Statement of the WSWS International Editorial Board
We post below the First Part of the Statement of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, published in WSWS.org on January 03, 2024. The statement contains four parts. Please access here Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. We, theSocialist.LK endorse this statement in its entirety and invite our readers to carefully peruse it and grasp it for actions ahead.
A bulldozer unloads the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israel in a mass grave in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2023. [AP Photo/Fatima Shbair]
1. New Year 2024 begins under conditions of escalating international crisis. At the dawn of the millennium, there were rosy predictions that world capitalism, under the benevolent and “unipolar” rule of the United States, was entering a new epoch of universal peace and prosperity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the demons of the “short twentieth century”—above all, the specters of Marxism and socialist revolution—had been buried for once and for all. Wall Street cried out to the world: “My name is Capitalism, King of Kings. Look on my works ye Mighty and despair!” But it has taken less than a quarter-century to dissolve that arrogant boast into a colossal wreck. The new century of triumphant capitalism has proven to be the shortest of all. The fundamental contradictions of the world capitalist system that produced the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century have not been resolved and remain the driving forces of the intensifying economic, social and political upheavals that are sweeping across the globe.
2. The horrors produced by the cataclysms of the past century are being reenacted. Genocide is being openly adopted as an instrument of state policy. The attempt by the Israeli regime to exterminate the Palestinian people in Gaza proceeds with the open endorsement of the United States and its imperialist allies, which have repeatedly proclaimed their opposition to a cease-fire. A densely populated urban area is being subjected to a merciless bombardment that has killed more than 25,000 people, mostly women and children, within the first 10 weeks of the war.
3. The fascist prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared in his New Year’s message that the onslaught will continue throughout 2024. Israel could not continue the war another week, let alone a year, without the unlimited financial and military support of the United States and its NATO co-criminals. The US president, secretary of state, countless other high government officials and top Pentagon personnel shuttle back and forth between Washington and Tel Aviv, overseeing the Israeli operations and participating in the selection of bombing targets. It is an open secret that US and NATO personnel are directly involved in murderous actions on the ground within Gaza.
4. The sanctioning of and participation in genocide represent more than the imperialist powers’ usual violations of their invocations of human rights. The Gaza genocide confirms, on a higher level, a tendency first noted by Lenin in the midst of World War I, more than a century ago. He wrote in 1916 that “the difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated because they are both rotting alive…” Substitute the term “fascist” for “reactionary-monarchist” and Lenin’s analysis is entirely valid as a description of present-day imperialist regimes.
5. The Gaza genocide is not a unique episode, best understood as a product of exceptional circumstances related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the inherently reactionary character of the Zionist project and its racialist and xenophobic-nationalist ideology. The latter elements play, of course, a significant role in the actions of the Israeli regime. But the unrestrained ferocity of the present war, carried out with the full support of its imperialist paymasters and weapons suppliers, can be understood and explained only in the context of the breakdown of the world imperialist and nation-state system.
6. The fundamental “error” of the strategists of American imperialism in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was that the event was explained in purely ideological terms, that is, as the triumph of capitalist “free enterprise” over socialist “dictatorship.” But this explanation, based on the false identification of Stalinism with socialism, concealed the real cause of the breakdown of the Soviet Union and its implications for the future development of American and world imperialism.
7. Notwithstanding its tragic consequences, the dissolution of the USSR confirmed the essential Marxist-Trotskyist critique of the Stalinist policy of “socialism in one country.” The reactionary nationalist utopia of an isolated socialist state fell victim, as Trotsky had predicted, to the reality of world economy.
8. The end of the USSR provided the United States a short-term advantage over its rivals, which its propagandists dubbed the “unipolar moment.” But the fundamental contradiction that led to the two world wars of the twentieth century—the conflict between the objective reality of a highly integrated world economy and the persistence of the obsolete nation-state system—had not been resolved by the demise of the USSR and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe.
