A revolutionist explains Tamil struggle for self-determination

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'There are approximately 3 million Tamil people on the island, divided between Ceylon Tamils (12 percent of the population) and Indian Tamils (6 percent of the population), who mainly work as farm workers on large agricultural plantations.' 5 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1991 In February, I had the opportunity to interview Vickramabahu Karunarathne, general secretary of the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP, New Socialist Party) of Sri Lanka, a country of 17-million people off the southern coast of India. "Bahu," as he is called, was in Europe attending the world congress of the Fourth International (FI), the world revolutionary socialist movement founded by Leon Trotsky. The NSSP had applied to join the FI, and was granted sympathizing status by the delegates.

I visited Sri Lanka twice in the mid1980s. It is a beautiful island, and was once a popular tourist spot for Europeans. That all changed in the early 1980s when the oppressed Tamil minority stepped up its agitation for self-determination. Armed Tamil groups began to grow and a fullfledged civil war developed.

There are approximately 3 million Tamil people on the island, divided between Ceylon Tamils (12 percent of the population) and Indian Tamils (6 percent of the population), who mainly work as farm workers on large agricultural plantations.

Until a 1987 agreement between the Sri Lankan and the Indian governments, most Indian Tamils were denied citizenship rights even though they were born on the island. The British first brought Indian Tamils to Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) in the 19th century to work the fields.

After political independence was won from the British in 1948, the new government of Ceylon adopted an anti-Tamil policy. The mostly Sinhala (74 percent of the population) capitalist class controlled parliament and passed laws making the Tamil people second-class citizens. Sinhala became the official language even though, under the British, Tamil and Sinhala had equal status along with English.

The national oppression of the Tamil minority is the origin of the current civil war. Tamils of all classes have been fighting for full equality since independence.

"The national problem is one of the most important problems in Sri Lanka," Bahu explained. 'There are two nationalities in Sri Lanka, the Sinhala and Tamil people. These two communities have been living in Sri Lanka for over 2000 years. But under capitalism they are now emerging as two distinct nationalities.

"After the British left, the country was in the hands of the Sinhala bourgeoisie who resorted to repression against the Tamil people to consolidate their racist capitalist government. The Tamil people have been fighting against this oppression."

"Our position," Bahu continued, "is support for the right of self-determination for the Tamil-speaking people. We believe that if we can bring democratic unification on the basis of the right of self-determination, there will be peace in Sri Lanka."

Since the civil war began in the early 1980s, more than 40,000 people have died. This includes some 25,000 Tamils-mostly by indiscriminate bombing of the northern and eastern parts of the island by the Sri Lankan army. The military has also attacked Sinhala-chauvinist groups in the south seeking to overthrow the goverment for granting a few concessions to the Tamil people.

Moors (7 percent of the population and Tamil-speaking) have also suffered. Nearly 700,000 people have been displaced by the civil war. Tens of thousands more have fled abroad.

Tamil Tigers The main armed organization of the Tamils is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Eelam is the Tamil name for an independent homeland. The Tigers have used their base of support in the north not to only fight the government but also to eliminate different Tamil groups and others who don't support their tactics to win self-determination.

"There have been divisions among the armed national liberation groups," Babu explained. "The Tamil Tigers have resorted INDIA TAMIL NADU to terror against other Tamil organizations, including left-moving Tamil currents, in order to establish hegemony among the Tamil people. They have attacked our organization, which has a substantial backing among the Tamil people in the north and the east. They killed one of our most important Tamil leaders, a member of our political bureau."

The hegemonic terror policy of the Tigers is one reason the Sri Lankan government is able to maintain its aggression against the Tamils without a major response in the Sinhala areas. At the same time, the army's terrorism has made a military solution impossible. The Tamil people prefer the Tigers over the Sinhala chauvinists in control of the state.

The Tigers' policies, however, have led to an erosion of support among the 55 million Tamils living in the state of Tamil Nadu across the Palk Strait in India. Tamil Nadu has historically provided a safe haven for Tamil militants, and pressured New Delhi to back the Sri Lankan Tamils.

