Short Article on the Election of Aruna Kumara Dissanayake to the Presidency of Sri Lanka: DOWN WITH ELECTIONS, DOWN WITH SEMI-FEUDALISM AND SEMI-COLONIALISM, DOWN WITH SINHALA-BUDDHIST NATIONAL/RELIGIOUS CHAUVANISM, LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE OF SRI LANKA AND TAMIL EELAM
Recently, on the 21st September 2024, Aruna Kumara Dissanayake of the supposedly ‘Marxist Leninist’ ‘Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’ (People’s Liberation Front), and their political coalition ‘Jathika Jana Balawegaya’ (National People’s Power), would win the Sri Lankan Presidential Election.
Sri Lanka is a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country on the island of Lanka/Eelam, which is composed mainly of two nations, in the South, West, and Centre, the Sinhalas, and in the North and West, the Tamils. The Tamils have been victims of both persecution since independence, and faced genocide in 2009.
While Sri Lanka was historically in the US Imperialist orbit, increasingly it has been an economic and poltical battleground between the American Imperialists, and the Chinese Social-Imperialists.
While, as the great leader of the international proletariat, Chairman Gonzalo has proven, it is obviously impossible (and not even desirable), in the current era of Capitalism-Imperialism, for a Communist to be peacefully elected to Presidency of a state. However, even ignoring that, there is more proof that Aruna Kumara Dissanayake is not a Marxist-Leninist, and neither is his party.
Both are Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist, anti-Tamil, reactionary, and servants of Imperialism. While in the past, the party represented reactionary backwards sections of the Sinhala peasantry and national bourgeoise, now it represents both those groups and the bureaucratic and comprador bourgeoise.
In fact, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna has never been Marxist-Leninist.
HISTORY OF THE JVP
]The JVP was founded by Rohana Wijeweera, a supposedly ‘Marxist-Leninist’, a former member of the Ceylon Communist Party (pro-Peking), who left the party because of his group’s left-adventurist line, in 1965.
The JVP would attempt to overthrow the government of Sri Lanka in 1971, attempting to both blow up the parliament with a grenade, and mobilizing a large number of poorly armed lower-caste Sinhalese peasants.
They would take control of large parts of the South of the island for a month, between April and June, before the poorly armed and trained group, with few arms and only some support from North Korea, was crushed by the Sri Lankan Army, with support from India, Pakistan, the revisionist USSR, and the USA.
The party’s leaders were forced into hiding, and many of it’s members, activists, and supporters were murdered by the Sri Lankan state after the uprising.
The wrongheaded nature of the uprising, and the incorrect positions of the JVP, can be seen both by it’s quick suppression and failure to transform into a more organized campaign of guerrilla war, into the first stage of guerrilla war, strategic defensive, as described Chairman Mao in his works on guerrilla warfare, and by the non-participation of the Tamil peoples in the uprising.
The Eelam Tamils, the population of Tamils that have lived on the island’s north and east (Tamil Eelam) for centuries, make up the largest, and most oppressed population on the island. The Indian Tamils (or Malayaga Tamils, as I will call them), the more recent arrivals from Tamil Nadu and other Southern States during the 18th and 19th centuries, make up a large minority as well, and are some of the poorest and most exploited peoples on the island.
The Tamils of Sri Lanka, from independence to the formation of the armed Tamil Liberation Movement, had suffered intense persecution.
The Malayaga Tamils had been denied citizenship during the independence of Sri Lanka on the insistence of the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists, and only after a period of intense struggle were 40% of the population granted citizenship, with the rest being expelled to India.
The Tamil language, despite over 1/3 of the territory being populated by the Tamil-speaking population (Eelam Tamils, Indian Tamils, and Sri Lankan Muslims, who mostly speak Tamil), who were 27.22% of the total population of the island at that point, was not allowed to be used as Offical Language, with Sinhala only being allowed that position.
The people of Tamil Eelam had there land taken and given to Sinhalas in a systematic campaign of state-sponsored colonisation of Tamil land by Sinhalas, starting in the 50s with the transport of tens of thousands of Sinhala peasants from Sinhala regions of the island to the Gal Oya Valley, and the removal of Tamils from the region, then the colonization of the village of Kanthalai in Trincomalee by mostly Sinhalas, and of the Tamil parts of Sinhala-majority Anuradhapura region. Colonistion was also planned in Jaffna District, the heart of Tamil Eelam. In Trincomalee District, this state-sponsored colonisation would be so successful that the region would go from having a 15% Sinhalese population to 33% by 1980, transforming the region from one with a clear Tamil majority, to one with only a Tamil plurality.