9. The United States sought to exploit its geopolitical advantage to achieve a level of global domination that had been denied to it in the aftermath of World War II as a consequence of the decisive role played by the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany and the post-World War II wave of anti-colonial mass movements. Washington convinced itself that it could finally reorganize the world economy under its control through its military power. US imperialism’s favorite pundit, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, proclaimed in 1999 that “the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps…”[1]
10. The endless series of wars launched by the United States—in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia—was a desperate attempt to maintain its dominant position, despite its overall economic decline. The International Committee explained the motivation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and foresaw the failure of its underlying hegemonic project:
The launching of an aggressive war against Iraq represents a final, climactic attempt to resolve, on the basis of imperialism, the world historic problem of the contradiction between the global character of the productive forces and the archaic nation-state system. America proposes to overcome the problem by establishing itself as the super nation-state, functioning as the ultimate arbiter of the world’s fate—deciding how the resources of the world will be allocated, after it has grabbed for itself the lion’s share. But this sort of imperialist solution to the underlying contradictions of world capitalism, which was utterly reactionary in 1914, has not improved with age. Indeed, the sheer scale of world economic development in the course of the twentieth century endows such an imperialist project with an element of madness. Any attempt to establish the supremacy of a single national state is incompatible with the extraordinary level of international economic integration. The profoundly reactionary character of such a project is expressed in the barbaric methods that are required for its realization.[2]
11. The Gaza genocide epitomizes the “barbaric methods” arising from the increasingly desperate and beleaguered effort of the United States and its NATO allies to sustain their dominant position in the face of the challenge posed to their hegemony by China and recalcitrant national states whose interests conflict with Washington’s “rules-based” imperialist order. The slaughter of the Palestinians is unfolding in the midst of the bloody US-NATO proxy war against Russia, which has cost since its outbreak in February 2022 approximately a half-million Ukrainian and, at least, 100,000 Russian lives.
12. As the war in Gaza has normalized genocide as an acceptable instrument of imperialist policy, the relentless escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia has been accompanied by the de facto acceptance of a high level of possibility, even probability, that the conflict may lead to the use of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. The Biden administration regularly sanctions and directs military attacks on Russian assets and territory that would have been ruled out during the Cold War as inciting nuclear retaliation. Repeatedly crossing “red lines,” the Biden administration and its allied NATO governments have asserted that their conduct of military operations will not be constrained by the threat of nuclear war.
13. Despite bleeding Ukraine white, US-NATO imperialism has failed thus far to achieve victory on the battlefield. Its much vaunted “spring offensive” in mid-2023 ended in a debacle. In the final days of 2023, the Ukrainian regime carried out a significant escalation of the war by launching a missile attack on Russian soil, killing at least 22 people in the city of Belgorod. Russia has responded with a new wave of missile attacks on Ukraine, which the Biden administration is exploiting to press its demands for continued unlimited funding of the proxy war.
14. In the final analysis, the US-NATO instigation of the proxy war in Ukraine marks nothing less than preparation for a US war against China, transforming every part of the world into a specific sphere of operations. Nearly 20 years ago, in 2006, the International Committee posed a series of questions related to the global policies of the United States, among which were the following:
Will the United States be prepared to retreat from its hegemonic aspirations and accept a more egalitarian distribution of global power among states? Will it be prepared to yield ground, on the basis of compromise and concessions, to economic and potential military competitors, whether in Europe or in Asia? Will the United States graciously and peacefully accommodate the rising influence of China?[3]
Responding to these questions, the ICFI replied that those who would answer in the affirmative “are placing heavy bets against the lessons of history.”
15. Today, the answers to these questions are not of a speculative character. War between the United States and China is viewed not as a possibility, but as an inevitability. This consensus within Washington’s foreign policy establishment is summed up in an essay published in the new January-February 2024 issue of Foreign Affairs. It is ominously titled, “The Big One: Preparing for a Long War With China.” Its author is Andrew J. Krepinevich, Jr., a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a leading imperialist think tank.
16. The essay assumes that the United States and China will go to war. It is a fact taken for granted, about which one should not waste time debating. The real questions relate to how and where the war will start—in the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, along the Sino-Indian border, or in South Asia—and whether the war will go nuclear. Krepinevich states:
Once a war has broken out, both China and the United States would have to confront the dangers posed by their nuclear arsenals. As in peacetime, the two sides would retain a strong interest in avoiding catastrophic escalation. Even so, in the heat of war, such a possibility cannot be eliminated. Both would confront the challenge of finding the sweet spot in which they could employ the force to gain an advantage without causing total war. Consequently, leaders of both great powers would need to exercise a high degree of self-control.
To keep the war limited, both Washington and Beijing would need to recognize each other’s redlines—specific actions viewed as escalatory and that could trigger counterescalations.[4]
17. It is nothing less than delusional to stake one’s hope for an avoidance of nuclear Armageddon on the ability to limit escalation in the midst of an existential conflict upon which the fates of the combatants depend. In any case, the US-NATO proxy war against Russia has already established that US imperialism will not be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation and will cross all and every “red line” in order to achieve its objectives.
