Statement of the Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles
Image courtesy:adaderana.lk
It is already clear that the state terror unleashed in the name of Operation Yukthiya is one way the government is intensifying its repression against the youth and the rest of the oppressed. Its goal is the protracted class struggle.
The government suddenly jumped on to the crackdown on drugs as one of the measures to forcefully maintain the much hated capitalist state; to keep the society terrorized with violence and to garner the support of a backward social stratum. This has already given way to allow the police to act beyond the limits of the existing law and making that situation the norm in the country. What the country has is a police force that has a long history of being warrented and been operating to kill persons outside the judicial procedure.
A complaint made to the Police Commission by Aruna Indika Wijesuriya, a professional photographer based in Madapatha, Piliyandala, exposes the repressive drama, hence bringing us a picture of what is happening right now across the country. According to the complaint, on December 6, the police raided the young man’s house at night, searched it thoroughly and found nothing suspicious, but arrested the young man and demanded a ransom of 10,000 rupees for his release. It is alleged that Sergeant Alwis and police driver Madushanka have requested the bribe and Indika’s friends gave them the requested amount. He was released on police bail the next day.
Aruna’s father, Shanta Wijesuriya, who is a well-known journalist and political activist, came to know about this later and went with his son to Kesbewa police station to complain about this, but the police avoided accepting the complaint. The police hunters were furious because the father and son tried to complain against the police for taking bribes.
On December 13, a group of plain clothed police officers assaulted Aruna, searched his house and arrested him again. When the youth made a phone call to his cousin, the police surrounded the relative’s house as well. Again, around 3 am, On December 17, a police team including Alwis, who was accused of taking bribes, surrounded the youth’s home. There, a young man named Shehan was also with the police, and the police showed Shehan something that appeared to be a pack containing the illegal drug called ‘Ice’ and asked, “Shehan, did Aruna give you this?” But, facing protests from those present, the police retreated with the following warning: “Aruna Oya Adath Dinum( (Aruna, you have won today too)”.
Later, on February 2, the police officer, identified as Paul, had threatened Wijesuriya – the father of the youth – at Kesbewa courts premises saying that he would “shoot him if he tries to be smart”. On the same day at around 5 pm, the police raided a place where the young man was taking photographs and arrested him. The next day, his girlfriend, who went to visit him, was arrested on the charge that she had recorded the conversation of the police officers, beaten and harassed by removing her clothes forcibly, checking for illegal drugs. The cousin who visited the youth was also arrested and later released. The court rejected the request of the police to send the young man for rehabilitation, alleging that the boy who was brought to the court with ‘ice’ had used the substance. Allegations that he had used it were nullified by the medical evidence. There is no place to complain about these injustices. The institutions which claim to be investigating and redressing such grievances continue to ignore complaints. The response received from many such institutions was that there is no evidence to prove the allegations.
On February 6, social media reported an incident where the father of two was arrested by the Baddegama Police. The victim, Jeewantha Kumara of Ganegama, within the jurisdiction of the Baddegama Police was arrested with 2 grams and 350 milligrams of “ice”. Police assaulted Jeewantha and his brother, and their sister, a school-girl, video-taped how the police team in plainclothes assaulted her two brothers. She watched and taped how one of the police team tried to put a black parcel in her brother’s pocket. The police assaulted her, snatched her phone, arrested Jeewanta and filed a case. The phone which recorded the incident was never returned and has disappeared with all the evidence. The girl and her other brother had to be admitted to Karapitiya Hospital and receive treatments. There is no reason to think that the complaints made to the Elpitiya Senior Superintendent of Police and Galle Assistant Superintendent of Police will bring justice to these oppressed people.
The case of shooting down a carpenter at Narammala is a well-known crime among hundreds of such incidents. On January 18, police personnel in plain clothes ordered him to stop the lorry he was driving. When he did not stop, the vehicle was chased and he was shot dead. This is the way the so-called Operation Yukthiya is being carried out and the Public Security Minister Tiran Alas has assured in Parliament that the operation will continue irrespective of any objections such as concerns of human rights.
This attempt by the state repressive apparatus to pose itself as the agents of morality against immorality, is deceitful, evil, and despicable. It is a desperate attempt to curb the resistance of the working and oppressed people, arising from the implementation of austerity dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), hence imposing the crisis of capitalist class rule on the oppressed masses.
The root of all crimes is the rule of the bankrupt capitalist class. It is not limited to Sri Lanka. These rampant economic, political and social problems are not caused by illicit-drug users. The drug business operates through politically supported transnational and domestic parasitic crime networks. Addiction to drugs itself is the result of social unrest flowing from endless economic, political and social problems. Under these circumstances, the daily operations by military and police, establishing military police roadblocks at every other inch and conducting search operations are nothing but setting up the mechanism to subjugate the lives of the workers and oppressed people to the conditions of the police state. These operations have nothing to do with eradication of illicit drugs.
