Sri Lanka police today questioned one comrade of Colombo Action Committee (CACPS) and later in the day took into custody its campaign material upon a court order.
CACPS members were engaging in a leaflet distribution campaign today (24) morning in Piliyandala town area. They were distributing CACPS latest statement (in Sinhala) titled “Defeat the state terror unleashed against the masses, including the oppressed youth, in the name of “Operation Yukthiya”! Around 9.45am in the morning, Piliyandala police stopped one comrade who was distributing leaflets to people and escorted him to the police station. Inquired as to why he was brought to the police station, the Officer in Charge (OIC), informed CACPS members that the leaflet contains material “insulting the police” and that the police want to conduct an investigation over and around the leaflet. Police recorded a statement from the comrade and was released within about an hour.
CACPS members campaigning in Piliyandala town on February 24, 2024
In the evening around 4.45pm, a team of police officers including the OIC of Kesbewa Police arrived at the residence of Comrade and journalist Shantha Wijesuriya, who is the Secretary of CACPS, along with a warrant from Kesbewa Magistrate Court to search the house for offences under Section 484 and 485 of the Penal Code. These purported offences respectively are intentionally insulting with intent to provoke a breach of peace, and circulating false reports with intent to cause mutiny or an offence against the republic or public tranquility. The police seized around 500 leaflets containing the CACPS statement and several dozens of posters and placards that had been prepared for use at the demonstration, to be held on February 27 in Kesbewa town, organized by the CACPS and Kesbewa Action Committee, on the theme of the statement.
Kesbewa Police encircle journalist Wijesuriya’s residence on February 24, 2024
Yesterday, Wijesuriya was also summoned by Piliyandala police by order of S. Wickremasinghe, ASP, to record a statement over two hours, as part of an “expeditd investigation” over a complaint lodged by him of alleged death theats by a police officer over a bribary complaint, and over another complaint made by his son’s fiancee in respect of an alleged sexual assault by police officers attched to the Kesbewa police. The ASP has already decided and told Wijesuriya that his allegations are false and that he knows that police officers did not engage in the alleged activities!
While the police have hurriedly initiated court proceedings in respect of CACPS activities, have delayed action against those accused of serious allegations.
These acts of police and of Wickremasinghe’s government are an attack against freedom of expression of CACPS and the oppressed masses, and are intended to intimidate and harass political dissent. Police and the government are attempting to block leaflets reaching the masses and stopping CACPS campaigns.
We call upon workers, oppressed masses and those who defend democratic rights to condemn this assault on political rights and fight for and demand the immediate halt of harassment of CACPS members and stifling of its political activity by the government.
Sri Lanka Speaker, Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena last Thursday (01) signed into law the Online Safety Act (No 09 of 2024) (OSA), a piece of legislation long prepared by the ruling class to crack down upon freedom of dissent in the country. The law was approved by the Parliament late January, with a majority of 46 votes, including provisions not in compliance with even the limited amendments proposed by the country’s Supreme Court in its determination on the Bill delivered last October. Subject to such proposals, the Supreme Court found the law, as a whole, constitutional.
This law is patently anti-democratic. It empowers a government body, the Online Safety Commission (OSC), the sole power to determine and declare the “falsity of any statement“, which would be published on an online portal, and thereupon prosecute anybody who makes and communicates a statement contrary to such “truth” declared.
“False statement” is defined as “a statement that is known or believed by its maker to be incorrect or untrue and is made especially with intent to deceive or mislead”. This knowledge or belief is presumed to be shaped by what is declared as false by the OSC, or what the government authorities have claimed to be true.