India's intervention

In 1987, the Indian government brokered a deal with the Sri Lankan regime to grant Tamils a degree of regional autonomy in the north. The Tigers and other groups initially accepted the pact, which included the stationing of Indian troops on the island to enforce the "peace." The Indians were at first greeted as heroes by the Tamils. Several armed Tamil groups disarmed and joined a regional government.

But not the Tigers. They broke the truce and relaunched the national liberation war against the Indian and Sri Lankan armies to win Eelam. They assassinated leading lamil capitalist figures as well as forme Tamil militants who had backed the IndianSri Lankan pact and joined the regional government.

Opposition among Sinhala people against India's troops began to grow. AntiIndian and anti-Tamil chauvinists took up arms against the regime. Finally in early 1990, the Indian troops withdrew. Armed Sinhala chauvinists opposed to the governPalk Strail Bay of Bengal Jaffna NORTHERN PROVINCE Trincomalee EASTERN PROVINCE ment's concessions to India were brutally crushed, and the Tigers and the goverment then agreed to peace talks. This lasted for 14 months. The civil war was once again relaunched by the Tigers in June 1990 to win full independence.

All Tamils did not agree, Bahu explained. Those Tamils became targets of the Tigers. An organization, University Teachers for Human Rights at Jaffna University (the main city in northern Sri Lanka and controlled by the Tigers, recently came out against the Tigers policy. They issued a statement saying the militants "calculatedly left the Tamils at the mercy of enraged Sri Lankan forces." They also attacked the Tigers' heavy-handed treatment of people in their areas of control.

"We only appeal that the LTTE should abandon its program of attacking other Tamil liberation fighters and also our party members, and on that basis, to establish a common front against the government," said Bahu. Nevertheless, Bahu added, the NSSP policy is complete support for Tamil self-determination despite their criticism of the LTTE's policies.

This position of defense of the Tamil people has resulted in murderous attacks on the NSSP by armed Sinhalese chauvinist thugs. Over a dozen members of the party have been assassinated by such groups, which have links with the police and army. Origins and perspectives of NSSP "We are basically a proletarian party," Bahu explained. "We are based on the organized working class, active in the trade unions. About 200,000 workers are organized in the urban trade unions and in that milieu 25 percent are in our trade unions."

In Sri Lanka, most trade unions are affiliated to, or led by, political parties. The NSSP has about 2800 active and associate members, with the majority being Sinhala. It leads two trade-union federations with about 40,000 members. Although there is government repression and attacks on democratic rights, unions are still allowed to meet and function. In addition to the issue of Tamil rights, NSSP-led unions The NSSP was formed in 1977 after a split from the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). The LSSP is the oldest working-class party in Sri Lanka. It was the Ceylonese section of the Fourth International until it was expelled in 1964 for joining a capitalist coalition government. FI supporters set up another group.

Leaders of the NSSP, however, stayed in the LSSP. "We were fighting inside the party against the coalition politics. After 1976, when the coalition government of Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike [Sri Lankan Freedom Party, SLFP] collapsed, many of the rank-and-file members turned toward us," Bahu said. "We had six supporters on the central committee. At the December 1977 party conterence, we declared ourselves the Nava Sama Samja Party" and began open activity.

The NSSP, he added, soon affiliated with the international political current in solidarity with the "Militant" tendency inside the British Labor Party. They broke with that formation in 1988 after sharp debates on what policy they should follow in Sri Lanka.

The NSSP was active in the 1980 general strike, which was defeated, and other agitation against the United National Party (UNP) government. As a result of its activities, one of its members was elected to parliament, and other members to local provincial councils.

Electoral policy

I asked Bahu about their evaluation of the LSSP's coalition strategy and electoral policy. The main bourgeois opposition party to the UNP is the SLFP. It claims to be populist and socialist, and has been out of governmental power since the late 1970s.

"We are opposed to coalition politics, Babu explained. But he then added, "While government. We are not in programmatic alliance with the SLFP. But we voted for them [in the1982 elections] to defeat the UNP. It is tactical. Unless you take up the question of complete opposition to the murderous government, you can get alienated from the people.