The Tamil peoples were also affected by constant pogroms that led to the deaths of many Tamils, and often the Sinhalese settlers in Northern Tamil Eelam would be active leaders in these pogroms. In 1956, Sinhalese settlers in Gal Oya would attack there Tamil neighbours with the help of the government. In 1958, a nationwide state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogrom would occur, with attacks on Tamils, in both the north and the south.
After the first Uprising, there would be more, in 1977, in 1981 (where the Jaffna Public Library, one of the largest archives of Tamil historical documents, was burned by Sinhala policemen in an act of Cultural Genocide), and the worst one in Black July in 1983. There would be more, one in 1985 by Sinhala colonizers, who massacred Tamil natives in order to colonize more of Trincomalee, and one in Trincomalee 1987.
Considering all this oppression by the Sri Lankan state, and the widespread revolutionary national consciousness in Tamil Eelam, if a revolutionary uprising had occurred in Sri Lanka, would the Tamil peoples not have flocked to the revolution?
However, they did not, they correctly viewed the JVP Uprising and it’s suppression as simply a conflict between two Sinhala factions, as the JVP had both not organised amongst the Tamil people, and had taken reactionary positions about the national struggle, opposing national liberation and Tamil self-determination. While at this time, the JVP had not openly taken anti-Tamil positions, after this insurrection they would move further into Sinhala Nationalism and anti-Tamil Sinhala-Buddhist Chauvinism.
After this failed uprising, Wijeweera and his Comrades would go back to the drawing board. In the meanwhile, the UNP-controlled state would accuse the JVP (along with the pro-Soviet Ceylon ‘Communist Party’, and the Nava Sama Samaja Party (New Equal Society Party, a faction of the Sri Lankan Trotskyists)) of orchestrating Black July, which was bald-faced lie, as it itself had really orchestrated the UNP.
After a period of relations with the governments of Sri Lanka shifting from mutual non-aggression to bans and persecution, under the background of the Eelam Tamil National Liberation struggle, in 1987, the JVP would launch an insurgency in order to takeover the country.
During this insurgency, the JVP would learn somewhat from there mistakes, establishing a stronger base amongst the lower caste peasants of the Sinhala areas and would establish support from Sinhala students, and would, at night conduct guerrilla operations and assassinations, assassinating many members of parliament.
While many of these asssinations would be understandable, one would stick out as sore thumb, the assination of Vijaya Kumaratunga. A singer who transitioned in politics, Vijaya Kumaratunga would take a progressive position, as the representative of the progressive Sinhala national bourgeoise position in Sri Lankan politics, calling for peace and negotiations with the LTTE, being one of the few Sinhala politicians to recognise that the Tamils had faced persecution from the Sinhala-Buddhist state.
In fact, he would even visit LTTE-controlled Jaffna and discuss the situation of the Tamils in Sri Lanka with the people of Jaffna, and with the leadership of the LTTE.
Both because of this, and because he had opposed the excesses of the JVP, which would regularly kill many people that were even accused of not being fully in support of the JVP, the JVP would decide to assassinate him, which would isolate them from the support of the masses, as Kumaratunga had support from a large amount of the Sinhala peasantry.
However, after intense fighting, both with the Sri Lankan Army, who, after the Indians took over the job of fighting the LTTE, were free to use the brutal methods they used against the Tamils against the JVP and it’s civilian supporters, would use intense violence, including the massacre of whole classes of school children who were accused of supporting the JVP, and the beheading of suspected members of the JVP, paramilitary bands who also used genocidal violence like the ‘Black Cats’, ‘Yellow Cats’, ‘Scorpions’ and ‘Eagles’, the detention and torture of 5,000 to 10,000 suspected JVP members in concentration camps, and almost the murder of the entirety of the leadership of the JVP, including Rohana Wijeweera and his brief successors Saman Piyasiri Fernando and Lalith Wijerathna, they would be defeated.
It would be under the fourth leader of the JVP, Somawansa Amarasinghe, Rohana Wijeweera’s closest Comrade in his last days, that the party would become what it is now. Under his leadership too did Amura Kumara Dissanayake grow in stature in the party.
Somaswansa Amarasinghe and AKD
During the tenure of Amarasinghe as leader of the JVP, the party would be unbanned by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Vijaya Kumaratunga’s widow, who in LTTE chief theorist Anton Balasingham’s book “War and Peace”, was noted to be much less understanding of the history of the oppression of the Tamil people by the Sinhalese, and the need for, if not independence, an equal federation, than her husband.