A person could be prosecuted for the offenses, among others, of “communicating a false statement” online and (a) posing “a threat to national security, public health or public order” or “promoting feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of people” (Section 12); (b) where such statement amounts to contempt of court; (c ) giving “provocation to any person or incites any person intending or knowing it to be likely that such provocation or incitement, will cause the offence of rioting to be committed”; (d) voluntarily causing “disturbance to any assembly lawfully engaged in the performance of religious worship or religious ceremonies”; (e) insulting or attempting to insult “the religion or the religious beliefs of that class” with “the deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of persons”; (f) inducing “any other person to commit an offence against the State or against the public tranquility” with “intent to cause any officer, sailor, soldier, or airman in the navy, army or air force of Sri Lanka to mutiny” or with “intent to cause fear or alarm to the public”. A person, “who wilfully makes or communicates a statement”, either true or false, “with intention to cause harassment to another person” (“target person”) by publishing any “private information” of the target person or a related person and causes such person “harassment”, also commits an offence. All such statements are “prohibited statements”.
Attempting, abetting and conspiring to commit these offences are also crimes.
The punishments for these offenses range from three to five to seven years imprisonment and in some instances may be doubled in the event of a subsequent offence, coupled with fines up to one million rupees.
The OSC has sweeping powers to order any internet service provider or internet intermediary (which provide the service of social media platforms) to disable access by end-users to an online location (such as a website, webpage, chatroom or forum), which contains a prohibited statement. It can also order removal of such statements. It can blacklist a website, social media account or a platform as a “declared online location”. The commission is also empowered to seize “property movable, and immovable and to sell, lease, mortgage, exchange, or otherwise dispose of the same”.
Criminalizing “fake news” has been the demand of the ruling class for some time. It was on the agenda of successive governments during the recent past – a draft law was on the table during the former Sirisena-Wickremasinghe government in 2019, following the Easter Sunday bomb attacks, and then under former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted by the mass struggles of April-July 2022, mainly organized through social media. These attempts were defeated temporarily by wider objections raised by civil society groups and international organizations, and right-wing political parties who demanded a social media and internet regulatory law that is in line with the “international standards”.
Sri Lanka’s President Ranil Wickremesinghe salutes military parades at the the government’s 76th Independence Day celebrations in Colombo, on February 4, 2024. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Presenting the Bill in the Parliament, Public Security Minister Tiran Alles claimed that this law is required to fight online harassment against women and children. This is only a pretext. He also revealed the intention to curb “misinformation” that damaged the reputation of parliamentarians. This is a reference to the extensive social media activism during mass struggles of 2022 that rejected the whole parliament.
Every opposition party in the parliament agrees with the government for a social media regulatory law placed in their hands.
During the parliament debate, National People’s Power (NPP) Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake concurred with Alles declaring that “things that should not happen also are taking place [in social media]”.
Main opposition party Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) member of parliament, Harsha de Silva worried that international tech giants would abandon Sri Lankan online space. His is the concern of the tech profiteer capitalists, whom de Silva wants to confer unbridled freedom to attract investment. Around the world, these companies have already been complicit in government censorship of free speech.
If and when in power, these parties will also ruthlessly employ these laws against the working class and political opponents, particularly from the left, to meet the demands of international financial capital.
Pseudo-left FrontLine Socialist Party (FSP) Education Secretary Pubudu Jayagoda told media, the proposed law is redundant because, “there are already laws to deal with situations of this nature [those covered by the new law]”, and conveyed FSP’s subservience to the oppressive legal system of the bourgeois state and the parliament. Its “People’s Council” programme is an appendage of the parliamentary system.
Another view among the middle class has been vocalized by Gamini Viyangoda, writing in the pseudo-left paper “Anidda” on Sunday (04). Viyangoda says that the Bill is politically maneuvered for the government “to prepare an environment to safely face the upcoming critical elections”. President Ranil Wickremasinghe, who himself knows to have a rare chance for him to gain a presidential election win, is not making these laws for himself, but for the capitalist establishment, all of whom, including NPP and SJB, have affirmed their readiness to go ahead with the austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on the back of the people. This is the very truth that these radicals conceal from the people.