18. Krepinevich acknowledges that the inevitable US-China war, even without the use of nuclear weapons, will have catastrophic consequences for all of humanity. He writes:
Even if the two sides avoided nuclear catastrophe, and even if the homelands of the United States and its major coalition partners were left partially untouched, the scale and scope of destruction would likely far exceed anything the American people and those of its allies have experienced.[5]
19. The conclusion drawn by Krepinevich is not that the military cataclysm must be prevented at all costs, but that the United States-led coalition’s “ability to sustain popular support for the war effort, along with a willingness to sacrifice, would be crucial to its success.”[6]
20. This nightmarish imperialist scenario of inevitable war must be opposed by the American and international working class. Workers in the imperialist centers of North America, Europe, Asia and Australia and New Zealand have absolutely no interest in defending the global geopolitical and economic interests of their power-mad financial-corporate imperialist ruling class. Nor should the workers of Russia, China and other major capitalist regional powers—Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, the Gulf States, Turkey, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Indonesia, to name only the most significant—attribute any progressive character to the reactionary efforts to reorganize world geopolitics on the basis of the utopian perspective of multi-polarity.
21. The fact that US imperialism instigated the Russia-Ukraine war does not justify, from the standpoint of the interests of the Russian and international working class, the decision of the Putin government to invade Ukraine. The Putin government’s response to the provocations of American and European imperialism was determined not by abstractly defined considerations of “national defense,” but by the class interests of the parasitical oligarchic-capitalist ruling class that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union and the privatization and outright theft of its nationalized assets.
22. In the years preceding the dissolution of the USSR, the political conflict within the ruling bureaucratic apparatus developed along national and ethnic lines. This reactionary tendency had been prepared and facilitated by Stalin’s repudiation of proletarian internationalism and the promotion of Russian nationalism under the cover of a chauvinistic Soviet patriotism. In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the already existing conflicts between nationalistic bureaucratic cliques—of which the Russian and Ukrainian were the most powerful—evolved rapidly into an open struggle for raw materials, markets, and territorial advantages between the new national capitalist ruling elites. In October 1991, less than three months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the International Committee warned:
In the republics, the nationalists proclaim that the solution to all problems lies in the creation of new “independent” states. Allow us to ask, independent of whom? Declaring “independence” from Moscow, the nationalists can do nothing more than place all the vital decisions relating to the future of their new states in the hands of Germany, Britain, France, Japan and the United States.[7]
23. The ongoing war is a vindication of the warning made 30 years ago by the International Committee. The struggle against the US-NATO war must be conducted not by adapting to the Putin regime, but in implacable opposition to its reactionary nationalist-capitalist agenda. The anti-war policy of Russian and Ukrainian workers must be based on the unity of all sections of the working class of the former Soviet Union against the new capitalist elites. The internationalist policy upheld by Lenin and the Bolsheviks during World War I, of intransigent opposition to the defense of their national capitalist state, must be adopted by the workers of present-day Russia (against the Putin regime) and Ukraine (against the Zelinsky regime).
24. The same fundamental principles of socialist internationalism determine the attitude of the International Committee toward the conflict between US imperialism and China. The United States strives to limit China’s economic development, restrict its access to critical resources and technologies, and block the expansion of its global influence. China attempts to counter the relentless pressure exerted by American imperialism through the restructuring of the prevailing geopolitical and economic institutions in which the US dollar functions as the pillar of world trade and financial transactions. But this policy, notwithstanding China’s attempts to endow it with a progressive and even altruistic veneer (e.g., through the promotion of the “Belt and Road Initiative”), unfolds on a capitalist basis and aims at nothing more than the reorganization of the existing global balance of power.
25. The outbreak of war cannot be averted by counterposing to the hegemony of American imperialism a new multi-polar coalition of capitalist states. The struggle against imperialist war cannot be achieved through a restructuring of the nation-state system, but only on the basis of its destruction. As Rosa Luxemburg insisted on the eve of World War I, the working class “must draw the conclusion that imperialism, war, plundering countries, haggling over peoples, breaking the law, and the policy of violence can only be fought against by fighting capitalism, by setting social revolution against global genocide.”[8]
[1] Thomas L. Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999
[2] A Quarter Century of War: The U.S. Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016, by David North (Mehring Books: Oak Park, MI), p. 277
[3] Ibid, pp. 368-69
[4] Foreign Affairs, January-February 2024, pp. 111-12
[5] Ibid, p. 117
[6] Ibid, p. 118
[7] “After the August Putsch: Soviet Union at the Crossroads,” by David North, in The Fourth International, Volume 19, No. 1, Fall-Winter 1992, p. 110.