The statistics of the World Bank show how the poverty in the society is increasing day by day. Poverty, which was 11.3 percent of Sri Lanka’s population in 2019, has increased to 12.7 percent in 2020; and then from 13.1 percent in 2021 to 25 percent in 2022, and to 27.9 percent in 2024. This is a manifestation of the bankruptcy of capitalism on a global scale. World Bank reports show that between September 2022 and March 2023, world poverty increased by 11 million from 648 to 659 million. That’s by calculating the income below $2.15 per day. But, taking into account the lower middle income level and upper middle income level countries, i.e. the levels of $3.65 and $6.85, this figure rises by another 28 million. The poor are consumed by hunger, disease and discomfort. On the other hand, the income of the top 1% supre-rich is increasing by leaps and bounds.
The results of this level of inequality include the escalation of social tragedy, from drug addiction to various crimes and suicides. There was a recent incident where a 14-year-old boy jumped to the fast approaching train and committed suicide near Tambalagamuwa railway station on February 11. Following the sound of the train’s horn, the other children moved out of the way, but this child spread his hands and was smiling while waiting for the train to go over him. The train driver has stated that he had never seen anything like this in his entire life. Later, the child’s guardian aunt told the media that the child was suffering from acute malnutrition.
Attention of the masses is, and should be, focused on these issues. The world is gripped by the struggles of workers, farmers and youth. Anti-democratic measures and terror-mongering displayed by governments bringing social media censorship laws, anti-terror laws are not at all manifestations of the strength of capitalist governments, which are largely discredited among the masses, so lacking popular support, but manifestations of their organic weakness. Those governments cannot fulfill even a single economic or social need of the people. Anywhere in the world, such regimes have been enabled to persist because trade unions and pseudo-left fronts have infiltrated every instance of class struggle, to disrupt, control and compromise mass struggles. We workers, peasants and other oppressed people must realize that self-defense does not come at all from official capitalist institutions, and that freedom and security cannot be guaranteed except through the formation of an independent mass movement against the capitalist establishment under the working class revolutionary programme.
We, the Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles, request all progressive people opposed to capitalist attacks to come forward to build and unify action committees at workplaces and residential areas, which can ensure the safety of the oppressed people. Only such a mass movement can really wipe out capitalist rule and all the tendencies that block the path of social progress.
Abolish all repressive laws!
Forward towards a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government!
[This statement was originally published here in Sinhales on February 17, 2024]
By the Executive Committee of the CACPS and the Editorial Board of theSocialist.LK
“The death toll in Gaza is staggering. More than 30,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed in just 150 days; 5% of the population is dead, injured or missing. It is impossible to adequately describe the suffering in Gaza”
Philippe Lazzarini, Head of UNRWA (Tweet on X on February 5, 2024)
Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles (CACPS) and theSocialist.LK yesterday (05) launched a public online Petition titled “Stop Gaza Genocide Now! No to Zionism! No to Imperialism!”. The significance of this political act to mobilize the working class, in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally, and all those who want to stop the massacre in Gaza, is expressed by the statement of Lazzarini, quoted above.
The Petition calls upon masses to reject the reactionary appeals to imperialist warmongers to stop the massacre. “Crisis ridden, these powers are planning a war with China, and are waging a war against Russia in Ukraine, as part of a global nuclear war that would entail Iran, the Middle East and the rest of the world. In these imperialist centers too, the war abroad has brought social counter-revolution at home,” Petition states.
Pointing out the necessary relationship between war on the one hand, and debt and austerity on the other, over billions of people around the world, the Petition states, “Manifestation of the hold of imperialism takes different forms: it may be war, it may be debt and austerity. Therefore, there is no fight against debt and austerity without a fight against war, and vice versa.”
It calls upon mass solidarity with the Palestinian people and to fight till their demands are met. These demands are expressed in the slogans the Petition fights for. These include, Stop Gaza Genocide Now! No to imperialist Barbarism! Punish War Criminals!
Refuting the imperialist political trap of the two-state solution, it calls upon to fight for a socialist programme to build a Jew-Arab Unified Socialist State, which would be part of a Federation of Socialist Unified States of the Middle East and the World.
In the backdrop of traditional working class organizations, the trade unions and their pseudo-left bckers, being lined up with imperialism and the capitalist state of austerity and international finance capital, the CACPS and theSocialist.LK call upon working class of Sri Lanka, united with the Israeli and US working people, to “unleash our enourmous power to fight for political power, independent of the State-Company-Trade Union alliance, to call general strikes, to stop war funding and military aid, and stop the Genocide and the world war.”
This Petition was launched as part of the wider campaign by the CACPS and theSocialist.LK against the long oppression of Palestinian people by the imperialist-backed Zionist Israel.
We invite fellow workers and our readers to sign the Petition today, share it widely and fight to stop the Gaza Genocide Now and halt to the impending neuclear war.