While OSA is made law, the government placed on the pipeline a new anti-terrorism law, surpassing the powers of arrest, administrative detention or custody and prosecution under the existing draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) of 1979. More than 35 parties challenged the proposed law last month in the country’s Supreme Court. Poet Ahnaf Jazeem, who is a former torture victim of PTA, petitioned the court and submitted that “this authoritarian law… is essentially designed to be used as a weapon of collective punishment against the working class… It is driven by class hate.“
Soon after his appointment as president, Wickremasinghe declared his government’s class war against the working people and the poor, poised to implement harsh austerity measures dictated by the IMF. In this backdrop, these laws are the new arms of Wickremasinghe’s armory to be used against political dissent, especially left-wing political ideas and movements, journalists and activists, to intimidate, harass, question, arrest, and imprison them, and block websites and social media accounts. Sri Lanka police is notorious for employing draconian anti-terrorism, public security and hate speech laws against social media activists, artists, protesters and ethnic-minorities.
Recently, Alles deployed special police forces to “fight drug menace” and arrested over 56,000 since December 17. This operation, falsely named “Yukthiya” (Justice), is intended to terrorize urban and rural impoverished areas, intimidating working people and youth throughout the country. Last month, the government commenced using facial recognition technology, according to Alles, as part of plans to “eradicate” the under-world and drug-trafficking.
Wickremasinghe has come a long way toward a police state, with dictatorial powers conferred to him under the country’s communal constitution. He has deployed tri-forces as strikebreakers and used essential services laws to witch-hunt worker leaders.
The global imperialist crisis, however, has not left Wickremasinghe alone in this onslaught against the masses. Just one month before OSB was tabled in parliament, the United Kingdom passed a similar law targeting social media freedom. In India, websites and social media platforms are now required to remove content about the Union Government, when notified by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) as “fake”.
The trade union leaders have succumbed to Wickremasinghe’s IMF “economic restructuring” plans and have no political programme to fight against austerity, nor to defend democratic rights. It is only the working class, which can and should fight to abolish these repressive laws and defend democratic rights. This requires organizing in their own independent organizations, united across ethnic divisions and industries, to bring about a government of the working people, free the economy from the siege of international financial capital and restructure the economic life on socialist lines.
The Sinhala section of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reported recently that a group of Jaffna University students raised the following question to the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka: “There is a widespread global protest movement supporting the Palestinians; But during the war in Sri Lanka, when the government carried out a genocide against the Tamil people, there was no such global movement to support us. why is that?”
What they are questioning is about the brutal attack by the Colombo government in 2009 in Mullivaikkal, where 150,000 Tamil people were trapped in an area of 14 square kilometers, just like what is happening in the Gaza Strip today. There is no reason for the pain in the hearts of these people to go away automatically, who were shaken by human feelings, exacerbated by the truth that the world betrayed them, when they were made helpless and subjected to cruel treatment and tortuous conditions.
A View of the Final Carnage in the Civil War [Photo:opiniojuris.org]
But, instead of facing this reality, the SEP, through an article published in Sinhalese on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on January 24, authored by Navin Devage, titled “A Reply to the Political Questions Promoted by Tamil Nationalists Among Jaffna University Students Regarding the Gaza War,” is attempting to narrow down the crisis of the Tamil people as a mere product of Tamil nationalists, pretending that there existed a global protest movement to fight against the Tamil Genocide.
Accordingly, “the claim that there was no global opposition to the genocide against the Tamil people during the war in Sri Lanka is false,” writes the SEP, pointing out the campaigns of the Tamil diaspora who were exiled from the island as a result of the war, such as, “8000 Tamils in Central Berlin marched from the CDU headquarters to the Indian Embassy”, “a hartal movement took place in Tamil Nadu”, “50,000 Tamils protested in Paris”, etc. The question that has arisen now is the fact that the cries of the oppressed Tamils, from within the country and abroad, for the protection of their lives in the last genocidal attack by the government forces, did not receive a favorable response from the world.