[8] “Petty-Bourgeois or Proletarian World Policy?” in Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I, translated and edited by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), p. 470
The Colombo Action Committee (CACPS) vehemently denounces the physical attack unleashed on two members of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), Dehin Wasantha and Lakshman Fernando, by the President and Secretary of the Moratuwa University branch of the Podujana Progressive workers’ Union – a trade union affiliated to the Sri Lanka People’s Front – on 30th November. We call upon the entire working class and the oppressed people, including the university workers, academics, and students, to rise to defend the rights of the SEP members to engage in their political activities.
SEP members were attacked while they were distributing leaflets to announce the public meetings to be addressed by Joseph Kishore, the national secretary of SEP, USA. When they were engaged in the campaign near the University of Moratuwa, Indika Perera and Suranga Piyawardene, leaders of the above-mentioned two trade unions, arrived armed with long clubs and brutally attacked the SEP members. Wasantha suffered a fractured bone on his left hand in trying to protect his head from the attack.
It is also reported that the thugs threatened to kill Wasantha, who has been working as a non-academic employee at Moratuwa University for more than 25 years, and accused him of “supporting the Tigers” (a reference to the LTTE). This is a despicable call to incite communalism against the party and a call for state repression. Thus, they have directly threatened not only the members of the SEP, the working class, but also the oppressed sections of the population.
This barbaric attack is an expression of the bourgeois fascist frenzy of the People’s Front, which is completely detached from the people. Their hatred towards the principled fight of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and its predecessor Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) over half a century, is no surprise to us. What runs under the hatred towards Wasantha is their mortal fear at the type of struggle he conducted for socialist principles, and for the rights of the workers and students of the University over a period exceeding 25 years, as a member of the Sri Lanka Industrial Officers’ Union. This incident tacitly brings us the lesson that the working class, facing a serious class war against capitalism, has to face not only the capitalist state, but also these union bureaucrats – which is an integral part of the capitalist state – in organizing its counter-attack.
This attack has once again proved that the reactionary role of trade unions has been raised to a higher level, at a time the capitalist system, immersed in a world scale crisis, is planning to deliver a critical defeat on the working class. While the ruling class burdens its crisis on the shoulders of the working masses through inflation, job cuts, snatching welfare etc., trade unions are aligning with the state to crush the growing counter-attacks of the working class, and stepping forward to carry out physical attacks on its organizations.
It is not a Sri Lankan experience only. Many incidents of such trade union thuggish attacks against the working class have been reported from all over the world in the recent past. We quote below from a statement of the Colombo Action Committee, protesting against an incident when the trade union officials attacked its own members inside the union office at Cankaya, Turkey in last August:
“Under the conditions of the working class encountering the deadly attacks of the capitalist system, which is deeply engrossed in a crisis of international proportions, the trade union movement is unable to provide any leadership to the working class. The trade union movements around the world, which were leading struggles to win reforms for the working class, acting as mediators between the capitalist class and the working class, thereby serving as mediators of the class struggle, in an era when production was relatively confined to national boundaries, have gone into complete crisis with the globalization of production. Under the conditions in which, the role of winning concessions for the working class has been objectively unviable, as there is no national perspective whatsoever to face the attacks on the working class by the capitalist class; now the trade unions work directly as a garrison of the capitalist class in response to the present global scale capitalist crisis. Thus, in the desperate effort of the capitalist system engrossed in a global crisis, for its very survival, the experiences all around the world confirms the readiness of the unions to go all the way as its partner.” [Defend the Turkish workers from the thuggish attacks of the trade union bureaucracy! August 20, 2023, theSocialist.LK]
Such is the reality behind the physical attacks on the working class organizations by the Trade Union bureaucracy.
