just in parliamentary terms (where representation from the workers parties was reduced to one member of parliament from the CP) but also on the trade union level. The conservatives hoped that by doing this they would encourage imperialist capital to invest in the island and get the economy moving again after the stagnation of the Bandaranaike period.
But the international economic crisis was to hit the debt-ridden Sri Lankan economy shortly afterwards. The International Monetary Fund demanded stepped-up austerity measures, especially against subsidized food prices, free education, and the social security system. The living standards of the masses began to slide. People were becoming politicized again.
In the October 1982 presidential elections, 47 percent of the electorate, and the absolute majority of voters in the industrialized zones in the south and southwest and in the Tamil north, voted for the opposition according to official figures.
It is clear that today the reactionary terror aims to stop this politicization, to step up the repression and the trend toward banning workers organizations, and to ensure the maintenance of a strong state increasingly based on the bourgeois army.
The Fourth International denounces the bloody crimes of the Ceylonese semicolonial bourgeoisie against the Tamil minority and the toiling masses of Sri Lanka.
It calls on the workers and democratic organizations throughout the world to defend the victims of repression in Sri Lanka and to demand the restoration of democratic rights without restriction.
It calls on all anti-imperialist and anticapitalist militants to come to the aid of their brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka.
Free all political prisoners in Sri Lanka!
Lift the ban on all the Tamil and workers organizations!
Full democratic rights for all the masses in Sri Lanka!
For the right of the Tamil nationality to selfdetermination!