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.
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 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.
An Open Letter to the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka
Dear comrades,
On November 19th, Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka held the second meeting of 3 meetings under the title “Stop the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in GAZA” in Galle at the Galle de Galle Auditorium. There, comrade Saman Gunadasa, the Assistant Secretary of SEP spoke in the following manner, during his two-hour lecture.
We defend “massacre of civilians, or taking hostages, or every other thing”, that was carried out on October 7th by Hamas, inside Israel, on account of the intolerable oppression that was carried out continuously by Israel. According to him, history runs through such uprisings of the oppressed masses. This is a distortion of the Marxist premise that, written history of all societies hitherto is the history of the class struggle. Marxism or working class has not stood with the petit- bourgeois suicidal methods.
Also during the first meeting of the above mentioned series of meetings held in the Millennium guest house on November 15th, the main speaker, Saman Gunadasa said, “I don’t approve the religious nationalist program of the Hamas organization”, while emphasizing at the same time “ however, I stand with the leadership and the actions of Hamas in the uprising of the Palestinian masses” and so on.
Saman Gunadasa addressing Jaffna meeting
Among the hundreds of articles published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and by the World Socialist Web site (WSWS) on the Palestinian question there has been no room for such a concept.
Instead, they show that the October 7 attack was prompted by a series of attacks on the Palestinians until this moment, starting from the conspiracy of creation of Israel, while they stand against the broad campaign that works to divert the attention of the masses from the roots that caused the entire conflagration. There, we base ourselves from a definite political standpoint. That is, mobilizing the international working class to establish a working-class rule, by sweeping away imperialism and capitalism, root of all crimes.
Gunadasa’s proposal to stand with “Hamas Organization’s existing leadership and its actions” represents a turning away from the Permanent Revolution that says “democratic tasks of national unity and liberation during the period of imperialism can be achieved only by the working class based on the class struggle, armed with Marxist program.”
For his defense, he might say that he has explained that “we defend the right of those oppressed masses to rise”. But he doesn’t explain the political logic behind his standing with the Hamas leadership and its actions, disregarding the concerns of two contradictory classes that represent the oppressed masses and bourgeois Hamas leadership. He will never do that. ICFI wrote against the opportunistic clique including Healey, when Palestine Liberation Movement was elevated instead of emphasizing the independent leadership of the working class, as follows: “Without defining the specific class forces in the nationalist movements, speaking of Palestinian people is once again a political aberration that serves to bury down the critical role of the working class” (How Workers’ Revolutionary Party betrayed Trotskyism, 1973-1985, page 107). History and foundations of Marxist Movement is built up through such a struggle.
However, at the last meeting of the proposed series of meetings held at Colombo Public Library Hall on November 21st, it was very clear that SEP General Secretary comrade Deepal Jayasekera stands opposed to Gunadasa when he emphasized that “we, as the world’s Trotskyist movement, have criticisms against Hamas Organization. They are political criticisms. They are not at all moral”.
“Hamas Organization is a bourgeois nationalist movement. We emphasize the fact that the methods employed by them including the October 7th attack will in no way contribute to the defeat of the Zionist state, nor to the liberation of the Palestinian people. Further, Hamas Organization is based on the support of the bourgeois apparatuses of the Middle East. Its Orientation is towards them. Their appeal is to those governments. Hence, they subjugate the struggle against the Zionist state to the requirements of the bourgeois regimes of the Middle East, and to the settlements they seek to arrange with Israel and the world imperialist powers.
“It has been shown that the workers and the youth around the world don’t have a habit of idly watching the genocidal war being carried out by the Zionist regime of Israel….. We stand in line with these workers and youth in solidarity. We insist to develop these movements as much as possible against the war in Gaza. Further, we in particular, intervene to direct these movements towards the working class. That is the only social force capable of stopping the Imperialist war and Israel invasion.”
Deepal Jayasekera addressing Colombo meeting
The program of the International Committee presented by comrade Jayasekera is clear, and we should say that we work in solidarity with this program. But, the fact that the Secretary and Assistant Secretary of the party proposed two different policies that are contradictory to each other, and allowing these two policies to co-exist, as a matter of course, is clear evidence that the political health of the party has degenerated. Gunadasa has publicly expressed his position at two public meetings. Party members, including at least half a dozen members representing the Political Committee or the Central Committee participated in these discussions. The complete video of the meeting has been posted in the SEP Facebook page. Nobody seems to have opposed Gunadasa’s proposal. What does that clearly Indicate? Isn’t it that, within the party, there is room not only to hold working class and non-working-class concepts, but also to campaign for them?
Above all, the fact that in Jayasekera’s speech at the Colombo meeting, there was not even a hint being shown of the danger raised in Gunadasa’s statement showed that such a situation exists within the party. When the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary were talking on the same matter from two extremes, members and friends applauded both of them very generously. Politically, this existence is centrist. Centrist politics creates revolutionaries as well as reactionaries. But, in general, it strengthens opportunism in the party.