To elaborate further, all the radicals, left parties and trade unions in Sri Lanka as well as in other countries, were engaged in the “war against terrorism” campaign unleashed by US-led imperialism at that time. The left parties of Sri Lanka were already smearing the blood of the oppressed Tamils on their hands. Temples and churches had become centers blessing the attrocities against Tamil people. The racists came to the fore, suppressing the progressive artists. Racist films and other creations had become part of popular culture. Unions encouraged their membership to donate wages to war funds. Creation of a horrified graveyard in the north was celebrated with milk rice (The traditional Sri Lankan food of celebration). In the midst of all this, with the massive escalation of military attacks in 2009, in order to cover up the massacres on the ground, the Rajapaksa government announced that it could not assure the safety of the lives of journalists and even of the Red Cross members. The oppressed Tamil people who did not then have smartphones, and access to Facebook and social media platforms, did not have the ability to share the events of the bloody tragedy that was unfolding before them, as in Gaza today. In this way, by the time of the final onslaught, the fact that a reactionary pro-war mass sentiment had been built against the Tamil people in the southern partk of Sri Lanka, gave the government an easy war victory.
The effort made in the article, to insinuate that the resistance to the genocide of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka was included as a common slogan of the mass struggles around the world, which were erupted by the global economic and financial crisis of 2008, is similarly false.
This objective reality must be overcome by a genuine movement of the working class. Instead, it is naive to try to console the Tamil people by distorting the reality and to say that such an idea was promoted by the Tamil elite, and to assume that the oppressed people can be hence freed from the influence of Tamil nationalism. It should be specially noted here that the article is written with the good intention of liberating the oppressed Tamils from reactionary nationalism, but the way followed to achieve it goes against the very objective. In other words, the purpose itself has revealed that the way followed to achieve it is unfair.
Against this distortion of the said article, we have to note that it was only the SEP, the WSWS and the ICFI, that have been carrying out a principled fight against the communal injustice and racist war against the Tamil people in the North-East of the country, by launching an international campaign and presenting a socialist program, over three decades uninterruptedly.
The February 4, 2009 WSWS editorial board’s statement quoted in the SEP article itself makes things clearer:
“Working people internationally have shown mass opposition to their governments’ support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and horror at the war crimes in Gaza. They will feel the same way if made aware of the situation in Sri Lanka. Tamil workers must link their struggles with that of workers all over the world against the common imperialist enemy.”
According to the article, “…by puffing the formula of problems unique to the Tamil people and a Tamil solution, what the students’ union is actually doing is to prevent such a united struggle of the oppressed of all races and creeds against the outdated social order – that is their common enemy – in which the capitalist ruling elite holds political power.”
In this way, the SEP leadership is exposing a struggle carried out within the party on the issue of whether the Tamil people have had no special problems. It is an illusion of the SEP leadership to believe in winning over oppressed Tamils to the international working class program, while denying to recognize the special discriminatory circumstances of Tamil people and thereby standing with the same infamous capitalist slogan.
As stated in the February 4, 2009 WSWS editorial board’s statement quoted in the SEP article, “The allies of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka and in the diaspora in the imperialist countries are the working class. It is the only social force with the power and whose class interests lie in ending the war, overthrowing the Sri Lankan bourgeois state, and ensuring the democratic rights of the Tamil population, as part of the struggle against the imperialist world order.”