"You have to show that you are prepared to give every blow to the present government, but not participate in any bourgeois government. There is no trust in the bourgeois leadership. That is the line we are following at the moment. It is by fighting together but marching separately."

In a speech Bahu gave in December, he elaborated on why he believes this policy is even more important today when presidential elections may soon be called: "Defeat of the UNP presidential candidate will open up the flood gates of mass intervention. The degree and quality of mass action will depend on the perspective given to the masses. If chauvinism and communalism take the upper-hand with individual revenge in place of socio-economic tasks, an era of anarchy and unrest may result, at least for a period.

"We Sama Samajists are duty bound to do everything in our power to arrest such a situation. Hence we cannot just settle down for the defeat of the UNP, without positively intervening to direct the masses for a non-racist democratic, social goal."

I pointed out that such a policy, in the opinion of Socialist Action, is not a tactical question. While it is correct to outline a general strategy for the masses to move towards political power through mass agitation, to do so by linking it with even critical support for capitalist candidates is a trap. It can miseducate and mislead the masses.

In 1960, the LSSP adopted a similar "tactical" course that eventually laid the basis for the LSSP's slide into a capitalist government in 1964. The issue, I explained, is one of principle, not tactics.

Bahu countered that the situation in Sri Lanka makes such a complicated tactical course necessary. It is the most effective way, he said, not to become isolated from the masses who are opposed to the 13-year rule of the UNP. The NSSP, he explained, will never join a coalition capitalist government. But he repeated that the number-one task today is the defeat of the right-wing regime.

This question of class independence is a central one of Marxist strategy. We agreed on the need to continue the discussion.

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if the Russian Federation. ... Masses tried to vote out hated Stalinist bureaucracy While playing on anti-Stalinist sentiment, Yeltsin made many promises he can't keep. Now, the two-some of Yeltsin and Gorbachev have only one goal: Get the workers to make gigantic sacrifices in the interest of "market reforms."

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population of the Russian Federation. National democratic movements have nocratic movements have developed among many of them—most notably the Tatars, historically the most advanced of the peoples of Islamic tradition.

At the same time as the Russian presidential vote, mayoralty elections were held in Moscow and Leningrad, where the Communist Party's bêtes noires, Gavril Popov and Anatoli Sobchak, were reelected by 65percent majorities.

The proposal for changing the name of Leningrad back to St. Petersburg also won a referendum in the city. All these results show that the majority of citizens will take any opportunity to cast what they thinks is a vote against the bureaucracy and its tradition.

What such votes are actually for is another matter. The U.S. media has played the Yeltsin victory as an indication that the Soviet voters are for a faster restoration of capitalism. In fact, the attempts to carry out what the U.S. authorities have clearly stated over and over again as an essential first step for "real reform," the establishment of "real prices," touched off a wave of strikes in April that threatened even to explode into an all-Union general strike.

It was this strike wave that forced Gorbachev to make the April 23 agreement with Yeltsin, an agreement, by the way, that made promises of automatic cost-of-living raises, cancelling some price rises, and "reconsidering" others.

If confronted by such a demand from workers in the West, any capitalist or capitalist economist would be quick to explain that automatic cost-of-living raises are in direct contradiction to the principles of the market.

Yeltsin promises that his market reforms will not impose any sacrifices on working people. Moreover, he offers a number of social benefits more advanced than any that have existed in the Soviet Union, such as a minimum consumer budget for disadvanMoscow mayor Popov's program also called for automatic cost-of-living raises. That is enough to make any self-respecting capitalist sick.

Of course, the likes of Yeltsin and Popov are unlikely to keep any such promises. On the other hand, they are just explains why they made these promises in the first place. "Endless mass meetings"

Symptomatically, in the case of the Leningrad referendum, it seems that the proposal of the The scowl on the other side of

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• Madural Colombo

SR LAN KA Batticaloa

we criticize the SLFP and put forward our own program, we campaign to defeat the