Pseudo leftists say that Israel attacks have affected Palestinian princes, capitalists, workers and peasants alike, and therefore it necessitates a solution that all can participate, and for that, one of the two solutions, either a dual state solution or a capitalist unitary state like that of Nelson Mandla’s South Africa is suitable, while they work devotedly to subjugate the world-scale public revolt, developed by the Palestinian genocide, to the capitalist class once again. When representing the rights of the oppressed, while accepting Hamas Leadership, doesn’t Gunadasa’s proposal express allegiance to this reactionary class collaborationist movement that made the working class pay with their blood on many occasions?
Was this a mistake that happened at the spur of the moment? When it was suggested for a general strike during the 2021 Teachers’ struggle, not only the party got frightened, but also those party members who made the proposal were viciously attacked. During the Covid-19 pandemic, having allowed the cremation of Muslim dead bodies in silence, it supported the cruel reactionary proposal of the government that the funeral ceremonies of Muslims should be done according to science. Although a discussion was requested by a few Central Committee members in order to resolve that matter, it was not allowed by the majority of the party apparatus. In 2022, during the public uprising, despite the development of the appropriate perspective and the program with the help of the ICFI, it abstained from intervening in the mass struggles in all possible ways, providing the necessary intervention required by the situation and the necessary leadership. Above all, when a request was made for a discussion to clarify these matters, those comrades including this writer who gave leadership to the SEP-Left group, were expelled en masse.
SEP-Left group stood for developing the theoretical struggle of the party at least since 2014. As was concluded by the 12th plenary session of ICFI in 1992, it understood that rebuilding the Marxist Culture that had been deteriorated by opportunism, including Stalinism, is the foremost responsibility of the party, and preparing the party for that task could not be delayed. But, this necessity was ignored by a conservatism that led to avoiding taking necessary turns at the appropriate moment. Conservatism was characterized by the obstacles that impeded the establishment of the Marxist perspective among the working class.
While this was the root of the disputes within the party, party apparatus, instead of solving these problems based on the lessons of the history of the movement, followed the easy path of moving forward disregarding them.
As for Gunadasa, this was reflected by his abstaining from the interventions in the factories of Ratmalana working class centre, where the interventions had been carried out over a long period. For a long time, not even a report had been published at least to reflect that there’s a working class there. Instead, he recently announced a fake railway action committee. No matter how much the subjective desire for the revolution is, the skepticism about the struggle that should be carried out for the political perspectives within the working class, opens the door for such frauds.
In order for them to organize themselves to adapt to these conditions, the party apparatus needed to get rid of the SEP-Left who opposed it. Appointing yes-men, who were not politically tested or who were incapable of taking political leadership, to the Central Committee and the other main committees, was one step taken by them. The nature of their politics is already apparent by now. Just consider the political fraud carried out by Aruna Malalagama – the businessman, who was newly appointed to the Central Committee – together with his local secretary Ratnasiri Malalagama. He announced a Southern Province action committee. He and Ratnasiri announced a series of action committees, such as those of cinnamon peelers, garment workers, Tangalle farmers and of hotel workers. Establishment was reported on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) too. One who has at least a scant respect of the history of the authentic struggle of the reputed website and of the party would not drag the party to the risks posed by such lies. The so-called hotel committee that Malalagama announced, calling the workers of his hotel by force, was maintained for a few days through creating a fear in them of losing their jobs. What has been done there was causing disgust for the very same organizational structure of the action committees.
The frenzied desperation in Gunadasa’ effort to disrupt the online public meeting organized by the Colombo Action Committee, which was the only organization that actively defended the artist and freedom of expression within the working class against her arrest, by unruly intruding into the midst of it, levelling unfounded allegations against the members of the Committee, is an indication of the abyss, the party has fallen into. Today, the very same person suggesting to stand with bourgeois Hamas is not surprising.
This also reveals that, when the entire party apparatus attacked the Marxist position on the national democratic right of self-determination – that it can be attained only through the dictatorship of the working class – Gunadanasa’s appearance as the chief proponent of the attack was not an accident.
The world vacillates between world war and socialist revolution. Preparation of the party for this situation cannot be reduced to mere relying on the word of the International Committee. Party can be prepared only through developing those perspectives in the party and in the class through active practice.
In that sense, investigation of the centrist behaviour expressed by Gunadasa cannot be delayed. On the other hand, his propagation of the anti-Party position must be corrected immediately. The role of individuals like Malalagama, and the question of how the party tolerates such behaviour, must be examined based on the history of the international struggle for building the party.
In order to do this, the party membership must take an initiative, and the theoretical capital that has already been provided by the experiences of the history of the International Committee and the SEP would provide the necessary tools for that. Sections of the International Committee should be built by the leadership and membership of relevant sections, subject to the perspectives and guidelines developed and provided by the ICFI – the perspectives and guidelines the ICFI has developed with the participation of all the sections. It is important to realise that the ICFI cannot substitute for the place of the party membership in this process.
Finally, it should be said that party building is absolutely bound up with the following emphasis of the ICFI: Firstly, explanation of the history, perspective, and the program; Secondly, intensification of the political struggle against opportunism in the working class; Thirdly, turning directly towards the working class physically and consistently.