Thus, “SEP the Sri Lanka branch of the International Committee fights to build a revolutionary alliance of Sinhala and Tamil working class and peasants to form a socialist united republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam. The democratic or social aspirations of the people cannot be realized under capitalist rule in Sri Lanka or within the confines of the nation-state system established in the Indian subcontinent in 1947-1948. The backwardness of Sri Lanka and Eelam, which is the result of the colonial past and continued imperialist rule, can only be overcome by the establishment of a worker-peasant government as part of the world socialist revolution.” [The SEP and the fight for the Socialist United States of Sri Lanka and Eelam, ICFI on release of SEP members by LTTE, December 1, 1998]
SEP and its pioneer RCL fought for decades for this perspective of the Sri Lanka-Eelam Socialist Republic. The said article refrains from mentioning the term, “Sri Lanka-Eelam”. We know that there is an “inevitability” behind every coincidence, even though it may appear to be a coincidence. Later, according to the policy developed by the SEP leadership, ‘Tamil people have no special problems’ compared to Sinhalese majority working class; If so, there is no question of the right to self-determination. It means that the national question is resolved automatically, already, with or after the defeat of the LTTE by the Colombo government. Then this ‘Sri Lanka-Eelam’ slogan cannot be valid. That is the very inevitability that caused it to disappear from the article.
As the SEP had pointed out from the beginning, the end of the war with the victory of the Colombo government suppressing the Tamil people’s struggle in the North, was opening up space for the suppression of the working class in the south. Also, the end of the war led to the strengthening of the right wing. It happened in the context of a pre-emptive strike by the ruling class against a possible popular uprising in the South. Buddhist extremist attacks started by the end of 2009 against other religions, the state campaign of extrajudicial killings under the guise of suppressing the underworld, continued unhindered with the approval of all the media and the majority of the middle class. The Party’s response was a belated, half-hearted one.
This policy went to the extent of the party’s tacit approval of the government’s move to forcibly cremate Muslim corpses during the Covid pandemic. In the face of these attacks, instead of continuing the struggle on the basis of its own history, it adapted to the status quo, taking a rest. These diluted responses of the party have reflected that the party was directed to adapt a little, in order to avoid isolation caused by the hostile attitudes against the party developed in the Sinhalese majority South, throughout the determined struggle that party carried out over three decades, based on the slogans calling not to give one cent, one man or one drop of blood to this war and to withdraw troops from the North and the East.
The theoretical conclusion of the International Committee that the campaign for self-determination of a nation understood as a right up to freedom of secession plays a regressive role in the context of a tendency to fragment states into Imperialist-backed statelets, and the rightward movement of national liberation movements and of all national political movements, including trade unions, consequent to the globalization of production, was employed by the party leadership to justify its adaptation. Accordingly, they argued that there is no question of self-determination anymore. Even the talk of self-determination was interpreted as representative of separatism and support for imperialism.
According to the International Committee, the demand for self-determination, as the right to freedom from national oppression, which is clearly a transitional demand, has not been used since Lenin’s time to promote the formation of a separate state. As long as we could subjugate it to the working-class strategy of united mobilization for the socialist perspective, we have fought for it firmly. As the current crisis exacerbates pressure on national groups, democratic issues including self-determination have emerged more acutely than ever. But, it must be based on the truth,”that the essential progressive content of ‘self-determination’—the eradication of national oppression—can be realized only through the SEP’s program for the Socialist United States of Sri Lanka and Eelam.” [The SEP and the fight for the Socialist United States of Sri Lanka and Eelam, ICFI on the release of SEP members by LTTE, December 01, 1998]
To elaborate further, “To the extent that the nation-state persists as a basic unit of political and economic organization of bourgeois society, the national question—which, at this point in history, would be more aptly called the “national problem”—persists. But Marxist tactics flow from a scientific understanding of the historical obsolescence of the national state. (David Noth, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century) As long as the working-class party avoids it, pro-imperialist, national separatist opportunism would build its kingdom on it.
The SEP article defects from that responsibility. Its distinguishing feature is its rejection of the historical materialist method. The writer selects only the things he prefers from the whole composition, and from it, arrives at the conclusions he is biased towards. In emphasizing the lessons of the 1985 split, the leadership of the International Committee has pointed out correctly on many occasions that, when pragmatism is thrown out of the front door, it creeps in through the back door. The revolutionary should carefully be aware of this.