Our statement on the Turkish incident also added:
“The Colombo Action committee understands that, not only in Turkey, but also in every country, the way to protect the rights of workers including safeguarding their jobs and wages is through the struggle against the capitalist system and its protectors; the trade unions. It recognizes that, it has become crucial to build up independent organizations of the working class in which working class democracy is practiced, by exposing the reactionary alignment of trade unions and middle-class movements with the capitalist state and corporations. In those working-class organizations that represent the economic, political and life needs of the workers and oppressed people, and operate on their democratic will, there is no room for capitalist agents including trade union bureaucrats, who tie the workers to the capitalist class and its state and put the burden of the capitalist crisis on the shoulders of the working class. Such independent, genuinely democratic organizations of the working class, which arrive at decisions democratically through discussion, are essential to carry out the struggle to a final victory, cutting off betrayals.
Colombo Action Committee supports the call issued by the ICFI through the WSWS, for building up independent action committees of the Working class and establishing the objective unity of the working class by creating an international organization of such committees around the world. In the recent interventions made by SEP activists presenting this program, there were incidents of physical assaulting and verbal threatening and obstructing by the trade unions. CAC has always defended SEP and independent workers against those attacks.” (-ibid-)
The fact that, not only the capitalist state, but also the trade unions acting as an instrument of the state, have started resorting to physical attacks against the independent class actions of the working class highlights the decisiveness of one of the democratic principles established by the legacy of the RCL-SEP struggle itself. That is, the principle of the necessity of fighting against the capitalist repression unleashed on any organization of the working class and oppressed people – despite their political differences – with all their might. The working class has no other way but to fight without retreating from this principle, which is constantly maintained by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
Colombo Action Committee (CAC) appeals to all workers to join hands in the struggle to take control unto their own hands, building their own political institutions, and unifying them nationwide and internationally, independent of the trade unions that act as a police force within the working class, aligned with the corporations and governments. That is the only path of freedom for the working class.
Workers, defend the democratic right of the Socialist Equality Party to engage in political propaganda and campaign!
Step forward to defend the organizations of workers and the oppressed!
Build independent action committees!
Build the Democratic and Socialist Congress of Sri Lankan workers and the oppressed!
Forward to an international alliance of workers’ action committees!
[This statement was initially issued in Sinhalese on December 10, 2023]
Featured image: A poster of the CACPS campaign against the attack
The High Court of Puttalam last Tuesday (12) acquitted poet and teacher Ahnaf Jazeem of the charge against him framed under draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), three and half years after his wrongful arrest. The acquittal is based on the failure of the State to prove the alleged offence, as none of the State witnesses testified against the poet. In spite of the established fact that the whole case was concocted, the Court refused to declare the prosecution as “frivolous and vexatious” and denied awarding any State costs to Ahnaf.
Ahnaf Jazeem
Ahnaf was arrested, at his home at Mannar, by the police Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division (TID), on May 16, 2020, in the climax of the anti-Muslim racist campaign of the government of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, as part of a broader onslaught on the democratic rights of the working people. The government endeavoured to link Ahnaf to Easter Sunday terror attacks of April 21, 2019, and to the “Save the Pearls” organization, one of the patrons of which was the human rights lawyer Hejaaz Hizbullah, who was also wrongfully arrested, detained for months and prosecuted in connection with the Easter Attack.
In view of the severe economic crisis the then administration of former president Maithripala Sirisena was confronted with and the presidential elections scheduled for November 2019, the post-Easter Sunday arrests, detentions and prosecutions of hundreds of Muslim youth and political leaders, and the continuous surveillance of Muslim community areas, heightened under Rajapaksha government, were intended to humiliate and intimidate Muslims and fan racialist sentiments within a section of vulnerable Sinhalese majority of the island.
With the subsequent revelations of the facts behind the Easter Sunday Attack and of the complicity of the ruling elite in the attack or in not preventing the attack well-known by the intelligence apparatus, people largely came to cognize the true nature of the racist crack-down upon Muslims, intended to divide the working class on ethnic lines. These revelations along with the unprecedented economic and financial crisis and corruptions widely discredited Rajapaksha government, leading to the mass struggles (also called “Aragalaya” in Sinhalese) of the April-August 2022, that toppled the regime in last August.
The eldest son of a poor farmer’s family, Ahnaf was 26 years old when arrested, and was employed as a Tamil language teacher in a private international school named, “School of Excellence”, whose dormitory, where Jazeem stayed with about 15 students, was housed temporarily in a building owned by the “Save the Pearls”. Ahnaf had by then published a poetry anthology titled Navarasam (Nine Moods). The arrest notice alleged him for “publishing books and teaching students on (Muslim) extremism and racism“. This reference to the book was to Navarasam.