මෙහි ගැබ්වන ඉදිරි දර්ශනය ලෝක සමාජවාදී වෙබ් අඩවියේ, “කම්කරු පන්තිය, ධනපති ම්ලේච්ඡත්වයට එරෙහි සටන සහ සමාජවාදී විප්ලවයේ ලෝක පක්ෂය ගොඩනැගීම (The working class, the fight against capitalist barbarism, and the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution)” යන මැයෙන් කොටස් හතරකින් යුතුව පළ කර ඇති ඉදිරි දර්ශනයට ලියූ පූර්විකාවක් වැනිය.
Statement of the WSWS International Editorial Board
We post below the Statement of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, published in WSWS.org on January 13, 2024. We, theSocialist.LK endorse this statement in its entirety and invite our readers to carefully peruse it and grasp it for actions ahead.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Thursday’s attack by the United States and United Kingdom against Yemen. With no popular mandate, with no congressional or parliamentary authorization, without even an attempt at a serious explanation, the Biden administration in the US and the Sunak government in the UK have carried out an illegal act of war against an impoverished nation.
The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the fast combat support ship USNS Supply transit the Strait of Hormuz, Dec. 14, 2023. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Keith Nowak ]
The attack on Yemen is a major escalation of the developing war in the Middle East. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US and its imperialist allies in NATO have overseen a massive militarization of the region, directly targeting Iran. This is itself part of an expanding global war, including the US-NATO war against Russia and the developing economic and military conflict against China.
US President Joe Biden did not even see fit to go on national television to explain the launching of a new war, under conditions in which there is overwhelming popular opposition to the expansion of war in the Middle East. As the Pentagon was planning to attack Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was admitted to the intensive care unit of Walter Reed Hospital, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but unbeknownst to the president. This bizarre episode underscored the reality that US war-making is operating on autopilot, increasingly outside the pretense of civilian oversight.
As always, the rationale provided to justify the war is a pack of lies. Biden declared that the missile strikes were “defensive” and “a direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks.” The American media, with the same breathless reporting that has accompanied every US military operation, proclaims that a country with a gross domestic product 700 times smaller than the United States is carrying out “intolerable” actions, against which the American military is “forced” to defend itself. Overnight, Yemen’s Houthis have been turned into a new bogeyman, requiring urgent military action without any discussion or explanation.
In coordination with the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the United States has dispatched to the Middle East a massive military armada, consisting of two aircraft carrier battle groups, multiple guided missile destroyers, an unknown number of submarines and dozens of warplanes. These forces have provided logistics, reconnaissance, and target selection to Israel in a deliberate effort to provoke retaliation from Iran and its allied forces such as the Houthis.
Yet, supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.
“We’re not interested in a war with Yemen,” asserted the Pentagon on Friday, “We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”
In fact, the imperialist powers have been waging a war against the population of Yemen for nearly a decade. The Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.
The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.
Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.
The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.
The immediate antecedent for the escalating war in the Middle East, of which the genocide in Gaza is a part, is the collapse of Ukraine’s “spring offensive.” But the imperialist powers are doubling down. “Backing Ukraine is key to the West’s security,” declares The Economist, while Foreign Affairs asserts that “Victory Is Ukraine’s Only True Path to Peace.”
Overriding all of this, the United States is involved in a struggle to fend off the challenge posed by China to its global hegemony, which threatens to trigger a shooting war in the Pacific. In the US media and political circles, there is growing talk of a new “axis of evil” involving Iran, China and Russia.
Each one of these conflicts cannot be understood in isolation. The bombing of Yemen is part of a global counter-revolution, in which the imperialist powers are seeking to reestablish direct control over their former colonies.
The countries carrying out this agenda are the old imperialist powers: the US, UK, France, and Germany. The British ruling class, unable to carry through its policies independently, seeks to exploit the so-called special relationship, that is, Britain’s role as the principal ally of American imperialism, to advance its own interests on a global stage.
Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.
American Imperialism, to paraphrase the words of Leon Trotsky, is “tobogganing towards disaster with eyes closed.”
Over the past three months, millions of people all over the world have marched in protest of the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. The US strikes on Yemen occurred on the same day as the International Court of Justice heard devastating evidence that Israel, and by extension the United States, were responsible for genocide in Gaza.
The response of US imperialism to these mass popular protests and exposures of its war crimes has been to accelerate its war plans. This is because the eruption of war, genocide and political repression is not an aberration. Imperialism, as Lenin explained, is not merely a policy, but rather a specific historical stage of capitalist development. Opposition to imperialism is, therefore, a revolutionary question.
It is not a matter of appealing to the capitalist governments responsible for these crimes to alter course, but rather mobilizing the working class, fusing the struggle against war with the developing struggles of workers all over the world against inequality and exploitation. The logic of these struggles requires the conquest of political power by workers all over the world, the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchs and war criminals, and the socialist reorganization of economic life on a world scale.