After the unbanning of the JVP, the JVP would come to the forefront as an opponent of negotiation with the LTTE, who wanted to the crushing of movement militarily. They would oppose the UNP because the UNP would flip-flop between ‘embracing negotiation’ and military solutions.
The JVP would stage a five-day, 116 kilometres foot march from Kandy to Colombo, to protest the 2002 ceasefire with the LTTE, coming out as the strongest supporters of the military solution, and by extension, the massacres of the Tamil people. Aruna Kumara Dissanayake would participate in this march.
They would oppose the granting of tsunami aid to the areas controlled by the LTTE, which were hit the hardest by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, with propaganda secretary Wimal Weerawansa saying “We should spit on NGOs and stop them from on our streets. Donor countries and their NGO agents are holding this country to ransom, telling the government to set up a joint tsunami relief mechanism with the LTTE.”
They would support the Sri Lankan Freedom Party, and there leader Mahinda Rajapaksa, who would win in 2005, and would be the man who launched the Tamil Genocide, illustrated best by the Mullivaikkal Massacre, one of many, whose events echo in on the Gaza Genocide, by ‘israel’, which itself had trained and supported the Sri Lankan Army.
To this day, the JVP defends this, and also is friends with Buddhist extremist monks of the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Army) who want the genocide of Tamils and Muslims, refuses to prosecute war criminals, opposes Tamil autonomy, and does not want to abandon the IMF baillout deal, instead wanting to simply ‘renegotiate’ it.
Our ‘Marxist-Leninist’, our ‘revolutionary’, our ‘Communist’, who supports ethno-religious nationalism and genocide, who refuses to prosecute genocide or not even be allied with genocidal forces, opposes the right of nations to self-determination, who is not even prepared to go the full way to fight US economic imperialism through the IMF!
Conclusion
Why was this article written? Well, there were two reasons.
Firstly, since an analysis that from a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist basis of the JVP’s history and of the positions of the JVP is known to exist. While this is not to say that there is none, there does not seem to be a publicly available one that is easy to access.
Secondly, as Britain has the second largest Eelam Tamil diaspora (over 100,000, with only Canada having a large population of Eelam Tamils),who came both from refugee and non-refugee methods, it was considered necessary to write this article in order to summarize the revisionism of the JVP, and to encourage the people of both Tamil Eelam, Sri Lanka, and the Eelam Tamil diaspora, to continue on there struggles.
The Eelam Tamil people must continue to march towards self-determination and national liberation, but unlike before, where a series of militarist and commandist mistakes led to the defeat of the Tamil people’s national liberation struggle, combined with the sheer brutality of the Sri Lankan Sinhala-Buddhist state, as the Tamil Eelam national struggle wasn’t under proletarian revolutionary leadership, and not guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, under a Communist Party, the Tamil people must fight to constitute (as there was never a real Communist Party for the people of Tamil Eelam, so there’s nothing to reconstitute) a Communist Party of Tamil Eelam, under Marxism-Leninism-Maoism principally Maoism, and through the correct application of it to Sri Lanka’s objective and subjective conditions, free the people of Tamil Eelam from Sri Lankan Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism.
The Sinhala people must fight to reconstitute there own Communist Party, first lost to the Khruschevite revisionism of S. A. Wickramasinghe, and then to the Avakianite revisionism of Ajith Rupasinghe Surendra (not to be confused with the revolutionary and stalwart fighter against Avakianism, Comrade Ajith, in India), who brought the Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist) into electoral politics and supported the Trotskyite candidate of the NSSP, Vikramabahu Karunaratne, intensify the class struggle in Sri Lanka, fight US and Chinese Imperialism, and support the national struggle of the people of Tamil Eelam.
The Eelam Tamil and Sinhala diasporas worldwide have a double task, both to support the previous goals, and to support the class struggle, and if they live in a country facing them, progressive national struggles of the country they fled to, and hold the internationalist commitment to the support of other class and progressive national liberation struggles (like in Palestine), which Eelam Tamils and Sinhalas in the prison island of Sri Lanka also have the obligation to do.
LONG LIVE THE NATIONAL STRUGGLE IN TAMIL EELAM!
LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE AGAINST IMPERIALISM, SEMI-FEUDALISM, SEMI-COLONIALISM, AND CAPITALISM-IMPERIALISM!
LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTIONARY MASSES OF TAMIL EELAM AND SRI LANKA!
LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM, PRINCIPALLY MAOISM, THE GUIDING IDEOLOGY OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT!
DOWN WITH NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS CHAUVINISM!