Ahnaf was unlawfully detained under the hand of Rajapaksha for 13 months and remanded for another 6 months, until he was bailed out by the High Court in mid December 2021. During the period of detention, he was kept incommunicado for several intermittent weeks, denied meeting with parents or lawyers for months, physically and mentally tortured and forced to confess and admit allegations which TID leveled against him in Court reports. TID kept the poet tied to a table in handcuffs, day and night, for over five months.
Ahnaf’s lawyers filed a fundamental rights case in the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka in April 2021, along with authoritative translations of the poetry book. The Attorney General filed the indictment against him in mid August 2021 under Section 2(1)(h) and 2(2)(ii) of the PTA. The charge had dropped the TID’s allegations made in respect of the poetry book, as by then it was widely known that the poetry book contained nothing advocating racial violence or Muslim extremism. Ahnaf was charged for “indoctrinating” his students with ideas “to arouse feelings of racialist or religious or communal ill-will or hatred between different races or religions”, during a two-month period at the end of 2019. If the offense was proved, Ahnaf would have been subjected to imprisonment upto 20 years.
During the trial, State led evidence of the principle of the School of Excellence and 4 of Ahnaf’s students. One of the students was even declared by the State counsel to be an adverse witness. Most revealingly, another student testified to the fact that the statement obtained from him was not read out to him before his signature was taken on the statement. Sri Lanka police, especially the TID and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), are notorious for obtaining forced confessions/statements from arrestees, which would be used against them in court under the PTA. Thus, the acquittal was made under Section 200(1) of the Criminal Procedure Code, which dispenses with the requirement of the defence opening its case.
Second from left is Ahnaf’s father, third his mother. First from the right is his brother, third Ahnaf and fourth is this writer. Two other lawyers are standing next to Ahnaf and this writer. They pose for the photo just after Ahnaf’s acquittal.
While knowing very well that the case against Ahnaf is a frameup, as a cover-up, the ministry of defense enlisted Ahnaf in a list of designated persons related to terrorist financing for two consecutive years since 2022, and confiscated his bank accounts, where there was no penny. In spite of appeals, Ahnaf still remains in the blacklist, and so, is unemployed.
Ahnaf’s freedom was secured by the masses. The campaign, “Defend Poet Ahnaf” initiated early 2021 by the Action Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE) and the World Socialist Web Site for the immediate and unconditional release of Ahnaf gathered widespread support from academics, journalists, artists, working class youth and other sections of the middle class, cutting across ethnic divisions. A number of local and international organizations, including the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, supported the defence campaign and called for the poet’s immediate release.
The betrayal of the unprecedented mass struggles of 2022 by the trade unions and the pseudo-left paved the way for the parachuting of Ranil Wickremasinghe as the President following Rajapaksa’s ousting. Committed to saving the crippled financial system, Wickremasinghe entered into a loan deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and launched severe austerity measures which included import restrictions, price hikes, drastic lowering of the income tax threshold, privatization, commercialization, pension aimed domestic debt restructuring and large subsidy cuts.
To suppress the anti-austerity protests by the working people and students, Wickremasinghe brutally deployed military and the police, arresting several hundreds. Social media activity was highly censored and activists and journalists were attacked, arrested and prosecuted. Far right racist elements were given a free hand to contain social unrest. The whole parliament has been largely discredited among the working class, farmers and a significant section of the middle class.
This greater unpopularity of the whole ruling establishment and the constant watch by the masses of the development of Ahnaf’s prosecution prevented the government interfering with the witnesses, so that the truth finally prevailed. History is witness to the fact that, in a different political climate, “truth” would have been shown to be proven otherwise.
Few weeks back, another victim of the same anti-Muslim campaign, activist Ramzi Razeek was discharged from the case filed by the CID. Arrested one month prior to Ahnaf, Razeek was kept in remand for five months. Later, in mid November, the Supreme Court declared that his fundamental rights had been breached by the government and awarded rupees one million compensation. Learned from recent mass struggles, the court has stepped in to save the system, not taking the risk of the people losing its last bit of trust in every organ of the parliamentary democracy.
The ruling class is well aware that it sits on a social powder-keg. As with other right-wing governments of the world, the Sri Lanka government has no option but resorting to military police measures to face the rising militant class struggles. Defence of the democratic rights is a task of the working class, and that requires the uprooting of the rotten capitalist political system. This needs the independent mobilization of the working class and all those who defend democratic rights around committees of action that will unite the working class across ethnic lines and organize industrial power to win political power to implement socialist policies.
